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Why Do We Keep Doing This? The Queens of True Crime

April 2, 2025 /

I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium, beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.

Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.

Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.

I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self  – are nailed into place.

A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.

The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.

There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.

 As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.

This House of Grief had a powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure – and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient, manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is being described.

Exploitative true crime is not so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of the society we live in.

On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.

Certain extreme fringes of the fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’ backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much, actually, who the Ripper was.

They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.

Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’

I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’

I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.

There are many theories as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind. We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.

I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.  

In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?

Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?

In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’

Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.

FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)

‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal understanding of what is at stake.

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)

Nelson’s aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.

The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee (2015)

Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis. The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)

As well as being the most problematic, serial killers are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016 with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just two months after the book’s publication.   

Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza (2023)

Rivera Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested. Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism, the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first to admire the book that bears her name.

Reading Peace, Writing Granite

March 25, 2025 /

It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.

*

READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE

‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak, a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup, the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad? Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the Final!’

My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United. The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been. But she remembered Munich.

On the afternoon of February 6th 1958, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover.

At the time of the Munich Air Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly – about grief.

British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home.

Peace evokes a world in which it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone, where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch winning matches just a fortnight later.

When you look at photos of Matt Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.

There are intimations in Munichs of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place.

In some ways, what happened at Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time, and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that?

There has to be something in this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing.

There is also the broader question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.

I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened. Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal, personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been cut short.

Peace’s present tense narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’ families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers, even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning of the novel’s title.

Peace never feels the need to use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay, so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines, the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets when they are put together in a particular way.

Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual, repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all of the Dead, including his dad.

*

I kept reading around David Peace before I actually read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were serious, at least if you had taste.

Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’

I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter.

Neither could I help noticing that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho, in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy. James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve.

I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with.

I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.

*

In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions.

“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news.

“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.

*

From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford –

          Silence in the black of the back of the van –

          Dim lights down black back roads –

          Sat in the back of the black of the van –

          Yorkshire, 1972:

          You’ll wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before.

When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition, though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some sense formed it.

He brought to it also some of the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers, whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection: Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the sequence moves forward.

The material by itself is challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows, staining the paper like mould.

You can feel it being written.

*

I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry. She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar landscape.

I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA.

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

There was something about Eliot’s images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material, even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.

As an adolescent, Peace harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.

Finding a path towards your material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different. Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative as it developed.

Every novel is a set of problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away.

At Candlemas: Winter Night (1948) by Boris Pasternak

February 2, 2025 /

Мело, мело по всей земле
Во все пределы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

Как летом роем мошкара
Летит на пламя,
Слетались хлопья со двора
К оконной раме.

Метель лепила на стекле
Кружки и стрелы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На озаренный потолок
Ложились тени,
Скрещенья рук, скрещенья ног,
Судьбы скрещенья.

И падали два башмачка
Со стуком на пол.
И воск слезами с ночника
На платье капал.

И все терялось в снежной мгле
Седой и белой.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На свечку дуло из угла,
И жар соблазна
Вздымал, как ангел, два крыла
Крестообразно.

Мело весь месяц в феврале,
И то и дело
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

*

{Snow fell and fell across the world fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned as midges in summer swarm to the flame so the snowflakes swarmed to the doorstep and to the window frame the blizzard scratched upon the pane circles and spears a candle burned on the table a candle burned upon the lighted ceiling the shadows locked crossed arms crossed feet crossed fate as two shoes fell to the floor from the bed so the tears of wax from the candle dripped on the cast-off dress and all was lost in the greyish gloom a candle burned on the table a candle burned and when the flame flickered in the icy draught love’s heat raised it up again wings crossed like an angel’s all through the month of February the snow fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned.)

Those Who Walk Away: Private Rites by Julia Armfield

January 21, 2025 /

One of my final reads of last year was Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a book I’d long been meaning to catch up with and which, in a year dominated by books about grief, turned out to be one of the most powerfully original treatments of the subject I encountered. Armfield’s second novel Private Rites – one of my first reads of this new year – is as powerful in its own way as Our Wives, as technically well achieved and is if anything even more daring in its use of speculative materials.

