Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.
Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?
If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.
I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.
More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.
There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.
Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.
I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.
Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:
“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”
This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…
Apologies for my absence from the blog recently. The work-in-progress is currently in its final stages, and so the bulk of my concentration and energy is being poured into that. I hope to return to more regular posting soon. In the meantime, here is the transcript of a talk I gave yesterday evening to the North Bute Literary Society, which is not entirely unconnected with the novel I’m working on. This was fascinating to research and write, so much so that I have ideas about expanding it into something more substantial at a later date.
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In a 2010 interview with the American publishing website GalleyCat, the British novelist David Peace talks about how he believes that crime writers, rather than inventing fictional serial killers, should concentrate their minds on interrogating the real events presented in newspaper headlines and police investigations. “I’m drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes,” he says. “To me there’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes. I think that the crime genre is 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.”
Peace’s own writing has from the beginning centred itself upon real crimes. The Red Riding Quartet, set against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the late 70s and early 80s, takes its inspiration from the Yorkshire and specifically the Leeds of Peace’s own childhood and adolescence. His later Tokyo trilogy examines the political and social evolution of post-war Japan through the filter of three real-life crimes that shocked and polarised a nation already traumatised by war and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the brutal force of Allied nuclear weaponry.
Peace claims as his most potent inspiration the American writer James Ellroy, who is so intent upon recapturing the atmosphere of the 1970s Los Angeles he writes about that he still uses a typewriter and has never owned a mobile phone.
We tend to think of the current interest in true crime as a modern phenomenon. Whether it be through podcasts like Serial, Netflix productions like Making a Murderer or closer to home, TV series like David Wilson’s Crime Files, which has a specifically Scottish focus, everyone seems to be talking about, watching or reading true crime. Along with popularity comes criticism – what is it about our society today that has led to what some call a prurient obsession with murder and murderers? Many, inevitably, have pointed to social media as the accelerant and you only have to look at the inappropriate and often abusive social media commentary around cases such as the recent, tragic death of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire to understand why.
Personally, I have always resisted the narrative around social media that has cast it as the chief villain of contemporary society. I happen to believe that social media is itself morally neutral, its agenda set entirely by those who use it. I would describe it not as the cause of a set of new and by extension worse behaviours but simply as a tool, a faster delivery system for the information, rumours, gossip, and scandal that has always obsessed us.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published in 1966 and is often hailed as the first ‘non-fiction novel’. In Cold Blood takes as its subject matter the murder, in 1959, of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, a Kansas farming family by small-time criminals Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. The two had recently been released from prison after serving time for robbery. They arrived at the Clutter house expecting to make away with more than $10,000. What they got was $40. Capote took more than 8,000 pages of notes in the course of writing the book, which brings the events to life using the techniques of New Journalism – a personal agenda, imaginative reconstruction and the interleaving of multiple points of view. As the writer Rupert Thomson puts it:
“Capote saw journalism as a horizontal form, skimming over the surface of things, topical but ultimately throwaway, while fiction could move horizontally and vertically at the same time, the narrative momentum constantly enhanced and enriched by an incisive, in-depth plumbing of context and character. In treating a real-life situation as a novelist might, Capote aimed to combine the best of both literary worlds to devastating effect.”
Just two years later, the playwright Emlyn Williams turned a
similar focus upon the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in Beyond
Belief, a work that similarly blends hard facts with imaginative reconstruction
and that lays emphasis not on the crimes so much as the social background and
family circumstances that made Hindley and Brady such an appalling influence on
one another.
Both these books were instant bestsellers – and instantly show us that the interest in true crime, for both reader and writer, long predates the advent of the internet. And we can trace that interest back far further than Capote. As early as 1875, the writer Wilkie Collins, perhaps most famous for his fictional mystery The Woman in White, wrote The Law and the Lady, a novel freely inspired by the trial of Madeleine Smith in 1857, a case that also inspired William Darling Lyell’s 1921 novel The House in Queen Anne’s Square. In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote a freewheeling true-crime account of another Glasgow case, the gross miscarriage of justice against Oscar Slater, falsely accused of murder and whose case was famously taken up by Doyle himself.
In my previous talk for this society, we concentrated upon writers associated with the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, the period between the wars when the social order was rapidly changing and whose excitement and unease were so inventively tapped by detective writers. We tend to think of the Golden Age writers as spinning convoluted, sometimes fanciful ‘puzzle plots’ – the antithesis of the gutter-level vantage point of true crime narratives. As it turns out, the Golden Age writers were as fascinated and inspired by real-life crimes as any of their grittier modern counterparts.
The Anatomy of Murder, published in 1936, is a collection of essays by Golden Age writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Francis Iles and Helen Simpson examining some of the most famous true-crime cases of the era. In his introduction to a recent reissue of the book, crime writer, historian and latter-day president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards talks about the fascination felt by Golden Age writers for real cases, how Detection Club meetings would often feature engaged discussion on the latest theory or new piece of evidence. Nor did they confine themselves to abstract discussions. Novels directly inspired by true crimes were as common and popular then as they are now, with many of them displaying much of the same concern and fascination with the social background to crime and the inequalities within society that is often influential not only upon the causes of crime, but how crime is seen and judged.
Perhaps the most written-about criminal ever is Jack the Ripper, whose true identity, ironically, remains unknown unto the present day. Anyone who suspects that behaviours such as trolling and the spreading of ‘alternative facts’ are the product of the internet age might do well to take a look at some of the spurious letters, communications and false rumours that deluged down upon the heads of officers charged with investigating these brutal murders in the Whitechapel of 1888.
More than a hundred years later, crime writers, podcasters and film makers are still writing and talking about the unidentified serial killer. One of the very first novels to take the Whitechapel murders as their key inspiration is The Lodger, written in 1913 by Marie Belloc Lowndes, the sister of the poet and satirist Hilaire Belloc. Sometime in 1910, Marie Belloc Lowndes attended a dinner party where she heard from the painter Walter Sickert of how the landlady of his then apartment in Mornington Crescent first showed him the rooms, telling him that she was sure a previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. Sickert famously painted the room as ‘Jack the Ripper’s bedroom,’ drenching the scene in his characteristic umber light, producing an ambience of dingy notoriety. Belloc Lowndes drew just as much inspiration from the tale, which inspired a short story published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911, a story that proved so popular with the readership that Lowndes decided to expand it into a novel.
The Lodger tells the story of Bunting and his wife Ellen, who keep a lodging house on the Marylebone Road. The Buntings meet while they are both in service, Bunting as a manservant and butler and Ellen as a maid. They work in good houses for generous employers, eventually acquiring enough money to set themselves up on their own. However, a series of disappointments and unforeseen accidents have left them without an income and as Lowndes’s novel opens they are desperate. Lowndes makes a point that might well have been missed by modern readers otherwise, that had the Buntings been either poorer to begin with, or more middle class they would have been more certain of finding help within their community. As things stand, they belong to no class, and so are thrown back on their increasingly depleted resources.
When
a mysterious stranger presents himself looking for lodgings, Ellen feels his
presence almost as a divine intervention. Mr Sleuth, she is certain, is ‘a
proper gentleman’. A touch eccentric yes, but quiet, decent and god-fearing, a
teetotaller like herself. His needs are simple, and if his habits seem strange
then the money he offers in return for his rooms is ample compensation. For the
first time in many months, the Buntings see the possibility of a new start. But
when a series of gruesome murders becomes the talk of the neighbourhood, Ellen
Bunting begins to notice an uneasy correspondence between the scenes of the
crimes and her lodger’s nocturnal rambles. As the body count rises, Ellen’s
imaginings take on the quality of nightmare.
The Lodger is a fascinating social document, evoking a world in which class is still absolutely the most defining factor in society. In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, the police find themselves unwilling, almost unable to believe that crimes of such a violent and sordid nature might be the work of a ‘gentleman’, and Lowndes is astute in demonstrating how their blinkered approach actively hampers their investigation. Lowndes’s portrait of Ellen Bunting is the most nuanced, revealing her increasing fascination with the crimes and the ways in which her insights lead her into places and behaviours that would previously have been unthinkable. A romantic subplot involving Bunting’s daughter from a previous marriage dovetails neatly with the main action when Daisy finds herself falling for a detective constable involved with the murder investigations. The Lodger is plainly written, unostentatious in terms of its literary style but Lowndes is an honest craftswoman with a nose for a good story and her descriptions of a London caught up in murder fever are given extra life by her knowing references to other real-life crimes of the period and her professional insights into tabloid journalism and the public thirst for sensation and especially for true crime. Bunting’s clandestine pursuit of his murder fixation in the Evening Standard will raise a knowing smile from all modern day podcast junkies:
Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
Anyone
reading The Lodger when it was first published would have been acutely aware of
its realworld resonances, and accordingly thrilled.
Lowndes was a prolific writer and journalist, active in society and constantly on the lookout for material suitable for adaptation into the hugely popular novels that, essentially, supported her family. The writer of our next book, Elizabeth Jenkins, was of a very different temperament. Shy and something of an introvert, she was an intensely private woman, who chose her subjects carefully and who expressed her opinions obliquely within her writing. Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins was born in 1905, and lived into our current century, dying at the age of 104. Jenkins studied English and History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and worked variously as a teacher and civil servant before becoming a full-time writer after WW2.
