Scots-Irish to the core, Sam Hanna Bell was born in Glasgow in 1909, but came to live near the shores of Strangford Lough at the age of seven or eight, following the death of his father, and before the family's subsequent removal to Belfast. He left school - public elementary school - at 14, and involved himself in a series of unsuitable trades, including those of potato salesman, night watchman, art student and welfare worker. In the 1930s he acquired the socialist orientation typical of Belfast's more enlightened milieus, and began to write sketches and stories for the BBC Northern Ireland programme Children's Hour.
He quickly became a part of a coterie of lively and intelligent young Ulstermen who refused to have any truck with the dourer and more hidebound aspects of the North. He was involved in the founding of the periodical Lagan (edited by his friend John Boyd), and, in 1943, saw the publication of his own first collection of stories, Summer Loanen, under the imprint of Richard Rowley's Mourne Press. His most significant work, though, was as a radio producer with an inspired touch, and a transfiguring approach to many previously neglected riches, rural and urban, on his Belfast doorstep.
He also, between 1951 and 1987, wrote four distinguished novels, of which the most pungent and best-known is the first, December Bride. All this, and more, is given a shape and a context in Sean McMahon's very enjoyable and workmanlike biography, even if the author has been a bit handicapped by his subject's extreme economy when it came to autobiographical disclosure. Some early years and private experiences are, it seems, completely unrecoverable; but for all that, Sean McMahon provides a welcome appraisal of one of Northern Ireland's most distinctive and engaging men of letters.
Patricia Craig is the editor of The Belfast Anthology and is currently working on the authorised biography of Brian Moore to be published next year.