Private Rites is a novel of a near future in which climate change has fundamentally altered the rhythms and expectations of everyday reality. Rain falls incessantly, weakening the physical structure of the built environment and devastating the agricultural landscape. Power outages and a general scarcity of goods have become the norm. Isla Carmichael, a psychotherapist, is determined that the life and career she has made for herself should continue as before. Her sister Irene lives in her sister’s shadow, resentful and regretful that her own academic ambitions were thwarted by the unfolding climate disaster. Their younger half-sister Agnes, mysteriously abandoned by her mother when she was still an infant, lives pragmatically from day to day, rarely in touch with her siblings and seemingly unable to form meaningful relationships with anyone. As the novel opens, the sisters have been forced together to organize the funeral of their father, a famous architect. Brilliant and utterly ruthless, he has left his mark on every aspect of their lives, most of all in separating them so decisively from each other.  

I’ve seen Private Rites compared with Shakespeare’s King Lear – three conflicted sisters, one mad father, one dubious inheritance – and the influence of Lear’s structure and family dynamic is certainly apparent. In its forensic examination of the corrosive effects on siblings (and especially half-siblings) of growing up under the dominance of a divisive, ultra-powerful parent, the novel will no doubt also be made to stand alongside the US TV drama Succession. None of this is to the bad – these are stellar examples to be set against. In the case of Succession especially, I would point to the character writing – the paring-apart of the relationships between those siblings – as the most relevant comparator. In talking about Succession with others I have frequently been surprised to hear people speak of the Roy siblings as ‘all awful!’ because – and this entirely on account of that magisterial characterisation, which reveals each sibling’s personality and predicament in unsparing totality – I came to love them all.

The same can be said of Isla, Irene and Agnes in Private Rites. Armfield openly points to her characters as being ‘unlikeable’ – whilst in the same moment revealing through the feelings and thoughts of those who do love them how they are equally unsparing of self and vulnerable to hurt.

But Armfield is talking about more than family feuds. As a novel about climate change, Private Rites is impressive on several levels. In its imagining of a partially submerged London, navigable only by ferries and ‘water taxis’, comparisons will inevitably be drawn with Ballard’s The Drowned World, though I for one don’t find them especially useful. Ballard, who used the form of the disaster novel as a frame through which to observe the human psyche, was never particularly interested in the natural environment other than as a tool in his imaginative lexicon; Armfield, writing at a distance of sixty years and from an entirely different vantage point, employs the language and imagery of climate change not as a backdrop but as her novel’s central and most urgent subject matter. Here is a world in which the most socially disadvantaged communities are left – literally – floundering. Here is a world in which your neighbour’s house and then your own might – literally – slide underwater in the aftermath of the most recent downpour.

Though it spends three-quarters of its length examining them, Private Rites ultimately dismisses the sisters’ squabbles and even their trauma as secondary issues, vanished in less than a second in the face of a greater and more universal catastrophe. As the novel nears its end, Armfield takes an enormous risk. ‘It’s the wrong genre’, one sister protests, as the action appears to veer off the main highway, screech-turning instead into a dark thoroughfare clogged with rubbish and simmering with violence. Armfield has done her foreshadowing – note the symbolism of The Omen, the passing mention of Sergeant Howie’s misguided search for Rowan Morrison in The Wicker Man, the reference to Auden’s poem on Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – but it’s so subtle we do not realise its full significance until later. Nonetheless, and though I spent some time after finishing the novel wondering if Armfield’s rug-pull was an act of madness or a stroke of genius, I came down on the side of the latter, and her rash and strange denouement feels fully earned.

More than that, it transforms the book at a stroke from a novel set in a time of climate change to a novel that tackles the subject of climate change as its core subject matter. From a novel that uses speculative materials to a novel of science fiction, a metaphor for itself. The choice Irene and Isla make at the end – an almost instantaneous renunciation of the past in an acceptance of a future that must be shared, no matter what it looks like or who gets to see it – also had me thinking about a much older work of science fiction, one that affected me deeply when I first read it, but that resolves a similar point of crisis in the opposite direction.  

Ward Moore’s story ‘Lot’ was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953, and it is distinctly strange for me to realise that this seminal piece of short fiction is now more than seventy years old. I first encountered it around 1980, in the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, edited by Brian Aldiss and one of my set texts for English Literature ‘O’ Level. This volume – a compendium of three successive SF anthologies Aldiss edited for Penguin in the 1960s – was published in 1973, and was the book that first made me fully aware of ‘science fiction’ as a distinct category, a type of fiction that had its own specifically definable characteristics and that could be discussed, if one so chose, wholly within and with reference to those parameters.

