While she was still a student at Harvard, Becky Cooper was told about a 1969 postgraduate student of archaeology, Jane Britton, who was found murdered in her apartment after failing to present herself for her General examinations. Traces of red ochre found at the scene seemed to suggest that Jane’s killer might have an association with the Archaeology department itself, that in all probability she had known her attacker.
Jane’s story was told to Cooper almost as a warning – that Harvard was not always a safe place to be, especially for women. Jane had been a singular individual, someone who made an impression on everyone who came into contact with her. There had been people in her life who thought she sailed too close to the wind. Others who nurtured unspoken jealousies. Jane’s murder was shocking, but more shocking still was the silence that seemed to descend in the wake of it. Friends stopped talking about her. Her family were too distraught and divided amongst themselves to discuss what had happened. Following the initial inquiry, the police had drawn a blank. Though there were whispers and rumours among the students who had known Jane and studied with her, no one was ever charged with her murder. The police refused to divulge Jane’s records, even though no work had been done on the case, seemingly, for decades.
The more Cooper’s questions multiplied, the deeper her obsession with the case became. She felt a personal connection to Jane that was hard to define but that would not let go of her. Determined to unravel the web of clues, false leads and tenuous connections that had confounded the police, she sets out on a journey to discover what she can. Ten years later, and just at the point where it seems the truth of Jane’s life and death might never be known, new evidence comes to light that throws all previous assumptions into confusion.
We Keep the Dead Close is a book in which the personal and the political are in perfect alignment. Cooper never loses sight of the story – what really happened? – but she is thorough and unstinting too in her pursuit of wider questions: how are women treated by the academic world? How far must women comply with the norms society expects of them in order to stay ‘safe’? What can we ever really know about another person, especially a person who is no longer around to speak for themselves?
Cooper’s writing is tactile, evocative and powerful in its arguments, above all because Cooper takes the risk of allowing herself to become a part of the story. Anyone who doubts the importance and social relevance of true crime writing might begin their reading here.
Like much of McNamee’s work, his new novel is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The bureau of the title is a ‘bureau de change’, where the shopkeepers and business owners who trade either side of the Irish border can exchange currency. This is only the surface layer of what goes on there, however. The bureau’s main business is in laundering the profits made from the less salubrious smuggling enterprises that form part of the natural ecosystem of the borderland, anything from cigarettes and alcohol to unlicensed diesel to human beings. The men who run the border trade are in permanent danger of death both from each other and from more serious criminals higher up the chain. The women involved with these men – whether wives or lovers – are on a hiding to nothing.
‘My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them,’ McNamee says. ‘In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family.’ Brendan McNamee is a solicitor. He opened the bureau after being struck off for embezzling funds. The clients he serves now are not the kind of people you would want to cross and it is not just Brendan who will be in the firing line if he oversteps his mark. On the other side of the counter is Paddy Farrell, who dreams of living ‘a sophisticated life’ in Florida or in Dublin, but who is unable to escape the pull of the border and the shadow life he lives there. Lorraine, a young woman whose intense and morbid spirituality seems at odds with her passionate physical desire for Paddy, longs for a time when the hostilities and underlying trauma of the border years will be behind them – except they never will be.
The events McNamee is writing about happened long before most newspapers began to be digitised and so to properly align fact with fiction you would have to consult the archives of the regional papers, as McNamee quotes them, or know your sources first hand, as McNamee does. If you’re as into this kind of literary mapping as I am, you can at least give yourself a virtual tour of the novel’s locations, glimpse the tracery of minor roads that are the back-ways across the border, see the hills and the forest laybys where deals were transacted, the churchyards, streets and houses where these people lived and died. The distance between Newry and Dundalk is about twenty miles via the main border crossing; in terms of what those miles once represented they span two different worlds.
The border is a liminal space, an uncanny valley between the two.
But The Bureau is not a history book, it is a novel; it’s interesting to wonder about the armature of facts on which this novel is based, but it’s by no means essential. Any book must stand or fall on its own internal merits, on its value as text, and it is as text that The Bureau shines brightest, that it lives in the mind. The Bureau is a poem in prose. From start to finish it holds the reader in a state of tension, of uneasy apprehension of what they know from the opening pages will be the final deadly outcome. Yet there is rapture, too – the inspiration and satisfaction one draws from being in the presence of a great work of art.
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
The vagrant dark. The streets and avenues of a burned-out city. The power and beauty of McNamee’s image-making so in tune with his subject matter. His grasp of darkness and of weather, both internal and external.
You want to place other people in the room. Shadowy figures. This was the era of shadows. This was the time when people disappeared without warning. This was the time of unexplained shootings, of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread. This was the border. There were set-ups, double-crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency, the game seen far into the future, the deep tradecraft.
It is often tempting to think of history as having moved on, but it is never that simple. Echoes remain, ripples spread, and in any case, history is not linear but cyclical. When someone asks what writing is for me I speak about my fear of time passing, my obsession with nailing memory into place and this would seem to be McNamee’s mission, too. To not forget. To say: this is how it was, this is what we went through. This is what we remember.
The novel that kept resurfacing in my mind while I was reading The Bureau was Death and Nightingales, by Eugene McCabe. Because both seem equally perfect, equally poised between rapture and terror, equally haunted. McCabe’s novel is set a hundred years before The Bureau and acts almost as a foreshadowing. The sense of place, so much an active element of both novels, is another point of union between them.
Reading a novel like The Bureau reminds me of what I am doing, or at least attempting. Writing as good as this is hard to find, but when you do, you feel grateful, you feel replenished. This is what’s possible, this is what it’s about. You know you’ll never be as good but you’re determined to try.
Speaking about the art and craft of historical fiction
in 2017, Hilary Mantel said she became a novelist because she had believed that
it was too late for her to become a historian. When her first, monumental work
about the French Revolution failed to find a publisher, she turned her
attention instead to stories with a tighter focus, a more restricted circle of
characters. But her reason for writing – and her way of thinking about history
– remained unaltered. ‘The historian and the biographer follow a trail of
evidence, usually a paper trail,’ Mantel explains. ‘The novelist does that too,
and then performs another act: puts the past back into process, into action,
frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their
fates, with all their mistakes unmade.’
