Despair’s Last Journey

At Beaver Tail, a lonely railway halt in the Rocky Mountains, a stranger in a silk hat and frock coat steps off the train and simply stays. He is Paul Armstrong, middle-aged, once famous, now pitching a tent along an old trail to be alone with what his life has become. His brother-in-law George finds him there with a letter from his sister Madge: their father is dead. From there the novel turns inward, as Paul sets down his own story, a boyhood in a printing office, a reputation as a liar that stuck after a travelling menagerie came to the parish, and a first infatuation with a girl he took for a creature from another sphere. Murray grew up in his own father’s printing shop, and the resemblance is hard to miss. Chatto and Windus published it in 1901.