This was the volume that introduced me to Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, Frederik Pohl’s ‘The Tunnel Under the World’, Algis Budrys’s ‘The End of Summer’, Tom Godwin’s ‘The Greater Thing’ and Robert Sheckley’s ‘The Store of the Worlds’. Already I gravitated naturally to science fiction stories that emphasised realistic background detail and strong characterization – my first taste of Ballard, via the astringent ‘Track 12’, left me mystified and mostly indifferent – and it was for this reason that of all the stories in the omnibus it was ‘Lot’, with its Biblical connotations and vividly evoked quotidian setting, that made the strongest and most lasting impression.

 ‘Lot’ is classic Cold War science fiction of the 1950s. The protagonist is David Jimmon, a Los Angeles insurance salesman with a wife, Molly, and three children: David Junior (known as Jir), Erika, and Wendell. As the story opens, they are about to leave their home in Malibu for an uncertain future. A nuclear strike on the USA a few days earlier has devastated Pittsburgh. A second missile has recently detonated further down the coast. Jimmon, who values ‘foresight’ above all else, has made plans to take his family north, loading their station wagon with enough basic provisions to give at least a chance of life in a brutal new world where ‘the docile mass perished, the headstrong (but intelligent) individual survived’.

I remember my ‘O’ Level essay about the story in which I used quotes to demonstrate how Moore illustrates the widening gulf between the world inside the car and the reality outside by pitting trivial domestic arguments against the fragments of news that emerge in fits and starts from the Jimmons’ car radio. Molly Jimmon is unable to fully accept the finality of what is happening, a failure of imagination that leaves her husband struggling to retain his composure. As they inch their way up the traffic-jammed Interstate, David Jimmon comes increasingly to see both Molly and his two sons as ‘dependent. Helpless. Everything on him. Parasites.’

Jimmon’s sexism is deeply ingrained but with US science fiction of this era that is pretty much par for the course. What raises ‘Lot’ above the watermark is its attention to detail. Moore’s skilful depiction of an average American family confronted with a crisis they are not equipped to deal with makes the disaster on the horizon all the more real. Even today, the story is devastating, claustrophobic, the sense of panic palpable. It brings back a lot of memories, both of my own early reading of SF and the fear of nuclear war that still persisted well into the eighties.

‘Lot’ is a fine piece of writing, showcasing some of the central themes and concerns of 1950s SF. It is also fascinating for what it reveals about the author’s own attitudes. For a large part of the story, Moore appears to be ‘with’ David Jimmon in his rising contempt for Molly and the two boys. But Jimmon’s final decision to abscond with Erika, leaving the rest of his family stranded at a gas station is clearly intended to be shocking – most of all because the reader is made complicit, persuaded by Jimmon’s conviction he has no choice in the matter. That if he does not act ruthlessly to save himself and the more competent Erika, then they are all doomed anyway.

And there are hints that Moore means us to think the opposite, that Jimmon is as unprepared to face reality as Molly and the boys. Still blaming Molly for persuading him to leave a job he had enjoyed, still stewing over her possible infidelity with an old boyfriend, Jimmon’s decision to leave his wife behind is as much tied up with petty resentment as with practical necessity. ‘He had purposely not taxed the cargo capacity of the wagon with transitional goods,’ Jimmon congratulates himself. ‘There was no tent, canned luxuries, sleeping bags, lanterns, candles or any of the paraphernalia of camping midway between the urban and nomadic life.’ If Jimmon believes he is suitably equipped to transition from his accustomed mode of existence to raw survivalism in the course of one night, he is surely as deluded as Molly.

The moral dilemma that ‘Lot’ examines is not unlike that presented in Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’. Published just a year later in 1954 and one of the most famous SF stories of that decade, it enshrines the same ‘big boys don’t cry’ attitude that tends to permeate much SF of the period. What the protagonists of these stories fail to acknowledge – perhaps they are incapable of seeing it – is that while they hold the end to justify the means, the means will fundamentally and forever alter the nature of the end. David Jimmon’s biggest failure of imagination lies in not understanding what his abandonment of his family might cost him, how little a life gained at their expense could possibly be worth.

This is precisely the question Ursula Le Guin seeks to address in her 1973 Hugo-Award-winning short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ I have never been fond of that story because – inconsequential SFnal stylings aside – it is cribbed more or less entirely from Dostoevsky and adds little in the retelling. Julia Armfield interrogates some of the same ideas with power, depth and an urgency befitting of the present moment. In her novel’s final pages, the Carmichael sisters face their future head on, and their thoughts are all of each other, no matter the cost.

The Last Lap?

