Shells and Bright Stones: A Biography of Leo Walmsley, edited by Nona Stead (Smith Settle, pb, £13)

LEO Walmsley turned his varied and eventful life into a series of novels. Highly acclaimed on publication, they are now, it has to be said, down a literary byway. But those who find them are usually captivated, and join the ever-growing band of Walmsley admirers.

Each year, a number gather at Robin Hood's Bay, where Shipley-born Walmsley, son of a bohemian artist and his snobbish wife, was brought up at the turn of the 19th Century.

Admiring the hardiness and skills of its fisherfolk, yet despising their small-mindedness, Walmsley had a love-hate relationship with Bay, to which he twice returned to live after quitting for travel abroad or to make his home in other places, including Pembrokeshire, Cornwall, London, and Genoa.

Improbably, Walmsley's novel Phantom Lobster fictionalised his attempt to devise a collapsible lobster pot, enabling boats to carry more pots and therefore intended to boost catches because each boat could carry more pots.

Adapted into the first J Arthur Rank film, his Three Fevers centred on feuding fishing families. Love in the Sun recorded an idyllic interlude with his second wife, living in a hut by a Cornish creek. Later, he lived there with a third wife, much younger than himself.

A pilot in the First World War, who afterwards gave official talks on his experiences, Walmlsey is a fascinating subject. In the burgeoning days of the oil trade he sailed on tankers, whose trade he recorded in a documentary book, Invisible Cargo. Always unconventional, he had a romantic streak which was well illustrated when he set the fireplace of a barn he converted into a home near Robin Hood's Bay at the exact spot where he and his second wife, who were to live there, had lit a fire on their first date.

A biography has been long overdue. The work of several writers, including his third wife, this one nevertheless has the unity vital to any successful biography: doubtless the achievement of editor Nona Stead, who contributes excellent pieces herself. J B Priestley said of Walmsley's writing: "Everything is made plain, made real, and is grandly alive." So too is this absorbing biography.

Harry Mead