The Last Englishman: the life of J L Carr Byron Rogers Aurum Press, 288pp, £14.99 ISBN 1854108387

When features journalism was less dominated by celebrity arse-licking, one tended to see more of Byron Rogers's articles in the papers. Writing with delicious drollery, he specialises in English and Welsh eccentrics, whether alive or dead (and in fact many of his features arise from grubbing around in churchyards). Lately two collections of his pieces have appeared, and his latest book is a homage to a man who influenced Rogers's journalism more than most. J L Carr so often formed the subject of it that when he was dying he wondered aloud about the effect on Rogers's finances.

J L Carr, who died in 1994 at the age of 82, was the son of the staunchly Methodist night stationmaster at Thirsk, north of York. He grew up to become a primary-school headmaster, a one-man publishing house, a novelist, and a true English eccentric. To begin on the lower slopes of that eccentricity. Carr lived in Kettering for most of his life, and when A N Wilson complained about the distractions of literary parties, Carr suggested that Kettering might be the answer for him, too. He would make stone carvings that looked as though they might have come from the Middle Ages, then hide them under long grass in churchyards saying: "That'll give 'em something to think about." As a headmaster he was effective but strange. He would have dozens of shepherds in his nativity plays, and once gave a copy of Prometheus Unbound to a school fete just to see who would buy it.

He retired in 1967, and set up as a publisher, producing idiosyncratic illustrated maps of the English counties, the nostalgic demand for which was boosted by Edward Heath's reorganisation of local government in 1974. Carr also turned out small books, such as his Illustrated Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary English Cricketers, which chronicled ferocious underarm bowlers of the 1890s who would run halfway down the wicket roaring: "That's got yer!" after every ball, and so on. Tiny, supposedly funny books are now as irritating as midges in bookshops, but Carr was there first, and his were genuinely amusing.

Carr began writing novels when he was 52. Generally they were short satires on the English institutions he'd known - village football teams, publishing, schools - written from the perspective of the little man. They're often fantastical (the football book is called How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup), but this is nicely offset by the dry humour of the prose. The particularly odd thing is that Carr really wanted his books to sell, even though his publishing satire, for example, was entitled Harpole & Foxberrow, General Publishers: a business history (with footnotes). He went mainstream for a while with the novella, A Month in the Country, in which the humour takes second place to unexpected poignancy and eroticism. This tale of a shell-shocked young man who, in the aftermath of the First World War, goes to a Yorkshire village to restore a wall painting in a church won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker. But Carr soon reverted to cult status, publishing his final two novels himself after a history of disagreements with bigger concerns.

Small of stature, he comes across as a literary sprite who could be played in a film by a suitably made up Ben Kingsley, keeping a solemn face but with a twinkle in his eye. Given his enthusiasm for English history, and churches, he also puts one in mind of a chippier John Betjeman. Carr worked as a teacher in South Dakota in 1938, and was completely unnerved by the lack of history - he might easily have run into people, as Rogers notes, "who'd had towns named after them". To compensate, he wrote a book called Old Timers, a 65-page history of the homesteading pioneers of Beadle County, South Dakota of which one copy survives, in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

Rogers attributes much of Carr's didactic energy to having failed his eleven-plus not once but twice, and for the rest of his life he was against streaming and selection. This book is logically ordered and well-written. The spartan interiors of Methodist chapels are described as "those large rooms cleared for action"; Carr was teetotal, or near enough, and when Rogers turned up at his house with a small bottle of whisky, Carr returned it to him, carrying it "as though it were nitroglycerine". Sometimes Carr and Rogers seem to merge, and you have to read twice. Is it Rogers who notes that the graveyard at Sherburn-in-Elmet, Yorkshire, contains the only man described on his tombstone as "a capitalist", or is he recording an observation of Carr's?

In the circumstances, however, it doesn't matter in the slightest.

Andrew Martin's most recent novel is The Necropolis Railway (Faber and Faber)

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