It is almost twenty four years since I read ‘The Last Stand of Mr America’, the second novel by Jason Flores-Williams. At the time I wrote on my Tangents website that I found it a shade ‘obvious’ in its critique of American popular/ist social and political culture but that it seemed a fine novel and that I was looking forward to seeing what the author might do next. As is the way of such things, the name slipped off my radar and for the following near quarter century (that can’t be right, surely…) the very fact that I had read or written about the novel drifted to the very edges of memory. I dare say that it would have continued to gather dust in the darkness of my brain as neural connections further decayed had it not been for the fact that earlier this year an email popped into my inbox from Jason Flores-Williams himself. It was a very charming message that thanked me for having taken the time to read and think about his novel all those years ago and that, having expressed interest in reading what might come next, would I be interested in reading the draft of a new novel, ‘Chamizal’?
Having for some years been firmly established in the world of broadly mid-20th Century English fiction I admit that the thought of reading something with a contemporary edge and focus was a little daunting. I’m glad that I managed the temporary shift in reading habits though, because I found ‘Chamizal’ to be enormously rewarding. Granted, it’s a pretty unrelenting groove of a book, more a discordant jazz improvisation than a pop song. Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ as opposed to ‘Coney Island Baby’, perhaps. Additionally, there is a degree of intentional confusion to the narrative such that reading the book feels akin to watching, say, ‘Twin Peaks’, in so much as one simultaneously has no idea what on earth is going on but also, on a subconscious level, knowing EXACTLY what is happening. Much of this confusion in ‘Chamizal’ is produced by there often being uncertainty about which character is talking at any one time. Indeed, it feels like a lot of the dialogue is actually the kind of inner dialogue we all of us have with ourselves, which feels entirely appropriate.
Much of the novel feels like it may be autobiographical to an extent, and given that Flores-Williams spent much of the intervening twenty plus years since the publication of that first novel involved in human rights law this is likely true to an extent. The law detail in the book inevitably then feels very solid, honest and real but is never domineering. A degree of self-mocking dark humour also helps to prevent things from dipping too far into potentially alienating detail.
Stylistically there are connections to old American Noir writers, which is fitting for a book which might well be described as a 21st Century legal detective story that subverts its own genre, like Erle Stanley Gardner on acid. A lot of the time too it feels like there is a Chandler voice to the writing, all clipped phrasing and short sharp sentences. Ross Macdonald too. Certainly there is something of Macdonald’s eye for seeing the evil in society and making a concise snapshot, but without making everything overwhelmingly bleak and dark. Sure, the book depicts a dark, existential dystopian nightmare, but there is also a lot of love and light. At times it also brings to mind Georges Simenon’s best works in that there is a similar kind of relish for the blackness and the underbelly. A ravishing darkness, if you will.
I write all this about ‘Chamizal’ with the knowledge that the novel has, sadly, yet to find a publisher. Extracts, however, have been slipping out throughout these past few months in the monthly ‘Alma Asfalto’ journal/newspaper that Flores-Williams has been putting together down in Mexico City. Firmly in the tradition of the radical or alternative presses of the past, it is heartening to see such things continuing in existence, particularly in these times. For those of us who might be slipping out the further edges of middle age into something more advanced there can perhaps be something a little ‘oh this again’ about some of the content, but this is me being particularly grumpy and twisted. And when I give that grumpy old geezer that I see in the mirror a good kick up the arse, there is also much that is ‘new’ to discover: a piece about photographer Tina Modetti (and the capitalist hijacking of her legacy); a ‘reappraisal’ of ‘Easy Rider’; a lovely personal recollection of Gregory Corso. And in particular an interview with Sunny War, a musician whose work would likely have continued to pass me by were it not for stumbling on the interview with her in the October issue. It’s a short piece and fairly bleak, but in many ways that’s the tone of ‘Alma Asfalto’ and of ‘Chamizal’. One key exchange between the interviewer (who I assume to be Flores-Willams) and Sunny War regarding living within the dystopian Trump regime goes like this:
Q: I grew up with a father in prison in the barrio, so nothing about what’s happening shocks me. A: Yeah. They’ve been terrorizing the whole world for years, and they owned slaves and continue to own slaves in the prison system. So what am I supposed to expect from them? Q: How do you personally maintain a sense of meaning in this? A: I think of life as a jail sentence and death as the release… when I was young I believed in people, but I lost hope in humanity. Now I just think, I’ll wait till I die. I don’t want to be part of it anymore… when you’re naturally empathetic, everything is pain. We’re all supposed to care about each other, but now that’s almost dangerous because it’s overwhelming how bad things are…. you can go insane thinking about it. There’s guilt – “I need to do something” – but then you feel powerless, and it’s chaos going back and forth in your mind. Now I just think, I’ll wait till I die. Q: Yeah, I’m 55 now, and the thought that I don’t have to keep doing this much longer actually makes my day sometimes. A: [Audibly laughs.] Q: What role does culture play in it? A: Culture is a way to cope.