The same words might be said – might especially be said – of the novelist who chooses to base their work around the story of a crime that really happened. True crime is simply history as viewed through a particular lens, and as Mantel herself vividly argues, the historical record can only ever be partial. The reader looks to the novelist more as a companion than as a teacher, someone willing to accompany them on their journey into the past. Someone who will put the questions they themselves might ask.
There is some marvellous true
crime writing out there: books that reconstruct trials, that pick apart police investigations,
that interrogate the psychology of criminals and investigate their background. There
are books that help us come to know the victims and to honour their memories. Some
of these books are factual reconstructions, some are investigative journalism.
Others are novels. In writing A Granite Silence I knew from the beginning that
I wanted to use my skills as a novelist to take the reader back in time, to lead
them to the street where the crime took place, to allow them to know the people
who lived there as if they were their neighbours. I wanted to be free to glance
off to one side, to let my imagination wander, to think about people whose
lives are missing from the historical record.
True crime novelists, like
historians, are passionate about the question of what really happened. I find
constant inspiration in the work of those writers who have felt drawn to certain
stories, who have followed them into the crannies behind the headlines. Writers
who find their own way of telling the truth. Here are thirteen of them.
Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins (1934). Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist, an historian and a
biographer. She also wrote two important works of true crime fiction, which
deserve to be better known. Harriet is an imaginative reconstruction of the
so-called Penge Murder of 1877 in which four people conspired to cause the
death of a vulnerable woman, Harriet Richardson, and her young child Tommy.
Harriet, who had learning difficulties, had been left a large sum of money by
an aunt – money Louis Staunton, a friend of the family, was keen to get his
hands on. What happened to Harriet was horrific; it was also as complicated,
unlikely and bizarre as the plot of any opera. Jenkins, who was born in 1905, remembered
people still talking about the case fifty years after it happened. She tells Harriet’s
desperate and enthralling story with precision, insight and empathy.
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934). When Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were
jointly accused of murdering Edith’s husband Percy in 1922, the case caught the
public imagination to such an extent that it dominated the newspaper headlines
for many weeks. A hundred years later and more, it is still exciting debate. In
her fictional recreation of the ‘Ilford Murder’, Fryn Tennyson Jesse’s
protagonist is Julia Starling, a young woman from a lower middle class
background who marries deadly dull Herbert and finds herself falling for Leo, a
young airman. With Leo often away on duty, Julia pours all of her
dissatisfaction and longing into her letters. She begins to entertain fantasies
of killing Herbert, and when the fantasy becomes a reality her letters turn
into a weapon to be used against her. Fryn Tennyson Jesse – a great-niece of
the poet – had a lifelong interest in true crime. Her 1924 book Murder and its
Motives is still in print, and she wrote introductions to six of the Notable
British Trials series, including the notorious trial of Timothy Evans and John
Christie in 1957. She was a remarkable writer, whose journalism took her into
war reporting and whose novelistic imagination surely made her identify with
Edith Thompson, a woman whose ‘trial by media’ saw her executed on no other
evidence than the fantasies of murder she had written down.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966). This is the one novel that inevitably crops up on
every true crime reading list. There’s a reason for that, which is that it
really is as good as everyone says, a book that anyone with an interest in true
crime would have to read. Capote’s novel is often credited with being the first
of its kind, which isn’t strictly true. What is true is that in Capote’s hands,
this account of a Midwestern farming family and their murder at the hands of
two disaffected young criminals attains the dimensions of classical tragedy.
Capote has been accused of displaying too much sympathy for the murderers and insufficient
attention to their victims, but I suspect that at least some of those who have
said this have not read the book. What we get from Capote is restraint,
empathy, a measured objectivity and just brilliant writing.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979). It’s not difficult to trace the lineage from
Capote’s In Cold Blood to Mailer’s magnum opus, which in its turn was the
direct inspiration for Gordon Burn’s book about Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s
Husband, Somebody’s Son. Mailer’s novel tells the story of Gary Gilmore, a
convicted armed robber who went on to commit two murders and who was the first
person to be executed in the US following a moratorium on the death penalty
that had lasted almost a decade. Like Capote, Mailer went directly to the
source, interviewing friends, family and associates of Gilmore as well as
police and legal counsel. His coverage of the trial and the debate around the
death penalty – Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence – could have been a book
in itself. I was only ten when Gilmore was executed but I have vivid memories
of the headline news – indeed this was almost certainly my first and horrified
realization of the fact that executions could still happen outside of the
history books.
Mary Swann by Carol Shields (1987). An innovative, densely textured novel that makes use
of both poetry and playscript, Mary Swann is the story of a ‘lost’ Canadian
poet who grew up poor in rural Canada and whose death at the age of forty
remains a mystery. The novel examines the effect of the poet’s life and death
on various individuals in her orbit, including her would-be biographer and a
shy provincial librarian. Shields wrote Mary Swann as a homage to the Vancouver
poet Pat Lowther, who was brutally murdered by her husband Roy in 1975. Pat
Lowther was prodigiously talented – her first poem was published in a local
newspaper when she was ten. Roy was a failed poet, and bitterly jealous of his
wife’s growing success. According to his daughter from a previous marriage, he
was also violent and extremely troubled. With its literary theme, innovative
form and embedded sense of mystery, Mary Swann was one of the novels that first
awakened my interest in writing based around true events.