Her most popularly successful novel, Harriet, was published in 1934 and was awarded the Prix Femina, beating both Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Antonia White’s Frost in May. Harriet is based on the infamous Penge murder trial of 1877, fully ten years before the Ripper crimes but a case that excited at least as much attention at the time.
Jenkins, who often insisted she needed the firm armature of a real-life incident to inspire her best writing, first learned about the case when her brother David, who was a solicitor, gave her a copy of The Trial of the Stauntons by JB Atlay, one of the volumes in the Notable British Trials series. David thought the peculiarly enmeshed, secretive family relations at the heart of the case might be of interest to Elizabeth, and he wasn’t wrong. She quickly found herself becoming obsessed with the Stauntons – or the ‘Cudham quartet’ as they became known – and decided to write a novel about them. This of course was Harriet, which in Jenkins’s own words was to be “one of the very earliest instances – if not the earliest – of a writer’s recounting a story of real life, with the actual Christian names of the protagonists and all the available biographical details, but with the imaginative insight and heightened colour which the novelist exists to supply’.
Harriet Woodhouse – Harriet Richardson in real life – lives in London with her mother and stepfather, her birth father, a well-to-do clergyman, having died when Harriet was twelve. As well as a generous settlement from her father’s will, Harriet has been left a sizeable sum of money by an aunt. Harriet has learning difficulties, and although she has a lively and curious nature she depends heavily upon her mother, who has always been determined that her daughter should gain as much life experience as possible within a safe environment.
Harriet is in her early thirties when she first comes into
contact with the significantly younger Lewis Oman at the house of a near
relation. Lewis, an auctioneer’s clerk, is a good looking young man, and when
he starts paying special attention to Harriet she quickly becomes infatuated
with him. When he proposes marriage, Harriet’s mother realises immediately that
he has no real affection for her daughter, but very real designs on her money. She
attempts to have Harriet certified as a lunatic in order to prevent the marriage
and protect her daughter, but the family doctor is quick to warn her that this
plan will probably fail:
‘You must see,’ said the doctor, ‘that what she’s doing now is done by hundreds of young women who to all intents and purposes are as sane as we are: alarming her friends by wanting to throw herself away on a worthless young man.’
The horror of Harriet’s eventual fate is equalled only by the bizarre network of relationships and lies that enable it. Elizabeth Jenkins’s abiding interest as a writer is centred upon human relationships – between men and women, between families – and her understanding of the characters at the heart of this story is acute and brilliantly rendered. She enters into the mind and heart of each person equally, whether they be innocent, guilty, or a little of both. Her descriptive writing has immense power, as we see here in her description of Lewis, standing at the London dockside not long before his devious plan goes into operation:
Hoarse cries sounding from the water, unintelligible words ceaselessly filling the ear, the perpetual hurrying to and fro of figures in the gloom, made an atmosphere so enthralling that hours passed unnoticed; and as Lewis stood amidst this stir he knew that a power was coming to him, too, that he was about to enter the sphere of those who moved the world by their activity; that whole tracts of his own being were waking to life which had lain stagnant in the routine of poverty and restricted labour.
Four people stood trial for Harriet’s murder: Lewis himself, his brother Patrick, Patrick’s wife Elizabeth and Lewis’s lover Alice. They were sentenced to hang, a judgement that was commuted to a pardon for Alice, and life imprisonment for the others just forty-eight hours before the executions were due to be carried out. Patrick died in prison just a couple of years later. Elizabeth and Lewis were released twenty years later in 1897. Lewis finally married Aliceand the couple emigrated to Australia. Elizabeth went on to run a boarding house, where the rumours surrounding her never entirely subsided.
Elizabeth Jenkins did venture into true crime again with her 1972 novel Dr Gully, based on the affair of Dr James Manby Gully, his affair with Florence Bravo and the consequent suspicious death of her husband Charles. Jenkins claimed Dr Gully, published in 1972, as her favourite among her own works.
The third of our spotlighted books was published in the same year as Harriet, though the case that inspired it has remained much closer to the centre of public consciousness, quite possibly because, for one of those who stood trial at least, the eventual outcome represents one of Britain’s most horrific miscarriages of justice, one that even at the time led to vociferous calls for the abolition of the death penalty. The case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, popularly known as the Ilford murder, took place in 1922. Edith, unhappily married to the rather staid and predictable Percy Thompson, became passionately attached to Bywaters, a young and handsome merchant seaman who was originally a friend of both the couple, so much so that Percy Thompson offered him lodgings in their house in Ilford.
When
Bywaters stabbed Percy Thompson to death in the street in October 1922, he
claimed he never set out to kill him, wanting only to confront Thompson in an
attempt to resolve the situation between the three of them. Edith played no
part in the murder and had no idea Freddy was even in the vicinity. She was
arrested solely on account of the love letters she wrote to Bywaters, found in
his room after his arrest and filled with tirades against Percy and fantasies
about possible ways to get rid of him. The two were jointly convicted according
to the ‘rule of common purpose’, and in spite of a million-strong petition pleading
for mercy, they were hanged at the beginning of January 1923.
Edith’s case has generated a substantial amount of both fiction and non-fiction over the years and the horror of her execution – the hangman in question, John Ellis, later took his own life – has continued to generate discussion as a standing argument against the death penalty. One of the most interesting fictional treatments of the case is Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow, which is as much an exploration of the background and particular character of Thompson herself as an account of the crime and of the trial. Jesse, a writer and journalist who was the great-niece of the poet Albert Lord Tennyson, had a longstanding interest in criminology and the law. She edited and introduced several volumes in the Notable British Trials series, most notably the Madeleine Smith case and the John Christie case. In 1924, she published the investigative volume Murder and its Motives, positing the theory that there are six main categories of motive that might lead to murder: Gain, Revenge, Elimination, Jealousy, Conviction and Lust of Killing.
In contrast with the rigorous, fact-based approach taken by Elizabeth Jenkins in Harriet, Jesse tells her story using characters and situations more loosely inspired by the real people involved. A Pin to See the Peepshowfocuses on the young Julia Almond, an intelligent, articulate and highly imaginative young woman from a lower middle class family who makes a dull marriage and soon wishes herself out of it. From the very beginning, we observe Julia’s love of romance, her desire for excitement and for a life beyond the ordinary suburbs of her upbringing. Her tendency to daydream, to fantasise is beautifully captured by Jesse, not least in the passage that gives the novel its name. Here we see the sixteen-year-old Julia, who is minding a class of younger pupils while their teacher is absent, confiscating a home-made ‘peepshow’ box from the nine-year-old boy who, a mere ten years later, is to change her life forever:
Then she picked up the box. A round hole was cut into each end, one covered with red transparent paper, one empty. To the empty hole was applied an eye, shutting the other in obedience to eager instructions. And at once sixteen year old, worldly wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child, an enchanted child was looking into fairyland. The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size – a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact but of insane proportions, lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was as though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.
To end with this passage seems particularly appropriate,
because Jesse demonstrates so well in her writing how fiction has an important
part to play not just in bringing information about true-life crimes to public
awareness, but in digging deeper into the personal psychology, historical
background and possible motivations that might have had an impact on the case.
The glorious thing about fiction is that it sets you free to imagine beyond what
is already known.
As a final postscript, Edith Thompson’s heir and executor, Rene Weis, who has long petitioned for an official pardon for Edith, finally had his application referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in March of this year. I hope that it succeeds. Nothing can make amends for the horror of her execution, but I like to think at least that Edith – imaginative, romantic, adventurous Edith – would be pleased to know that a century after her death, she is a poster girl for women’s justice as well as a figure of inspiration for writers and film makers. Edith Thompson was unjustly killed, dying well before her time, but she has ended up becoming immortal and of that we can be glad.
Although she has pulled away from the self-destructive behaviour patterns of her early twenties, Charlotte has not yet discovered her true direction in life. She is at that awkward stage: filling in time, working as a barista and waiting for something to happen. When a once-beloved childhood friend gets back in contact suddenly, Charlotte is cautious about renewing the relationship. Danielle was important to her – as close as a sister – but when she lost herself in heroin addiction, Charlotte felt forced to distance herself. When she meets up with Danielle for a drink, she begins to feel more hopeful. Her friend has finally kicked the heroin, and seems in a much better place generally. Could be things have changed for the better, after all.
But less than a week later, Danielle is found brutally murdered in a motel room. Charlotte is shattered. She cannot help asking herself if she might have triggered something – if Danielle’s murder might in some mysterious way be her fault. As the police investigation gets underway, Charlotte wonders who stood to profit by her friend’s death: her estranged mother, Sally, her pornographer boyfriend, Brandon, or someone else entirely, someone from the past Charlotte doesn’t even know about. Her friend’s death has raised demons – not least her own grief. And as with any mystery, there are some questions it might be better not to learn the answers to.
Melissa Ginsburg is a published poet, and her awareness and love of language is a defining feature of this, her first novel, an economical and neatly wrought piece of Texas noir from 2016. As fully befits more modern iterations of the genre, she has some fun reversing and reinventing classic noir conventions: men, for the most part, take secondary roles. Centre stage belongs to the women, and so do the drug and alcohol problems. There is a detective – the suitably rugged and likeable Ash – but he always seems to be one step behind the action, as Charlotte’s deeper, sometimes disturbingly intimate knowledge of the suspects in this case bring her closer both to the truth and to personal danger.