December 31, 2024 /

A week or so ago a friend sent me a link to a Booktube video by Jules Burt, a book dealer and vintage paperback collector with a wealth of bookish knowledge and a love of science fiction. This particular video shows Jules unboxing his then most recent purchase, a consignment of titles issued by the British Science Fiction Book Club, which ran on a monthly subscription from 1953 until 1971.

The monthly selections are interesting and actually quite progressive – the club kicked off with the now classic but then just four years published Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and went on to feature more future landmarks of science fiction literature by Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), John Christopher (The Death of Grass) , Chip Delany (Nova), and John Wyndham (Trouble with Lichen) among many others. The books were all issued in hardcover and featured bold, modern cover designs, not unlike the Penguin science fiction covers of the same era. I like them a lot. But the reason my friend sent me the video was less for the books themselves than for a flyer insert that Jules had discovered inside one of them while he was unboxing it: the SF Book Club’s monthly newsletter, which just happened to include a mini-essay called ‘The Last Lap’, by a certain Christopher Priest.

Chris often spoke of the SF Book Club – he still owned the SFBC edition of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, as well as several other titles – but he had never mentioned writing for the newsletter and I had no idea this essay existed. It was a delightful surprise, all the more so for being so quintessentially Chris.

‘The Last Lap’ was written in 1965. Chris was twenty-two years old, still a year out from making his first pro sale. (I was not even born.) But what is remarkable about the piece is how clearly it shows that even at this very early stage of his career, both the passion Chris had for science fiction and his insistence that those who wanted to write it be ambitious and demanding of their chosen material were already established.

‘Science fiction is supposedly a fiction above the general run,’ he writes. ‘Its assimilation into that run is close, frighteningly so. To regain that sublimation – call it “sense of wonder” if you will – SF must become first of all literate, then imaginative, and then experimental. When these qualities have been recovered, and they are something that have been lost, then SF will find itself possessed of a new and invigorating element: originality.’ Science fiction must in other words be technically well written, far-reaching in its scope and innovative in its manner of expression. I am tempted to say that if we had more twenty-two-year-olds in SF right now who felt equally moved to express such concerns we would have a better literature. But I think I’m done with carping, not only because those who carp inevitably end up preaching to the converted, but also because they run the risk of becoming wearyingly repetitive.

I find ‘The Last Lap’ incredibly moving, all the more so because for the sixty-year duration of the career that followed, Chris never gave up on the principles he outlined, nor lost interest in what they represented. Every novel and story he wrote strove to be original, exploratory, different from the one before it – it is this quality of intent that makes his oeuvre so consistent, so unified. The essay is fascinating in a broader sense, though, for what it says about us, and by us I mean those in science fiction with a love of polemic, of criticism, of argument. What is perhaps most notable about ‘The Last Lap’ is that – a scattering of date-specific minor details aside – it could have been written any time at all in the sixty years since. It could have been written last week. I would hazard a guess that it might equally have been written five or ten years earlier.

There have been some magnificent ‘SF is doomed’ polemics in recent years. Chris’s own ‘Hull 0: Scunthorpe 3’ from 2012 (fondly known as ‘Priestgate’) is one example, with another favourite being Paul Kincaid’s ‘The Widening Gyre’ in the LA Review of Books from the same year, in which Paul compares three of the annual ‘best of’ anthologies in an attempt to answer the perennial question: ‘Is SF exhausted?’, a question that – to those of us who are in deep with these matters at least – is becoming as over-familiar as ‘Is the novel dead?’

In ‘The Last Lap’, Chris points to symbolism in SF as ‘a passing fad’, just as ‘the death of the space story is upon us’. He fears that SF is ‘like a racing car that, having shown its paces around the track, now rests in the pits’. His essay is in this way similar to those that went before and many that came after – including a fair few of my own – that protest the condition of SF without being entirely sure of how, specifically, it should be remedied. In the end, what all these essays come down to is: SF should be less like [writer/s I don’t like] and more like [writer/s I do].

This is normal, natural, even healthy. I’ve enjoyed writing essays like that, mainly because they get me thinking, asking myself the same questions the essay is asking of others, and for this reason alone I would not be foolish enough to promise I’ll never write another. But the deeper conclusion that must be drawn is that nothing really changes: the state of play is always vexed, the industry is always toxic, and SF is always exhausted. The opposite is equally true. By the time he and I met, Chris had (almost!) given up on the idea of SF as a unified entity. ‘There’s no such thing as “the field”,’ he would say, ‘there are just individual books, by individual writers, many of which are bad, some of which are great.’ It was these individually great books and authors, he maintained, that we should read and pay attention to, that we should discuss with reference to themselves, and to literature as a whole, rather than subjecting them to an artificial analysis within the confines of a genre that had outlived – in terms of criticism at least – its usefulness.

