Back in 2023 I took a short mooch around the Scottish Borders town of Moffat, looking for the spirit of authors D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering. I found Stevenson’s old house looking somewhat neglected and sad but the little town felt very pleasant and the surrounding landscape certainly seemed still to glisten with the pleasures of these old writing friends’ books. In the intervening eighteen months or so I’ve passed the motorway signs for Moffat several times and never detoured, but last month I finally returned for a brief stop to stretch my legs and visit the Moffat Bookshop to see what secondhand treats it might have on its shelves.
After a good rummage I came away with two books, the first of which was a lovely 1950 pocket hardback reprint of the 1920 novel ‘Penny Plain’ by O. Douglas. Now I am certainly no expert on early to mid 20th Century British fiction, but I like to think that over the past few years I have become aware of a good number of names to look out for whilst browsing the secondhand shelves. O. Douglas however was entirely new to me and with the book’s jacket promising a tale set in a Scottish Borders town it felt unwise to pass up the opportunity. I’m certainly glad I didn’t, because ‘Penny Plain’ is a charming little book that sets a Cinderella tale within the context of post WW1 Britain, exploring as it does so threads of class and social snobbery. It may suffer slightly from a certain clunky style that is, in my limited and non-academic experience, prevalent in a lot of British fiction from the early 20th Century, but there is enough lightness of touch to carry things off. Again, from a thoroughly non-academic perspective, it seems to me that a lot of popular genre fiction written in this period is still struggling somewhat to find a 20th Century voice. It certainly feels true in the crime and detective genre where the (for me) rather dull and overly wordy 19th Century flavour lingers long into the 1920s and, for some writers, through most of the 1930s. I get the same kind of feeling from what I suppose one would broadly call the romance genre, and there is I think a degree of this in ‘Penny Plain’s otherwise delightful romantic entertainment. As already mentioned however there is a degree of lightness to the book and certainly the way in which Douglas conjures both the landscape of the fictional Borders town of Priorsford and its maze of social connections is done very nicely indeed. Priorsford is by all accounts a lightly fictionalised version of Peebles, and the clues are certainly there to guess that much, even more than a century later. There is a lovely segment late in the book when the little Jardine family on whose fortunes the narrative largely dwells take a motor trip down into England. The first part of this in particular is vividly written and, I dare say, little changed in the past hundred years. Certainly the road that they follow along the Tweed and then descend via the Devil’s Beeftub with its views across Stevenson and Clavering’s beloved Annan Water into Moffat must be essentially still the same.
Speaking of Stevenson, there is in ‘Penny Plain’ a little of the gentle social satire of Stevenson’s 1934 classic ‘Miss Buncle’s Book’ as well as a similar soft conservatism throughout everything. Sometimes this can feel a little disquieting to a 21st Century liberal/progressive viewpoint but on the whole the charm wins us over, whilst Douglas’ rather withering portrayals of the most obnoxiously snobbish and rampantly traditionalist characters sadly ring as true today as they would have done in her time.
The owner of the Moffat Bookshop could not tell me anything about O.Douglas but I have since learned that it was the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, younger sister of John Buchan (’39 Steps’, ‘Greenmantle’ etc) and that she published a number of other novels, including two more to complete a Priorsford trilogy, throughout the 1920s and 30s. I left behind several of these on the shelves of the bookshop, many in a similar 1950 pocket hardback format, and I hope they might still be there next time I am crossing the border.
It would have been remiss of me of course not to have looked for some D.E. Stevenson novels on the shelves of the Moffat Bookshop and, as expected, there were quite a few on offer (though sadly nothing by her friend Molly Clavering), almost all of which I had already read in the excellent reprint editions from Furrowed Middlebrow. I did however pick up a nice first edition of her 1954 novel ‘Charlotte Fairlie’, a novel set for the most part on a fictional island of the Inner Hebrides. However, whilst still being an enjoyable enough piece of romantic fiction, it strikes me that it is far from being Stevenson at her best. The story is essentially one in which Professional Spinsterhood is pitted against Traditional Family Structures with (Not At All A Spoiler Alert) predictably conservative outcomes. It all feels oddly older than its 1954 publication date might suggest and perhaps gives lie to the idea that post-WW2 Britain was entirely in tune with progressively socialist ideals. There is precious little of that here, as the headmistress of a girls’ school (private of course – none of your leftie State School rubbish) finds herself drawn into romance with the parent of one of her charges. Inevitably this parent happens to live in a castle on a Scottish island to which the novels titular character is invited to spend the summer by the child. To the modern (state) educationalist’s eye this is an outrageous suggestion that sets off just about every safeguarding klaxon one could imagine, yet seems entirely normal in the book’s 1950s context. Indeed, for all I know, those working in 21st Century private schools might not bat an eyelid at such a situation, but it is still one of the most jarring pieces of period reference that I’ve come across in my not inconsiderable reading of early to mid 20th Century fiction, ranking alongside Josephine Tey’s ‘Dago’ debacle in her 1929 debut ‘The Man In The Queue’.
Rarely do I find the preposterous nature of scenarios in novels (particularly those broadly within the romantic fiction genre) to be a stumbling block, but I admit that I continued to find the relationships between headteacher, students and parents to be so in ‘Charlotte Fairlie’. Certainly there are interesting threads in the book that explore the role of fathers, and the verve with which Stevenson describes the landscapes of the island of Targ (it feels like an amalgam of the islands of Rùm, Coll and Tiree) and the West Country in which Charlotte Fairlie’s school is set (at one point she contemplates a trip to Sidmouth) is as admirable as one would expect. Others will no doubt struggle much less with these difficulties and will enjoy the book immeasurably more as a result, but for me ‘Charlotte Fairlie’ is distinctly a second or third division Stevenson.
Finally, staying in the environs of the Hebridean isles, I just finished reading Mabel Esther Allan’s lovely 1950 children’s novel ‘Over The Sea To School’. Reissued in 2024 by the marvellous Girls Gone By imprint (who also reprinted Allan’s ‘The Amber House’ which I so enjoyed recently) the book takes us over the sea to Skye and into the somewhat progressive (again private) school of Dundonay House. Jennifer Shelley’s short but informative introduction to this reprint suggests to the uninformed children’s fiction rookie (like me) that 21st Century academia sees such books as belonging to “an unrecognised radical literature for children in the early to middle twentieth century.” I admit that it can be difficult to see much evidence of radical views in a book like ‘Over The Sea To Skye’ for the narrative is crammed full of deeply traditional and conservative attitudes. The crofters of Skye feel rather like caricatures, as does their excitement at welcoming back the traditional Laird to the Castle. It does rather feel like we are in the midst of some Conservative propaganda for A Return To The Old Values of pre-war society rather than imagining an equitable or, dare one say it, socialist utopia. As for the Dundonay House school, there is a distinct air of the middle classes being able to BUY progressive teaching and learning methods as a means of salving their conscience about How Things Ought To Be. It’s not unlike 21st Century progressives convincing themselves they are Saving The Planet by buying enormous new electric 4×4 vehicles every other year and being rampantly authoritarian about individual recycling efforts.
Yet this ought not to discourage one from reading ‘Over The Sea To School’ for it is a marvellous book that does a fine job of capturing the timeless internal conflicts that plague teenagers in whatever era one might choose and that invokes the tremendous thrills of the best children’s mystery and adventure stories. Yes, the adventure thriller angle is rather suddenly thrust into the mix as the novel nears its conclusion and arguably feels a little shoe-horned into place, but then one remembers that it IS a children’s book and that perhaps such boisterous leaping from one episode to the next is entirely to be expected and indeed encouraged. What lingers most strongly from Allan’s writing however is the tremendous sense of place that she conjures in her writing. ‘The Amber House’ with its setting in Rye and Winchelsea suggested to me that this might be the case with her other books, and certainly the beauty of Skye and the surrounding island landscape of Scotland is as well served as in any other text for children or adults. I’m certainly looking forward to the forthcoming reprints of Allan’s sequels, ‘A School in Danger’ and ‘At School in Skye’ with eager anticipation.
Last month I wrote about discovering Elizabeth Goudge through her children’s novel ‘Smoky-House’ and made a comment about looking forward to reading more of her books for adults as well as for children. Well, in the six weeks or so that have passed since then I’m pleased to say that I’ve ticked that box to some extent, taking in two of her novels for adults and another of her children’s books. The first of her ‘grown up’ novels that I read was one that doesn’t seem to be talked about much, even amongst Goudge aficionados. First published in 1941 (a year after ‘Smoky-House’), ‘The Castle On The Hill’ is set in 1940 and is, as much as anything, another of those tremendous views into the home front of England during the early years of WW2. I read the book shortly after finishing Betty Miller’s 1945 novel ‘On The Side Of The Angels’ and together these two make for a compelling double act, both being the kind of novel where one cannot help but get busy with the underlining pencil as passages and exchanges ring with remarkable clarity and resonance. Miller’s novel is rather more world weary and brutally frank than Goudge’s but, being written after another four years of wartime, this is perhaps understandable, not to say inevitable. War is a central character in Miller’s book (it could hardly be otherwise) but perhaps of more interest is the way in which she explores notions of identity and faithfulness, particularly in relevance to what kind of world one might hope to emerge from the ruins. Characters chaff against each other, conflicts sparking from physical passions and emotional attractions as much as, if not more than from differing ideologies. Questions of sexual identity are certainly central to Miller’s novel and in some ways might be seen to foreshadow the kinds of obsessions seen in the 21st Century. Crucially though, it feels like Miller is sending us a warning from the past with regard to this Cult Of The Individual. “‘The courage to be yourself. Isn’t that important?’” asks one character, echoing what, in the approaching decades of Pop Cultural Marketing would become the central thrust of both dominant and counter-cultures. The question in Miller’s hands is answered with en empathic No. “’On the contrary. We’ve got to learn how not to be ourselves – to have the courage, the strength to be something else. Otherwise there never will be any progress.’” (My emphasis). There is much to be taken from Miller’s novel, even (especially) at this point in the 21st Century, but this puncturing of the dominant idea of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries feels to me to be the most poignant and perceptive.
Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘The Castle On The Hill’ may be less caustic than Miller’s later novel and may too be a more obviously patriotic and propagandist text, yet this notion of individuality being necessarily subservient to some Greater Power filters powerfully throughout the book. The titular castle on the hill is modelled on Berry Pomeroy in Devon, just a stone’s throw from the village of Marldon whose setting and village pub inspired ‘Smoky-House’. Once again Goudge successfully conjures a sense of place, her feel for both the physical and spiritual essence of landscape marvellously on display. The castle and the landscape inhabit the novel with a vivid presence, but it is the characters with whom Goudge peoples the story that carry the weight. Whilst using the displacement of children from London as a vehicle for the clashing of social class and economic wealth (and lack of), Goudge is nevertheless wary of falling too far into the clutches of stereotypes and cliches. There is necessarily an element of this however: the aged patriarch who would really rather exist in the past; the ideological young aristocratic heir who rails against inequality and the suffering of The Poor; the poor who are quite happy thank you very much with their place in the world and who’ll thank you for not being so condescending; the foreign refugee seeking safety in the arms of England (Queen Elizabeth’s prayer before the Armada is invoked here, something the Jingoistic 21st Century ‘Reformers’ would do well to reflect on); the pacifist grappling with what pacifism means in the context of “no ordinary struggle of rival imperialisms but a fight to save the very things that had been won by man’s integrity.” And of course The Children who see everything through the peculiar lens of fairytales (the Pied Piper references might be a little obvious but are still charmingly done).
If it were not all so marvellously written then the book might indeed feel a little like a parody of itself, for as well as this assortment of characters there are the obvious themes of tragedy, sacrifice, loss and love threading throughout. That it rises above the ordinary is certainly down to Goudge’s talent for telling stories in an entertaining yet intelligent manner, placing observations and insight into the words of her characters with a remarkable lightness of touch. My underlining pencil needed a good deal of sharpening, I can tell you.
Through everything too there ripple the deep waters of Goudge’s faith. It seems like God is never far away in her novels and whilst this might be something that would have guaranteed their rejection by my younger self, these days I find it all rather gratifying. Not so much in the sense of Organised Religion (which still seems to me to be largely an example of humans seeking a means to obtain personal and structural power) but rather in the sense of God as connective glue, if you like. Indeed, as ‘The Castle On The Hill’ nears its conclusion, Goudge seems to acknowledge this by echoing that quote from Betty Miller’s book in saying: “Separateness is only an illusion, a sort of curse on us because of sin. We refused to be children of God, we wouldn’t be brothers of each other, and so there was egotism and the hell of loneliness. But it’s only an imaginary hell. You can break out of it if you break away from yourself.” (again, my emphasis). Or, as Goudge almost immediately puts it more plainly: “life is God and life is love”.
Amen to that.
Unsurprisingly God threads throughout the other Goudge novel for adults that I have recently read, as befits a story that is part of a ‘Cathedral Trilogy’. The 1936 novel ‘A City of Bells’ is the first installment and is another marvellous evocation of place, in this case the Somerset Cathedral town of Wells, where Goudge herself lived with her father the Reverend Henry Leighton Goudge who taught in the cathedral school there. The novel is essentially a piece of Romantic Fiction masquerading as a book of faith and place, or perhaps vice versa. Either way it is both a charming period piece that evokes its late 19th/early 20th Century setting and a source of ageless wisdom, as the best pieces of art always seem to be. Once again Goudge’s feel for place inhabits the pages as the streets and buildings of Wells and its surrounding landscape are captured in deft strokes. Visiting the town even today one would recognise almost all of what Goudge describes, although artisanal cafes and bijou restaurants might sadly have replaced the bookshops and fruit sellers. Certainly the cathedral and the Bishop’s Palace are most likely essentially unchanged in the 90 years since Goudge penned her novel, and I dare say that some of the characteristics of the clergy remain largely intact also. As with ‘The Castle On The Hill’, it is as much the interplay between these characters that lends pleasure to ‘A City Of Bells’ as its delicious sense of place, allowing explorations of ingrained attitudes of class distinction as well as the more mundane (or alternatively more divine) pursuit of love and the sense of belonging.
From my limited knowledge of Goudge’s work these seem to be common themes, ones that she prods and explores in a subtly different manner each time. There is also, as in ‘The Castle On The Hill’, the idea of the neglected/misunderstood (musical) artist who doubles in both instances as a father figure to ‘lost’ children. In the case of ‘A City of Bells’ this child is Henrietta, and if the denouement is ultimately as eye-rollingly obvious as it is unbelievable then this is all to the good, for Goudge is certainly one for operating within the expectations and structures of the fairytale. She does this with a tremendously deft turn of phrase too, as the style of her writing shifts almost imperceptibly as episodes switch focus from adult to child and back again. It is all exquisitely done and lends ‘A City of Bells’ a unique charm as it seems to oscillate magically between two worlds.
If ‘A City of Bells’ inhabits, at times, the liminal space between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, then the 1942 ‘sequel’ of ‘Henrietta’s House’ unashamedly opts entirely for the fairytale form of childrens’ fiction. Set once more in the familiar surroundings of Wells (or the fictional Torminster if you prefer), ‘Henrietta’s House’ is set a few years after ‘A City of Bells’ and reunites us with many of the characters first met there. Inevitably when reading the book as an adult one can feel a degree of irritation at the unflagging ‘innocence’ of the writing style. This is no criticism of the book but rather an acknowledgment of the pleasures of growing up/old. If ‘Henrietta’s House’ feels unrelentingly charming to the extent of being ever so slightly sickly sweet then this in turn is arguably a sign of its success as piece of welcome escapism for children in the midst of WW2. If the idea of characters becoming lost in a fairy netherworld of water filled caverns and flower lined bowers, eventually to (hardly a spoiler alert, but still…) emerge more pleasant and rounded individuals in a Happy Ever After world of optimism makes you shudder then ‘Henrietta’s House’ may not be for you. Or then again, it may be just what you need. It certainly cheered me up, and I admit that I am looking forward to catching up with the ‘sequel’, the Christmas themed ‘Sister of the Angels’ (actually published in 1939, which perhaps makes the idea of it being a sequel a trifle confusing) at the appropriate time of year. As for the other two ‘Cathedral trilogy’ books (‘Towers In The Mist’ and ‘The Dean’s Watch’), well these are certainly on my ‘to be read’ shelves and I look forward to getting to them with eager anticipation.
Did you watch the recent BBC drama based on Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’? I am not entirely sure why I persevere with such things, but I admit that I did and that, perhaps predictably, found myself in two minds about it all. On the one hand I thought it was a fine enough entertainment. All the actors were first rate and the whole thing looked quite ravishingly appealing. I’m quite sure that anyone unfamiliar with Christie’s novel would have found it a very enjoyable piece of period drama, whilst some contemporary relevance in terms of its themes might well have found favour with any younger members of the audience. This however is perhaps my major bugbear with recent adaptations of Christie novels: these themes either simply do not exist in the original texts or they are much more subtly suggested. To go into any great detail about this with regards ‘Towards Zero’ would be to inevitably throw multiple spoilers about either book or show into the mix, so let’s just say that calling the television show ‘Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’’ might just be the most egregious example of mis-labelling since, well, the last television adaptation of one of her books. But then something like ‘Very (and when I say very, I mean VERY) loosely based on ‘Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’’ does not have the same ring to it.
Of course I understand the desire of film makers to tweak existing pieces of fiction in order to meet the very different requirements of visual text media, but watching ‘Towards Zero’ one might as well be watching something written entirely from scratch. The differences between Christie’s book and what appears on screen are numerous and not insignificant. Most obvious, perhaps, is the fact that Christie’s book is part of a short series featuring the Superintendent Battle character, a character notable in the show only by his complete absence. Other figures are largely re-written both in terms of their characterisation and their importance to the narrative. Some, like Battle, are missing in action whilst others are completely new creations entirely. Motives are altered and invented to the point of it all feeling a little like a parody of the Traditional Country House Murder Mystery, but with ‘edgy’ 21st Century character traits and motivations thrust into the mix. This is all very well, but it feels a bit disrespectful to Christie, whose plotting is much tighter than the film might suggest and whose ultimate motivation for murder in the book is, I would suggest, much more ‘modern’ and with contemporary relevance than that which ultimately features in the show. The characters in the film also feel too far removed from the original text, with backstories and traits written into the script that, to some extent feel like an inferred reference to the rather lazy and often raised criticism of Christie being no good at characterisation. All of the people in the book are perfectly reasonably drawn. Christie uses line(s) sparingly in doing this, but I find this a strength rather than a weakness. However, the peculiarly 21st Century obsession with identity and self appears to insist on the need to expose and exaggerate negative traits. We are all damaged and suffering and everyone has to see that, at all times. It all gets rather tiresome, doesn’t it? Well doesn’t it?
Perhaps Agatha Christie would have loved it though. Certainly her estate will love the significant influx of cash into their coffers from licensing her name.
There can be a lot of unpleasantness on The Social Media these days and I understand why many sensibly minded folks are leaving it behind. I have done so with much of it, but do occasionally find some pleasures in the Facebook universe. The other month one of those ‘recommended’ pages cropped up, this time for ‘Old Torbay’ or suchlike. This particular post showed a ‘then and now’ split photograph of a garage site sitting, as they often did in their infancy, in the corner of a road junction. At the time I only vaguely noted that the garage in question was on the approach to the village of Marldon and that a pub called ‘Ye Olde Smokey House’ was pictured in the middle distance along one of the lanes. So far so unremarkable. However, in some kind of strange reversal of 21st Century normality, in which one’s experiences in the ‘real’ world become mirrored almost immediately with advertisements and ‘suggestions’ in the online one (evidence suggests that it is not paranoia to think that devices are literally listening to us and feeding the algorithms) a few weeks later I found myself reading a children’s book where both the village of Marldon and its pub took centre stage. Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘Smoky House’ was originally published in 1940 but has found itself reissued by the delightful Girls Gone By publishing venture and is a thoroughly charming read. Set in the early 19th Century, ‘Smoky House’ blends historical fiction with mild fantasy, and if the inclusion of fairy folks (‘The Good People’) might test the patience of our more cynical ages then I imagine it being remarkably appealing to youngsters reading it at the onset of WW2. The historical fiction elements involve the free-trading community (don’t call ‘em smugglers) of the fictional village of Faraway in Devon, and the action revolves around the village inn and the Treguddick family. At the time of her writing the book Goudge had recently moved to Marldon, and so the village and its surrounding landscape are as much the stars of the book as anything else. I believe that the inn in question (‘Ye Olde Smokey House’) was an inspiration at least in terms of name, but it was certainly not always called this, a map from the late 19th Century showing it as ‘The Ship Inn’. Perhaps too Goudge, whilst lifting the name from ‘Ye Olde Smokey House’, envisioned her fictional inn as being more like the Church House Inn at the centre of the old Marldon village. It is fun to play these games of reference, and whilst we have been recently enjoying watching Ben Robinson exploring ‘Villages By The Sea’ on the telly, it would be even more fun to see him make a series where he looks at the architectural and cultural history of inns, hotels and pubs around the country. The show might be called ‘Time At The Bar’, and the inns of Marldon would be a good place to start.