The action I would describe as intense rather than fast-paced, although there are moments of violence and genuine tension, and enough surprises to keep trad noir fans happy. The plot is well thought out, coming together in a way that is satisfying and without any of the eleventh-hour stupidity that so vexes me in generic crime fiction. I warmed to these characters, even when I found myself completely at odds with what they were doing – and that is entirely down to Ginsburg’s skill in characterisation, her obvious sympathy with the situations she is describing. Above all I would praise her sense of place. As in all the greatest noir, this is a novel of the city – of urban grime, debauched glamour and moral ambivalence, and if Sunset City belongs to anyone it is to Houston, Texas. Ginsburg finds poetry in the most mundane of subject matter, in small details and moments and sensory impressions lesser writers might skip over or simply not notice.
A short book, but an impressive one, and in spite of the horror at its heart, moving and humane.
2021 is a difficult year to describe. 2020 felt fraught, urgent, dangerous and tense. 2021 has felt more nebulous, more fractured, characterised by uncertainty and an increasing sense of restlessness. In terms of personal achievement, I delivered a new manuscript, a book that for me feels very much like the product of 2020, seamed and studded with all the furious contradictions that year brought but referenced obliquely rather than colliding with them head-on. It’s a novel I’m hugely proud of, and one I look forward to sharing with you in 2023.
In the months since completing that book, I have begun inching my way towards the next work, a transition that has felt more complex and troublesome even than usual. The times we are living through throw up searching questions; as a writer, it does not seem altogether surprising if those questions end up being framed around the process of writing, not just the how but the what and the why. There is never any doubt in my mind that writing – art – has value, that whatever trauma is being addressed, the practice of reflection and analysis, of creative re-imagining inherent to all art is intrinsic to the experience of being human.
Such knowledge should not prevent us from being robust in our seeking out of our own best practice. I count myself fortunate in that this period of not-knowing – familiar in its outline, yet different in its particular details every time – has always felt energising to me. I never quite know how I will come out of it, or what will result. If I can feel certain of anything, through this time as all times, it is the joy I find in the power and the talent of other writers. Discovering new works, new directions, new attitudes, visions and modes of expression – the excitement and the gratitude never lessens.
By this same time last year, the document on my hard drive entitled ‘Books 2021’ was already filling up with upcoming works of fiction and non-fiction I was eager to read. Many of them were books whose publication dates had been postponed, pushed over from 2020 into 2021 in the hope that by the time they were released, in-person events and book festivals would be happening again. This turned out not to be the case, and on the far side of 2021, I cannot help noticing that the number of books on my ‘Books 2022’ list is considerably smaller. There is a sense of uncertainty affecting all of us: what shall we be reading, what shall we be writing? There is an eerie sort of silence.
Here also, there is opportunity. Not knowing – feeling less sure of what I’m going to be reading leaves more space for new discoveries. It also leaves space for me to go back and read more of the books I did not manage to get to in 2021. A year of regrouping, maybe. A year of finding out what is important.
I enjoy reading challenges because they give my reading a focus. This can be especially valuable if the challenge is related in some way to a problem or question that has a bearing on my work in progress. I also enjoy reading challenges because they provide me with a framework for talking to readers. With all of this in mind, I have created my own crime reading challenge for 2022. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I am always on the lookout for original, challenging and imaginative approaches to genre archetypes, with the mystery archetype foremost among them. For pure reading pleasure, there’s nothing to beat a mystery. There is also no stronger template for withstanding the often punitive process of literary experiment.
I have created thirty prompts, some of them leaning heavily towards my particular interests, others designed to take me into less familiar territory. Thirty seems like a good number – big enough to make the challenge interesting, not so huge that it becomes burdensome, squeezing out all other reading. The individual challenges can be completed in any order, and can be based around any aspect of crime writing: fiction, true crime, journalism, history or memoir can be considered and included for any of the prompts. I am hoping to have completed and blogged all thirty by the end of the year. Here are the prompts. Let’s see how we get on:
Published in 2022
By a debut author
Translated from the French
Translated from the German
Translated from the Italian
Translated from the Spanish
Translated from the Japanese
Set in South America
Nordic
Set in Australia
By an author based on the African continent
By an African-American author
Historical mystery
Experimental published since 2000
Experimental published before 1980
Published by an independent press
Classic noir
Neo noir
Golden Age
Nineteenth Century
Published before World War 2
By a Scottish author
Legal thriller
Financial or military
With a speculative element
Award-winning
Has been adapted for the screen
Woman detective
Based on real events
Any crime but murder
I have some ideas already for how I might fill some of the categories, books I have been wanting to read for a while and now have the perfect incentive to tackle. Others I have not yet started to think about. Mainly I am hoping to be surprised. Surprised and inspired. Here’s hoping we can all find something of the same in 2022.
Yellow hands slid coffee cups across the table. At the next table a woman laughed. The moon had lost its battle with the clouds and retreated, leaving no trace of copper brilliance in the ominous sky. The air had grown heavier. In the window of a tenement a slim girl stood, her angular dark silhouette sharpened by a naked electric bulb.
When glamorous advertising executive Laura Hunt is found shot dead in her apartment, the crime instantly sparks shock and outrage among her friends and admirers. Suspicion falls initially on Laura’s fiance, Shelby Carpenter, constantly short of money and a known philanderer. But what of Waldo Lydecker, cantankerous older writer and possessive friend of Laura whose feelings for her may run deeper than the innocent affection he professes. Detective Mark McPherson, whose cynicism about women would seem to grant him the objectivity he needs to crack the case, finds himself drawn against his better judgement under the dead woman’s spell. A twist in the tale around its halfway point gives this neat whodunit an extra edge of mystery I was not expecting.
I am constantly surprised and delighted by how skilfully made these works of classic noir often turn out to be. Laura displays a beautiful economy of style and purpose, with the alternating points of view providing a well judged change of pace. There is extra interest to be found in Caspary’s feminist take on classic tropes. The author subtly reveals the way in which those who gossip about or try to solve the murder cannot seem to help – consciously or otherwise – pinning the blame on Laura herself, on her ‘lifestyle’ as an independent woman who has the temerity to enjoy nice things and who earns more than her dithering fiance. (Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter is the high point of the famous movie adaptation, which looks stunning but whose script is flat and rather lifeless and not nearly as intelligent or nimble as the original novel.)
Vera Caspary is no Patricia Highsmith but then who is? For fans of classic crime, Laura is well worth your time, and Lydecker’s section especially boasts some admirable writing. An absorbing afternoon’s read from a writer whose life story is every bit as fascinating as that of her heroine. I’m always interested in noir novels written by women and I’m glad to have finally caught up with this one.
Style is not disguise, it is imaginative transformation, even sorcery. It turns people, actions, into other forms, even calls them into being; then the reader is interested neither in what was there before, nor whether anything was there at all, only in what she/he is seeing, hearing, feeling now.
(Afterword to The Treatment, Michael Nath)
The question that looms largest in my mind after finishing The Treatment is how come Michael Nath isn’t better known?
As you no doubt know by now, I am constantly on the lookout for novels that do interesting, subversive, experimental things with genre, that demonstrate a belief that is strong in me, that it isn’t what you write, it’s how you write it. A feel for language, a desire to communicate, a powerful sense of empathy, a joy in the formal possibilities of words on the page – any of these can turn base material into literary gold. Luckily for British crime writing, Michael Nath has all the above, and more.
The Treatment follows journalist Carl Hyatt, who some years before the novel opens made the mistake of riling up a dodgy property developer named Michael Mulhall. The end result of this misadventure is that Carl gets fired from his job on the G**** (a left-leaning broadsheet we all know which one) and winds up working for the Chronicle instead, a free local newspaper that has big ambitions but zero resources.
Unsurprisingly, Carl is unable to let go of his resentment of Mulhall, and a chance encounter during a holiday in Spain leaves him with the simmering suspicion that there may be more to the story even than he realised. He has promised his wife Karen that he’ll steer clear of trouble – but Carl’s lingering horror over a crime that took place in the neighbourhood two decades before leaves him no option but to investigate further. Was Mulhall linked to this crime and if so, how? And what might be done to bring the remaining original perpetrators – still walking free – to justice?
Carl’s belief in putting his money where his mouth is is all well and good as an ideal – but what if it gets people killed? The Treatment examines questions of decades-long guilt, the morality of revenge, and the relative worth of truth in a landscape where the pursuit of that truth is liable to put those closest to you in mortal danger.
The bare bones of this novel might be the bones of any one of a hundred contemporary crime novels. The substance of this book is unlike any other crime novel – or novel, period – I’ve yet encountered. There is frequent mention of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, murdered in a tavern in Deptford (The Treatment takes place mainly in southeast London, which as a former resident of that neglected parish would be recommendation enough in itself) and these references are no accident – if I’m sure of anything about this novel it’s that Nath does nothing by accident. The vigour, the fruitiness, the rambunctious, squalid life of this teeming text – the heightened register of language, which has at the same time the music of street slang with all its contemporary resonance – kept reminding me of Marlowe’s Faustus, of Webster’s sordid revenge tragedies, of the blood and guts of Elizabethan London, so little different, in essence, from own own.
