[stumpstalker]

To round out his background a little more, this is from the blurb on the back of the book jacket of Spiller’s FIRELIGHT, the 1990 Gunnerman reprint of the original 1937 publication.

“His large hands were rough from honest toil, the kind with dirt-filled cracks that don’t come clean for Sunday church. A commercial flower bulb grower, blacksmith, devout Christian, market gunner, violin maker, teetotaler, a complex multi-faceted man who was known as the Poet Laureate of the ruffed grouse.… A man with little in the way of formal education, Burton Spiller was destined to become respected for his work with the written word, no mean feat when you consider the credentials of his contemporaries.”