I’m not at all sure that I buy into the “life is a jail sentence and death a release” vibe, but I think I understand where it’s coming from. Certainly though this notion of culture being a way to cope is valuable and I think perhaps eternal. Earlier in the interview Sunny War describes herself as ‘just playing folk music’ and that is a great line because it simultaneously deflects notions of artistic self-importance whilst subtly suggesting the vast, important possibilities that lie within the realm of a medium which is inherently conservative, traditional and revolutionary in its scope. The title of Sunny War’s album from this year, ‘Armageddon In A Summer Dress’ suggests this duality and the songs held within deliver in spades. As with ‘Chamizal’ there is a ravishing darkness about the album that is oddly captivating and enormously rewarding. I cannot recommend either enough.
Check out Alma Asfalto on the streets of Mexico City, or online here: https://almaasfalto.com If you are a publisher or literary agent I encourage you to contact Jason Flores-Williams and to give ‘Chamizal’ the publication it deserves.
‘The School At The Chalet’ by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer has been on my ‘to be read’ list for a few years now and what better time to finally get around to it than with this centenary reissue by the Girls Gone By imprint. In many respects I am very, very far from the target audience for a one hundred year old children’s book about a fee-paying girls’ school in the idyllic Austrian mountains, not least because after a thirty year professional career working in state education, the very idea of private schooling can still make me prickle. So yes, the fact that the characters are for the most part upper middle class and ‘privileged’ can occasionally be an irritant but it is also true to say that as with, for example, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine adventures (whose reissued books brought me to Girls Gone By in the first place) this ought not to out one off investigating. Besides, it would be churlish to judge (and/or dismiss) such fictional worlds according to one’s contemporary standards for to do so would be to miss opportunities to learn about historical contexts. In terms of education for example it can be very easy for those of my own generation to really grasp the idea that education should NOT be provided free of charge by the State for all young people, or that girls should not (at least notionally) have learning opportunities equal to boys. One could of course argue long and hard about the ways in which UK (and perhaps specifically English) education policy in the past fifty years has made things better (or indeed worse) for those from backgrounds of reduced capital (financial and, increasingly perhaps more relevant, cultural) but this is hardly the time or place. Instead, whilst one perhaps does need to park a sense of class consciousness in order to enjoy a book like ‘The School At The Chalet’ equally one can also use it as an opportunity to consider people as characters defined by qualities other than social class.
Indeed, using the context of a school and characters who are for the most part children can be an excellent means of questioning the very rigidity of the social class structures prevalent in 1925. The realm of the Girls’ School novel is largely alien to me, but I do think that for example Mabel Esther Allan’s ’School on Skye’ books from the 1950s certainly seek to challenge such notions even whilst operating within their constraints. One thing that certainly strikes me about ‘The School At The Chalet’ is the way in which the school grows so rapidly immediately upon its opening. It feels like this reflects an appetite, at least within some of the middle classes, for girls’ educational opportunities previously lacking. Having said that, it must also be admitted that the curriculum at The Chalet School does seem to be lacking in mathematics and the sciences, with much time given over to the ‘Finishing School’ staple of languages, music and sewing. Still, small steps and perhaps later books in the extensive series see the curriculum expand to embrace more ‘boyish’ subjects?