How I feel about this argument varies – according to my energy levels, my state of mind, even the book I happen to have just read. But what is absolutely not in dispute is that there are and have always been superlative individual novels and writers of the fantastic, books that break boundaries and challenge norms even in the midst of the most conservative periods of genre complacency and orthodoxy. These are the books and writers that ultimately matter, that shape the literature going forward, even when, in the present moment, they appear to be outliers with zero chance of influencing anything, such is the quantity of identikit cosy fantasies and interchangeable space operas stacked against them.

I have spent the past year – the past two years, really – in the literary company of JG Ballard, a writer who, in his essays and reviews for New Worlds in the early 1960s, produced some of the greatest and most resilient ‘SF is exhausted’ polemics in the secondary literature. His novels, even when they contain no outwardly speculative elements, were from the first until the last written with what I like to describe as a science fictional sensibility: that is, through a lens of deeper imagining, through a habit of questioning and subverting the status quo. For Chris at the time he wrote ‘The Last Lap’, Ballard was a key inspiration, one of the outliers, the writers who showed by example some of the ways in which SF might reach its full potential. His decision to embark on a full-length study of Ballard’s life and work in the late autumn of 2022 was a kind of homecoming.

Working to complete that project has been a vital source of intellectual and emotional sustenance for me through the difficult, bewildering months of 2024, the only thing that made sense, firstly because it’s been so challenging and in the pursuit of writing at least that is what I thrive on, but mainly because it is the continuation of a conversation that will never end.

Keep asking the questions. Keep striving for better. Keep feeding the fire.

Per aspera ad astra. Happy New Year.

Books of this year

December 26, 2024 /

My reading through 2024 has been dominated by the demands of the Ballard project, taking in books about JGB as well as re-reads of most of Ballard’s novels. This kind of deeply immersive, intimate engagement with the work of one writer is something I have not experienced in the same way since writing my Masters thesis on Nabokov, getting on for thirty-five years ago now, but it is one that completely fits my mindset and that has, in some sense, reset my thinking and aspirations for where I might want to go as a writer, further down the line.

Other than that, it has been a strange and somewhat erratic year all round. From the first half of 2024 I would have to make particular mention of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story simply for existing and being there for me to read, with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue being in their own way similarly consolatory. Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, and Richard Morton Jack’s superb Nick Drake: the Life were both exactly what I needed to remind me of what I was doing and why I was doing it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos was an extraordinary reading experience, one that was personal to me in unexpected ways, and I was thrilled to see Erpenbeck, after several previous nominations, finally win the International Booker Prize.

Moving through into the second half of 2024, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands and its follow up, Thunderclap were both equally magnificent, revealing Cumming in my eyes as one of the most accomplished writers working in Britain today. Janet Frame’s posthumously published short novel Towards Another Summer is a quiet, devastating miracle, and I could use exactly the same words of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, though the two books could not be more different. I was delighted to finally catch up with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, which is a very good book indeed, and also – from somewhat further back – with Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, which follows Ballard’s prime example in revealing science fiction as a radical, knotty form that is capable of just about anything. Indeed, one of the side-effects of the Ballard project has been a re-engagement with the ideals of the British New Wave and the literary possibilities of a mode of literature that – no matter how it is used, abused, sidelined and devalued – remains as powerful and significant as any given writer chooses to make it.

Will 2025 be the year I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy setting myself reading challenges, but I’m going to hold off on doing that, just for the moment. I would like to leave the reading horizon open and uncluttered, a space to inhabit as feels useful, inspiring and necessary, a year of new discoveries.

Yuletide…

December 21, 2024 /

… and what better time to finally catch up with a classic of weird fiction that I have read a lot about but never read?

Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is one of those books. Written in 1895, this collection of stories has inspired and influenced writers all the way from HP Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto (and can you believe it has already been ten years since the first showing of True Detective??)