Libra by Don DeLillo (1988). There is a forensic quality to all of DeLillo’s
writing, a pared-back brilliance that makes it a natural fit for true crime
subjects, and here in Libra we get his take on one of the biggest. The
assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 has probably spawned more
words on paper than any other murder (with the possible exception of Jesus of
Nazareth) but DeLillo’s deep dive into the mind and chequered history of Lee
Harvey Oswald is remarkable for very deliberately blending historical fact with
imagined scenarios. DeLillo shows how the assassination could have happened –
whilst maintaining his own stated belief that the truth behind Kennedy’s murder
is most likely lost to history. Unsurprisingly, Libra generated plenty of controversy
in the US. A review in the Washington Post accused DeLillo of being a bad
citizen. ‘If novelists are bad citizens,’ DeLillo countered, ‘we’re doing our
job.’ He gets my vote every time.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). The Grace of the title is Grace Marks, a servant in
the house of Canadian farmer and landowner Thomas Kinnear. In July 1843,
Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, with whom he was having an
affair, were shot and bludgeoned to death by James McDermott, another servant
of the house and Grace’s lover. McDermott and Marks fled to the US, where they
were soon apprehended. Both were convicted, though Marks was spared the death
penalty. Before he was hanged, McDermott made a statement blaming Grace for the
crimes, insisting that she was the ‘evil genius’ behind the plan, and that she
had feigned madness in order to escape the gallows. Atwood’s novel takes place
after the murders. Grace has been committed to an asylum and is something of a
cause celebre. A doctor, Simon Jordan, is determined to win Grace’s confidence
and to discover the truth: was Grace involved in the murders, or not? In the
novel, as in life, the question remains unresolved.
Red Riding quartet by David Peace (1999 – 2002). Peace’s first four published novels take place
against the background of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with the investigating
police force revealed as corrupt, inefficient, and riven by internal feuds. Some
characters keep returning from book to book; others are killed off, their
deaths a warning to anyone trying to discover who was responsible. Peace’s
language is bold, stark, uncompromising, as is his portrait of the social and
political landscape that formed the backdrop to his own adolescence. It’s
difficult to overstate the impact these books had on me when I first read them,
most of all for their subverting of crime genre stereotypes. Peace does not
offer any of the comforts of traditional crime fiction. What he offers is
brilliant writing and an honesty about the nature of violence and the impact of
poverty that few writers have matched.
Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn(2008). Though Gordon Burn’s career was cut
tragically short – he died of cancer in 2009 at the age of sixty-one – the
books he left behind have been powerfully influential. To write his 1984 book
on the Yorkshire Ripper, Burn spent most of two years living in Sutcliffe’s
home town, getting to know his friends and family in order to gain an authentic
insight into his background. Burn’s later book about Fred and Rosemary West,
Happy Like Murderers, saw him immersing himself in trial transcripts, police
interviews and many other other first-hand accounts. Researching this horrific material
had a severe impact on Burn’s mental health, and he said he would never write
another true crime book. His final novel, Born Yesterday is the closest he came
to revisiting the territory, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a single year – 2007 –
and the news events that defined it, most notably the abduction and
disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Burn said that he hoped the novel might give
future readers a sense of how the raw material of news gets refashioned as
history. It is a remarkable achievement. I have read this book several times
now and am still hypnotized by it.
The Kills by Richard House (2013). In the vastness and complexity of its structure –
four standalone novels that combine to create a single overarching narrative –
The Kills bears comparison with David Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There are
plenty of murders in The Kills, but the true crime being examined is the
political chicanery, economic exploitation and environmental vandalism
perpetrated by US-government-backed big business in the aftermath of the Iraq
war. The ‘War on Terror’ kickstarted by 9/11 is revealed as a free-for-all in
which the only working currencies are money and violence. As well as being a
masterpiece of formal invention, The Kills is a thrilling, disquieting,
thought-provoking piece of fiction that reveals bitter truths about our own
time.
Dead Girls by Selva Almada translated by Annie
McDermott (2020). Roberto
Bolano’s 2004 novel 2666 was one of the first to openly address the crime of
femicide in Latin America. Since Bolano we have seen pioneering work in true
crime writing by Laura Restrepo, Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and
Cristina Rivera Garza among others. In Dead Girls, Selva Almada concentrates
her attention on three young Argentinian women who were murdered for their
gender in the 1980s, exploring their backgrounds and circumstances as well as
the political backdrop against which their killings took place. Almada is one
of a brilliant new generation of South American writers whose approach,
blending journalistic with fictional techniques, has brought new energy and
viewpoints into contemporary true crime writing.
The Treatment by Michael Nath (2020). Here is a novel that shows what is possible when
fact and fiction come together in the mind of a writer whose imagination is as
fertile as his talent with words. Nath bases The Treatment around the Stephen
Lawrence Inquiry and the decades-long struggle to unmask institutionalized
racism within the Metropolitan Police. A journalist, Carl Hyatt, has been fired
from the broadsheet he worked for after his investigation into a corrupt
property developer risks getting them sued. He’s been forced to take a job with
the Chronicle, a free-ads paper. But in spite of promising his wife that he’ll
stay away from the story, Carl’s obsession with uncovering the truth is about
to lead him and those he cares about into mortal danger. The Treatment is a
postmodern take on the Elizabethan revenge drama, delivered in a bravura mix of
poetry, street slang and Multicultural London English. Nath exercises superb
command of his material in a novel that demands a second reading to fully
appreciate its inventiveness.
Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates (2023). Oates has frequently takes inspiration for her work
from true crimes, and the background to Babysitter is a series of unsolved
child murders that took place in Detroit in the mid-1970s. The novel follows
Hannah, the wife of a rich but rather dull businessman. She begins an affair
with a total stranger, who refuses to reveal anything about his background or
even his real name. He is powerful, controlling and violently unpredictable –
but for Hannah that is part of the attraction. Oates’s narrative is
multi-stranded, with Hannah only gradually becoming alive to what is going on in
her own neighbourhood. Babysitter is brilliantly imagined and richly characterised,
with a genuine sense of menace. Keeping the external events at one remove –
glimpsed from the corner of the eye – gives the reader a queasy and increasing
awareness of the danger Hannah is in.
I’m reading Helen Garner’s diary at the moment, or
rather her diaries, the three volumes recently released in the UK as a compendium,
beginning soon after the publication of her first novel Monkey Grip in 1978 and
carrying us through to the late 1990s. I’m currently in the middle of the
eighties, just after the publication of perhaps her best-known work The
Children’s Bach, which more or less coincides with the end of her second
marriage. People talk about the clarity of her gaze, her merciless
self-scrutiny and while all of that is true, what strikes me again and again is
the calibre of her ambition, her genuine terror that she might not live up to her
own high standards. She compares herself constantly with other writers and
finds herself wanting, a necessary discipline that does not in the least
diminish her ever-present joy in the practice of reading.