Structurally, ‘The School At The Chalet’ is episodic with each chapter or small cluster of chapters covering a series of events throughout the school’s first year. Sometimes these are Grand Adventures, such as getting caught in the mountains during a thunderstorm and having to spend the night in a herdsman’s hut. Oftentimes, however, the ‘episodes’ are relatively everyday events that allow the many individual characters to develop. A somewhat myriad cast of characters threatens at times to overwhelm things, but the focus just about stays on the few with whom the story begins, these being the school’s ‘owner’/principle Madge Bettany, her young sister Jo and her friend from Cornwall (where they set off from) Grizel Cochrane. In many respects the book is about Grizel coming to terms with the fact that she is rejected by her father and step-mother (Madge and Jo appear to have been orphaned at quite a young age although it is not explored in detail in this book), neither of whom seem to want Grizel spoiling their opportunities for fun and this exploration of behaviour does add a layer of interest to the book that might otherwise be lacking. Indeed Brent-Dyer revisits this theme with the introduction of another character, Juliet, who is even more brutally abandoned into the Chalet School’s care by her parents. There is surely an element here about not judging children based on their parents’ social class and/or financial status and something also about emotional states being blind to material ‘worth’. Equally, I am willing to concede that this is a ridiculously intellectual reading of something intended solely as escapist fantasy for children, something which is surely borne out by the somewhat rushed ending to the book in which Madge, Jo and Grizel each find themselves in comically thrilling situations that tumble to a conclusion without barely a pause for breath much like this sentence in fact.
The real star of ‘The School At The Chalet’ however is the landscape of the Northern Tyrolean Alps and specifically the area around the Achensee. Indeed, it was apparently a holiday to the lakeside village of Pertisau in 1922 that inspired Brent-Dyor to begin her Chalet School odyssey and her love of the landscape and people of the area are certainly marvellously captured. There is a small degree of negativity about foreigners, but this seems specifically targeted at Germans, and ‘Prussians’ in particular in the form of the ‘Frau Berlin’ character who pops up a couple of times in the story. Given the proximity of the book’s writing to the First World War, however, any anti-German feeling is lightweight and pretty much restricted to ‘Frau Berlin’ which makes one think that perhaps this is more of an urban/rural observation than anything rooted in geographical borders. Incidentally, ’Frau Berlin’ for some reason reminds me of The Bellinger in Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine stories and it is perhaps worth remarking that Saville’s outing to Austria in his 1950 ‘Jillies’ adventure ‘The Sign Of The Alpine Rose’ displays significantly more xenophobic attitudes in its English characters than those in ’The School At The Chalet’.
I understand that Brent-Dyer once acknowledged the fact that she was “no ‘great’ writer” and certainly ‘The School At The Chalet’ would seem to bear this out. Its appeal, however, would seem to lie (as with Enid Blyton, perhaps) not in any sense of literary excellence but in an intuitive knack for understanding what girls wanted (or arguably what a patriarchal society encouraged them to want) from fiction. As much as those on the ultra-conservative leaning edges of society today might welcome a wholesale return of the kind of educational focus seen in the early 20th Century, it is very doubtful indeed that many teenage girls would find much of interest in ‘The School At The Chalet’ in 2025. Indeed, for some time now (at a rough guess, the last 30 years?) the readership of the book, which has never been out of print, must assuredly be in the category of ’heritage readership’. That readership must surely too be passing from those who discovered books like this in their own childhood and who read them now for purposes of nostalgia and comfort into an audience who have no such connection of emotional memory. For them, amongst whom I certainly count myself, the appeal is… well, what exactly? A peek into social and historical contexts from Before Our Time and an opportunity to spot the things that time and history do not touch (or at least just lightly kiss)? Or perhaps something simpler and in fact more in tune with their avowed intent: fantasy escapism into fictional realms devoid of connection to the harsh realities of the present day. Either way, whilst I do not feel the need to obsessively start reading the entire (and extensive) ‘Chalet School’ series, I do certainly see myself dipping a toe into Brent-Dyer’s pleasurably sketched waters of the Achensee in the future.
Back in 1983 or so I said to myself that summer was the time for doing things and winter the time for writing about them. More than four decades later I still seem to be living pretty much by the same excuse, except that in 2025 it is less writing about what I did in the summer months and more about what I read. On her entertaining ‘Adventures in reading, running and working from home’ blog Liz Dexter has had a decade long series of posts covering ’20 books of summer’. This year was a theme of ‘get those hardbacks off the shelves’ and covered an intriguingly diverse range of titles, some of which I have already read and some which I’ve since added to my own ’to be read’ shelves/piles/digital libraries. It would be a good exercise to try and do next summer, although I dare say that when May 2026 comes around I shall be too focused on getting out on my bicycle and visiting the beach to actually do anything about it. Not that I stopped reading during the months of May, June, July, August and September of course, just that from around the middle of June I stopped writing about most of them.