Goudge’s story then is certainly in part about the locale of Marldon and is certainly too about the historical context of the free-trading culture of the early 19th Century. As much as these, however, the story is one of values and identity, of the weird wobbly liminal space between childhood and young adulthood where questions of faith and belief are tested. It is an exciting and enormously pleasurable story with a charming innocence that is nevertheless still infused with just enough harsh reality to make the fun fairy presence acceptable. The magical fantasy element is just about at the limit of what I can stomach, but nevertheless I am intrigued by Elizabeth Goudge and there are many more of her books (both children’s and adults) that I would like to explore at some point.
Similarly republished by the Girls Gone By imprint is Mabel Esther Allan’s 1956 young adult novel ‘The Amber House’. Of course no-one used the term ‘Young Adult Fiction’ in 1956 so Allan’s book would have certainly been shelved in the Children’s Fiction section of the local library and bookshop. Like ‘Smoky House’, ‘The Amber House’ is as much about place as anything else, in this case the small town of Rye in Sussex. Anyone who has ever visited must surely have been charmed by its narrow streets and pleasing architecture and it is likely too that a certain number of those visitors would be unable to think of the place without also remembering E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia characters. Benson, as many of you will know, resided in Lamb House whilst writing his stories and the house is Mapp’s ‘Mallards’ to Tilling’s Rye, complete with Garden Room of course. Prior to Benson, Lamb House was perhaps most famous as the dwelling place of Henry James, and it is certainly his association which is celebrated most by the National Trust which now looks after the property. Incidentally, as a slight aside, if you have been watching the recent BBC adaptation ‘Miss Austen’ you might have spotted Rye rather preposterously masquerading as Sidmouth, Jane and Cassandra Austen walking with their parents and Henry Hobday down West St and past Lamb House after attending church. These literary connections (with the exception of the Austen/Sidmouth deceit) are mentioned, along with a great deal more, in Samantha Littles’ introduction to the 2024 reissue of ‘The Amber House’ and her additional contextualisation of Rye’s free-trading past helps set the scene for Mabel Esther Allan’s marvellous piece of fiction.
The story revolves around Helen Brierley, a young woman just about to embark on a career in education (as a secretary, of course) but who is rather suddenly diverted into a job supporting her great aunt. This formidable lady (what great aunts in fiction are not formidable?) is writing a book about her home, the historic (and titular) Amber House. Situated on Mermaid Street in Rye, Amber House is modelled on what was once the Neptune Inn. This black and white timber framed building sits opposite the similarly styled Mermaid Inn, and much is made of the free-traders’ tunnels and hideyholes (existing and conjectured) within the architecture. Indeed it is arguably the architecture that is the real star of the book, for as nicely drawn characters as Helen, her great Aunt, the young, adventurous Derry Brown and the romantic interest of Peter Glynde are, it is the little towns of Rye, Winchelsea and the Amber House itself that steal the show. It must certainly have been a grand advertisement for the area in 1956 and I imagine a generation of youngsters must have grown up yearning to visit after reading ‘The Amber House’, no doubt dreaming of treasure hunts and hidden tunnels. That it still casts such a pull on this rather older reader in the 21st century is certainly testament to Mabel Esther Allan’s skills and I’m keen to try more of her books in the future.
Of course Rye and its environs was a favourite too of Malcolm Saville. Born just along the coast in Hastings, Saville used the area in several of his Lone Pine Club adventure stories, including 1964’s ‘Treasure at Amorys’ and 1969’s ‘Rye Royal’. As noted last year when I was writing about Enid Blyton and Saville, it is possible that Blyton was at least inspired by conversations with Saville when writing ‘Five Go To Smugglers Top’, for that book was published almost simultaneously with Saville’s ‘The Gay Dolphin Adventure’. The third instalment of the Lone Pine Club series, this remains one of my favourites, as does the 1951 outing ‘The Elusive Grasshopper’ which also features what is perhaps my favourite of many marvellous covers to Saville’s books. It is tempting to suggest that one reason the Rye instalments in the Lone Pine Club series are my favourites is to do with the descriptions of the town and surrounding landscape but I suspect too that a bigger reason for the enjoyment is that the terrible (in more ways that one) Morton twins tend to be less prominent in these stories. In ‘Treasure at Amorys’ and ‘Rye Royal’ they are, thankfully, a minor annoyance, and Saville instead focuses more on the development of the relationship between cousins Jon and Penny Warrander. This exploration of blooming romance, including the ones between the other ‘couples’ in the Lone Pine Club does eventually rather pull the later Lone Pine stories down, but in ‘Rye Royal’ it just about works. That said, it is perhaps the first obvious moment where Saville struggles to square contemporary youth cultural trends with his rather more traditional notions. There is a struggle too, I think, with simply resolving the entire thirty five year lifespan of the series, in which the characters age just a few years. In retrospect I wonder if Saville might have been better simply ‘doing a Blyton’ and ignoring the tiresome effects of time’s passing both in terms of the age of his characters and the time period of his books’ setting. Of course he rather digs a hole for himself from the off in this latter respect by pulling in references to the war and soldiers in the series’ 1943 debut ‘Mystery At Witchend’, and utilising the Blytonesque trick of setting everything in a kind of idealised and non-specific era might well have jarred with a desire to use very specific places as his settings. Regardless, the Lone Pine Club series does seem to stagger somewhat resignedly into the 1970s and there does feel like something of a rushed necessity to tie up all of the romantic threads that were so delightfully suggested in the earlier books. It is this desire for some kind of resolution that, to my mind, makes the final few books so relatively disappointing. There are still some moments of excitement and Saville’s flair for capturing place (as opposed to period) remains in place. Yet by acknowledging the aging process and the development of, ahem, ‘feelings’ these books lose some of the charm that made the majority of the preceding instalments so appealing. As in ‘The Smoky House’ and ‘The Amber House’ this appeal was to a large extent to do with conjuring that peculiar liminal space between childhood and adulthood, that fleeting period of delicious uncertainty. So whilst it is all very pleasant to see Jon and Penny, Tom and Jenny and, finally, AT LAST, David and Petronella cementing their devotion to each other as couples it is also peculiarly disappointing. One cannot help but wish they could have stayed in that space of thrilling uncertainty forever. Anticipation is so much better, after all.
This explains perhaps why, on current reflection, I have a preference for Saville’s six book series featuring the Jillion family over the Lone Pine Club books. Published in a six year period between 1948 and 1953, the compact time period sees none of the characters grow up/older, allowing the tremor of romantic suggestion between Mandy Jillion and Guy Standing to stay at just the right level of will they/won’t they throughout. Only the third book, 1950’s ‘The Sign Of The Alpine Rose’ is a minor disappointment, given that Guy and Mark Standing do not appear and that Saville allows a degree of tiresome English exceptionalism to creep into the otherwise exciting Eric Ambler style thriller. The other five books in the series are pretty much all equally enjoyable, although the 1948 season opener ‘Redshank’s Warning’ and the following year’s ‘Strangers at Snowfell’ just edge ahead as favourites. ‘Strangers at Snowfell’ is notable for its excellent depictions of railways and trains as well as its typically evocative capturing of place, in this case the landscape around Shap summit in Westmorland. The snowbound train and the trek cross-country to a farmhouse in the book recall J.Jefferson Farjeon’s 1937 creepy detective novel ‘Mystery In White’ and I wonder if Saville had it in mind when he was writing? Similarly, I wonder if Ian Samson was thinking about either or both these books when writing his tremendous ‘Westmorland Alone’ from 2016? One rather hopes so.
‘Redshank’s Warning’ really must be the pick of the crop, however, not least for its utterly charming cover illustration showing a windswept Mandy Jillion on a blustery Norfolk shore. Once again, watchers of Ben Robinson’s tremendous ‘Villages By The Sea’ show will have seen this landscape during the episode focusing on Cley-next-the-sea, for ‘Redshank’s Warning’ is set in nearby Blakeney, its church’s beacon tower playing a prominent role in the story’s climax. This is another fine example of Malcolm Saville at arguably the peak of his powers and it is no surprise that in a poll of Malcolm Saville Society members it ranked as the third favourite of all his books, with only ‘The Gay Dolphin Adventure’ and ‘Mystery At Witchend’ being rated higher. All six of the ‘Jillies’ books have been reissued by the Girls Gone By imprint, although even now the first three of these are almost as hard (and expensive!) to come by as the first edition hardbacks. All, needless to say, are pieces of treasure more than worth hunting down.
In recent years I have found myself drawn more and more to English fiction written in the aftermath of WW2. A lot of these books have been in the detective fiction genre for sure, but increasingly my interests seem to lie in the ‘middlebrow’ fiction of the age. Margaret Kennedy’s masterful ‘The Feast’ would be the book that started to steer me in this direction, standing as it does with, if not one foot then at least a couple of toes in the ‘mystery’ camp. The Persephone imprint continues to be a rich source for this particular kind of book, as of course does the extensive Virago catalogue. There is so much to explore. In recent weeks though I have turned again to the marvellously named Furrowed Middlebrow imprint (companion to the Dean Street Press) and specifically once more to D.E. Stevenson.
If pressed I might just admit that Stevenson has been my favourite literary discovery of the past few years. Some might bridle at the notion of calling her ‘literary’ of course and I can certainly understand that, for her books do not pretend to be Great Works Of Literature. Yet this, for me, is where the appeal lies, and the skill in writing something that is comforting and charming yet remains mostly clear of a sickly saccharine taste should not be underestimated. In my recent approbation of John Rhode’s detective fiction I bandied about the criticism that his books often feel as though they have come off a mass production conveyor belt, each barely distinguishable from the next. The same criticism could be levelled at Stevenson of course, and one should not really shy away from embracing the idea of formula and identifiable style in any art form. One person’s preferred diet of pleasure is another’s boring repetition, after all.
