It’s been a while since I gave any attention to the British Library Crime Classics series. Blame the summer recess when another collection of short stories hit the shelves (‘Cyanide In The Sun’), followed by yet another John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr title (‘The Judas Window’), both of which finally managed to break my habit of buying/reading every release simply because it was on the label, as it were. I’ve known for a long, long time that the short story form is not for me, and that with very few exceptions I have found every John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr book I have ever read (and it’s an embarrassingly large number) to be insufferably dull and smug. So, with the habit broken I have since managed to sell off all my previous BLCC short story compilations and also avoided the latest ‘Locked Room and Other Miraculous Crimes’ entry. I did, however, enjoy the reissue of Christianna Brand’s ‘Cat and Mouse’ (it had just arrived in the mail when I last wrote about a BLCC title back in May). There is no Inspector Cockrill in the book, which is a shame, but it’s nonetheless a cracking kind of psychological thriller type mystery full of deceit, deception, mis-direction and identity confusion all wrapped up in or around Welsh folklore, or at least local here-say. More proof that Brand’s books are, for me, as reliably fine as John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s are frustrating.

A more recent entry in the BLCC catalogue that I’ve picked up has been Nina Bawden’s ‘The Odd Flamingo’. First published in 1954, it is one of two crime novels written by the author much more famously known for her children’s books ‘Carrie’s War’ and ‘The Peppermint Pig’ (cue The Cocteau Twins…). Written when Bawden was in her late twenties, the book does perhaps suffer slightly from a youthful preoccupation with Darkness and Gloom, but in its defence does capture the seedy side of post-war London with aplomb. I’ve read other reviews of the book where readers bemoan the lack of any particularly ‘likeable’ characters, and whilst this is a pretty accurate observation I personally do not see it as a weakness. Certainly the fairly unrelenting unveiling of the negative aspects of human nature might seem a little much, but arguably this was something that those who grew up with war and its aftermath needed to get out of their systems, in Bawden’s case perhaps through writing this book. There are some interesting themes at work here around the impact of familial fragmentation caused by war, as well as the enduring idealisation of feminine ‘innocence’ in the male gaze. The story concerns for the most part the ‘amateur’ investigations carried out by a solicitor but is certainly not in the lawyer-mystery field inhabited by, say, Sara Woods, and the character of Will here is no Anthony Maitland. Rather he comes across as rather a starched shirt, seeing his illusions of ‘propriety’ progressively dismantled as the story progresses. It’s easy to read Will as the embodiment of conservative attitudes, wildly hoping to re-establish some kind of pre-war status quo but being wholly ineffectual in doing so against the tide of change wrought by conflict. Not that Bawden is suggesting that any kind of positive ideal might be replacing that status-quo. There is none of the underlying hopefulness of, say, Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ here, and even when the face of authority in the form of police presence appears it feels decidedly downbeat, with an air of resignation even. The fatigue of post-war Britain here feels deeply ingrained, and it is not pretty.

‘The Odd Flamingo’ in the book’s title refers, as the attractive cover illustration of this reissue suggests, to a night club in the heart of London. It, and its habituées are well sketched by Bawden and there is certainly something of post-war desperation starting to segue into the beginnings of the beatnik coffee-house generation. There is an air of Robert Frank or Sergio Larrain’s photographs in Bawden’s words, particularly Larrain’s evocative nightclub images from 1959, though Bawden’s characters (particularly her young female ones) lack a degree of optimism visible in Larrain’s photographs from five years in the future. They may be beautiful but they are utterly damned.

‘The Odd Flamingo’ then is arguably one of the most depressing entries in the BLCC series but it is also perhaps one of the most peculiarly enjoyable. For sure anyone looking for a locked room or otherwise ‘miraculous’ mystery should stick to their John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s for they will find nothing to puzzle over here, except perhaps the endlessly enduring facility for human beings to be unfailingly vile to one another. I’m certainly glad that it’s been dusted off and given a new lease of life and hope that a reissue of Bawden’s other crime novel, ‘Who Calls The Tune’ might follow before too long. Fingers crossed.