Did I read much in the summer of 1983? Cycling Weekly and Autosport magazines perhaps. Books? Not so much that I can remember. I do however have a vague recollection that some of my friends were enjoying Leslie Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books from the 1960s and ‘70s and that I rather turned my nose up at them (the books, not the friends). I just read a synopsis of the titular 1966 novel and nothing about it appeals to me in the slightest now either, although I can see why the themes of sex, war and male camaraderie conveyed in a supposedly comedic style might have appealed to some. The very idea still makes me shudder, however.
What I had not realised until now was that the the naughties TV show ‘The Last Detective’ starring Peter Davidson and Sean Hughes was based on another series of books by Leslie Thomas, this time the ‘Dangerous Davies’ stories. Have I ever watched the show? No. Will I ever watch the show? Perhaps. I have a DVD boxset that might provide some light entertainment on gloomy winter days when I tire of old episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders’ and Zooey our ageing cat requires her afternoon cuddle in front of the fire. I have however, now read the ‘Dangerous Davies’ novels and these four books, originally published between 1976 and 1998, were the last four completed in what might have been my own ’40 or so books of summer’ programme.
Regular Unpopular readers, if such a thing exists, will likely have already noted that the books are to a degree anomalies in terms of my reading tastes in that, whilst they certainly seem to be examples of detective fiction they are remarkably ‘modern’ (for which read ‘written after the mid 20th Century’). Certainly they are somewhat unusual in having been written and published within my own lifetime and are set within a timeframe that I remember. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons that I struggled with them to an extent. On the level of light entertainment, which arguably is the only level on which to judge them, they are fine. Good, even. They rattle along at a decent pace and the characters are pretty well drawn. They are, as they say, ‘page turners’. The comedic style is of a much lighter touch than I expected given the cover blurbs’ insistence that the books are ‘richly humorous’ and that is certainly a point in their favour, particularly for those who, like me, rarely find comedy funny. There is too a degree of Thomas disguising darkness with lightness, particularly with respect to the crime at the core of the first book. Agatha Christie does this so well in her Miss Marple stories, often obscuring deeply disturbing themes with the patina of comfortable old age and middle class environs. Thomas attempts a similar trick, this time with an air of world-weary bonhomie and gentle cynicism, though the settings are much more resolutely urban and working class (all the books are set predominantly in the London borough of Willesden). The books are certainly pungently evocative of their times and do rather read like period sitcoms, which is not altogether a ringing endorsement, it should be said. For whilst many pieces of period fiction (detective or otherwise) from the early to mid 20th Century necessarily contain aspects of the deeply rooted sexism and racism of their contexts, it very seldom seems to permeate their entirety. These ‘Dangerous Davies’ books, by comparison, feel much more obviously coloured by such social contexts and if Thomas tackles some of the themes of class, race and gender expectations with admirable intent, it often comes over as a little cringeworthy. One gets the feeling that Thomas is trying too hard, or not trying hard enough. It’s hard to decide which.
This is perhaps a little harsh because, as I say, I kept turning the pages and kept picking up the next book. Would I have continued if there were more than four books in the series? Maybe, maybe not, although it is of course a moot point. And have they made me want to read Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books some forty five years after snootily dismissing them as mainstream airport paperback rubbish? Of course not. Because whilst one of the most enjoyable aspects of getting older is to gleefully flick the finger to one’s younger self, paradoxically another pleasure is to be found in fiercely upholding some of those increasingly ancient opinions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is the first book that you can remember reading? For me, as with many of my age/generation, it would probably be something by Enid Blyton. Or, more specifically, a Famous Five adventure/mystery. ‘Five Go Down To The Sea’, perhaps, or ‘Five Go To Smugglers Top’. Possibly even ‘Five On A Treasure Island’, although I doubt that personally I would have been so lucky as to have started reading the series at the first instalment. What I do know for certain is that it was not until my later years that I read all the books in their published order, such things being so much more difficult when one is a child with limited pocket money and libraries have gaps in their inventories. It is tempting however to put a degree of certainty on ‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’ (ironically their penultimate outing), for its 1971 Green Knight cover illustration by Betty Maxey is the one that reverberates most, although whether that is down to the ghostly garden sculpture appearing through a break in the greenery or to the lustrous blonde of Anne’s hair I could not say for sure. It is a great adventure regardless, with an alluring island, stolen treasure, secret passages and Unpleasant Characters to be defeated. All the essential ingredients, in other words.