D.E. Stevenson’s formula is certainly one rooted firmly in the middle of the road. Her books are largely about and for the middle classes, pitched assuredly and unashamedly at the middlebrow audience. They are conservative minded and might cause some 21st Century Progressives to bristle with discomfort, yet I do not think this is altogether a bad thing. There is something valuable, I think, in seeing the cultural and political thoughts of previous generations captured in fiction both as a reminder of what progress might have been made, but also at what might have been lost. The tumultuous period in England in the immediate aftermath of WW2 contains the essence of this tension, I think, and this is to an extent portrayed in the treatment of different characters returning from their disparate war service roles and experiences that populate Stevenson’s 1947 novel ‘Kate Hardy’. It is captured too in the feeling of an urban/rural divide that seems to have been prevalent in this period. In simplistic terms this would appear to be an argument between progress and tradition or more accurately perhaps the challenge to/preservation of land ownership and power. It is an argument that might still be seen to exist in 2025, when mistrust and misrepresentation could be described as being ever more extreme.
Having moved to the small Scottish Border town of Moffat in 1940 there is a sense that Stevenson was, by the end of WW2 certainly leaning towards the more conservative/rural side of this argument. Subsequent books like the Vittoria Cottage trilogy and the Amberwell series certainly root themselves firmly in the Borders landscape whilst her characters in these books often reflect what appears to be a genuine love of local colour and traditional charm. None of Stevenson’s books prior to ‘Kate Hardy’ could be said to be particularly urban themed (suburban, certainly, in the case of the marvellous Miss Buncle books) but this nevertheless feels like a novel where shift begins to happen. With the titular character of ‘Kate Hardy’ (a successful writer of thrillers, under a male pseudonym of course) moving to the rural English village of Old Quinings there may then be something autobiographical both in the setting and in the character. If so then Stevenson is mildly unapologetic for both her character’s and her own success, challenging the prevalent pre-war notion that people ought not to get above their station. At one point Kate responds to a barb by one of the upper middle classes that “It’s a pity when people get too big for their boots” with the charmingly thoughtful riposte that “They can always get new boots”.
This gentle steeliness is perhaps the most appealing attribute of the titular character, whilst the least appealing might be her predilection for what Amanda Craig, in her preface to a Persephone reprint of John Moore’s 1965 ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ called “posh young women taking up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that, in Moore’s case this particular predilection in literature of the period may have been fuelled by the lifting in 1960 of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’, but there is certainly an air of D.H. Lawrence’s taste for a bit of rough in ‘Kate Hardy’ even in this pre-ban period. As one who might identify more with the “civilised” and “slightly effete” character of Richard, about whom Kate felt “there was too little of the cave-man” this causes a degree of irritation that may be irrational but is nevertheless felt and ‘real’. Others will no doubt feel otherwise.
Now having mentioned John Moore, there is surely a delightful little barb aimed at his successful ‘Brensham Trilogy’ (published between 1945 and 1948) when Stevenson notes that “Kate toyed with the idea of a “little book” about Old Quinings (her publishers would be pleased, she knew, for her name would be sufficient to sell it, and “little books” were fashionable at the moment), a “little book” illustrated with woodcuts which would reveal the inner soul of an English village to people who were so unfortunate as to live in towns.” Well, there is room for such books alongside swashbuckling adventure thrillers and clever detective entertainments, just as there is space for intellectually challenging literature and lightly spiced romance.
Having said that, now might be an opportune moment to suggest that there may not be quite so much space for another D.E. Stevenson title that I read recently. ‘The Fair Miss Fortune’ was written in 1938 and rejected by publishers at the time. Given its first airing as late as in 2011, a more recent Furrowed Middlebrow reissue includes correspondence between Stevenson and her agent at the time of its writing, and I have to say that I am firmly on the side of the publishers who rejected it. The book plays on the theme of identical twins who are mistaken for each other with, Stevenson would no doubt have hoped, hilarious consequences. This hoped for humour instead feels forced, however, and the narrative painfully obvious. If anything it makes for a perfect example of how fine the line is between success and failure in this type of book. Here that saccharine silliness overwhelms and spoils the confection.
The book does share some similarities with ‘Kate Hardy’, notably in the part of female characters moving from the thrilling anonymity of city life to the apparently impenetrably insular English Village Life, but it is immeasurably more clumsy and irritatingly naive. An oddity for completists that is best left on the shelf by anyone else, ‘The Fair Miss Fortune’ might perhaps be seen as a failed experimental splurge filled with a pre-war predilection for hiding in a disappearing past. ‘Kate Hardy’ on the other hand feels like a measured step into the post-war unknowns of dismantled social norms and the challenge to the status-quo. Stevenson might be firmly on the conservative side of that social, cultural and political challenge but should not be condemned for that. A marvellously pure love for people, place and the pleasures of the rural landscape and ways of life shine through in her books and transcend any underlying conservatism. In this they are not unlike those books of John Moore’s that her Kate Hardy character so gently pokes fun at and as such can be richly rewarding reading some seventy years after the fact.
John Rhode is one of those prolific writers of detective fiction from the so-called Golden Age whose work I have dipped into occasionally in the past few decades. I’ve found his books to be, at their best, entertaining enough, but at their worst more of those irritating endeavours in which the author attempts to show how fiendishly clever they are. Dorothy Sayers, who one often thinks ought to have known better, but clearly didn’t, said that “One always embarks on a John Rhode book with a great sense of security. One knows that there will be a sound plot, well-knit process of reasoning, and a solidly satisfying solution with no loose ends or careless errors of fact.” Actually, on re-reading that quote there is a possibility of damnation by faint praise, isn’t there? She might as well have said that Rhodes is ‘workmanlike’ or ‘sound enough if you care for that kind of thing’. ‘Burn’, as I believe younger people have said in recent years.
Well, I admit that occasionally I have rather cared for that kind of thing, but Rhode’s effort ‘Murder At Lilac Cottage’ which I read last week isn’t something I could recommend. It feels like something written much earlier than its 1940 publication date, and there is something of the mass-production line about it as the story unfolds with weary predictability. One of Rhode’s particular fancies is in utilising ridiculously convoluted means of committing murder. He does like his contraptions (one of his books is titled ‘Invisible Weapons’) and this one certainly ticks that box with a suitably Heath Robinson murder machine being rigged up to pull of the crime and give the murderer an alibi. Sorry, does that seem like a spoiler? Well, perhaps so, but I dare say that one would tumble to the ‘mystery’ pretty quickly even if one was not previously aware of Rhodes’ predilections. I am rather useless at working out the puzzles in detective fiction but even I had the general notion nailed pretty early in the book. Even as a 99p Kindle punt I came away thinking I’d been swindled.
Better by far is the latest entry in the British Library Crime Classics series. ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ is another book in the expanding collection of reissued books penned by Edith Caroline Rivett. This effort is one of her titles under the Carol Carnac incarnation, and it has her serial detectives Julian Rivers and Inspector Lansing delving into the obfuscated world of the Civil Service and attempting to navigate the no-less muddy waters of Contemporary Modern Art. Set in the fictional Ministry Of Fine Arts in London, Carnac (or Rivett) does a fairly convincing job of weaving something of the real Arts Council of Great Britain’s history into the narrative. There is more than a hint of suggestion that the fictional first chairman of the Ministry of Fine Arts, one Joyce-Lawrence, is meant to be John Maynard Keynes, whilst the second (“old Higginson”) arguably bears more than a passing resemblance to Sir Ernest Pooley, who held the position of chairman until 1953, the year that ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ was published. It was too the year in which Sir Kenneth Clark ascended to the chair of the entire Arts Council (having previously headed up the Art Panel) and on whom surely the character of Humphry David is based, at least notionally. This playful weaving of the fictional and the real must have felt deliciously wicked at the time and there is certainly an argument to be made for ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ as a tremendous piece of contemporary political and cultural satire.
In many of Rivett’s (or E.C.R. Lorac’s, if you prefer) Inspector MacDonald books there is a great sense of place, and the writer typically uses the early pages of those books to elegantly sketch the landscape with a care to attention that is light yet remarkably evocative. She does the same thing here, only rather than landscape it is the complex structures of the Ministries of Government that are captured with swift , confident lines. It could be easy to get mired in such complications, but the book races along at a fine pace with well drawn characters and a marvellous balance struck between humour and the necessary sowing of clues to solve puzzles of the how, the who and the why of the crime. This is, after all, a murder mystery.
The air of humour is important though, and if one can never quite escape the image of Tony Hancock’s ‘The Rebel’ inhabiting some of the pages that is all to the good. Certainly the satirical quality works well, even at the distance of some seventy years. Some things never change, after all, and the convoluted workings of government ministries and contemporary Art scenes might just be amongst the most intractably difficult to unravel.
Perhaps what sets ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ apart from 21st Century sensibilities, however, is the manner in which partisanship never quite results in polarisation. At one point Inspector Rivers asks his superior officer, Henry Fearon, if he thinks it’s “possible that these contemporary paintings are potent enough to arouse murderous passions?” Fearon replies: “No. I don’t. I hate them as much as anybody does, but I would neither commit murder nor lift a finger nor spend a sixpence for any of them.” One wonders if a senior police officer might have quite so forgiving an attitude in 2025.
Indeed, there is a shift in Rivers’ appreciation of the paintings as the book progresses, eventually suggesting that “by the time I’m through with this job we’re on, I shall want to buy an Abstract. Ben Nicholson for preference.” One rather hopes that he did, for it would certainly have provided an excellent investment to supplement the police pension if nothing else!
In terms of the mechanics of the murder mystery, things are executed in typically fine Rivett style. Suspects are wheeled in front of our eyes with possible motives and potential solutions extrapolated for our convenience. As in ‘Murder at Lilac Cottage’ there is something a little Heath Robinson about the murder method, but the solution of how a massive sculpture might have been manoeuvred in order to fall onto the unfortunate victim’s head is dealt with altogether more elegantly here than in Rhode’s hands, as indeed are all the other necessary components of the murder mystery. In Rivett’s hand these are always entertainingly managed, and if there is a small degree of clumsiness as the book necessarily pivots into its conclusion, it is nevertheless as a Caravaggio compared to the Cecilia Giménez ‘Ecce Homo’ of Rhodes.
One to add to the collection, then, and another to drop in the charity shop box.