‘The King in Yellow’ is the title of a text-within-the-text, a play that brings insanity on anyone who reads it. I find it remarkable and rather wonderful, that the ‘cursed text’ trope is a hundred years old and more. So much of the power of the weird lies in its timelessness, the enduring appeal of its ideas and imagery. In the first story, ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, Hidred Castaigne is obsessed with the forbidden play, which he has read while convalescing from a head injury sustained in a horse-riding accident. Whether his madness stems from this accident or from reading ‘The King in Yellow’ is for the reader to decide. The glorious uncanniness of the story hinges on the fact that as readers we are drawn into Hildred’s delusion – that he is heir to a vanished kingdom – that we experience both shock and horror as his plan to assassinate his cousin in pursuit of his destiny comes closer to being enacted.

That the story is also science fiction – it is set twenty years in the future – adds another level of weirdness. The ‘future’ Chambers imagines is dark and sinister. There are suicide booths on street corners, a palpable sense of unease even in the most ordinary actions and interactions. All colours seem heightened, somehow. What I loved most about this story is how modern it feels.

Only the first four stories in the volume are explicitly bound by the ‘King in Yellow’ mythos. The remaining tales have often been dismissed or excluded from newer editions for not being weird enough, but I think this is a mistake. They are weird – very. There is a time-slip romance – a young man loses his way and ends up betrothed to a falconer in mediaeval France (very reminiscent of Le Grand Meaulnes) – and a brutal war story set during the Siege of Paris, which took place just twenty-five years before The King in Yellow was written. The chaos of war is written as a kind of haunting:

The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, then vanished, while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized and bore him with them through the mist.

Even in those stories where ‘lost Carcosa’ is not explicitly named, there is a sense that the realm of the lost king is there, waiting to reassemble itself, that the world we inhabit is the delusion, a temporary structure that might be swept away at any moment:

From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint.

That the overt weirdness of the stories recedes, reined back in the later tales to a suggestion, a supressed memory almost, makes the collection as a whole still more memorable and mysterious.

So much is left unsaid and unexplained. As if the writing of the book was interrupted, or prevented. It is unsurprising to me, that so many writers since have fallen in love with its atmosphere and – I use the term in its truest sense – obscurity. That they have felt bound to explore the yellow kingdom for themselves.

I may well become one of them…

All Hallows

October 31, 2024 /

Samhain, the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. Memories of Hallowe’en when I was a child, the dozens of paper demon faces I would cut out and colour, slipping them between the pages of books, under tea mugs and into cupboards, so that even months into the new year they still turned up unexpectedly, little ghosts from the past.

Memories of my grandmother, who would make up a new Hallowe’en story for me every year, then on the morning of the 1st of November I would hear her in the kitchen, putting on the kettle and singing the hymn for All Saints Day, her voice her one extravagance, that and her storytelling, my twin inheritance from her.

It has felt difficult to write here, lately. How many times can you say that you miss someone without the words becoming shadows of themselves?

Samhain.

Samhuinn.

Sauin.

Some of you will know that I have been contracted to complete the biography of JG Ballard that Chris was working on before he died. Our book, as we came to think of it, has been a source of comfort, consolation and huge satisfaction to me through this difficult year. This is without doubt the most demanding and challenging project I have yet undertaken, for all kinds of reasons, but I am happy to say it has been going well and is getting closer to completion. Coming to know a writer’s work in such intimate detail is both a privilege and an inspiration. Chris and I talked about the project endlessly. He knew that this is how I would be spending the year, basically, and knowing that he knew has been a strength and continues to be.

My thoughts are turning also to what will come next. I have ideas, and they excite me, which I know is a good thing. Samhain is all about return, reappraisal, reconnection. Lighting the fire.

Going home

August 30, 2024 /

Today I waved goodbye to Chris’s literary archive – thirty-two boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and notebooks covering the whole of his life and career – as they began their journey from our home on Bute to their new one at the British Library. The archive will in due course be open to readers, researchers, scholars and fans. Chris knew this was the plan, and I know he would be delighted to see that plan fulfilled. He would have been delighted also by the great care that has been taken by the archivists at the BL who have been dealing with the acquisition. Their sensitivity, expertise and appreciation have been extraordinary, and a great comfort. It is wonderful to know that Chris’s papers are in such safe hands.

Glasgow 2024

August 14, 2024 /

Chris knew there would be a memorial for him at the Glasgow Worldcon and I know he would have been delighted and touched to see so many people gathered together to celebrate his life and writing. The event was everything I hoped it would be, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who came along. Thanks especially to Meg MacDonald, who was such a support to me in the run-up and who made sure everything happened, basically. How she managed to fit this in alongside everything else she had to do will remain forever a mystery, but the event would not have been the thing it was without her commitment, understanding and energy.

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