Yet whilst there is some uncertainty about which of their books I read first, even less clear to me now is how I came across The Famous Five at all. Was one of their books a present from my parents or a relative? Did a friend lend me a copy? Was it a librarian’s recommendation? This latter seems unlikely, for although the boycotting of Blyton by the UK’s librarians in the 1960s had eased somewhat by the early 1970s when I had reached an age to be interested, I am sure that a certain sniffiness remained. Still, at least we were fortunate to have libraries at all, and I do have a deeply ingrained memory of visiting the old sandstone library building on Troon’s Templehill, although the details of the books I borrowed have long since evaporated of course. Years later, with the ‘new’ library already matured into its setting opposite the town hall, I revisited that sandstone building to make benefit claims, this being something that university students could still do outside of term time in the 1980s. The past is a foreign country sure enough.
As for a book being borrowed from a friend, well, that is possible. I do recall wandering out across the fields (long since built over) behind our house with a couple of friends, exploring abandoned farm houses and imagining that we were on the trail of some unidentified adventure. The abandoned cottages were haunted, of course, and the barns used by smugglers. One evening we ran away from these smugglers and hid in a field of barley. The smugglers were farmers and they shouted at us to get out of their fields and to stay away from their barn. Being a fragile and largely obedient soul I did as I was told.
A colleague at the school I ended up teaching at for 30 years (and who I am sure was much less fragile as a child) told me once that reading Famous Five books as a youngster set the seeds for a lifetime’s fascination with the outdoors. A straight line from ‘Five On A Hike Together’ to Ten Tors Expedition Co-Ordinator. Me? I ended up as an art teacher, as perhaps all sensitive children inevitably do.
Finally then, were the Famous Five books gifts from my parents? I asked my mother and she told me that she honestly cannot remember. I do recall that books were common Christmas gifts in my younger years, but that they tended to be the typical Annuals (a Basil Brush one stand out), or non-fiction things like the ‘Usborne Book of Ghosts’ that everyone of A Certain Age seems to remember so vividly. Indeed, non-fiction books are the thing I remember seeing most around the house in my childhood. I certainly do not recall ever seeing my father look at books that were not mostly filled with diagrams and photographs. As I grew older I also became aware of the fact that he avoided writing too, although it was not until I trained as a teacher that it dawned on me that he very probably struggled with dyslexia. Books, then, and certainly the idea of reading fiction for pleasure, were not high on his agenda. As for my mother, well I do not recall seeing her reading much either, although I suspect she must have read some fiction. I asked her recently what she read in her younger years and she was, perhaps understandably (she is 91) a little vague. Neville Shute stood out, and the romance stories in ‘The People’s Friend’ magazine. These days she, like me, thoroughly enjoys the post-war romantic fiction of D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering. She would likely have been unknowingly familiar with Clavering in the past too, for she had more than 20 works serialised in the aforementioned ‘People’s Friend.’ (Clavering, not my mum). Funny how things cycle around.
Reading then was encouraged to a point by my parents, but not visibly reinforced by their own practice, and all of the books we owned were easily contained in a small wooden bookcase holding around 50 books in total, amongst those the collection of ubiquitous Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopaedias. These days I would fill that bookcase in six months, which perhaps says as much about levels of disposable income and the culture of consumption and accumulation than it does about anything else. Still, research by the National Literacy Trust in 2021 suggests that 6% of children and young people in the UK do not have a book of their own at home so perhaps things have not progressed as much as some of us would like to imagine.
However I happened to come across The Famous Five, then, I am eternally grateful, for I suspect that reading Blyton’s stories at the very least planted a seed of reading pleasure. Did these tales of mystery solving and daring adventure colour my later immersion in crime and detective fiction as an adult? Perhaps. Certainly, thinking back, it is interesting to see how strongly childhood threads feed into early adulthood and beyond. For example I recall how, at age eighteen, I spent several summer weekends with friends camping out in a woodland gorge outside Mauchline in Ayrshire. Even though our evenings around the campfire were fuelled more by Tennents Special than ginger beer, a shared attachment to a Blyton-esque idyll prevailed. Around this same time The Comic Strip were making their own spiky vision of Blyton with their ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ comedy routine. Was it supposed to be a Left Wing satirical take-down of Middle Class escapism? I think it was, but watching it again now, it all strikes me as being a bit lazy, picking on easy targets and not nearly as funny as I thought it was.