We are already nearly a month into 2025 (and who shall not be delighted to see the back end of January recede into the distance once again?) and I realise that, for all the words written about books in 2024 I never once mentioned what my favourites were. In truth there were several things vying for the top spot and all three of them, unsurprisingly, were written before I was born. First is Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Saplings’ (1945) which I read in another of those gorgeous Persephone reissues that I have been consuming and collecting over the past few years (their grey and cream/off white spines make a very pleasant decorative element above the bed). I may write more about ‘Saplings’ at some point, just not today. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully written novel that captures much of the disruption and uncertainty of English family lives in the early years of WW2 and provides a piercing critique of class attitudes of the period. I’ve heard it suggested that the novel is a kind of “dark inversion” of Streatfeild’s classic children’s book ‘Ballet Shoes’ but not having read that one, I cannot be sure. ‘Ballet Shoes’ is certainly on my sizeable ‘to be read’ list though, which in turn sits in the shadow of the physical ‘to be read’ piles and the ‘to be read’ Kindle collection. This is how life ought to be, however, so that is fine.
Is ‘The Wind In The Willows’ (1908) a children’s book? My copy says ‘Penguin Classic’ so I am sure that it is admissible for adults to read it, even if they are not necessarily seeking to rekindle the feelings they might have felt on reading it in their childhood. Regardless, I am certain that one reason I never read it in my youth is that it is another of Those English Things that were rather scorned in Scotland. I know that I Make A Lot Of This these days but it is something worth repeating, I think, because of its essential truth. To me, if to no-one else, although I suspect it is also a truth that is, if not universal, at least quite recognisable to those of a similar age and geographical background. Anyway, the point here is that I finally read ‘The Wind In The Willows’ in 2024 and was startled by just how beautiful and ageless it is. Lots of little cultural puzzle pieces fell into place on reading it too, which is always a delightful feeling. Humbling too, for this kind of experience also shows how little one knows, or half knows. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.
Just edging these two titles for the dubious prize of being The Unpopular Book Of 2024 however would be John Moore’s ‘The Waters Under The Earth’. Originally published in 1965, this was another of the Persephone reissue titles that had sat on the aforementioned ‘to be read’ pile for a good eighteen months before I finally got round to it, but goodness it was worth the wait! Although written in the early 1960s the novel is set a decade earlier, in the Gloucestershire countryside that Moore knew and loved so well. It is a rural landscape that Moore had written successfully about previously, and his ‘Brensham Trilogy’ books (‘Portrait of Elmbury’, ‘Brensham Village’ and ‘The Blue Field’) published between 1945 and 1948 sold handsomely at the time. So too did his enormously entertaining 1951 novel ‘Dance and Skylark’, whilst ‘September Moon’ (1957) apparently sold half a million copies. All of these are worth reading, and whilst I believe that ‘the Bresnham Trilogy’ have been collected and reprinted within the past decade or so, second hand copies of early editions can be picked up cheaply. In many ways each of these books seem to set the groundwork for ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ and each seems to inform the subsequent instalment. Characters return, sometimes in alternative guises but usually recognisable, whilst through it all the rural landscape and the rhythms of its life emerge as the dominant presence. All of these books are marvellously entertaining reads. Short and comedic, they also explore themes of class and industrial ‘progress’ that lend them a degree of weight. The books are light but never slight.
‘The Waters Under The Earth’ on the other hand stands out in being much longer and by some distance more sombre than any of Moore’s previous books. This is perhaps apt since it was to be his last prior to his death, in 1967, at the youthful age of 59. It also arguably reflects a degree of disillusionment in the post-war Labour government and the Urban/Rural divide apparent in much of the later 1940s and early 1950s. Being unashamedly a ‘countryman’, Moore’s books are necessarily conservative in much of their tone, yet ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ is noticeably more apologetic for the way of life lived by the rural land-owning classes than any of his previous books. Whilst there remains a lingering affection for hunting that might cause a degree of hand-wringing amongst many Waitrose shopping Guardian readers of the 21st Century, this is tempered with a growing awareness that Tradition need not be an excuse for cruelty. What comes across much more strongly is the sense of the landowner as custodian of nature being replaced by exploitative greed. ‘Growth’ and ‘Progress’ at all costs and hang the consequences. Indeed there is arguably a deep seated sorrow at the heart of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’, a recognition that human beings are doomed to destroy themselves by their lack of empathy and understanding not just for nature but for each other. There is a kind of existential ennui suffusing much of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ that feels at odds with the comedic pulse of Moore’s earlier books, yet at the same time the book retains a warmth that is heartening. This is a difficult balancing acts to pull off, but Moore does it admirably. He also pulls off an exploration of class in the post-war period with remarkable even-handedness, escaping a class partisanship which might have otherwise derailed things. Slightly less effective is the theme of romance which suffers somewhat by what Amanda Craig refers to in her excellent preface to the Persephone edition as being an example of the trope where “posh young women take up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that this in turn may be “perhaps not unconnected to the ending of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’” and whilst mildly irritating it also arguably lends ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ an additional degree of historical cultural context.
Like Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’, all of Moore’s novels are to an extent records of a disappearing rural landscape and way of life. What perhaps differentiates between them, however, is the context of the two authors: Blythe being from yeoman stock and a childhood of rural poverty, Moore from a comfortable middle class, growing up in a Tudor townhouse in Tewkesbury (now The Tudor Hotel). This possibly explains too, in part, the different lasting degrees of recognition for their work, ’Akenfield’ never being out of print since 1969 and Moore’s books being only sporadically reprinted in much smaller numbers. After all, when ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ was published four years before ‘Akenfield’ it perhaps already suffered from entering a publishing realm where the fashion was very much for The Voice Of The Working Class. The Angry Young Men in the ascendency and Swinging London getting into its stride. This might explain why Moore seemed so quickly to be forgotten. A voice of The Past when all that mattered was the shiny and new. Or NEW! AND IMPROVED! as the advertising lingo might have put it. Did ‘Akenfield’ then slip neatly into the space between that Swinging London POP explosion and the ‘back to the earth’ Hippie daydream, and was ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ just a little too late and a little too early to gain the traction that it perhaps, in hindsight, deserved? Perhaps.
Whatever the reasons for its sixty odd years of neglect, ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ more than deserves a place on the top shelf of classic rural fiction. It deserves attention too for its apparent prescience of what was, in 1965, The Future and is to us, in 2025, the recent past and the present: The Earth exploited for personal wealth; faceless corporate/syndicate wealth wielding power; the cult of individualism insidiously dismantling notions of community and class. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.
So the year has turned once more and here we are, heads bent to it again, battling the January gloom. A opportunity perhaps to try and flex the mind, scrape off some of those flakes of rust. Books help, of course, as books help with most things. I’m having a dabble with StoryGraph to track my reading this year, currently running alongside Goodreads which I have used for quite a number of years now. I had forgotten that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but frankly I would be massively hypocritical to say this was the main reason I am looking to move. Instead it is the appeal of a more attractive and user friendly UI and hopefully something that’s a bit quicker, at least in the app version. There is also more data analysis available which might be fun, although I know without any technology to help me that the majority of my reading is detective fiction, followed increasingly closely by mid-century middlebrow fiction, often broadly in the romance genre.
In terms of detective fiction then, it’s been something of a mixed bag recently. All of the new-to-me detective novels set in the festive period that I read in 2024 were disappointing. This may say as much about me as it does the books, but I found Brian Flynn’s ‘Exit Sir John’ and Christopher Bush’s ‘Dancing Dead’ to be fairly dull and dreary reads. I persevered, but almost wish I hadn’t for they both rather soured my mood towards the season almost before it began. Both are too puzzle orientated for my tastes, and Bush in particular suffers dreadfully from employing the technique of explaining the thinking processes of his detective (in this case the tedious Ludovic Travers) in excruciating detail. I’ve read other early Bush novels in the Travers series and came away with the same impressions, so why I thought that this one might be different/better eludes me. Later books are, I’m told, better, particularly when Bush switches to the first person narrative. Perhaps a resolution for 2025 ought to be to try one. Or to studiously avoid altogether. Both are options.
Brian Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst is slightly more appealing than Travers, and ‘Exit Sir John’, being a late example of Flynn’s work (book 34 in the series, republished by Dean Street Press) shows a degree more maturity. As a post-WW2 (1947) it manages to retain something of a flavour of pre-war times which can be both a pleasure and a frustration. It feels therefore rather like a book which isn’t quite sure of its place in the firmament and whilst this is understandable for a writer for whom the vast majority of their work was produced in the ‘golden age’ of the interwar years, my preferred late 1940s and early 1950s works are those where the writer embraces at least the possibilities of a more hopeful and equitable society. That said, ‘Exit Sir John’ does touch on the post war turmoil for the upper classes quite nicely, although the personal appeal for me is that the country house setting is one ‘High Fitchet’ in Monfitchet in Essex, this being the English base for the spread of my surname, itself ‘imported’ from Normandy.
Disappointing too is the 2024 Christmas addition to the British Library Crime Classics series. Originally published in 1948, Elizabeth Anthony’s ‘Dramatic Murder’ was ‘lost’ for 75 years and I have to say that on the evidence it might have been better to stay that way. I’m sure that others will find something of pleasure in it, but I am not sure what that might be. Perhaps those interested in the theatrical world might find amusement in the rather two dimensional and stereotypically daubed characters, but in truth I suspect they would find them to be the loathsome caricatures that irritated me during the days when I trudged through the book, regularly putting it down and picking it up again in the vain hope it might get better. Or end soon. I persevered, but could hardly recommend that anyone else should do likewise. My most pleasant memories of the book, by some margin, are the glasses of sherry (a very old Palo Cortado and a delicious Oloroso) I consumed whilst reading.
Better by some considerable distance in terms of my Christmas detective fiction reading were some relatively new-to-me re-reads. Best of all remains Clifford Witting’s delightful ‘Catt Out Of The Bag’. Originally published in 1939, this in the fourth of the peerless Inspector Charlton series, although this time out Witting returns to play with a first person narrative contributed by bookseller John Rutherford, as utilised in his debut ‘Murder In Blue’. It works well, for Rutherford is an eminently likeable character and he act as a nice counterfoil to his wife’s Uncle (Inspector) Harry Charlton. Anyone looking for a top notch piece of classic English detective fiction with a Christmas setting should pop this on their shelf of reliable re-reads and revisit regularly. Elsewhere, Bovey Tracey resident Molly Thynne’s terrific 1931 novel ‘The Crime At The Noah’s Ark’ (which I wrote about at this time last year) also rewards a re-read, as does Moray Dalton’s ‘The Night Of Fear’ from the same year. Pretty much everything I’ve previously written about Dalton (here, here and here) is applicable to this Christmas story of murder and masquerade, and I recommend it heartily.