It’s a big book (500 pp) and very dense. The novel opens with a cast list as extensive as Tolstoy’s in War and Peace – but don’t let that put you off. In fact, you won’t need the cast list because this book is like a soap opera you might have stumbled upon mid-season: tricky to work out what’s going on for the first half hour or so but stick with it and you’ll find yourself addicted before you know it. The novel’s time-frame is dizzyingly fluid, dipping back and forth between the present, the immediate past and the cusp of history, elusive and mercurial. You might feel like you’re running to keep up on occasion, but Nath’s sure-footed virtuosity in the handling of his material means the moment will come when you’re swept up in the action, flipping pages to find out what happens like your sanity depends on it.
For lovers of true crime literature, The Treatment is equally indispensable as a unique and visceral response to the twisted and troubled aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, an examination of systemic racism, an evocation of London society and culture on the cusp of great change. The Treatment is Shakespearean in scope, Dickensian in potency, Joycean in technical ambition.
The Treatment is Oldboy down the Old Kent Road. It’s a piece of work. Dive in.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (2020)
The dog was still barking when he returned to the camp. He headed straight for the second hut, and as he drew closer it barked even louder. He asked the soldier on guard if everything was all right, and the guard answered yes. Suddenly, the door opened and the girl stepped out, crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments that intertwined with the dog’s ceaseless barking.
And in that moment after dusk, before complete darkness fell, as her mouth released a language different from theirs, the girl became a stranger again, despite how closely she resembled all the soldiers in camp.
Minor Detail is fewer than 200 pages long, and if proof were needed that a work’s ambition, importance and profundity is not dependent on page length, this book is it. I read Minor Detail back-to-back with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and two more disparate approaches to narrative prose could scarcely be imagined. After Lowry’s furious and incandescent 400-page bender, entering into Shibli’s intensely distilled, chillingly circumscribed world came as a fascinating contrast, not least because it was a reminder of the fact that in writing there are no rules.
Minor Detail is divided into two parts, roughly similar in length. Part 1 takes place in 1949, in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. After helping to secure victory in that war, an Israeli commander leads a small company of soldiers on a series of patrols into the Negev desert, with the aim of establishing territory and flushing out insurgents. While resting in his tent, the unnamed commander is bitten on the thigh by an unseen creature, possibly a spider. Not wanting to admit to weakness, the commander treats the bite himself with antiseptic ointment. Some days later, the company sights and exterminates a group of Bedouin nomads. The single survivor – a girl – is taken prisoner with the intention of returning her to her own people at the next available opportunity.
This is not what transpires, however. Whether his moral disintegration comes as the direct result of septicemia caused by the infected bite or is simply exacerbated by it we are left to decide for ourselves, but the commander’s gradual loss of perspective and humanity is chilling to observe. Part 1 of Minor Detail is a masterclass in economy and precision. The cool, almost dispassionate third-person account of what happens is set in monstrous contrast with the events themselves, with the stark beauty of Shibli’s landscape writing providing still deeper ambiguity.
We are a third of the way through the book before we hear a word of dialogue, and the words the commander speaks are not dialogue as such but a slew of propaganda. At a celebratory meal to mark their victory, the commander speaks of the changes that are coming, the rebirth of the barren land the soldiers occupy. It is only when we come to Part 2 that we see how disastrously those changes have impacted the occupied population:
The road I’d been familiar with until a few years ago was narrow and winding, while this one is quite wide and straight. Walls five metres high have been erected on either side, and behind them are many new buildings, clustered in settlements that hadn’t existed before or were barely visible, while most of the Palestinian villages that used to be here have disappeared. I scan the area with eyes wide open, searching for any trace of these villages and their houses, which were freely scattered like rocks on the hills, and were connected by narrow, meandering roads that slowed at the curves. But it’s in vain.
The second half of the novel is told from the perspective of a Palestinian woman living and working in present-day Ramallah, who happens to read about the war crime committed by the commander and his soldiers in 1949. In contrast with the pared back, almost fastidious objectivity of Part 1, the first-person narrative of Part 2 seems saturated with nervous anxiety, conveyed through constant repetition of phrases and images – many of them already familiar to us from the commander’s section (the howling dog, the smell of petrol, the hose pipe, the spiders, the shivers gripping the narrator’s body in the museum) – and a brittle, almost fractured manner of delivery that allows us to share the narrator’s inner tension:
When a military patrol stops the minibus I take to my new job, and the first thing that appears through the door is the barrel of a gun, I ask the soldier, while stuttering, most likely out of fear, to put it away when he’s talking to me or asking to see my identity card. At which point the soldier starts mocking my stutter, and the passengers around me grumble because I’m overreacting; there’s no need to make things so tense. The soldier isn’t going to shoot at us, and even if he does, my intervention won’t change the course of things, quite the opposite. Yes, I realise all that, just not in the moment, but rather hours, days or even years later.
In Part 1, the emphasis is on clear, chillingly dispassionate description, like a camera focused squarely and impartially on what is happening. In Part 2, we get sideways glimpses, we are asked to look between the cracks, to notice what has been left out, the minor details:
As for the incident mentioned in the article, the fact that the specific detail that piqued my interest was the date on which it occurred was perhaps because there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. And bombing that building is just one example. Even rape. That doesn’t only happen during war, but also in everyday life. Rape, or murder, or sometimes both. I’ve never been preoccupied with incidents like these before. Even this incident in which, according to the article, several people were killed, only began to haunt me because of a detail about one of the victims. To a certain extent, the only unusual thing about this killing, which came as the final act of a gang rape, was that it happened on a morning that would coincide, exactly twenty-five years later, with the morning I was born.
My knowledge of Middle Eastern history is shamefully slight, and there is no way I could or ever would wade into the debate over the political situation in Israel and Palestine, past or present. What I will say is that the question that pursued me most doggedly while I was reading Minor Detail was of how appallingly difficult it would be, for the narrator of Part 2 to bear or ever come to terms with such wholesale erasure of her history and heritage, up to and including the very landscape beneath her feet.
I take the maps I brought with me out of my bag and spread them over the passenger seat and across the steering wheel. Among these maps are those produced by centres for research and political studies, which show the borders of the four Areas, the path of the Wall, the construction of settlements, and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Another map shows Palestine as it was until the year 1948, and another one, given to me by the rental car company and produced by the Israeli ministry of tourism, shows streets and residential areas according to the Israeli government. With shaking fingers, I try to determine my current location on that map. I haven’t gone far.
Perhaps what is most incredible about this book though is that it could be shorn of all details specific to time and place, and still be equally powerful. Minor Detail is a timeless account of oppression, of the imposition of the will of the empowered upon the powerless, of the horror of war, the unequal distribution of peace, the moments of beauty and resilience that prevail in even the darkest of circumstance.
As a crime novel, Minor Detail is as brutally chilling as any you might read. The perfect poise of Shibli’s prose, her dexterous approach to structure, together with the concentrated force of her commitment to the story she is telling make this an unforgettable, essential reading experience. This is a novel about slipping through the cracks, about the revelation of greater truth through minor details. Of the possibility of escape through the force and reach and power of the written word.
For further insights into Shibli’s background and themes, see this excellent interview.
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This has been the tenth edition of Corona Crime Spree, and with the modest easing of lockdown restrictions that came into force here in Scotland on Friday, I was finally able to meet with my mother in her back garden. As an added bonus, the Scottish weather gods have been on our side these past few days and being outdoors has been a joy unto itself. Although my mum and I don’t yet have any firm idea of when we might be able to resume our ‘Morse suppers’, as we enter the eleventh week of lockdown I have decided to make a change to my weekly blog, shifting the emphasis from crime fiction to speculative fiction for a new series of ‘Weird Wednesdays’, beginning next week.
As with Corona Crime Spree, my aim is for these posts to act as a personal diary of my reading experiences during this time, focusing on older texts as well as brand new books and my own meandering ruminations on reading and writing. I’m trying as far as possible not to plan too far ahead, but rather to let one book lead naturally to another, wherever my thoughts, ideas and inclinations happen to lead me.
I’m finding these blogging projects to be a valuable and constructive way of navigating the lockdown and my own personal experience of it. I hope you are all doing well, finding strength of purpose and inspiration in your own reading and writing. Stay safe and keep well, and see you all here next Wednesday for the first Weird Wednesday!
Over and over, scholars and biographers have searched for direct connections between Nabokov and young children, and failed to find them. What impulses he possessed were literary, not literal, in the manner of the ‘well adjusted’ writer who persists in writing about the worst sort of crimes. We generally don’t hear the same suspicions of writers who turn serial killers into folk heroes. No one, for example, thinks Thomas Harris capable of the terrible deeds of Hannibal Lecter, even though he invested them with chilling psychological insight.
Sarah Weinman is a writer I admire. Both in her promotion of underappreciated women crime writers, and in her own field of true crime journalism and longform essay writing, she is one of the best of the new generation currently working. Her skill in creating compelling narratives, diligent research and all-round passion for the genre, together with her ability to ask tough questions, her fascinating insights into social issues and the history of criminology all serve to make her work an essential reference point and, most of all, a joy to read. When I learned she’d written a book centred around the Sally Horner case and its relationship to Nabokov’s Lolita, it went straight on my to-read list. Two of my key literary interests, brought together by one of my favourite writers? I fully expected The Real Lolita to be one of my books of the year.