On reflection, ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ is probably just an example of how Blyton and The Famous Five have long been perfectly positioned to be an effective weapon in Culture Wars, with The Comic Strip’s use of parody and satire itself, in hindsight, a rather quaint 1980s raspberry blowing in the wind. These days, with their roots firmly set in the Middle Class milieu of an historically more conservative England, the Famous Five books are perhaps doomed to be interpreted as either examples of archaic values in desperate need of the more extreme action of ‘cancellation’ or amber-encased evocations of A Better Time that must be preserved at all costs. Inevitably, of course, the intended audience of children for the most part have never cared much about such things. Having always been open to influence and inspiration from fiction, they are rarely quite as gullible or ignorant as many adults imagine. This has always seemed remarkable to me. Perhaps there is something peculiarly blinding about parenthood? Thirty years of working in an English High School suggest that this may be so. In all that time I found parents much more difficult to deal with and understand than their children, but this likely says as much about me as anything. Emotionally blocked, or something.
Certainly Blyton seems to have suffered from a degree of arrested development due to the childhood trauma of not only a breakdown in the family structure between her parents, but also in the manner in which her mother pretended it had not happened. This kind of ‘for appearances sake’ approach would not have been particularly unusual (especially within the upper middle classes) in the Edwardian age but it does seem to have had both a profound physiological and psychological effect on Blyton. In a 2004 biopic filmed by the BBC, Helena Bonham Carter gave a typically marvellous depiction of Enid. The actor said she “was attracted to the role because she was bonkers. She was an emotional mess and quite barking mad.” I suppose one could get away with saying such things in 2004, especially if one was Helena Bonham Carter, but I think it is a tremendous quote. The actor also points out that Blyton was “unbelievably modern. She was a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman. She knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature.”
Attempts to make the books, characters and narratives more ‘relevant’ to contemporary audiences are doomed to be divisive of course. Yet commerce demands that such attempts at ‘modernisation’ continue. The Past must be exploited, after all. Stakeholders/shareholders must be paid and there are mortgages on second or third homes to service. A ‘reimagining’ of The Famous Five by the BBC in 2023/24 has predictably sparked fevered accusations of ‘wokeism’ on Social Media. Even those arguing against such allegations cannot help but distance themselves from actually ever enjoying the books at any point in the(ir) past. Finding anyone willing to tread a middle ground in these times is an almost impossible task. Moderation, after all, does not sell.
Personally, I rather enjoyed the BBC show for its balancing act of projecting contemporary 21st Century anxieties onto a mediated fictional 1930s tableau. In this it owes far more to the Indiana Jones films than to Enid Blyton’s books, but that is how media works after all. Most Children, I suspect, will care nothing for this and will focus their attentions on the fun and frenzy of being a child. Fancying the actors/characters and their escapist universe, as all children (or, if you insist, ‘young people’) have done since the invention of television or the printed word (and possibly since hearing stories around campfires in caves). Goodness knows ‘reality’ is grim enough. Nor do I have any particular issue with, for example, English Heritage alerting audiences to strains of racism, sexism and xenophobia in Blyton’s work. These are after all, to a large degree, objective observations, albeit themselves somewhat (but not entirely) directed by the historical context in which they are made. Adding a negative reference (as English Heritage has also done) to the literary merit of Blyton’s work does, however, feel a mite subjective. It seems to me that making such critical assertions misses a crucial element, which is in the challenge of making something so ‘simple’ and apparently ‘lacking in literary merit’ so massively successful. We do need to remind ourselves sometimes that ‘simple’ does not equate to ‘easy’, just as ‘successful’ does not automatically translate as ‘critically lacking’.
It might be argued that the best way in which to avoid Culture War weaponisation in the present is to simply not have been the most successful artist operating at any period in the past. Well, that and to not have reflected any racism, sexism or xenophobia inherent to the particular point in history during which they worked, which is a tough ask. I suppose one might simply ignore everything that was created before any arbitrary date one might care to come up with. Belle And Sebastian and Bob Dylan suggested that we ‘Don’t Look Back’, after all, but I am not sure they meant it in this manner. Nor, really, did the ‘Punk Rock’ year zero pose, although I admit that I was ignorant enough at that time to take it on board as a model for living for a while. I rather think that many generations do a similar thing. In other words, whenever one is in that range of teens to twenties (and often beyond), one sees oneself as being Right and True and Pure, and that not only is anyone older automatically Wrong, they will also Never Understand. This is the blessing and the curse of being that age.