Similarly recommended, but without the festive setting, is E.C.R. Lorac’s ‘Murder In Vienna’ which was re-published towards the end of 2024 in the British Library Crime Classics series. This again was a re-read for me, though this time thankfully without all the typos of a badly scanned digital edition. It’s not quite from Lorac’s top drawer, for after a wonderful few opening pages where the writer’s gift for capturing landscape is shown in her lines about flying over the Kent coast at Dungeness, the book does rather lurch into something that feels like a tourist leaflet for Vienna. It’s to the writer’s credit that the book recovers from this and manages to configure itself into something that elegantly straddles the murder/spy thriller genre. This is a tricky literary landscape to inhabit as the shadows of Le Carre and Ambler are so strongly cast. Lorac does a fine job and her story of shrouded identities and uncertain motivations is pleasantly entertaining. It is again, however, Lorac’s gift for conjuring a sense of place that is what lingers longest after reading, and if her accounts of Vienna retain something of the sheen of a tourist information guide then the depictions of the suburb of Hietzing and its nearby hills and forests are much more convincing. If they never seem quite as evocatively captured as the Lunesdale landscapes beloved of her Inspector/Superindentent Macdonald then this is hardly a criticism for the Lorac novels set in those hills are as fine as anything in the genre. ‘Murder In Vienna’ then is something of an outlier in the Macdonald series, but no less entertaining and recommended for all that.
Another outlier in terms of the output of the British Library Crime Classics series is the recently re-published 1973 novel ‘Tea On Sunday’ by Lettice Cooper. Cooper’s is a name I know from the wonderful Persephone Books reissue series, but I had not picked up on the fact that she had dabbled in detective fiction. Now, whilst much is made in the publicity for the reissue that it is written in “the vintage mystery style” I’m not convinced that this marketing angle is worth a great deal. The book may follow a ‘traditional’ murder mystery structure (the murder happens early in the book; there is something of the ‘closed room’/country house in that there seems to be a definitive group of suspects; the detective, in this case Inspector Corby of The Yard, explores each suspect in turn) yet one could say as much about many such books from any period. Does this make it ‘vintage’? I am sceptical. Indeed, much of the book feels like a distinctly period piece, being evocative of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or at least evocative of this period as subsequently portrayed in other media. There are references to young men with long hair and (witheringly) to clothing that might be a bed-spread, and there is something of a run-down and rather sordid desperation that is at odds with illusions of glamour and prosperity. There is deceit, corruption, duplicity, mental illness, jealousy and, most troubling of all (spoiler alert/trigger warning), a degree of misogyny that boils into a piece of domestic violence that feels rooted in victim-blaming. That aside, the cast of suspects are mostly very well drawn and the multiple potential motives are interesting and believable enough to keep the reader entertained.
The blend of settings that take in London and Yorkshire is well balanced, with Inspector Corby’s dash to the West Riding of Yorkshire (one assumes that the fictional Hithamroyd is modelled to a degree on Mytholmroyd) making for a necessary change of place and pace. It allows Copper to pull on personal experience of place (her ‘National Provincial’ novel of 1938 is set in the Aire region which would have been, broadly speaking, the landscape of her youth) and she does this admirably. Indeed, ‘admirable’ is a word for ‘Tea On Sunday’ for it is a book that does a fine job of balancing good writing with the necessities of the detective fiction genre. That it never quite reaches the heights of excellence in either realm is no great criticism and certainly no reason not to add it to one’s shelves.
Last time out I suggested that James Ellroy had a lot of traumatic childhood weight to carry and to process, and the same could be said of Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald – see, I promised I would eventually get back to him) and it is perhaps one of the reasons that Ellroy dedicated his 1984 novel ‘Blood On The Moon’ to the then recently deceased Millar. In an inscription pictured in the magnificent ‘Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ Ellroy draws attention to the dedication and writes that “He was a master: He kept me tremendously sane during bad years.”
To say that Millar was a master is to possibly understate things, for there is a certainly a compelling argument to be made that Millar was THE master of the American detective novel. In a series of eighteen books written between 1949 and 1976 the series detective Lew Archer saw his creator Ken Millar change his pseudonym from John Macdonald to John R. Macdonald to John Ross Macdonald and finally to the now familiar Ross Macdonald. The sequential name change was made in order to avoid confusion with another contemporaneous writer of detective fiction, John D. McDonald. John D.’s novels featuring “salvage consultant” Travis McGee are fine enough thrillers but largely leave me cool, even on re-reading. Personally I would stick to the ‘Cape Fear’ film (either Scorcese’s 1991 effort or the 1962 feature with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum) of the 1957 novel ‘The Executioner’ but I know others will disagree. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to change my mind over the choice of Macdonald/McDonald made back when the 21st Century was in its infancy and I was an impressionable and opinionated thirty-something.
But why did Kenneth Millar not just publish under his own name? Well, by the time Ken had anything significantly published his wife Margaret was making significant headway. Her 1945 novel ‘The Iron Gates’ was particularly well received at the time and still stands up as a terrific period piece, whilst the 1956 Edgar Award winning ‘Beast In View’ is rightly considered as something of a classic of the psychological mystery genre. Margaret’s many other mysteries are also fine, but perhaps any lasting popularity has been hurt by her not really having any ‘series’ character to speak of. Husband Ken made sure he had that in Lew Archer.
The first Lew Archer mystery that I ever read was ‘The Chill’, issued in a neat paperback edition back in 2001 as part of Canongate’s Crime Classics series. At the same time I would also have picked up Macdonald’s ‘The Drowning Pool’ and Charles Willeford’s ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’, all of them featuring the generic cover that showed what looked like a Saul Bass take on the Black Dahlia corpse viewed through a vaseline smeared lens. Willeford is certainly a writer worth exploring, and I devoured a lot of his work during the early naughties. The cover blurb for ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ promises “an amoral update of Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’ set in 1970s Miami” and it delivers in spades. Willeford did write terrific detective crime stories, notably the great series featuring his Hank Moseley character, but ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ is really a crime book starring criminals, falling into a genre that would include the likes of the great Jim Thompson and Richard Stark (a pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake), whose ‘Parker’ series of novels are arguably the gold standard. All three of these writers are firmly rooted in the hard boiled tough school of Noir fiction and are massively entertaining. Ross Macdonald, though, is a step or two apart and Lew Archer is way ahead.
‘The Chill’ is the eleventh book in the Lew Archer series and was originally published in 1964, two years before I was born. Now oftentimes I like to start any extended series of books at the beginning and to read them in order of publication. You can blame a certain amount of Poirot-esque OCD for this if you like. This approach is relatively easy these days given that so much is readily accessible via the Internet, but it was not always so. Even at the turn of the millennium, when Canongate reissued ‘The Chill’, it was difficult to just walk into your local book store and see the entire sequence of any writer’s work ranged in front of you. Even in a city, and even with the big names like Christie, Sayers, Allingham or whoever, there would be gaps. If you were charity shopping then the odds of finding what you were after were even less, though balanced by the possibility of finding unknown gems for a few pence. It was a case of take what you can and be thankful for it. There was a peculiar pleasure in that too of course. Still is.
If there is any author whose novels featuring a series detective can easily be read and enjoyed out of order though it is Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer books. Macdonald/Ken Millar was fond of using the phrase “it’s all one case” as a means of tying all the apparently disparate elements of the arcs and characters in any given novel into one cohesive conclusion, and indeed to define the gestalt of the entire Archer series. It’s not so much that all eighteen Lew Archer books are the same story re-written and refined each time (though one might argue this is the case to an extent), it’s that Millar weaves the same themes throughout everything. Unrelentingly and unapologetically so. Concerns about identity, familial discord, moral corruption wrought by money and Freudian psychiatric theories run blatantly throughout. Relationships between fathers and daughters are high on the agenda, as are sons looking for lost fathers. It might all quickly become a bit overpowering if it was not so perfectly crafted.
Following a formula is one of the keys to success in genre fiction of course, just as it is in music, painting, cinema, whatever. It should not be read as criticism to say as much either. No-one sits in a room full of Rothko paintings and complains that they all look the same, after all. At least not if they have even a grain of humanity in their body.
The early Macdonald novels and the first number of Lew Archer stories certainly do largely follow the formula of the hard boiled tough school. Ken Millar needed to make a living, after all, so best not mess too much with the tried and tested formula. There was plenty of competition in the 1940s/50s detective fiction marketplace of course, particularly in the USA, and there was certainly too a degree of literary snobbery about some of the more popular authors. Millar in particular seemed to have issues with the enormous popularity of Mickey Spillane and Erle Stanley Gardner. Spillane’s stories featuring the ultimate tough-guy detective Mike Hammer sold millions, as did Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books, and it would be easy to suggest that Millar, who seemed always to be caught between the intellectual pull of literary academia and the desire to make money writing, was simply playing the sniffy snob role about wildly successful popular, or populist culture. Like other critics such as Millar’s English crime novelist friend Julian Symons, Millar had a point when he expressed distaste for Spillane’s rock bottom roughhousing no-holds-barred style for what Millar called the “kick-’em-in-the-teeth crowd”, but then again Spillane had come up writing for comics in their own Golden Age, penning stories for ‘Superman’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Captain America’. This in a time long before the elevation of comic book writing to an ‘art form’, and instead in a realm where Bang! Pow! Shazam! short sharp hitting was the order of the day. In such a context I think that Spillane’s books are great entertainment, though most certainly not for everyone, particularly in the second decade of the 21st Century. Stanley Gardner’s books are more sedate by comparison, but are neatly plotted and often give the reader a fine mystery where good always outwits evil and American Values emerge victorious. His books written as A.A. Fair featuring the Donald Lam and Bertha Cool characters are harder edged than the Perry Mason stories and remain great favourites of mine. Hardly the height of fine literature that Ken Millar aspired to (and eventually attained) with his Lew Archer books, but tremendous stuff regardless.
Oddly, perhaps, Millar seemed to have had more time for the work of Michael Avallone, whose enormously popular work included the first ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ novel in 1965. Avallone’s series of books featuring his Ed Noon character are preposterous tales, a blend of James Bond spy thriller and tough guy detective with some bizarro American propagandising thrown in the mix. The Ed Noon books read like Stateside Leslie Charteris stories with a Red China fixation in the later books and are just as entertaining if you like that sort of thing. Ken Millar particularly dug the 1973 title ‘Shoot It Again Sam’ and Avallone considered it his definitive Ed Noon novel, probably because it is the one where Avallone runs riot with Noon’s predilection for quoting from old movies, and Noir pictures in particular. If you only read one Ed Noon it should be this one, though don’t be surprised if you find yourself intrigued to read more despite a nagging feeling that you really oughtn’t.
