Scottish Authors > A J Cronin Novelist 1896-1981

Archibald Joseph Cronin, the creator of Doctor Finlay, was born on 19th July 1896 in Cardross near Dumbarton, in the midst of the area which was to provide a source and inspiration for a number of his novels, more particularly Hatter's Castle, the best selling first novel which catapulted him to worldwide fame in 1930. As the son of a mixed marriage of Protestant mother and Catholic father, he was brought up as a Catholic, but attended Dumbarton Academy because of his precocious abilities. Years later he wrote:

"A feeling of social inferiority was immediately ... communicated to me, a sort of spiritual wound deriving from my religion"

so it is possible that a feeling of alienation from the West of Scotland may have contributed to his long exile.

At Glasgow University he studied medicine with some distinction and after war service as a Royal Navy surgeon - one of several echoes of another Dumbartonshire novelist, Tobias Smollett - Cronin entered general practice and went to work in a mining area of South Wales. Again this experience and his subsequent move to a fashionable practice in Harley Street was to provide inspiration - most obviously for The Citadel, which was at the same time his most commercially successful and his most crusading work. It has been said that its exposure of inequalities in medical provision contributed to the introduction of the National Health Service.

Cronin tends to be classed nowadays as being among the first of the formula writers, very dependent on the shrewd marketing skills of his publisher, Gollancz. Certainly, his success was staggering by any yardstick. The Citadel, for example, broke all publishing records and sold at the rate of 10,000 hardback copies a week for months on end. A "blockbuster" then, but not without critical approval. Hugh Walpole called Hatter's Castle the finest first novel since the Great War, while others were quick to spot a vivid cinematic quality in the novels - indeed many were made into successful films. Here is a scene from Hatter's Castle, in which Brodie the bullying patriarch is cross-examining his daughter Mary about a young man:

"An unconscious force drove her to say in a low, firm voice: 'He's not a worthless scamp.'

'What!' roared Brodie. 'You're speaking back to your own father next and for a low down Irish blackguard! A blackthorn boy! No! Let these paddies come over from their bogs to dig our potatoes for us but let it end at that. Don't let them get uppish'."

By the 1970s, however, Cronin's reputation was slight and later novels like A Song of sixpence attracted fewer readers, although the new medium of television indirectly claimed new fans, through the Doctor Finlay stories. He withdrew to what was assumed to be a tax exile in Switzerland and died there in 1981, generally supposed to be a millionaire, in that respect a rarity among Scottish writers. The Times obituary judged that his had been "middlebrow" fiction of the most adroit and telling kind.

Ronald Armstrong

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