All of which is a rather meandering way of introducing Malcolm Saville. Saville was a contemporary of Blyton, and indeed was instrumental in getting her established with the Newnes publishing house in the late 1930s. Yet whilst his output was almost as prodigious and his books very successful in their time, they have, unlike Blyton’s Famous Five, never been constantly in print. Abridged paperback editions of his Lone Pine Club series appeared in the late 1960s and early 70s but thereafter there was a thirty to forty year gap until the small Girls Gone By imprint started republishing the series in their original form. In the past year or two I have been devouring this Lone Pine Club series and enjoying them enormously.
I have wondered previously about why no-one ever told me about Malcolm Saville when I was younger. At that time I suggested it may have been because Malcolm Saville is very certainly An English Thing, like donning fancy dress at any opportunity and being sniffy about the French. I stand by that suggestion and still strongly suspect that the librarians of my day would have turned their noses up and pointed mine towards Good Scottish Authors like Stevenson (Robert Louis, not D.E.) and Scott. Both of whom I found dull beyond belief, incidentally.
Would I have enjoyed the Lone Pine Club books if I had read them as a youngster? It is a moot point, certainly, for by the time I might have progressed from The Famous Five to their slightly more grown up narratives (there are some marvellous elements of romantic tension between characters completely lacking in Blyton, for example) I rather think I had developed (if that is the right word) into a Typical Boy with a predilection for Non Fiction. If memory serves correctly (and it probably doesn’t) by the time I was entering my teens, time in the local library was spent almost exclusively looking for books about cars, motor sport, tanks and WW2 aircraft.
It is entirely possible too that as a Scottish youngster I might have agreed with my imaginary librarians about the books being Too English. For whilst the Lone Pine Club adventures are remarkably fine at capturing real landscapes, they never head north of the border (Yorkshire seems to about as far as they are willing to venture). Nor, for that matter, do they consider treading into the realm of Wales, which is a little more peculiar given that so many of the books are set in and around the border countryside of The Long Mynd in Shropshire. Yet why should this be a criticism? Saville seems certainly to have been interested in the idea of what Englishness meant, at a time when it did not seem to be fully encumbered with negative images of rampant xenophobia, regardless of what Enid Blyton’s books might have suggested. There is certainly an argument to be made that Saville lamented what he saw as the passing of a traditional, rural English way of life, and that his stories were at least in part a way of capturing that. Indeed his own favourite amongst his books was ‘Jane’s Country Year’ which I wrote about here.
A love of nature and landscape is central to ‘Jane’s Country Year’ and this passion is crucial to almost the entirety of Malcolm Saville’s output. Indeed, he is rightly celebrated for setting his children’s adventure stories in real places (often, delightfully, with accompanying maps in the end papers). In contrast, Blyton instead veered more to the imagined and generic landscape. True, Kirrin Castle (but not the island) is supposedly inspired by Corfe Castle, and ‘Whispering Island’ (‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’) modelled on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, but without that knowledge one would struggle to recognise Blyton’s love of Dorset in her writing. Even when the books are set in a named place such as Cornwall (‘Five Go Down To The Sea’) it is difficult to read the landscape as anything other than an imaginary ideal. The un-named Rye that features in ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ is, of all her landscapes and places, perhaps the most accurately sketched, although perhaps one needs to have at least been to Rye to realise this. Either that or to have read the third book in the Lone Pine Club series. Malcolm Saville’s ‘The Gay Dolphin’ is filled with real places and is hugely evocative of the area around Rye. Look, here is Winchelsea (where Saville himself lived for a period, perhaps as a neighbour of Spike Milligan?) and over there is Dungeness. This is Camber Castle and this the military canal. Over there beyond the dunes is the golf course where Mr Morton will at one point go for a round and, eventually, this space will fill with a holiday camp and the sounds of fey indie bands. Naturally too there is hidden treasure and a secret passage through the walls of Rye. Indeed, in many respects ‘The Gay Dolphin’ and ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ share remarkably similar DNA, and with both being published in 1945 it is intriguing to conjecture about who borrowed from whom. Ask any Lone Pine Club fan and they will no doubt suggest that Blyton must have, at the very least, taken on board Saville’s ideas following a conversation at the publishing house. Blyton fans on the other hand will likely point to coincidence…
The question of Rye aside, there does certainly seem to be a degree of mutual mistrust between fans of Blyton and Saville and I suspect that this distancing is rooted in those kinds of tribal allegiances that many of us naturally make in our youth. I can never quite decide if these impulses are entirely natural and simply exaggerated by the manipulation of Capitalism or if they are in fact constructs of materialist exploitation. Either way, the divisions seem real and also to be very much opened up along those lines of class distinctions and snobbery. Perversely, perhaps, it is most likely within the ‘educated middle classes’ to whom the fictional Famous Five characters and their parents belong that one finds criticism of Blyton and affection for Saville. This kind of inverted snobbery is intriguing. It is certainly the kind of thing I have practised with regards to music throughout most of my adult life. You know the kind of thing: “What sort of music do you like?”, “Oh, obscure things that you’ll never have heard of, and even then I prefer the unreleased demos. I have a copy of those you know, because I interviewed the singer for my fanzine when he was in his first band when he was twelve and I was eleven. We bonded over a mutual love of The Velvet Underground.”