Outside of some of his contemporaries and competitors though there is certainly a lineage to be seen going from Hammett through Chandler to the early Lew Archer stories. Millar seemed to get a bit antsy about the continual comparison to Chandler, however, mostly because Chandler went out of his way to disparage Millar’s early work as being a copy of his own. Such sparring is understandable in the context of a time when their working lives overlapped but feels largely irrelevant today. There is undoubtedly a Chandler influence in the Lew Archer books but whereas Chandler’s plots often come across as wildly disjointed semi-abstract collages always on the verge of collapse, Millar’s by comparison are equally convoluted but hold together with astonishing poise and ultimate cohesion. No pieces feel like they have been forced into place. Everything does actually fit.
One thing that certainly fits in the Lew Archer stories are the connections out to Kenneth Millar’s own life experiences. Whilst hardly necessary in order to enjoy the Ross Macdonald fiction, if you ever read a Lew Archer book and get hooked (five on a ten says you will) then doing even a modicum of background reading will bring an intriguing level of insight. Tom Nolan’s superlative biography is probably as much as you’d need, although tracking down ‘It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ by Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery and Jeff Wong is well worth the effort, even if just to enjoy all the period jacket designs.
From a 21st Century perspective, and particularly for anyone involved in the education sector, there are elements of the father/daughter themes in the Lew Archer novels, and in the troubled behaviours of Millar’s teenaged daughter Linda through the 1950s to set off safeguarding klaxons. Underage drinking and relations with older boys came to a head in 1956, when Linda was charged with the hit and run killing of a thirteen year old boy in Santa Barbara. Three years later, whilst on parole and under psychiatric care she disappeared from her college dorm room, sparking a widely publicised eleven day police hunt. The Millar’s themselves recruited private investigators to search for their daughter, and whilst this in itself seemed like a case of truth mirroring fiction, Ken Millar went a step further, recycling events in future Archer novels, notably with a gender flip in ‘The Goodbye Look’ published a decade later.
Millar’s fixation on father/daughter relationships tails off a little through the Lew Archer books of the 1960s, but is front and centre in the 1950s and surely anyone involved in the 1956 hit and run case who read any of Ken Millar’s novels would have raised eyebrows, if not concerns. Different times, certainly.
Then again, when I first read the Lew Archer novels at the turn of the millennium I had been teaching for ten years and I do not recall being particularly bothered by some of what I read in the books. As a teacher and tutor of course the importance of child safeguarding was always paramount, and whilst I was aware of some pretty sorrowful cases, it is also true to say this was as nothing compared to the level of heightened awareness throughout the second half of my thirty year teaching career. In a leadership role during that period I could not help but be made more and more aware of safeguarding concerns, which perhaps explains why, when I re-read the first twelve Lew Archer novels in the first months of my early retirement in 2021/22 I could not help but be drawn up short by a lot of the content. It would be easy to pull questionable quotes at length, but here’s one from ‘The Chill’ in 1964: “when Dad gets upset it has a peculiar effect on me. It’s like sympathetic vibrations: he goes to pieces, I go to pieces. Not that I’m blaming him.’” Archer responds with: “‘I’m blaming him.’” Which might read as Millar blaming him, and which might then also read as Millar blaming himself. And whilst there is surely a large element of truth in the suggestion that Ken Millar writes Lew Archer as a character who keeps rescuing daughters because to a large extent Millar could not save his own, there lurks beyond all this the suggestion of something darker, perhaps. There is an intriguing line in Ed Nolan’s biography, discussing Millar’s attitudes to all of this. Millar suggests that his wife Margaret “had a need for “a jealous and exclusive love,”” and he “thought his wife hypersensitive to “the fairly normal incestuous content in the father-daughter relationship.””
Different times, as I say. Or maybe not. Maybe things just get talked about differently, brushed under carpets differently, obscured differently. Maybe nothing fundamentally changes in human nature at all or maybe everything is a result of the ways in which our popular cultures mediate and manipulate perceptions of ‘normality’, shifting as they do with every passing generation. Maybe too I have been overly sensitised through thirty years of teaching. It is also possible that Millar’s preoccupation with saving young female characters is simply a symptom of an instinct common amongst fathers with daughters. Not being a parent I have no reference point for this at all, but it seems plausible. Plausible too is that it is as a result of prolonged exposure to media coverage of crime and tragedy. Indeed in his 1951 novel ‘The Way Some People Die’ Lew Archer reflects that he “keep(s) thinking of the Black Dahlia, all the young girls that have been stolen away and destroyed by evil men.” Millar and Ellroy connected again.
So yes, it is possible to dive in at pretty much any point in the Lew Archer series and come up trumps. If pushed to pick one Lew Archer mystery though, I think that it would be the eighth instalment, 1959’s ‘The Galton Case’. Some critics have suggested this is the novel in which Ken Millar really finds his mature voice, and there is a strong case to be made for that. Although the somewhat obsessive theme of father/daughter relationships will continue to crop up in various guises in future books, in ‘The Galton Case’ it is replaced with a more successful musing on the nature of identity. The book engages with typical detective tropes of missing persons, this time most explicitly referencing Millar’s difficult childhood and detachment at a young age from his own father. It is not important to know any of this to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the book, but it does add an extra layer of interest, particularly when one considers the ideas of identity with regards author and character. Where does Ken Millar end and Ross Macdonald begin? And how does that persona of the writer blend with the character of Lew Archer in particular? It is true that as consumers of art and media we ought to be wary of projecting the qualities of the works onto the creators, and this is particularly true in the realm of fiction writing. The clue is in the word ‘fiction’, after all. Yet Millar is certainly a case where this boundary between truth and fiction is particularly finely poised. So much of Millar’s own experiences undeniably do find their way into his writing, so it does seem perfectly valid to wonder whether Lew Archer is speaking with a voice of imagination or of Millar’s personal experience. Never quite knowing is surely a large part of the continuing appeal.
One thing in ‘The Galton Case’ that almost certainly reflects Millar’s own cultural taste is that he uses the book to cast a curious and somewhat supercilious eye over the Beat Generation. It’s clear that Millar has little time for this particular incarnation of Youth Culture, yet typically he cannot quite allow Lew Archer to be wholly dismissive.
Ken Millar did share a love of jazz with the Beats, however, and at times he talked about wanting to construct his novels the way jazz musicians approached musical pieces. I’m not certain that comes over in his texts, but in ‘The Galton Case’ he certainly writes a nightclub jazz scene that, whilst much more restrained than Kerouac, is equally good: “The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night. The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.”
Archer gives over the feeling that Ken Millar might prefer the jazz to be slightly different in style and performance, but he certainly digs it just the same.
Then there is an amusing swipe at Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ when the poet performing at the club takes “a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket” before proceeding to perform: “Death Is Tabu,” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat.” As critiques go it is certainly less cutting that Truman Capote’s “that’s not writing, it’s typing”, but it’s still a soft swipe.
The fictional poet in the nightclub (named Bolling) is based not on Kerouac but on Kenneth Rexroth, who The Beats saw as something of a significant influence and who Millar saw as being better than what he begat, as it were. There is certainly a degree of warmth shown towards Bolling by Archer, who notes that “Like other performers, he had a public face and a private one. Each of them was slightly phony, but the private face suited him better.”
My friend Joe suggests that the scene where Archer and Bolling visit the San Francisco shore and the poet talks about building a new Athens there is a deliberate echo of the opening of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. Unlike Joe I am no academic literary expert, but I am quite certain that he is correct. Elsewhere in Millar’s novels there are Classical and other literary references (notably to Samuel Taylor Coleridge) that go way over my head, but that is fine. There is no need to ‘get’ the references to enjoy the novels. And whilst they might be described as Easter Eggs hidden in the text to delight any unsuspecting literary experts lured into reading detective mysteries I suspect too that their very existence lends Millar’s writing the elevated sense of magnificence that ‘ordinary’ readers like me sense without really understanding. Millar keeps the brilliance delicately cloaked, and therein lies its magic.
If Lew Archer, and by association Ken Millar, seems to hold something of a disliking for the Beats and a degree of bewildered lack of understanding of their youthful audience then it is perhaps a reflection of that state one gets to when one suddenly no longer seems to understand younger generations. It is a feeling, I think, that appears to work by stealth, and on reflection one can never pinpoint the moment it happens. I do not think this is any big deal, incidentally; no longer believe it is in any way related to hazy notions of ‘selling out’ or whatever I used to proclaim when I was younger and even more foolish. Archer/Millar looks on the Beat kids in ‘The Galton Case’ with a degree of generational detachment, then, and whilst he continues to do so through the remainder of his books he retains always a certain protective warmth towards youth. In 1962’s ‘The Zebra-Striped Hearse’ Archer encounters some post-beat teenage surfer kids, and then nine years later chances up against what would be their natural development in ’The Underground Man’, all long hair and mistrustful looks and attitudes. Archer can’t help but be grudgingly admiring of their Outsider pose, even as he tacitly acknowledges that he himself is emblematic of The Man. It’s like Millar is nodding towards the knowledge that it is inherently difficult for youth to recognise salvation/help in older generations and/or in established structures, just as the opposite relationship can be equally impossible. Millar positions Archer to be the pivot upon which that eternally problematic relationship hinges and he does it exquisitely well. He is careful too not to get drawn into commentary about specific cultural phenomena, and Archer’s dialogue in particular treads the fine line between Californian street/beach vocabulary and sound fictional conventions. It’s just one of the factors that make the Lew Archer books so very evocative of time and place whilst simultaneously appearing timeless. Awareness of the value of being seen to be informed by, but equally outside of contemporary events might explain why Millar turned down two financially lucrative offers to write (as Ross Macdonald) about the grisly Manson murders in 1969. If Millar was to artfully blur the boundaries between fact and fiction then they should at least be his own personal ones.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s it could be said that the final three Lew Archer books (‘The Underground Man’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Blue Hammer’) seem to almost imperceptibly fall away in terms of quality. If they were by any other writer it could justifiably be said that they contain flashes of brilliance, but set beside the white heat brilliance of previous Macdonalds they just feel to be in their shadow somewhat. Then again, perhaps this can only be sensed when reading an extensive batch of Archer mysteries in one go. To have experienced them in their contemporary contexts (1971, ’73 and ’76) would doubtless have been a terrific experience, yet I still cannot help wonder if that “anticipation is so much better” line so eloquently used by The Delta 5 in their ‘Anticipation’ single of 1980 might have applied even to an Archer fan at the time. Certainly by the time of 1976’s concluding ‘The Blue Hammer’ Ken Millar was starting to show signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually consume his brilliant mind. In the tremendous extended interview sessions with Paul Nelson that forms the basis for ‘The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ there are moments where memory fails. For the vast majority of the interviews Millar is astoundingly sharp and erudite, remarkably well-read and marvellously rounded. He covers up the memory slips admirably, but you can just about see the cracks starting to appear and it is heartbreaking.
