Last weekend, at a used-book store, I picked up a quaint little hardcover Faber & Faber 1954 reprint of Charles Williams’s 1930 novel “War in Heaven.” In its opening pages, a corpse is discovered under an editor’s desk at a publishing house. A chapter later, a postcard from one of the publishing house’s authors demands, with mysterious urgency, the deletion from his page proofs of a paragraph about the Holy Grail. The Grail, according to the to-be-deleted paragraph, may reside today in a church in the parish of Fardles, a short commute from the city. Are the murder and the chalice somehow linked? If Muriel Spark had drunk a little too much Sir Thomas Malory, she might have written something like this. I was incapable of resistance. I bought it.