Even in the midst of life – and hers is an immensely social life, a tangled mass of friendships and rivalries and love affairs and motherhood – writing is central. She never seeks to downplay its importance and how I love her for that. I don’t believe in keeping writing stashed at the back of the cupboard, something that is done in spite of. Writing is because.
Garner has arranged her diaries as a series of vignettes. Only the years are given as a guide to where we are in her life. Individual entries are undated. They are like film stills, a pile of postcards, or photographs. You turn them over, one at a time. The year gradually accrues not through numbers but through narrative glimpses. Jump cuts. Sudden revelations. A life to lose yourself in. As I read I keep thinking about how Garner is now in her eighties and so I worry about her. I don’t want to lose her from this world, to lose this voice, this edgy, bracing, self-critical, fearlessly life-loving presence.
I know in advance that this volume will end with only one of Garner’s book-length works of narrative non-fiction out in the world: The First Stone, which was published in 1995. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014) will still be ahead of her. But even from where I am now in the 1980s, the qualities that make her a great writer of true crime – the acuity of observation, the rapacious curiosity, a quality of objectivity and a relentless capacity for asking questions, not only of others but especially of self – are nailed into place.
A surety of line, the apparently effortless ability to make ordinary language carry a meaning and a beauty that rises above itself. Garner, for all her fears to the contrary, is a great writer, period.
The first book of Garner’s I read was This House of Grief, which follows the trial of Robert Farquharson, accused in 2005 of killing his three sons by deliberately driving the car in which they were travelling into a reservoir. Less than a year earlier, Farquharson’s wife Cindy had left him, and Farquharson had become increasingly depressed and resentful as a result. The series of trials that led to Farquharson’s conviction took seven years to unfold, and Garner was present in the courtroom for every hearing. This House of Grief has, perhaps inevitably, been compared with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But it’s a very different book. Capote’s genius is in excising himself from the text entirely – except in the matter of the quality of his writing. Garner is there. She reveals not only the story but her process in telling it. She speaks and sometimes argues with others who are present, reporting their interactions in intimate detail. Like Capote, she finds herself becoming drawn into the circle of relatives and family friends who have been directly affected by the case. But where Capote rode out the emotional impact of such personal involvement in private, Garner’s difficulties and doubts are made plain in the text, becoming an inalienable part of the story she is telling. She asks the questions we ourselves might want to ask, often remaining openly uncertain about the answers she is given.
There is a perfection to Capote’s work that is somehow unassailable; Garner’s has an immediacy that arises from its openness to scrutiny, through its expressions of doubt, not only about casting judgement but, on occasion, about the whole enterprise.
As with her frank and self-searching account of a sexual harassment case in The First Stone, some critics found fault with Garner for not paying sufficient attention to the gender-specific aspects of the Farquharson case, most especially the nature and repetitive frequency of male violence. But one of the qualities I value most in Garner is that she has never been interested in filtering her observations or her writing through an ideological lens. She is interested in people and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. Most of all she is interested in discovering the truth of what really happened.
This House of Grief had a
powerful impact on me, not just in the shocking, harrowing story it was telling
but in the way it was written. True crime literature has come in for censure –
and I mean always, not just right now – for being exploitative, prurient,
manipulative and even immoral. I would maintain that this is not a problem of
content but of style. If you reach for cliches you will find your narrative
lacking in nuance, in objectivity, in accurate reasoning. In any kind of
storytelling but most of all when you are dealing in facts – especially painful
facts, especially disputed facts – the chief responsibility of the
writer is to strive for language that adequately conveys the nature of what is
being described.
Exploitative true crime is not
so much immoral as badly written. The work of a writer like Helen Garner is the
antidote, the antithesis. In revealing to us the conflicted, contradictory and
hard-to-discover facts and abiding contradictions of this terrible case she
reveals to us ourselves, the extent of our prejudices, the divided nature of
the society we live in.
On the day I started writing this, I read an interview in the Guardian with the writer Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold rightly gained attention for her 2019 book The Five, in which she re-examines the lives and circumstances of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper. In shifting the attention away from the women’s killer, she created a compelling new model for true crime literature as well as providing insight into a society that – sometimes subtly, often not at all subtly – insisted that murdered women were to some extent responsible for their own violent deaths. A hundred years later, the same set of attitudes became a determining factor in the botched police investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. If anything proves the need for the shift in thinking Rubenhold is advocating it is surely this. And yet – proving her own point – she ended up becoming the target of online abuse by ‘Ripperologists’, that peculiar subset of true crime enthusiasts who concern themselves with the unsolved (and now unsolvable) mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Certain extreme fringes of the
fraternity were incensed, it seems, by all kinds of things: that Rubenhold was
not sufficiently immersed in the ‘science’ of Ripperology for her opinion to
have any currency; that she ‘hated sex workers’ because she insisted on
undertaking a more nuanced (and factually accurate) examination of the victims’
backgrounds; that she dared to suggest that it didn’t matter all that much,
actually, who the Ripper was.
They’re a funny bunch, Ripperologists. I’m not going to castigate them for their weird enthusiasm – or only those who go in for online harassment – because to an extent at least I get it. In every writer of true crime there is at least a little of the obsessive, a little of the Ripperologist. What I don’t get is: why Jack? Seriously, guys, we are never going to know. Move on. Rubenhold herself has moved on. Her new book, Story of a Murder, focuses on a crime that took place decades later but that commanded equal column inches at the time. Dr Crippen was often reported in the press as a ‘mild-mannered murderer’; through focusing once again on his victim(s), Rubenhold is intent on showing us that he was no such thing. That indeed there is no such thing.
Rubenhold has some fascinating things to say in her interview about true crime generally. ‘I’m not interested in straight true crime,’ she insists. ‘I’m interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I’m fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I’m looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.’