Best by far then to remember Ken Millar as the Ross Macdonald (and vice versa) of the 1950s and 1960s, books filled with characters and plots that like the author are complex, challenging, troubling, intricately interconnected, intellectually stimulating and endlessly entertaining. He was simply, as James Ellroy suggested, the master.
The process of re-reading can be a strange one, I think. Personally I have never been one for doing much of it. There is always something ‘new’ to move onto, after all, and a book requires so much more time and attention than a record, say, or even a film. Both of those media reward our focus of course, but they seldom require immediate investment of more than a couple of hours at a time. Indeed the best long-player records can be over in a half hour. A film, an hour on top of that. A book though? A detective novel? Four of five hours maybe, and that spread over the space of days, weeks, depending on circumstances. I know some people take months to finish a book and that is fine because everyone’s lives and demands are different, but I struggle to remember what’s going on beyond three or four days. Occasionally I’ll manage a book in a single sitting but that is much rarer than it used to be and is surely as reliable a measurement of age as anything else.
I know too that many people have books they return to on a fairly regular basis. They are something of a comfort blanket perhaps. Familiarity with the magic of their prose, or with the resolution of their narratives lends a certain solace maybe. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times people can read Jane Austen, for example. I have tried reading her books and been defeated each time. I think the reasons are to do with the structure of the writing, but I am not intellectually informed enough on those things to be certain. Maybe one day it will click and make sense in much the same way Bruce Springsteen’s records did, though I admit my saying this is largely an excuse to put Springsteen and Austen in the same sentence.
Forcing myself to re-read books for this project then has been interesting. Mostly I realise how little I remember.
I do know however that it was 2003 when I was feverishly picking up and reading as much by Ross Macdonald as I possibly could because an old train ticket fell out of a copy of ‘Black Money’. It is one of those great Black Lizard ‘crime classics’ paperback editions with very period 1990s graphic design. The pages are now yellowed but it looks terrific in a photograph with a morning coffee, which is one of my ongoing projects, or habits or whatever. The photographs I mean, not the coffee, although of course it is both.
I’ll get back to Ross Macdonald eventually, I promise, but for now let me go off an on tangent and say that the photographs of beverages and books started in 2015 and that the first picture I made was of Joseph Hansen’s great ‘Fadeout’ alongside a coffee in a mug from The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Hansen’s short series of novels featuring his detective Dave Brandstetter are well worth seeking out. He’s celebrated mostly these days as being the first openly gay detective character, and that is to be applauded of course. There is certainly a degree of Hansen reclaiming the whole queer identity and reframing the language in positive ways within the books, but they are also just really well crafted detective stories that maybe help shine a light on the strange strained suffusion of homoerotic sexual tensions that exist in much of the hard boiled stuff. All those manly figures showing off their toughness to each other. Psychiatrists would have a field day.
Another of my early beverage and book photographs was made in the Boston Tea Party cafe in Exeter. I recognise the table grain and one of their big white mugs holding a black coffee. The book is Don Carpenter’s ‘Hard Rain Falling’, one of those really nice New York Review Of Books paperbacks with a terrific cover photograph by Ken Light. It’s not a detective novel, but it is a story of crime and punishment and redemption of sorts. Carpenter is Dostoyevsky if he’d been around in the Beat Generation. His fans include Jonathan Lethem, Anne Lamont and Richard Price, who all supply effusive copy for the back cover. There’s an introduction too by George Pelecanos, which is naturally worth reading.
Pelecanos should be given a lot of credit here because, when I think about it, he was maybe my line (back) into detective fiction when the Serpent’s Tail imprint published his trilogy of Nick Stefanos mysteries in 1998. That late 1990s period was a pretty hectic time for me. I’d been teaching art in a Devon high school for six years by 1998 but still somehow found the time to be writing pretty much non stop about music and books. By 1998 too the Tangents.co.uk website would have been running for a couple of years, growing as it did out of a decade or more of fanzine writing and publishing. I’m fairly certain I had blagged review copies of other books from Serpent’s Tail and that they sent me the Pelecanos trilogy as part of their regular publicity mail out. I’m glad they did because really those books hit me like a freight train. Something about elements coming together serendipitously at the same time, maybe, but Pelecanos seemed like a voice that connected. The intensity of his prose in those Stefanos books still prickles with the energy of the DC Hardcore punk bands he’d maybe have been seeing in his formative years. The Pop cultural references effortlessly root the stories to place and time but crucially never feel forced. That’s much more difficult than it sounds.
In his later books there is perhaps a sense of Pelecanos getting sidetracked by Issues based narrative arcs, but I would say his attempts to address more serious, grown up topics like political corruption never feel as lightly done as, say, Chandler managed. That can be taken as a criticism or as praise though, so take your pick. Throughout though Pelecanos has never lost his talent for capturing speech, being as skilled in that area as any of the tough school predecessors or indeed his contemporaries. He neatly continues the hard boiled predilection for detective characters who are tough yet sensitive, soft yet strong, maybe much like Pelecanos himself. That was certainly the feeling I got when I interviewed him at the tiny Nantos Hotel, a Greek place in London where he was doing some publicity back in 1998 to promote the his just published ‘The Sweet Forever’. At the time I was doing this thing on Tangents called ‘Mass Observation’ which was a bunch of questions split in two sections, one for the present day and one for when people were 16 years old. This conceit was all tied up in the notion that 16, or at least the conceptual age of 16 is when we are ‘born’, pop-culturally speaking. It’s a flawed conceit of course, but I mostly stand by it. Anyway, the opening questions went like this: “Where are you?” “Nantos hotel, London.” “What are you?” “A Greek American writer.”
And then the third question, which was intended as one about the creative output, and couched in British English colloquialism: “What do you make?”
“What do I MAKE?”. I thought Pelecanos was going to hit me. End of interview right there. Of course he naturally interpreted this from an American perspective and assumed I was being outrageously nosey about his income. “What do I MAKE?…” In the astonished pause, I quickly realised how he had taken the question and I just as quickly filled the pause with an explanation of the intention. Thankfully he laughed and went with it. “Books” was the blunt and pretty obvious answer, the unspoken part being, did I really have to ask?
Perhaps unsurprisingly that session with Pelecanos was the start and pretty much the end of my foray into the realm of the journalistic interview. Teaching increasingly took up my time, and that was a pretty tough job, even back at the end of the 20th Century. It’s much harder now, although that’s another story, the kind of story Pelecanos would probably tell really well. In fact he kind of did, though obviously from an American perspective, in season 4 of the TV show ‘The Wire’ in which the character of Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski takes on a job as a Math teacher in a Baltimore middle school. By season 4 Pelecanos had dialled back his involvement in the show to focus on a new book, but he still got some writing credits. I recall seeing Pelecanos’ name in the credits for the show when it screened in the UK and being so pleased because he had answered my Mass Observation question about what he wanted to be when he was 16 with “I wanted to make movies.” So ‘The Wire’ was not exactly a movie, but it was close. Maybe better.
So I think I’ve got a lot to be grateful to George Pelecanos for. He kind of scared the shit out of me, yes, but he hooked me (back) into the detective genre, so he is to thank for all of this. Or to blame. Take your pick.
Someone else who dug Pelecanos was James Sallis. His 2001 novel ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ is the sixth and final instalment of a tremendous series featuring detective Lew Griffin and at one point Griffin is to be found “reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name”. Elsewhere in the book Sallis drops references to the Rebel Inc imprint which was so enormously important back at the turn of the 20th to 21st Centuries with its reprints of such essentials as John Fante, Jim Dodge’s ‘Stone Junction’, and Emmett Grogan’s mighty ‘Ringolevio’. Sallis describes it as ‘a new publishing house in Scotland run by a bunch of kids’. The story of Rebel Inc is fascinating in itself, with its roots in the world of fanzines and the strange literate punk energies of Edinburgh. There is a fun story of Alan Warner sending some poetry for potential inclusion in the ‘Rebel Inc’ magazine back in the 1990s, and signing it all as being by/from Morvern Callar (Warner was still writing the novel of the same name at the time). Publisher of the ‘Rebel Inc’ ‘zine Kevin Williamson however recognised the handwriting on the envelope as being Warner’s. He says that “Warner probably thinks I’ve forgotten but I don’t forget anything like that. I remember everything.”
Lew Griffin remembers everything too. He’s forever bringing up quotations and peppering them through his books. Lots of philosophy, Emerson in particular. And of course I say Lew Griffin when I really mean James Sallis. It’s James Sallis who manages to pull up all sorts of delightful philosophical gems and he just happens to use Lew Griffin to give them voice. Such is the life of the writer. Of course Lew Griffin himself is a writer too as well as a teacher, an investigator and a drunk. Not that Sallis is all of those things, or indeed any of those things except writer, although perhaps somewhere inside we are all of us all of those things at some point in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, with more or less adherence to dictionary definitions. Anyway, to coin a phrase some of my Tangents writer friends and I used a lot, James Sallis writes like God.
But only sometimes. I once read his spy thriller ‘Death Will Have Your Eyes’, and it was not that great. But the Lew Griffin novels, now that’s another matter. Of course all the greatest Noir has always at core been about Identity, and this is probably why Sartre and Camus were such fans. Sallis understands this implicitly, and the Lew Griffin novels are notably as much about identity and spirit as they are about crime. Indeed, in ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Bluebottle’, crime barely comes into it, the books being much more about the nature of exploration or, if you will, investigation; looking for clues as to who and why we are what we are as much as to solve any misdemeanour. Perhaps also the only misdemeanour is our very existence on this Earth, but maybe that’s getting altogether too maudlin and end-of-the-world weary.
Sallis writes as much as anything about the splendour of books, and the splendour of life and people. He writes about the search for meaning in words and in faces, gestures, touches, kisses, words shared, exchanges… all of this thrown up and examined and found both life-affirming and wanting at the same time. Of course all great Noir is essentially existential, and Sallis writes the poetry of the weary existential outsider with a sparkling mix of the coolest prose in the warmest of lonely hearts. His books still feel special.