As it turned out, this was not the case. I ended up not liking this book, in the main because I passionately disagree with the thrust of Weinman’s argument. I could go further and say I don’t think Weinman understands Nabokov, or the process of fiction-writing. Even as a work of true crime literature, The Real Lolita has significant problems, and at least some of my issue with this book lies in its being not just unsubstantiated, but insubstantial. Weinman’s writing is as well researched and readable as ever, and I am sure there will be plenty who will not only enjoy The Real Lolita a great deal more than I did, but who will be more sympathetic to Weinman in the arguments she makes. That’s a good thing – Weinman is always worth reading, and one could argue that these kind of judgements are subjective – but for anyone interested in Nabokov in particular I would caution them to approach with a degree of scepticism. (And please, please, please read this instead!)
The Real Lolita started life in 2014, as an essay in Hazlitt, and arguably this is where it should have stayed. The background details of Sally Horner’s kidnapping and how the case might have influenced Nabokov in the way he eventually chose to structure Lolita make for a fascinating essay, pointing up one of the many instances in which novelists have always been influenced and inspired by real-life cases. I can even see why Weinman was tempted to expand the essay into a book. But I don’t think there is enough material here to justify that decision.
In the March of 1948, ten-year-old Florence ‘Sally’ Horner was dared by her schoolfriends to perform a minor act of theft from a Woolworth’s store in her hometown of Camden, New Jersey. As Sally tried to make her escape, she was confronted by a man claiming to be an FBI officer, who cautioned Sally that he had seen what she did, and that he’d be keeping her under his watch in the months to come. Understandably, Sally was terrified and told no one about the encounter. Three months later the man – not an FBI agent but a motor mechanic named Frank La Salle – returned to claim Sally, persuading her mother that he was the father of one of Sally’s schoolfriends, that he was taking them on holiday to Atlantic City and that Sally herself was desperate to come along for the ride. What for Sally began as a desperately unlucky chance encounter went on to become a twenty-one-month ordeal. After kidnapping Sally from her hometown, Frank La Salle drove her across the United States, subjecting her to multiple rapes and a campaign of coercive control in which he threatened that she would be sent to reform school if she told anyone what was happening or tried to escape.
Eventually, Sally was brave enough to confide in a neighbour, who encouraged her to call the police immediately. Sally then made contact with her sister and brother-in-law back in New Jersey, who raised the alarm. Sally was rescued by federal agents the same day. Frank La Salle, after being extradited to New Jersey to face charges, was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. Astonishingly, he persisted in his fantasy that he was Sally’s real father.
As always, Weinman is excellent not only in recounting the facts, but in setting the scene, grounding her investigation vividly in place and time. She draws us into the story immediately, laying out the string of weird coincidences, systemic failures and blind, unlucky chance that enabled La Salle’s exploits – and Sally’s ordeal – to continue for so long. Riveting though Weinman’s account is, I still found myself unsettled by some of the assumptions she seemed to be making. For most of the time she was in captivity, Sally was leading what looked on the surface to be a normal life – La Salle always enrolled Sally in school wherever they happened to be, for example, for whatever reason seeming to prefer Catholic institutions. Perhaps, ironically, he liked the idea of Sally being in a more morally rigorous, less laissez-faire environment. Weinman takes a different view:
But I suspect La Salle gravitated toward Catholic institutions because they were a good place to hide in plain sight. The Church, as we now know from decades’ worth of scandal, hid generations of abused victims, and moved pedophile priests from parish to parish because covering up their crimes protected the Church’s carefully crafted image. Perhaps La Salle saw parochial schools for what they were: a place for complicity and enabling to flourish. A place where no one would ask Sally Horner if something terrible was happening to her.
This is tendentious at best, full of harmful assumptions at worst, not least because the various scandals around paedophile priests were still decades from being uncovered, or openly discussed. I also find it disappointing that Weinman chooses not to comment on the less than humane treatment Sally was subjected to by law enforcement after her rescue. In spite of her repeated and totally understandable insistence that all she wanted was to be allowed to go home, Sally Horner was remanded in police custody in a juvenile detention facility for the duration of legal proceedings. The reasoning behind this was supposedly ‘to ensure the girl stayed in a calm frame of mind before and during the trial’. Only her mother is allowed to visit her, at the state’s discretion. Considering that Sally has done absolutely nothing to warrant such a summary revocation of her freedom, moreover, that she has just endured twenty-one-months being held against her will by a known paedophile, this stipulation seems not only authoritarian, but barbaric.
Of course, the attitude to minors as people with rights has evolved considerably since then, but in 1950s America summarily stripping children and parents of their autonomy was accepted practice, not just in reform schools but in hospitals, mental welfare facilities and the educational system. The situation in the UK was no different. I would have liked to have seen Weinman delve into this more, but she leaves the problematic behaviour of the police and courts unexamined, commenting only that ‘thanks to an unexpected development, Sally’s stay at the center didn’t last long at all.’ Given that Sally escaped at the end of March 1950, and prosecuting attorney Mitchell Cohen ‘expected the case to go before the jury no earlier than June’, La Salle’s prompt decision to plead guilty was fortunate indeed. It seems odd to me that Weinman does not express greater outrage, almost as if she is concerned that any such criticism of those who are ostensibly ‘the good guys’ would be bad form.
This seeming reluctance to criticise the US judicial system does not end there:
The extensive media coverage meant all of Camden, and much of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, knew what had happened to Sally. Cohen worried the girl might be judged harshly for the forcible loss of her virtue, even if that reaction was in no way warranted. Cohen also urged [Sally’s mother] to seek the advice of the Reverend Alfred Jass, director of the Bureau of Catholic Charities, ‘in directing Sally’s return to a normal life’. Ella was a Protestant, but clergy was still clergy, and Sally’s recent attendance at Catholic schools may have influenced Cohen’s choice of religious adviser.
Given Weinman’s earlier portrayal of Catholic schools as hotbeds of paedophilia, to let this pass without comment seems extraordinary to me. The treatment of Sally and her mother following her rescue displays many of the hallmarks of sexism and classism still rampant in the American justice system today, a fact that surely warrants more attention than it is given here. It would also have been interesting to look at Cohen’s advice to Ella about changing her place of domicile, even her identity, following Sally’s release – advice that, to my mind, was both patronising and utterly clueless about Ella’s family and financial circumstances – in the light of the toxic media climate around more recent abduction cases, that of Madeleine McCann in the UK, for example, which has seen the missing girl’s parents demonised and gaslighted over a period of more than a decade. Real-life parallels like these might ultimately have been a more interesting and fruitful investigation to follow than the small and ultimately peripheral connection between Sally Horner;s abduction and Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
Weinman does a better job of picking apart the aftermath of Sally’s ordeal: the bullying she experiences from classmates (‘No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut’ Carol said. ‘That’s the way it was in those days.’), as well as the blanket erasure of the episode from family history. She is also excellent on the city of Camden and the changes wrought by post-war social upheavals. Her account of the cases prosecuted by Mitchell Cohen is insightful and informed, in particular the 1949 spree killing perpetrated by army veteran and gun obsessive Howard Unruh. It is ironic though, given the subject of her book, that she does not bring attention to the hideous appropriateness of this mass-murderer’s surname. Nabokov, with his ability to move fluidly between several European languages, certainly would have done.
And it is in the territory of Nabokov’s fiction that Weinman seems least comfortable. Her contention, broadly, is that it was reading about the case of Sally Horner that finally freed up the mental logjam Nabokov had been experiencing in the writing of what turned out to be his most famous novel. Indeed, she goes further:
Sally Horner’s story mattered to Nabokov because Lolita would not have been finished if he hadn’t read of Sally’s kidnapping.
That is a vast assumption, by any stretch, all the more so when we consider the paucity of evidence Weinman is able to cite in bringing her case. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Nabokov’s work will be aware that he had been grappling with the themes and obsessions that govern the narrative of Lolita long before he came to America and before Sally Horner was born. The pursuit of young girls by predatory older men forms the subject of several of Nabokov’s early short stories, and is fleshed out at greater length in his novella of 1939, The Enchanter, which also happens to be the last work he wrote in Russian. Weinman is at pains to stress the supposed inferiority of this earlier work, which, she suggests, was written before he possessed the literary wherewithal to adequately exploit his chosen theme:
Nabokov was not quite the artist he would later become, and it shows in the prose: ‘I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it – how many one sees, on a grey morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles – these kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else.’ He doesn’t have the wherewithal to describe his chosen prey, whom he first sees roller-skating in a park, as a nymphet. Such a word isn’t in his vocabulary because it wasn’t yet in Nabokov’s.
Weinman then goes on to compare this passage with a passage in Lolita whilst failing to acknowledge that the former is a translation from the original Russian by Nabokov’s son Dmitri, whilst the latter consists of words and sentences actually written by Nabokov in English. This omission strikes me as strange, as does the assertion that Nabokov’s narrator in The Enchanter lacks the ‘wherewithal’ to describe his pre-pubescent victim as a nymphet – as if ‘nymphet’ were a previously existing descriptor, rather than a term Nabokov himself was responsible for introducing into the English language. Similarly:
The Enchanter’s narrator may be tormented by his unnatural tastes, but he knows he is about to entice his chosen girl to cross a chasm that cannot be uncrossed. Namely, she is innocent now, but she won’t be after he has his way with her. Humbert Humbert would never be so obvious. He has the ‘fancy prose style’ at his disposal to couch or deflect his intentions. So when he does state the obvious – as he will, again and again – the reader is essentially magicked into believing Dolores is as much the pursuer as the pursued.
