Top 10 cricket scenes in fiction

In his autobiography, Arthur Conan Doyle recalled how he was once stumped by the England wicketkeeper Dick Lilley off the bowling of WG Grace. Sherlock Holmes would have instantly spotted Conan Doyle’s creative embellishment. A check of the scorecard (London County CC v MCC, July 1902) shows that while the bowler was Grace, the keeper was not Lilley but Edward French, an obscure amateur.

Fiction has a tendency to creep into cricket anecdotes, as I discovered during research for my biography of Grace. Yet that does not mean cricket is easy terrain for novelists. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an otherwise perfect thriller, the only false note is struck when Smiley says Control “hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus and Lord’s Cricket Ground”. It is of course just “Lord’s”.

Few writers know enough about cricket to avoid such pitfalls and have the literary skill to make the game connect with life beyond the boundary. Here are 10 authors who have pulled off this double achievement, as difficult as a cricketer’s “double” (1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a season).

1. The Go-Between by LP Hartley (1953)

Twelve year-old Leo Colston becomes embroiled in a heady adult world of sex, lies and handwritten notes during a hot summer holiday spent at a posh schoolfriend’s stately home in Norfolk. Leo runs messages for his friend’s elder sister Marian and her secret lover Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer, while Viscount Trimingham steels himself to propose to her. Hartley distils Leo’s emotional confusion into one climactic moment of betrayal at the annual cricket match between Brandham Hall and the local village team, when he catches Burgess, the village’s star batsman, off the bowling of Trimingham. Brandham Hall wins the game. In different ways, Burgess, Marian and Leo are poised to lose everything.

2. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (2008)

Hans van den Brock, a Wall Street bank analyst, seeks solace from a broken marriage by joining Staten Island cricket club. One sweltering afternoon, a Trinidadian umpire called Chuck Ramkissoon orders a bowler out of the attack for delivering dangerous bouncers. The fielders protest and then scatter when a man wanders onto the field brandishing a gun. Ramkissoon stays put and persuades the intruder to leave the field. We already know that the umpire will die a gangster’s death, his handcuffed body dumped in a canal. Why then, does he deliver a homily after the game about cricket as a lesson in civility? In one passage of play (or rather, non-play), O’Neill sets up a sub-plot that deserves a novel in itself.

3. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (1928)

In his autobiographical novel, Sassoon uses an Edwardian village cricket game between Batley and Rotherden to evoke a rural English society that was buried in the mud and slaughter of the first world war. Young George Sherston (the fictionalised Sassoon) excitedly whitens his pads with “Blanco” after learning he has been picked for Batley. Pastor Yalden, a cricket-mad cleric, is bowled by a “vicious yorker”. A nervous waiting batsman fumbles with straps and buckles as he hears the wickets crash. As a piece of nostalgia, the “Flower Show match” is pitch perfect – not least because we are aware that time will soon be called on this idyll. Sherston ends the book in the trenches, having “more or less made up my mind to die”.

4. Playing the Game by Ian Buruma (1991)

This beguiling novel by a half-Dutch cricket fan about the Indian batting genius KS Ranjitsinhji (1872-1933) is also an exploration of cultural ambivalence. A thinly fictionalised Buruma arrives at Ranji’s alma mater in Gujarat to find an old boys’ cricket match in progress. It is anyone’s guess where England ends and India begins. The OBs wear blazers and old school ties and call out “Good Shot!” in English, Gujarati and Hindi. Afterwards, the English headmaster (Tonbridge and Balliol) invites Buruma to tea. Here is an England that “only ever existed in India, as a piece of Raj theatre”.

5. Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (1982)

“Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this only does apply to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension.” So begins Douglas Adams’s intergalactic comic riff on the meaning of Krikkit (“Let’s be blunt, it’s a nasty game”). UFOs appear above Lord’s as time traveller Arthur Dent prepares to bowl at a Krikkit robot. It’s cricket, Jim, but not as we know it.

6. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836-37)

Dickens’s match between Muggleton and Dingley Dell remains one of the best satires on how cricket appears to the uninitiated. After Mr Tupman is accidentally shot in the arm, Mr Pickwick declares he is keen to watch a game “in which the impotent effects of unskilful people do not endanger human life” – precisely the danger faced by early 19^th-century batsmen on unprepared pitches. Nobody gets killed during Muggleton v Dingley Dell, but the game is so tedious you could easily die of boredom. In the end, Dingley Dell simply give up when they recognise Muggleton’s “superior prowess”. It is all rather pointless, which is probably Dickens’s point.

7. Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn (2011)

Cricket is rarely seen through a woman’s eyes in fiction, except to illustrate their ignorance of the game. Twenty-one year-old Connie Callaway, a keen cricket fan, breaks the chauvinist mould in Anthony Quinn’s fine novel about love, war and “the discipline of batsmanship”. At a county match in 1911, Connie offers some advice to out-of-form Will Maitland about his batting technique. “May I ask, Miss Callaway,” Will bristles, “have you ever played cricket yourself?” Connie walks off in a huff, appalled by Will’s pomposity, even though “she had rather liked his face”. Romance is just around the corner, fielding at leg slip.

8. Psmith in the City by PG Wodehouse (1910)

Local bigwig John Bickersdyke walks in front of the sightscreen, distracting the batsman Mike Jackson, who is on 98. Jackson misses the ball and is bowled, and his team lose the match. Only cricket fans can appreciate the full horror of Bickersdyke’s faux pas; yet like an American cocktail or a fully buttoned waistcoat, something has evidently disturbed the Wodehousian world order. After such a blunder, is Bickersdyke after all the right kind of chap to take Mike’s friend Psmith under his wing? You already sense the answer.

9. Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers (1933)

Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic detective, goes undercover as Death Bredon, an advertising copywriter, to unmask a murderer at Pym’s Publicity Ltd. Batting in a company cricket match, Wimsey can’t resist hitting a wild fast bowler all around the ground after he is struck a nasty blow on the elbow. An elderly spectator recognises “Bredon” as the same Wimsey who scored 112 for Oxford at Lord’s in 1911. Fortunately, a brilliant run-out by one of his teammates has already given Lord Peter his vital final clue. Terrific stuff. Who cares that Sayers’s plot is pure tosh?

10. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Only Joyce could have constructed a filthy sex scene out of the names of first-class cricketers. Here’s a taster: “… whenever she druv gehind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his tunnil-clefft bagslops after the rising bounder’s yorkers, as he studd and stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry’s blackham’s red bobby abbel …” JT Tyldesley, J Tunnicliffe, CT Studd, AE Stoddart, AE Trott, VV Trumper, Lord Harris, JM Blackham and R Abel never had it so good. After a page in this vein (and yes, Grace gets a piece of the action) you wonder how Joyce’s weak eyes coped with poring over old editions of Wisden. Fortunately help was on hand in the form of the former first-class batsman S Beckett, Joyce’s research assistant on Finnegans Wake.

• Richard Tomlinson’s centenary biography, Amazing Grace: The Man who was WG, is published by Little, Brown, priced £25. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop for £20.