Note: This page is part of the Peter de Polnay project.


I found this list on the Fantastic Fiction website.

Polnay wrote 93 books in total, 15 of which were non-fiction.  He also wrote short stories for magazines.

Fiction

  1. Angry Man’s Tale (1938) (see Neglected Books review)
  2. Children, My Children (1939)
  3. Boo (1941)
  4. The Magnificent Idiot (1942)
  5. Water On the Steps (1943)
  6. Two Mirrors (1944)
  7. A Letter to an Undertaker (1946)
  8. A Pin’s Fee (1946)
  9. The Umbrella Thorn (1946)
  10. The Fat of the Land (1948)
  11. The Moot Point (1948)
  12. Into an Old Room (1949)
  13. Out of the Square (1949)
    (Short New York Times review: “A strange and sometimes beautiful book which surely can take a place on the front bookshelf of literature about Italy of the late Forties, this story moves in the twilight of fantasy without being fantastic. On the outside — modern people wandering through the public squares and private villas of a Florence shadowed by its medievalism — the narrative is fairly simple.”)
  14. Somebody Must (1949)
  15. The Next Two Years (1951)
  16. A Beast in View (1953)
  17. When Time Is Dead (1954)
  18. Before I Sleep (1955)
  19. Fools of Choice (1955)
  20. The Shorn Shadow (1956)
  21. The Clap of Silent Thunder (1957)
  22. The Night of the Hyrax (1958)
  23. The Scales of Love (1958)
  24. A Door Ajar (1959)
    (Short review from The Spectator in 1959:
    “The young de Polnay won and lost a fortune in five months on the Riviera of the 1930s, when ‘it was then like a beautiful lady: nowadays it is a travel agent surrounded by a caravan site.’ Evocative of that now transmogrified place, and of that forgotten age when the King of Sweden was playing in the mixed doubles, and with a remarkable chapter on the splendours and miseries of the gaming table.”)
  25. The Shriek of the Gull (1959)
  26. The Uninvolved (1959)
  27. The Crack of Dawn (1960)
  28. The Gamesters (1960)
  29. Mario (1961)
  30. No Empty Hands (1961)
    (Short review from Encounter magazine: “This popular writer’s new novel is the story of a Catholic’s spiritual conflict. It is his deepest and therefore most important book.”
  31. The Flames of Art (1962)
  32. A Man of Fortune (1963)
  33. The Run of Night (1963)
  34. Three Phases of High Summer (1963)
  35. A Home of One’s Own (1964)
  36. The Plaster Bed (1964)
  37. As the Crow Flies (1965)
  38. In Raymond’s wake (1965)
  39. The Centre-Piece (1966)
    (Short review at The Spectator: “Mrs Harriet Visser Long is an American millionairess who is sixty-five, but who tells everyone that she is fifty and `thereafter had to appear fifty.’ If Peter de Polnay’s entertainment, called The Centre-Piece, has a tragic side, it is the picture drawn of an ageing woman keeping up a pretence and clinging to the memory of herself as great hostess with a succession of lovers. The present story revolves round a dinner-party which she gives in Paris, and the summoning of her guests provides the author with an opportunity to portray not only a series of witty character sketches, but to offer some telling observations about what exactly it is that goes to make an expatriate.”)
  40. Not the Defeated (1966)
  41. A Winter’s Promise (1967)
  42. The Second Death of a Hero (1968)
  43. The Patriots (1969)
  44. Tower of Strength (1969)
  45. Napoleon’s Police (1970)
  46. Permanent Farewell (1970)
  47. Spring Snow and Algy (1970)
  48. Tale of Two Husbands (1970)
  49. T.-shaped World (1971)
  50. Life of Ease (1971)
  51. Caroline’s Way (1972)
  52. The Moon and the Marabou Stork (1972)
  53. The Grey Sheep (1972)
  54. The Loser (1973)
  55. Price You Pay (1973)
  56. Indifference (1974)
  57. The Crow and the Cat (1974)
  58. The Scrapheap (1974)
  59. The Chains of Pity (1975)
  60. Blood and Water (1975) (see Neglected Books review)
  61. Clump of Trees (1976)
  62. None Shall Know (1976)
  63. The Stuffed Dog (1976)
  64. Make Believe (1977)
  65. Driftsand (1977)
  66. Other Shore of Time (1978)
  67. It’s Cold Next Door (1978)
  68. Autumn Leaves Merchant (1979)
  69. The Talking Horse (1980)
  70. A Stone Throw (1981)
  71. Minor Giant (1981)
  72. Sea Mist (1982)
  73. Of Venison and Victims (1983)
  74. Other Self (1983)
  75. The Lost Stronghold (1984)
  76. Guest House (1985)
  77. The Dog Days (1986)

Non-fiction

  1. Death and To-morrow (1942) (see also a review on the Salvete atque Valete! blog )
  2. Germans Came to Paris (1943) (See Kirkus review)
    (Also, a short review by Robert Gale Woolbert at Foreign Affairs:
    “This description of life, intrigue and growing French resistance in Nazi-dominated Paris is one of the best accounts to come out of occupied France. The author is a Hungarian novelist who for a while enjoyed special privileges in the French capital.”)
  3. Death of a Legend (1952)
  4. An Unfinished Journey (1952)
  5. Descent from Burgos (1956)
  6. Peninsular Paradox (1958)
  7. Travelling Light (1959)
  8. Garabaldi (1960)
  9. Madame De Maintenon (1960)
  10. A Queen of Spain (1962)
  11. The World of Maurice Utrillo (1967)
  12. Aspects of Paris (1968)
  13. Sarah Bernhardt (1968)
  14. Enfant Terrible (1969)
  15. Paris (1970)
  16. My Road- An Autobiography (1978)

Contributed to

  1. The true story of the Maid of Orleans (1969)
  2. (as translator) The Vampires of Alfama by Pierre Kast (1976)
    (Short blurb found at lwcurrey.com :  “Leftist historical fantasy set in eighteenth-century Europe. A vampire scientist is trying to bring physical immortality to man, to bypass the kind offered by the Church.  A brilliant novel by a noted film critic, spectacular in its grotesquerie and eroticism; it boldly offers the vampire a role more aptly heroic than those subsequently popularized by such writers as Saberhagen … and Yarbro …”)