 Wherever the definitions of a genre threatened to restrict his enquiry into the human condition, Rathbone never hesitated to push it into wider territory.In a climate of increasing specialisation expected of novelists by commercial publishers, this was an unfashionable approach to take, with arguably a great commercial cost as Rathbone went his own way and refused to seek or accept any label or badge of identification, which might increase sales but confine his activities as a writer.Rathbone created four characters who appear in more than one book, permitting a certain grouping, while never taking over the heterogeneous spirit of his work or deflecting him from the pursuit of wider fictional interests.