I find all this deeply relatable. In writing A Granite Silence, the stuff I kept coming back to was the quotidian detail and circumstance of ordinary lives. The first witnesses called in the trial of Jeannie Donald were working people – a lamplighter, a gas worker, a baker – who happened to be up and about on the street in question before anyone else. I kept coming back to these people – the slaters, the rag-and-bone men and especially the lamplighters. Their trade does not even exist now yet in 1934 it was still part of the normal street scene. Such details – like the items of furniture in a room I describe in the first pages of the novel – are luminous to me because they give us an insight into history as it is lived. To quote Rubenhold again, ‘that’s where the story is – it’s about people’s experience.’
I would add though that I think we need to be honest about our attraction to these kinds of stories. There’s a section of the commentariat that insists the current ‘obsession’ with true crime is a new thing, a toxic byproduct of capitalism, or celebrity culture, or (most popularly and inevitably) the internet. But that simply isn’t true. Going back to Jack the Ripper (if we must) the police file of bogus witness statements, prurient and salacious rumour-mongering, false sightings and – yes – dozens of people claiming to be the Ripper is as thick as any amount of similar correspondence they might receive today. Ditto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, two full decades before widespread internet use. And the public fascination with high-profile murder cases goes back well before either.
There are many theories
as to why that might be. I tend towards the belief that there is something
mythic about these stories, something we recognise as being common to all of
us. We draw together instinctively behind the headlines in sorrow for the
victim, fear of the killer and fascination with the mystery. We feel horror at
the violence and a sense of helplessness at the suffering of those left behind.
We feel something else, too, something harder to describe. Not excitement so
much as déjà vu. These crimes lay bare our fears, our vulnerabilities. We want
to read about them because they are part of the definition of who we are.
I know all this, because I feel it, too. It is why I am drawn to write about such things.
In her truly excellent book Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe suggests that there are in fact four distinct categories of true crime junkie: those who identify with the victim, those who seek for justice, those who cast themselves in the role of detective and those – a very small group – who see themselves in the killer. Monroe gives potent examples from each category. I find her arguments convincing and compelling and for the record, as both reader and writer I would put myself firmly in the detective camp. I would also say about myself as a writer that I recognise and respond to the powerful energy of the mystery template in fiction and especially in non-fiction, that relentlessly nagging question: what really happened?
Personally, I don’t find anything wrong in this. How a reader – or a writer – relates and responds to true crime stories is a personal matter, the business of their own conscience. For me, that business depends on providing suitably persuasive answers to the question of why I am interested in a particular story, what I can bring to my account of it that might justify and make sense of that interest in literary terms. There have been moments – quite a few of them – in the last twelve months when I have doubted my ability and my desire to work in this field again. But then I have asked myself: what if I am good at it? What if I cannot, now, imagine doing anything else?
In her interview for the Guardian, Hallie Rubenhold reveals that her mother died while she was working on Story of a Murder. ‘It really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives,’ she says. ‘Because there’s a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end. This is your time. And that’s it.’
Her words for me are powerfully resonant, a true reflection of my own motivations in deciding to focus my attention on this kind of story.
FIVE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF TRUE CRIME WRITTEN BY WOMEN
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
(1990)
‘[The journalist] is a kind of confidence man, preying
on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying
them without remorse.’ So opens Janet Malcolm’s interrogation of the ethics of
journalism, and true crime journalism in particular. The journalist, Joe
McGinniss, befriended and gained the confidence of the murderer, Jeffrey
MacDonald, in order to write his bestselling 1983 book Fatal Vision. MacDonald quickly
came to see McGinniss as his ‘man on the outside’ and possibly a route to being
exonerated. Needless to say he was very, very wrong. Malcolm’s book is itself a
kind of true crime narrative, brilliantly written and with a deeply personal
understanding of what is at stake.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson (2007)
Nelson’s
aunt Jane was murdered in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, while she was still a
student. No one was convicted of the crime. The tragedy had always been there
in Nelson’s background, but it wasn’t until 2005 that she addressed it in
writing. Jane: A Murder is a hybrid work that includes poetry, prose and
reportage to tell Jane’s story and to recover her identity from that of ‘murder
victim’. The Red Parts is the continuation of that story some thirty-six years
later, when a new suspect is identified and finally brought to trial. Nelson is
a writer of powerful originality and both these books offer radical new
perspectives on true crime as the subject of literature.
The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Ann Lee
(2015)
Carol Ann Lee is a historian and biographer who has
written on a number of true crime subjects, including Myra Hindley and Ruth Ellis.
The Murders at White House Farm is her exhaustive investigation of the 1985 Jeremy
Bamber case, in which the then twenty-four-year-old Bamber was ultimately charged
with the murders by shooting of five close relatives including his six-year-old
twin nephews. Bamber continues to protest his innocence, now as then blaming his
sister Sheila Caffell for the killings. This is one of those cases that now
appears to be unsolvable. The only person still alive who knows the truth is
Bamber himself – the ultimate unreliable narrator. Lee’s account, like all her
work, is quiet, methodical, beautifully written and open to all arguments. Her
careful reconstruction of the character, background, personal problems and
appalling media portrayal of Sheila Caffell makes this book doubly worthwhile.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (2018)
As well as being the most problematic, serial killers
are for me the least interesting subjects of true crime literature – these men
are violent, small-minded, narcissistic misogynists, end of. For this reason I
read very few serial-killer-related narratives, especially US ones. Michelle
McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is the exception, a book that proves that any
subject can be a worthy subject if the writer is sincerely motivated and equal
to the task. McNamara made it her life’s work to discover the identity of the Golden
State Killer, a notorious rapist and murderer who committed his horrific crimes
throughout California during the seventies and eighties. McNamara died in 2016
with her book still unfinished and the killer still uncaught. The manuscript
was brought to completion by McNamara’s husband, together with an investigative
journalist and a true crime writer. The resulting book became an instant
bestseller and recharged the continuing cold case with some much needed
publicity. The murderer – a retired cop – was finally brought to justice just
two months after the book’s publication.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza
(2023)
Rivera
Garza’s sister Liliana was murdered in Mexico in 1990. She was just twenty
years old. Though the killer’s identity was widely known, he was never arrested.
