From Wodehouse and Douglas Adams to Dickens and even Joyce, the game has been pitched into some first-class novels
In his autobiography, Arthur Conan Doyle recalled how he was once stumped by the England wicketkeeper Dick Lilley off the bowling of WG Grace. Sherlock Holmes would have instantly spotted Conan Doyle’s creative embellishment. A check of the scorecard (London County CC v MCC, July 1902) shows that while the bowler was Grace, the keeper was not Lilley but Edward French, an obscure amateur.
Fiction has a tendency to creep into cricket anecdotes, as I discovered during research for my biography of Grace. Yet that does not mean cricket is easy terrain for novelists. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an otherwise perfect thriller, the only false note is struck when Smiley says Control “hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus and Lord’s Cricket Ground”. It is of course just “Lord’s”.
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