Bog-Myrtle and Peat

by S.R. Crockett

S.R. Crockett wrote some twenty-odd novels that centered in and around the Scottish country that he loved. He wrote about that land so clearly, so beautifully, and so well that at moments it almost seems alive to us as we read his telling of it. In "The Story of Seven Dead Men," six men play a little joke on a little boy. They had found a dead man in the ocean and told the boy that the man was only sleeping -- a joke the little boy never quite understood because the joke was ultimately played on the six fishermen. There are several more stories within these pages, all fascinating and entertaining. S.R. Crockett wrote some twenty-odd novels that centered in and around the Scottish country that he loved. He wrote about that land so clearly, so beautifully and so well that at moments it almost seems alive to us as we read his telling of it.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1895

About the author

Samuel Rutherford Crockett was a Scottish novelist. He was born at Duchrae, Balmaghie, Kirkcudbrightshire, the illegitimate son of dairymaid Annie Crocket. He was raised on his grandfather's Galloway farm, won a bursary to Edinburgh University in 1876, and graduated from there during 1879.

After some years of travel, he became in 1886 the Free Kirk minister of Penicuik. During that year he produced his first publication, Dulce Cor (Latin: Sweet Heart), a collection of verse under the pseudonym Ford Brereton. He eventually abandoned the Free Church ministry for full-time novel-writing in 1895.

The success of J. M. Barrie and the Kailyard school of sentimental, homey writing had already created a demand for stories in Lowland Scots when Crockett published his successful story of The Stickit Minister in 1893. It was followed by a rapidly produced series of popular novels frequently featuring the history of Scotland or his native Galloway. Crockett made considerable sums of money from his writing and was a friend and correspondent of R. L. Stevenson, but his later work has been criticised as being over-prolific and feebly sentimental.

Crockett was well travelled in Europe and beyond, spending time in most European countries and he wrote several novels of European history including The Red Axe (1898), A Tatter of Scarlet (1913), and the non-fiction The Adventurer in Spain (1903) which holds its own against Robert Louis Stevenson's travel writing.

He died in France on 16 April 1914.