To continue that musical theme, then, Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.
In this imagined realm of Children’s Authors as 1960s Pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness. Nostalgia is baked in.
Such notional connections are entirely personal ones, of course, attachments to (and rejections of) cultural streams being entirely subjective after all. Both Blyton and Saville would doubtless have been at best bemused and at worst horrified by such comparisons. Which is part of the fun of making them.
That notion of nostalgia is certainly critical in considering Blyton or Saville in the 21st Century, although I think too there are ways of defining what one means by nostalgia. For the most part I’m in agreement with musician and author John Darnielle in so much as I consider nostalgia as “an emotional attachment to the past but not a preoccupation or fixation on it”. In my ‘Young and Foolish’ book I posited a vague theory that our lives (specifically in terms of musical consumption, but also in a much broader way) move in orbits around a central point. The suggestion, which I largely stand by still, is that whilst we head off on a variety of new trajectories (some lengthy, others intensely brief) we are always drawn back to this centre, where we might recharge before embarking on our next journey. That centre is, at some basic level, rooted in a sense of loss, or absence, these being what I still regard as the essential qualities of great Pop. I did not then, and do not now, see that as being necessarily a place of sadness or sorrow. Perhaps, though, that centre of nostalgia does drain something of our souls even as it recharges us. A vampiric deal with the devil, or something similar. Perhaps we reach a point when the trade is no longer in our favour and, lacking the energy to break free on a new trajectory, we sink deeper into the mire of The Past. Which is not even ‘our’ past, but instead one painted for us by media controllers with vested interests in maintaining status quos. A space that echoes to the bewildered mutterings of ‘much better in my day’ curmudgeons.
The audience for Malcolm Saville’s books in the 21st Century then is most assuredly the more, ahem, ‘aged’ generations who are enjoying both the nostalgic element of books from their own youth or, like myself, finding pleasure in writing rooted in landscapes that remain largely unchanged even after more than three quarters of a century. Landscapes that can still be visited, paths that can still be walked, towns and villages that would still seem seem largely familiar to the books’ young protagonists.
As for children of the 21st Century? Well despite, or because of the best part of three decades spent teaching teenagers, I am in no position to make any informed judgement on that. Friends With Children suggest that Blyton holds no great interest and Saville is naturally invisible, except where those parents themselves might have old Lone Pine adventures on their shelves. Even here I suspect there would be an instinctive mistrust of anything ‘old’. One friend told me that whilst his daughter expressed an affection for ‘Mystery At Witchend’, she actually much preferred Robin Stevens’ ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series.
I can see why Stevens’ stories would appeal, for they are, like Alan Bradley’s ‘Flavia De Luce’ books, of which they remind me, great fun. They are, of course, fired through with contemporary issues projected onto the kind of fictionalised comic-book vision of 1930s England that perhaps only an American (or a Malta dwelling Canadian) can conjure. This is a compliment, incidentally.
It could be argued that both these series of books are rooted in the adventure and mystery genres of The Famous Five or The Lone Pine Club, but both also unashamedly play the game of putting the individual at the heart of the narrative. The notion of the identity obsessed individual living a progressively liberal existence in opposition to a conservative society in Stevens’ books seems particularly On Point for the 21st Century, and is something one might alternately admire or abhor. An anti-Blyton for the 2020s, perhaps.
Will Steven’s ‘Detective Club’ mysteries be The Famous Five of their age, doomed forever to remain in print and to plague future (further) enlightened generations with as yet unforeseen problematic depictions of identity and/or history? Or will they be The Lone Pine Club, destined to occasionally flourish in one or two bursts of nostalgia over the forthcoming half century, adored and ignored in almost equal measure? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile the actual Blyton brand will, I am sure, prevail for some time to come yet. Commerce, after all, insists upon it.