I would take this as a serious misreading of Lolita, more importantly, a serious underestimation of how the book works and what it is about. Early on in The Real Lolita, Weiman reports the experiences of the writer Mikita Brottman, who discussed Lolita with male prisoners as part of a prison outreach program. While Brottman confessed that Humbert’s ability to dress up his crimes in erudite language meant that she had ‘immediately fallen in love with the narrator’, the prisoners in the book club were not so beguiled:
An hour into the discussion, one of them looked up at Brottman and cried, ‘He’s just an old pedo!’ A second prisoner added: ‘It’s all bullshit, all his long, fancy words. I can see through it. It’s all a cover-up. I know what he wants to do with her.’
Anyone arguing that Nabokov’s aim in Lolita is to dupe his readership might do well to consider this account of the novel’s impact on ordinary readers. We need also to keep it in mind that Humbert is a literary device, not a flesh-and-blood narrator, that part of Nabokov’s skill in Lolita lies in the way he constructs the novel so as to reveal the inadequacy of Humbert’s language in hiding his true nature.
I was regularly nonplussed by Weinman’s reading of specific parts of the text, for example in the way she describes the events leading up to Humbert’s duplicitous marriage to Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze :
Charlotte, bafflingly, concludes that if he showed no romantic interest in her and remained in her home, then she would take it that he was ‘ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.’ (Since we’re always in Humbert’s head, we have only his word that Charlotte wrote this.)
Well, up to a point, I guess, but the whole essence of Humbert lies in his devastating honesty. And at this point in the narrative, we’re not ‘in Humbert’s head’ in any case, as he includes the text of Charlotte’s letter in full. What it actually reads is:
If I found you at home (and I know I won’t – and that’s why I am able to go on like this) the fact of your remaining would mean only one thing: that you want me as much as I do you; as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.
Nothing baffling about that, and I can’t explain why Weinman’s sense of this passage is so muddled that she misquotes it entirely. Throughout her analysis, she displays a curious tendency to write about Nabokov’s characters as if they were autonomous individuals, comparing their actions with those involved in the Sally Horner case as if they were active participants in an alternative true-crime scenario:
Dolores Haze’s husband, Dick Schiller, had to raise their child without her. But another woman had to reckon with the collateral damage of a father’s abuse. That woman was Frank La Salle’s daughter, known as Madeline.
Weinman indulges in this kind of dream logic not just once but many times, eventually coming to the conclusion that:
It is to Nabokov’s credit that something of the true character of Dolores – her messy, complicated, childish self – emerges out of the haze of his narrator’s perverse pedestal-placing.
That would be because the gap between Humbert’s view of himself and the wider reality forms one of the central tenets of the entire book. For me, slips like these are symptomatic of Weinman’s overarching failing here: that is, her insistence on addressing Lolita in terms of its morality, on reading Nabokov’s text so literally as a novel ‘about paedophilia.’ Throughout her analysis, she remains convinced that the seminal effect of Lolita upon most readers will be that of being tricked:
Lolita moved far beyond the bestseller list to become a cultural and global phenomenon. The template was in place for generations of readers to be taken in by Humbert Humbert, forgetting that Dolores Haze was his victim, not his seducer.
I first read Lolita at the age of seventeen. I had read nothing like it before, and I still remember the painful urgency I felt, to get the book over with as quickly as possible because I found its content so desperately upsetting. At the same time, I was thrilled in a way I had not experienced since first reading Eliot’s The Waste Land a couple of years earlier, to find myself confronted with a work of fiction that was so unquestionably a work of genius. I have read the novel three or four times since over the years, and its power as both narrative and text remains undiminished. I firmly believe that any attentive reader will be aware throughout of the hideous disjuncture between what Humbert says and what Humbert does, as well as Nabokov’s brilliance in having his narrator undermine himself with every word he speaks. One comes away from Lolita loathing Humbert, yet exhilarated by the experience of being in the hands of such an outrageously gifted storyteller – Nabokov, that is, and very much not, as Weinman keeps insisting, Humbert Humbert.
Weinman’s contentions around the genesis, publication and reception of Lolita are, for me, as tendentious and wide of the mark as her analysis of the text. The central premise of The Real Lolita is that Nabokov’s novel as we know it could not and would not have existed in the absence of Sally Horner’s own real-life suffering. Not only does this ‘fact’ needs to be addressed, Weinman argues, but Nabokov should also be posthumously held to account for his underhandedness in appropriating material that was not his to exploit. As a response to this, I can do no better than to repeat the words used by Vera Nabokov in reply to a letter sent to her husband by Alan Levin, a reporter at the New York Post. Having read of Nabokov’s purported interest in the Horner case, Levin was curious to know, in Weinman’s words, ‘if it could be true that Lolita owed its plot to a sensational kidnapping, and if it was true, what would the great Vladimir Nabokov have to say on the matter,’ Vera, who dealt with Nabokov’s correspondence as a matter of course, replied as follows:
At the time he was writing Lolita he studied a considerable number of case histories (‘real’ stories) many of which have more affinities with the Lolita plot… [The Horner case] is mentioned also in the book Lolita. It did not inspire the book. My husband wonders what importance could possibly be attached to the existence in ‘real’ life of ‘actual rape abductions’ when explaining the existence of an ‘invented’ book.
Weinman reacts to what is a straightforward and factually correct piece of correspondence in a way that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of fiction-writing:
How the Nabokovs handled Levin’s letter, and by extension Welding’s article for Nugget, is a window into their maddening, contradictory behaviour when anyone probed Lolita’s possible influences. They denied the importance of Sally Horner but acknowledged the parenthetical. They mentioned a ‘considerable number’ of case histories, but only Sally’s is described in the novel.
So what??
Vera’s stubborn insistence that the Sally Horner story ‘did not inspire the book’ is akin to trying to drown out a troublesome argument with the braying of one’s own voice. Though it worked, since Levin did not push back – at least, not that we know of.
And that would probably be because there was nothing to push back against. What Weinman suggests here is that it is or should be incumbent on the writer, to disclose their inspirations, describe their processes, quantify how much and how often they might have made mental or actual reference to realworld events and for what reason and on what authority and by whose leave. While other more recent shenanigans in the world of books (I’m sure we can all cite at least three from the past six months alone) might seem to indicate an increasing number of commentators (I will not call them critics) who believe exactly that, I say it’s bollocks. More than that, it’s dangerous bollocks, and should be named as such.
Any and all of the information about Sally Horner’s case to which Nabokov had access was firmly in the public domain, available to anyone who was interested to read and discuss. Had Nabokov nefariously obtained previously unknown, off-the-record information about Sally or her family, which he then proceeded to make public use of for his own fame or profit, the question of justification might be radically different. But as a writer I believe, and would argue strongly, that any such information obtained simply by reading it in a newspaper or seeing a report on TV does not present any boundary issues or moral questions in terms of its use as source material or inspiration. Both legally and morally speaking, there is no case for Nabokov to answer, especially as he famously makes direct reference to the case in his own text.
As it concerns the germination and narrative direction of Lolita, the story of Sally Horner for Nabokov was a lucky accident, the kind of ‘ah ha!’ moment of synchronicity any writer might experience in seeing their current area of interest echoed in a real-life incident. The itch to write Lolita was there long before Sally was kidnapped – Weinman herself has said as much. It is fascinating to read the notes Nabokov made about the case on one of his index cards, complete with summary observations and corrections. It is perplexing and vaguely annoying to see Weinman waste time speculating over why Nabokov did not burn these cards to hide his tracks. (That would be a) because there was nothing to hide and b) those index cards were an inalienable and lifelong part of his writing process and he counted them as part of the work itself.)
The simple and rather ordinary facts – that Nabokov probably did read about this infamous kidnapping case around the same time as he was re-engaging with the manuscript that would become Lolita – are presented by Weinman as some kind of revelation. As any novelist would tell you, they are nothing of the kind: Writers are magpies and writers are hoarders – we pick things up, save them for later to decorate our nests with. All fiction is an amalgam of lived experience and imaginative construct. It is a giant leap of logic to state, as Weinman does, that Sally’s story is so central to the genesis of Lolita that ‘it’s surprising to think the novel could have existed without it.’ The truth is, if the story of Sally Horner hadn’t happened along, something else would have.
If Nabokov had been a one-hit wonder, with Lolita as the sparkling solitaire diamond in an otherwise unremarkable oeuvre, then Weinman’s insistence on the importance of Sally’s story particularly might bear more examination, but this is very much not the case. Lolita might be Nabokov’s best-known book, but he wrote at least a half-dozen others that in terms of their literary brilliance are easily its equal. Sally’s story, and the telling of Sally’s story, is important in the real world – for surviving relatives, for other victims, for the interests of justice, most of all for the purposes of honouring Sally’s memory, and I can absolutely see the fascination in reading about the true-crime background of a novel as important and controversial as Lolita. But in the end we must conclude that in the context of Nabokov’s development as a writer, the significance of Sally’s story is marginal, background colour.
“We got through the end of the world,” she said, but when he looked over his shoulder, she was sleeping and he wondered if he’d imagined it. Melissa was red-eyed and speedy, driving too fast, talking about her new job selling clothes at Le Chateau while Paul only half-listened, and somewhere on the drive back to their apartment he found himself seized by a strange, manic kind of hope. It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.