Some thirty years later, Rivera Garza attempts to gain access to the files that
were kept on the case. Unwilling to expose themselves to scrutiny or criticism,
the police prove to be an active impediment in her search for justice. Rivera
Garza’s formally inventive and searching memoir examines the official response
to the crime of femicide in Mexico amidst the systemic problems of entrenched
machismo and a failure to understand or even recognise the increasing phenomenon
of intimate partner violence. It is also a joyful, defiant celebration of
Liliana herself, a young woman who, one feels instinctively, would be the first
to admire the book that bears her name.
It is now just a little over two weeks before the publication of my new novel A Granite Silence. In the run-up to that, I would like to talk a little more about the background to this work – what inspired it, what it means for me as a writer. The question I have been asked a lot about this book already is: what is it? Is it historical fiction, is it true crime, are there any speculative elements involved? The simple answer is yes, yes and yes, but there’s nothing simple about this book, nor what led me to write it. A Granite Silence feels like a significant milestone for me as a writer. At the same time, it is a novel I have been gearing myself up to write for many years. Here’s an essay I wrote about that journey.
*
READING PEACE, WRITING GRANITE
‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as
the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished
United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak,
a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not
fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup,
the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad?
Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the
Final!’
My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it
happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it
to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked
about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United.
The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been.
But she remembered Munich.
On the afternoon of February 6th 1958, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover.
At the time of the Munich Air
Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to
be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at
Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though
Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he
talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had
been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of
its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly –
about grief.
British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home.
Peace evokes a world in which
it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone,
where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially
working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where
young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch
winning matches just a fortnight later.
When you look at photos of Matt
Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of
those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma
counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about
what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day
chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they
burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie
Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly
injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised
flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.
There are intimations in Munichs
of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the
crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team
more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt
Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place.
In some ways, what happened at
Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more
open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater
freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on
moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time,
and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where
Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the
Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after
Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that?
There has to be something in
this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all
about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in
the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than
most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The
funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever
had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men
died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could
never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing.
There is also the broader
question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for
years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British
European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was
a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned
thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of
vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for
someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their
backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at
fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not
long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.
I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about
this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in
my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened.
Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an
evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures
the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal,
personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace
himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of
those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his
father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been
cut short.
Peace’s present tense
narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’
families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper
reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate
management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival
teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers,
even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening
pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have
more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning
of the novel’s title.
Peace never feels the need to
use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay,
so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary
words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines,
the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what
is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the
heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets
when they are put together in a particular way.
Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a
battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual,
repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all
of the Dead, including his dad.
*
I kept reading around David Peace before I actually
read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to
what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books
had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of
particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the
feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime
was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK
to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime
novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were
serious, at least if you had taste.
Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’
I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter.
Neither could I help noticing
that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho,
in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy.
James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to
get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care
about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with
Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve.
I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with.
I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.
*
In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet
up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just
being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed
home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast
Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely
delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions.
“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news.
“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.
*
From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford –
Silence
in the black of the back of the van –
Dim
lights down black back roads –
Sat in
the back of the black of the van –
Yorkshire,
1972:
You’ll
wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before.
When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so
with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the
Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition,
though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps
he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But
whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted
Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not
to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written
earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the
story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a
time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some
sense formed it.
He brought to it also some of
the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers,
whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection:
Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of
Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And
there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that
marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the
sequence moves forward.
The material by itself is
challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered
police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional
detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic
effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red
Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking
is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s
language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in
places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially
gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows,
staining the paper like mould.
You can feel it being written.
*
I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English
class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I
had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry.
She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the
advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I
knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a
country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar
landscape.
I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
There was something about Eliot’s
images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know
the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material,
even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very
different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform
another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that
Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also
visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.
As an adolescent, Peace
harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his
mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you
are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep
noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.
Finding a path towards your
material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based
around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A
Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe
in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different.
Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative
as it developed.
Every novel is a set of
problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have
solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have
will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that
a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The
chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away.
И падали два башмачка Со стуком на пол. И воск слезами с ночника На платье капал.
И все терялось в снежной мгле Седой и белой. Свеча горела на столе, Свеча горела.
На свечку дуло из угла, И жар соблазна Вздымал, как ангел, два крыла Крестообразно.
Мело весь месяц в феврале, И то и дело Свеча горела на столе, Свеча горела.
*
{Snow fell and fell across the world fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned as midges in summer swarm to the flame so the snowflakes swarmed to the doorstep and to the window frame the blizzard scratched upon the pane circles and spears a candle burned on the table a candle burned upon the lighted ceiling the shadows locked crossed arms crossed feet crossed fate as two shoes fell to the floor from the bed so the tears of wax from the candle dripped on the cast-off dress and all was lost in the greyish gloom a candle burned on the table a candle burned and when the flame flickered in the icy draught love’s heat raised it up again wings crossed like an angel’s all through the month of February the snow fell then and ever a candle burned on the table a candle burned.)
One of my final reads of last year was Julia
Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a book I’d long been meaning to
catch up with and which, in a year dominated by books about grief, turned out
to be one of the most powerfully original treatments of the subject I
encountered. Armfield’s second novel Private Rites – one of my first reads of
this new year – is as powerful in its own way as Our Wives, as technically well
achieved and is if anything even more daring in its use of speculative
materials.
Private Rites is a novel of a near future in which climate change has fundamentally altered the rhythms and expectations of everyday reality. Rain falls incessantly, weakening the physical structure of the built environment and devastating the agricultural landscape. Power outages and a general scarcity of goods have become the norm. Isla Carmichael, a psychotherapist, is determined that the life and career she has made for herself should continue as before. Her sister Irene lives in her sister’s shadow, resentful and regretful that her own academic ambitions were thwarted by the unfolding climate disaster. Their younger half-sister Agnes, mysteriously abandoned by her mother when she was still an infant, lives pragmatically from day to day, rarely in touch with her siblings and seemingly unable to form meaningful relationships with anyone. As the novel opens, the sisters have been forced together to organize the funeral of their father, a famous architect. Brilliant and utterly ruthless, he has left his mark on every aspect of their lives, most of all in separating them so decisively from each other.
