Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does… When Sir Humphrey Strange, 8th baronet and squire of Batch Magna departs this world for the Upper House (as he vaguely thought of it, with God presiding in ermine), what’s left of his estate passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx. Sir Humphrey Franklin T. Strange, 9th baronet and squire of Batch Magna, as Humph now most remarkably finds himself to be, is persuaded by his Uncle Frank, a small time Wall Street broker, to make a killing by turning the sleepy backwater into a theme-park image of rural England, a playground for the world’s rich. But while the village pub and shop put out the Stars and Stripes in welcome, the tenants of the estate’s dilapidated houseboats tear up their notices to quit, and led by randy pulp-crime writer Phineas Cook and the one-eyed Lt-Commander James Cunningham, they run up the Union Jack and prepare to engage. AUTHOR: Peter Maughan’s early career covered many trades, working on building sites, in wholesale markets, on fairground rides and in a circus. Later he travelled the West Country, picking fruit, and sleeping wherever he could, before moving on to wherever the next road took him. After travelling to Jersey to pick potatoes, he found work in a film studio in its capital, walk-ons and bit parts in the pilot films that were made there, and as a contributing script writer. He studied at the Actor’s Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland, subsequently founding a fringe theatre in Barnes, London, and living on a converted sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway. His idyllic, heedless years by the river, inspired him to write the Batch Magna novels, set in a peaceful river valley in the Welsh Marches. He is married and lives currently in Wales.