I’ve been keeping a record of my reading for around eight years now. Nothing elaborate, just the books and their publication dates and a brief, informal summary of my overall impressions. I also award each book read a mark out of ten, for my eyes only of course, and again for no other purpose than to remind me of how I responded to the book at the time of reading.
The Glass Hotel is my first 10/10 book of 2020. I find this objectively interesting because I’ve read some great books so far this year, some of them good enough to award nines to. But that ten mark for me has to be a signifier not just of literary excellence but something extra, that indefinable quality of gut-punch, the sense that I have read something that will remain a part of my personal literary landscape for a long time to come.
These are my notes for The Glass Hotel, written almost immediately after I turned the final page:
This had a similar effect on me to reading Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise in that it is such a well made, professionally written, imaginatively vast, gorgeously surprising book, the kind that does not depend for one moment on flashy effects or tricks or forced innovation, just the best kind of unshowy, rock-solid writing that timelessly immersive fiction can allow. Both books also have powerfully moving endings, but that’s a side-issue![It occurs to me only now that there is also the element of water, ever present in both The Porpoise and The Glass Hotel, that draws these two novels together.] I loved literally every page of this. It does my heart good to see a writer who pays such careful attention to her craft, who treats her vocation with the seriousness it deserves. My first 10/10 book of the year, which has been a while coming but I never doubted it would. Stupendous.
I can only imagine how strange it must feel for Mandel right now, with her new book just out and everyone so intently focused on her previous. In terms of her visibility as an author, Station Eleven was a game-changer for Mandel. However, she wisely rejects the idea that the novel was in any way prescient – the research she undertook in the process of writing the book made it clear to her that pandemics, like earthquakes, have always been with us, and always will be. For Mandel, Station Eleven was simply her next book. It took her two years to write. The Glass Hotel has taken her around five years, and according to Mandel’s most recent interviews has undergone many transformations and revisions. One of the difficulties she speaks of – and perhaps the chief manner in which it differs from its predecessor – is the problem she has found in defining the book for purposes of publicity. The marketing departments of publishers are understandably eager for a book to have an elevator pitch, a couple of swift, pithy sentences that simultaneously sum up what the novel is about, and convey something of the experience of reading it.
It is close to impossible to describe The Glass Hotel in these terms, a fact that, for me at least, would seem to convey something of its depth and complexity. Is it a crime story? Is it a ghost story? It is both, and neither, and more. I can only hope its refusal to be defined, coupled with the trying and disappointing circumstances into which it has had the misfortune to be published, will not prevent readers from discovering it, savouring it, remembering that it exists. Will it win as many fans and plaudits as Station Eleven? Possibly not, though to my mind it is even more praise-worthy (not to mention prize-worthy). What it does do, without a doubt, is cement Mandel’s reputation as a writer who means business. The Glass Hotel is a thing of beauty, hovering at so many moments on the brink of being truly profound.
*
The glass hotel of the title is to be found close to the small town of Caiette, on a remote promontory of Vancouver Island. The hotel is accessible only by boat, a luxury retreat that attracts only the richest and most discerning of clientele. As such, it would seem to be the ideal venue for a classic whodunit of the Golden Age school. In fact, the crime story Mandel has in store for us could not be more different.
At the hotel we meet Vincent, a disaffected young woman who works as a bartender and still grieving the death of her mother some years before. Her half-brother Paul is also working at the hotel. Unlike Vincent, he hates the place, and can’t wait to get away. He keeps seeing ghosts – or one ghost in particular, the spirit of Charlie Wu, a musician who died from taking a drug that Paul supplied. The owner of the hotel, Jonathan Alkaitis – aloof, secretive and terribly rich – has warned the staff of the presence of another guest, Ella Kaspersky, with whom he does not wish to come into contact while he is staying there.
Paul meets Ella, Vincent meets Jonathan. The Glass Hotel is in a sense the story of the echoes and repercussions of these two life-changing meetings. It is no secret that Mandel has based the story of Jonathan Alkaitis on the story of the rise and calamitous fall of criminal financier Bernie Madoff, and this knowledge adds an extra layer of potency to her narrative. We know in advance where Alkaitis will end up, but this in no way diminishes the power and horror of the multiple stories behind the headlines.
He never noticed dandelions before he came here, but in the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking. Likewise, the birds. They’re the kind of birds that blend into the landscape on the outside, just robins and ravens and finches and such, but here there’s something extraordinary about the way they alight on the grass and then leave again, flitting in and out of bounds. They are emissaries from another world. The prison rulebook prohibits feeding them, but some guys surreptitiously drop crumbs on the grass.
Mandel’s ‘office chorus’ – the massed voices of those who work for Alkaitis and enable his crimes – not only reveal the scope of the crime in greater detail, they remind us at every turn of our own potential complicity. Not in this crime maybe but in some other, at another time, in another place. Maybe our own moral weaknesses and failures will not land us in jail, yet such moments will haunt our lives, nonetheless. All that is needed for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing.
In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.
But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the cheque, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. ‘You already knew this,’ he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. ‘There are no surprises here. You know what you are.’
Mandel has referred to The Glass Hotel as a ghost story, and she is fascinated by the concept of parallel realities – Vincent dares to imagine a world in which the Georgia Flu becomes a pandemic, for example, a subtle nod to fans of Station Eleven. But in exploring these ideas, she seems more drawn to the imaginative power of the concept, rather than the explicitly science fictional ‘what ifs’ we see elaborated upon in more conventional approaches.
What lies at the heart of The Glass Hotel is a recognition of the frailty of the now, the million ways in which characters – that is to say, us – can be jolted out of one life and into another. One of Alkaitis’s investors (again, readers of Station Eleven may have reason to believe they’ve met him before) finds himself catapulted literally overnight from a position of prosperity and privilege into what he comes to think of as the shadow country, a United States in which people work tiring jobs for low wages, live out of camper vans and try to avoid thinking about what might happen to them if they or one of their family happens to fall ill.
This world is his life now. The fact that hits him hardest is that this world was always there, and yet he never saw it.
As a crime novel, The Glass Hotel is an electrifying dramatisation of a particular moment in history. For those of us who remember these events as news headlines, the book effortlessly captures the frenetic, almost hyper-real atmosphere of the years leading up to the financial crash of 2008. Those who weren’t there will find this story equally compelling – like all great novels, The Glass Hotel can be perfectly understood without any prior knowledge of its source material. As text, it is close to perfect, which gives it 10/10 from me.
(You can read another interview with Mandel here, and listen to an excellent podcast interview with her here, exploring the inspirations behind The Glass Hotel as well as Mandel’s writing process and love of ghost stories.)
Well, here we are at the start of Week 7 of lockdown and with no end in sight. Following the unveiling of Boris’s so-called ‘roadmap’ yesterday evening, here in Scotland the message is still very much Stay at Home, which if you’re living on an island means travel to the mainland continues to be prohibited except for emergencies. In practice and especially considering the circumstances, this is no great hardship for Chris and me: we have everything we need right here in Rothesay,, and with both of us working on new novels, we have more than enough to keep us occupied on a day-to-day basis. The relaxation of the ‘once a day’ exercise rule has come as very welcome news – as the weather improves I have been itching to get outside more, and as social distancing is relatively easy to maintain here that’s a double bonus.
I’m also very lucky in being able to maintain a strong sense of purpose and both intellectual and emotional solace by focusing on work. (I know many writers and artists have not been finding it at all easy to concentrate right now and my thoughts are with them.) That is not to say that my work-in-progress has been unaffected by the current crisis. Quite the opposite. As is normal for me, the new manuscript had already been through a number of massive rethinks and structural changes. But as the corona crisis took hold, the book as I began writing it back in September became increasingly to seem like an impossible thing, and a week or so ago I realised I had reached an impasse.
With some misgivings but a sense of inevitability and rightness I have started writing the novel again, from the beginning. This feels scary – the manuscript at present is less manuscript, more ragbag of dissociated passages that I am simply having to assume will coalesce at some point in the future. But it also feels necessary, a small reflection of what is happening across the world and my own best response to it. Ironically, the book at the moment feels closer to how I originally conceived of it – closer to its source material – than it did over the winter, which cannot be a bad thing. I guess we’ll find out.
And of course, with lockdown measures still firmly in place in Scotland, I still have no idea when my mother and I will be able to resume our Morse Suppers. We’re talking on the phone a lot but – as all of you will know all too well – that just isn’t the same. So onward with Corona Crime Spree. And perhaps it’s no surprise at this stage in the lockdown that this one turned out to be a bit of a rant!
Swan Song by Edmund Crispin (1947)
I have never been the biggest fan of Midsomer Murders, and every time I pick up a novel of the Golden Age, I am simultaneously reminded of everything that makes classic detective fiction so entertaining and so popular, and all the reasons why it can be so irritatingly facile. There are authors whose work in this genre rewards the time spent with it because of their literary intelligence, their personal engagement with the material and their skill in subverting the cliches. There are others whose flippancy, whose attachment to the more reprehensible attitudes of their time and whose general irksomeness gets in the way of one’s enjoyment. I am sorry to say that Swan Song annoyed me far more than it engaged me.