I’ve seen Private Rites compared with Shakespeare’s King Lear – three conflicted sisters, one mad father, one dubious inheritance – and the influence of Lear’s structure and family dynamic is certainly apparent. In its forensic examination of the corrosive effects on siblings (and especially half-siblings) of growing up under the dominance of a divisive, ultra-powerful parent, the novel will no doubt also be made to stand alongside the US TV drama Succession. None of this is to the bad – these are stellar examples to be set against. In the case of Succession especially, I would point to the character writing – the paring-apart of the relationships between those siblings – as the most relevant comparator. In talking about Succession with others I have frequently been surprised to hear people speak of the Roy siblings as ‘all awful!’ because – and this entirely on account of that magisterial characterisation, which reveals each sibling’s personality and predicament in unsparing totality – I came to love them all.
The same can be said of Isla,
Irene and Agnes in Private Rites. Armfield openly points to her characters as
being ‘unlikeable’ – whilst in the same moment revealing through the feelings
and thoughts of those who do love them how they are equally unsparing of
self and vulnerable to hurt.
But Armfield is talking about
more than family feuds. As a novel about climate change, Private Rites is
impressive on several levels. In its imagining of a partially submerged London,
navigable only by ferries and ‘water taxis’, comparisons will inevitably be
drawn with Ballard’s The Drowned World, though I for one don’t find them especially
useful. Ballard, who used the form of the disaster novel as a frame through
which to observe the human psyche, was never particularly interested in the natural
environment other than as a tool in his imaginative lexicon; Armfield, writing
at a distance of sixty years and from an entirely different vantage point, employs
the language and imagery of climate change not as a backdrop but as her novel’s
central and most urgent subject matter. Here is a world in which the most
socially disadvantaged communities are left – literally – floundering. Here is
a world in which your neighbour’s house and then your own might – literally –
slide underwater in the aftermath of the most recent downpour.
Though it spends
three-quarters of its length examining them, Private Rites ultimately dismisses
the sisters’ squabbles and even their trauma as secondary issues, vanished in
less than a second in the face of a greater and more universal catastrophe. As
the novel nears its end, Armfield takes an enormous risk. ‘It’s the wrong
genre’, one sister protests, as the action appears to veer off the main highway,
screech-turning instead into a dark thoroughfare clogged with rubbish and
simmering with violence. Armfield has done her foreshadowing – note the symbolism
of The Omen, the passing mention of Sergeant Howie’s misguided search for Rowan
Morrison in The Wicker Man, the reference to Auden’s poem on Breughel’s The
Fall of Icarus, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – but it’s so subtle we do not realise
its full significance until later. Nonetheless, and though I spent some time
after finishing the novel wondering if Armfield’s rug-pull was an act of
madness or a stroke of genius, I came down on the side of the latter, and her
rash and strange denouement feels fully earned.
More than that, it transforms
the book at a stroke from a novel set in a time of climate change to a
novel that tackles the subject of climate change as its core subject
matter. From a novel that uses speculative materials to a novel of science
fiction, a metaphor for itself. The choice Irene and Isla make at the end – an
almost instantaneous renunciation of the past in an acceptance of a future that
must be shared, no matter what it looks like or who gets to see it – also had
me thinking about a much older work of science fiction, one that affected me
deeply when I first read it, but that resolves a similar point of crisis in the
opposite direction.
Ward Moore’s story ‘Lot’ was first published in The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953, and it is distinctly strange for
me to realise that this seminal piece of short fiction is now more than seventy
years old. I first encountered it around 1980, in the Penguin Science Fiction
Omnibus, edited by Brian Aldiss and one of my set texts for English Literature
‘O’ Level. This volume – a compendium of three successive SF anthologies Aldiss
edited for Penguin in the 1960s – was published in 1973, and was the book that
first made me fully aware of ‘science fiction’ as a distinct category, a type
of fiction that had its own specifically definable characteristics and that
could be discussed, if one so chose, wholly within and with reference to those
parameters.
This was the volume that introduced me to Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, Frederik Pohl’s ‘The Tunnel Under the World’, Algis Budrys’s ‘The End of Summer’, Tom Godwin’s ‘The Greater Thing’ and Robert Sheckley’s ‘The Store of the Worlds’. Already I gravitated naturally to science fiction stories that emphasised realistic background detail and strong characterization – my first taste of Ballard, via the astringent ‘Track 12’, left me mystified and mostly indifferent – and it was for this reason that of all the stories in the omnibus it was ‘Lot’, with its Biblical connotations and vividly evoked quotidian setting, that made the strongest and most lasting impression.
‘Lot’ is classic Cold War science fiction of the 1950s. The protagonist is David Jimmon, a Los Angeles insurance salesman with a wife, Molly, and three children: David Junior (known as Jir), Erika, and Wendell. As the story opens, they are about to leave their home in Malibu for an uncertain future. A nuclear strike on the USA a few days earlier has devastated Pittsburgh. A second missile has recently detonated further down the coast. Jimmon, who values ‘foresight’ above all else, has made plans to take his family north, loading their station wagon with enough basic provisions to give at least a chance of life in a brutal new world where ‘the docile mass perished, the headstrong (but intelligent) individual survived’.
I remember my ‘O’ Level essay about the story in which I used quotes to demonstrate how Moore illustrates the widening gulf between the world inside the car and the reality outside by pitting trivial domestic arguments against the fragments of news that emerge in fits and starts from the Jimmons’ car radio. Molly Jimmon is unable to fully accept the finality of what is happening, a failure of imagination that leaves her husband struggling to retain his composure. As they inch their way up the traffic-jammed Interstate, David Jimmon comes increasingly to see both Molly and his two sons as ‘dependent. Helpless. Everything on him. Parasites.’
