and others. His contemporary J. M. Barrie had already created a demand for stories in Lowland Scots, with his sketches of Thrums in the late 1880s. R. L. Stevenson a corresponding friend of both writers, described the relationship thus: "you are out of doors and Barrie is indoors" in a letter in 1893. Crockett's breakthrough year occurred in 1894 when T. Fisher Unwin published no fewer than four of his works, The Raiders, The Lilac Sunbonnet, The PlayActress and Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills. Crockett was one of the new breed of professional writers emerging in the late 19th century whose work was written for the emerging popular 'mass market' readership. As one of the foremost celebrity authors, he divided literary critics both his own time and subsequently. His fellow late-nineteenth-century novelist George Gissing for instance found his novel The Raiders "wearisome". His early work was dismissed by some contemporary critics as Kailyard and it was a label that has proved hard to shift. The stigma associated with it has seen his work overlooked for many years. A reappraisal of the nebulous connection with Kailyard is beginning to be acknowledged, as evidenced by a re-appraisal of the whole Kailyard concept by writers such as Andrew Nash. The mid-20th century view that his later work was 'over-prolific and feebly sentimental is now being challenged. His work is much less easy to categorise than such simplification suggests, not least because it is so extensive. Most broadly it falls into an historical adventure romance genre. However, he also wrote of contemporary issues, largely from a rural perspective. He championed the rural working classes and was outspoken against all forms of hierarchy. While many of his stories are set in rural Galloway, there are also stories set in Edinburgh, Scotland, England, France, Spain, and further abroad. In the late 1890s he was commissioned to write many introductions (including Blackwood's 1895 edition of John Galt) and, for children, versions of Sir Walter Scott stories (Red Cap Tales and Red Cap Adventures). He wrote nonfiction as well, including a booklet published by the London camera manufacturer, Newman & Guardia, in 1900, comparing cameras favourably to pen and pencil and explaining how he encountered the N and G advertisement. This led to the publications of a nonfiction work The Adventurer in Spain (1903). His non fiction work Raiderland (1904) takes the reader into the Galloway of