We are in Oxford, at the start of rehearsals for one of the first post-war performances of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. The star of the show, Edwin Shorthouse, is making life a misery for the whole company with his monstrous egotism, his general high-handedness and his sexual harassment of female members of the company. Amidst the rising tension, there are three people in particular who would benefit from Shorthouse’s death: the conductor, Peacock, who is being driven almost literally mad by Shorthouse’s deliberate provocations, Judith, one of the younger singers who Shorthouse attempts to rape, and Charles, Edwin’s brother, a composer who stands to inherit his sizeable fortune.
When Edwin is discovered hanged in his dressing room just a week before the first performance, the police are keen to record a judgement of suicide. No one particularly cares that the man is dead and suicide means less paperwork than murder. But Gervase Fen, scholar, detective and opera fan, is not convinced. As Fen begins his investigation, he fears that other members of the company could still be in danger.
At this point in my discussion of a crime novel I might normally attempt an analysis of the characters – their personalities, interests and motivations – yet in the case of Swan Song I cannot bring myself to do so because it would be pointless. To quote the American critic Edmund Wilson in his (in)famous essay of 1945, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd‘, ‘how can you care who committed a murder which has never really been made to take place, because the writer hasn’t any ability of even the most ordinary kind to persuade you to see it or feel it?’
In the piece that preceded WCWKRA (and that directly precipitated it), ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories‘, Wilson contends that the central problem of Golden Age fiction is one of sketchy characterisation:
You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister,, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion.
What Wilson is saying in his essay can be summed up as follows: in order for a story to be effective, we have to care about the outcome. What we care about may vary from reader to reader, but something must be at stake. The overriding problem for me with Swan Song is that I didn’t care about any of it. I didn’t care about the victim because he is portrayed as an egotistical wanker with no redeeming qualities apart from his voice, which I didn’t care about either because the narrative doesn’t give any true sense of his quality as a performer. I didn’t care about any of the suspects (or which of them was guilty) because they are about as realistic as the counters in a game of Cluedo. Nor did I care about the puzzle itself, the detective mystery, firstly because Shorthouse’s murder could never have happened in the way Crispin describes (as a method for murder, ridiculous doesn’t even begin to cover it) and secondly because when set against the possibility of being hanged, the various motives Crispin suggests for the crime are unconvincing. Or rather, the characters are so poorly portrayed we don’t believe in their stories.
During the course of my reading of and around crime fiction, I had seen and heard Wilson’s thoughts referenced multiple times without ever having read the essays themselves. Having finally set that to rights, I can report the experience outshone that of reading Swan Song by a considerable margin. In his slaughtering of sacred cows, Wilson is brutal, provocative and just plain bloodthirsty. I especially enjoyed his description of the letters that poured in after his first essay was published, castigating him for his snobbishness and ignorance and insisting that his problem with detective fiction was simply down to the fact that he hadn’t read the right books, an argument so reminiscent of literally every online spat about science fiction versus ‘the mainstream’ it is difficult to believe that Wilson’s essays were written eighty years ago.
I don’t agree with every word Wilson says, but that doesn’t matter to me because the quality of his argument is so wonderfully entertaining. What reading his essays also highlights is that although they are often referred to, they are seldom discussed in the round. Wilson admires Chandler, for example, and it is not the crime narrative – the suitability of crime as a subject for literature – that he is castigating so much as the vast swathes of generic detective novels that do not even attempt a proper investigation of their subject matter. ‘The murder story that exploits psychological horror is an entirely different matter,’ Wilson says, further insisting that ‘Dickens invested his plots with a social and moral significance that made the final solution of the mystery a revelatory symbol of something that the author wanted seriously to say.’
Such a contention would seem self evident, yet it is important that Wilson makes it, as it raises his essay above the level of rant to that of an argument that is not only seriously intended, but also reminds us of what good crime fiction can do and why readers and writers are still drawn to it as a vehicle for the communication of complex ideas.
One of the chief complaints levelled at Golden Age detective fiction by non-believers – and one that is not levelled often enough by its fans – is how problematic it can be in terms of the sexism, racism and class prejudice that runs through the entire canon like a fatal hairline crack through a porcelain vase. Of course this is an accusation that could reasonably be brought against anything written in the pre-war era – there are shitty attitudes aplenty in D. H. Lawrence, never mind H. P. Lovecraft. But the rampant classism in Golden Age novels seems to be less an embarrassing side issue than hardwired into its structure – all those rude mechanicals with their patronisingly conveyed vocal mannerisms, their comical tendency to miss the point, their universal deference to their elders and betters. Throughout my explorations of Golden Age fiction to date, I have found the classism almost more unbearable than the sexism, because there’s a sense that these assumptions were so deeply embedded in society even the writer is unaware of how poisonous they are.
But if it’s sexism you’re after, there’s a typically generous helping of it in Swan Song. How about this:
‘Isn’t the girl something to do with Shorthouse?’
‘As to that,’ said Joan rather definitely, ‘I couldn’t say. If so, I’m sorry for her. She’s a pretty child.’
‘Chorus?’
‘Yes. One of the boatload of maidens. It’s she who dances with David.’
‘Oh yes, so it is.’ Adam considered. ‘I felt sure I’d seen her with Shorthouse. But she looks very much attached to that young man.’
‘Promiscuous, probably,’ said Barfield, dropping cake crumbs on to his knee.
Or this:
‘I mean, reputedly he lives in sin with a woman called Beatrix Thorn. She is not attractive,’ Adam added unchivalrously. ‘She is not attractive at all. But composers have a way of getting hold of the most appalling women. I can never quite see why it is. Look at the Princess Wittgenstein. Look at Mlle Reccio. Look at Cosima. Look at -‘
‘All right,’ said Fen. ‘I accept the general proposition.’
And of course this old chestnut:
Physically [the dressing room] resembled that in which Edwin Shorthouse had met his end, but its atmosphere was entirely different, and Fen marvelled anew at the relative sensitivity of the sexes to their immediate surroundings. The difference appeared to be – he became momentarily abstracted and analytical – in the feminine predilection for profusion and colour.
And one more for good measure:
‘I realised even then that I was the first Salome to give the males in the audience a really good run for their money during the Dance of the Seven Veils, It was at the Paris Opera, and I ended up in a condition of nudity that would have made the Windmill girls blush.’
One of the reasons I wanted to try reading Crispin was because I was intrigued by his background. His real name was Bruce Montgomery, and he was close friends with writers such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Brian Aldiss. He always counted music as his primary creative activity, and composed a number of well known film scores, most famously the music for the Carry On films. I felt certain that he would have an interesting approach to the detective novel and in some respects I was right. I enjoyed the Oxford backdrop, which gives the novel a firm sense of place, convincingly described. Swan Song is full of energy and displays a degree of wit, even if the author is too obviously in love with his own cleverness and cultural awareness. What should have sounded a warning bell, perhaps, was the very background I found myself attracted to: cliquey Oxford pubs, College loudmouths guzzling beer and taking the piss out of each other and groping the bar staff. Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin are brilliant and important writers but they are both notorious misogynists. It’s all too easy to imagine the kind of ‘locker room talk’ these chums went in for.
Another reason for my attraction to Swan Song was the theme of music. I have a complicated relationship with Wagner but I know his operas well, and I’d heard that Crispin’s insights into the composer and his work raised this novel to a higher level than others in the Gervase Fen series. Boy was I disappointed. Crispin certainly knows his Wagner, but his decision to set the action around a production of Meistersinger turns out to be a massive excuse for name-dropping. The text abounds in references to famous singers and conductors of the era (yep, Ed, got ’em all) yet there is no attempt whatsoever to introduce the uninitiated reader into the weird and wonderful emotional and political labyrinth that is Wagnerian opera. We’re barely told what Meistersinger is about, let alone who the characters are (casual allusions to Sachs and Beckmesser are just further unneeded examples of authorial arrogance).
There is some discussion of the relationship between Wagner and Nazism and the significance of Wagner’s return to the repertoire after World War Two, but it is all very perfunctory and by-the-numbers, and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Crispin’s own portrayal of Jewish people is far from ideal. Most importantly, anyone coming to Swan Song never having listened to Wagner before would undoubtedly go away with little to no idea of what his music sounds like, why it is important, Wagner’s role in the development of Western music. Given that Crispin is at such pains to convince us of his musicological expertise, this seems a stunning omission.
I am passionately in favour of novels in which authors share their enthusiasms, in which they make them part of the fabric of their writing. But in order for such a work to be successful, the writer must take pains to communicate their passion directly to the reader. Swan Song is sadly lacking in this respect. The great Wagnerian detective novel has still to be written.
Fiction is fiction, and the choice of subject matter should be free for all, whether reader or writer. The subject of murder though is a serious business, and – as Edmund Wilson reminds us – it tends to be most effective when treated with respect. The forms this respect might take are many and varied: depth of characterisation, sense of place, moral complexity, social or political commentary, psychology, forensic examination of a crime scene or court case, even the intricate and painstaking construction of a clever puzzle. All are valid approaches, and the one that appeals most to one reader may be less interesting for another. But there must be something.
I can understand how some readers might enjoy Crispin for precisely those qualities that bug me: his sense of humour, his studied insouciance, his preferring not to. But for me, reading Swan Song has served only to confirm what I already knew: that the crime writers I most admire are those whose fiction is a genuine expression of their interests and concerns. Swan Song reads like a bagatelle, a bit of a laff. I have Midsomer Murders for that, if I’m in the mood. But when it comes to novels I’d much rather spend my time with authors who dare to set the stakes a little higher.