Jimmon’s sexism is deeply ingrained but with US science fiction of this era that is pretty much par for the course. What raises ‘Lot’ above the watermark is its attention to detail. Moore’s skilful depiction of an average American family confronted with a crisis they are not equipped to deal with makes the disaster on the horizon all the more real. Even today, the story is devastating, claustrophobic, the sense of panic palpable. It brings back a lot of memories, both of my own early reading of SF and the fear of nuclear war that still persisted well into the eighties.
‘Lot’ is a fine piece of
writing, showcasing some of the central themes and concerns of 1950s SF. It is
also fascinating for what it reveals about the author’s own attitudes. For a
large part of the story, Moore appears to be ‘with’ David Jimmon in his rising
contempt for Molly and the two boys. But Jimmon’s final decision to abscond
with Erika, leaving the rest of his family stranded at a gas station is clearly
intended to be shocking – most of all because the reader is made complicit,
persuaded by Jimmon’s conviction he has no choice in the matter. That if he
does not act ruthlessly to save himself and the more competent Erika, then they
are all doomed anyway.
And there are hints that Moore
means us to think the opposite, that Jimmon is as unprepared to face reality as
Molly and the boys. Still blaming Molly for persuading him to leave a job he
had enjoyed, still stewing over her possible infidelity with an old boyfriend,
Jimmon’s decision to leave his wife behind is as much tied up with petty
resentment as with practical necessity. ‘He had purposely not taxed the cargo
capacity of the wagon with transitional goods,’ Jimmon congratulates himself.
‘There was no tent, canned luxuries, sleeping bags, lanterns, candles or any of
the paraphernalia of camping midway between the urban and nomadic life.’ If
Jimmon believes he is suitably equipped to transition from his accustomed mode
of existence to raw survivalism in the course of one night, he is surely as
deluded as Molly.
The moral dilemma that ‘Lot’ examines
is not unlike that presented in Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’. Published
just a year later in 1954 and one of the most famous SF stories of that decade,
it enshrines the same ‘big boys don’t cry’ attitude that tends to permeate much
SF of the period. What the protagonists of these stories fail to acknowledge –
perhaps they are incapable of seeing it – is that while they hold the end to
justify the means, the means will fundamentally and forever alter the nature of
the end. David Jimmon’s biggest failure of imagination lies in not understanding
what his abandonment of his family might cost him, how little a life gained at
their expense could possibly be worth.
This is precisely the question
Ursula Le Guin seeks to address in her 1973 Hugo-Award-winning short story ‘The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ I have never been fond of that story because –
inconsequential SFnal stylings aside – it is cribbed more or less entirely from
Dostoevsky and adds little in the retelling. Julia Armfield interrogates some
of the same ideas with power, depth and an urgency befitting of the present
moment. In her novel’s final pages, the Carmichael sisters face their future
head on, and their thoughts are all of each other, no matter the cost.
A week or so ago a friend sent me a link to a Booktube video by Jules Burt, a book dealer and vintage paperback collector with a wealth of bookish knowledge and a love of science fiction. This particular video shows Jules unboxing his then most recent purchase, a consignment of titles issued by the British Science Fiction Book Club, which ran on a monthly subscription from 1953 until 1971.
The monthly selections are interesting and actually quite progressive – the club kicked off with the now classic but then just four years published Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and went on to feature more future landmarks of science fiction literature by Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), John Christopher (The Death of Grass) , Chip Delany (Nova), and John Wyndham (Trouble with Lichen) among many others. The books were all issued in hardcover and featured bold, modern cover designs, not unlike the Penguin science fiction covers of the same era. I like them a lot. But the reason my friend sent me the video was less for the books themselves than for a flyer insert that Jules had discovered inside one of them while he was unboxing it: the SF Book Club’s monthly newsletter, which just happened to include a mini-essay called ‘The Last Lap’, by a certain Christopher Priest.
Chris often spoke of the SF Book Club – he still owned the SFBC edition of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, as well as several other titles – but he had never mentioned writing for the newsletter and I had no idea this essay existed. It was a delightful surprise, all the more so for being so quintessentially Chris.
‘The Last Lap’ was written in 1965. Chris was twenty-two years old, still a year out from making his first pro sale. (I was not even born.) But what is remarkable about the piece is how clearly it shows that even at this very early stage of his career, both the passion Chris had for science fiction and his insistence that those who wanted to write it be ambitious and demanding of their chosen material were already established.
‘Science fiction is supposedly a fiction above the general run,’ he writes. ‘Its assimilation into that run is close, frighteningly so. To regain that sublimation – call it “sense of wonder” if you will – SF must become first of all literate, then imaginative, and then experimental. When these qualities have been recovered, and they are something that have been lost, then SF will find itself possessed of a new and invigorating element: originality.’ Science fiction must in other words be technically well written, far-reaching in its scope and innovative in its manner of expression. I am tempted to say that if we had more twenty-two-year-olds in SF right now who felt equally moved to express such concerns we would have a better literature. But I think I’m done with carping, not only because those who carp inevitably end up preaching to the converted, but also because they run the risk of becoming wearyingly repetitive.
I find ‘The Last Lap’ incredibly moving, all the more so because for the sixty-year duration of the career that followed, Chris never gave up on the principles he outlined, nor lost interest in what they represented. Every novel and story he wrote strove to be original, exploratory, different from the one before it – it is this quality of intent that makes his oeuvre so consistent, so unified. The essay is fascinating in a broader sense, though, for what it says about us, and by us I mean those in science fiction with a love of polemic, of criticism, of argument. What is perhaps most notable about ‘The Last Lap’ is that – a scattering of date-specific minor details aside – it could have been written any time at all in the sixty years since. It could have been written last week. I would hazard a guess that it might equally have been written five or ten years earlier.
There have been some magnificent ‘SF is doomed’ polemics in recent years. Chris’s own ‘Hull 0: Scunthorpe 3’ from 2012 (fondly known as ‘Priestgate’) is one example, with another favourite being Paul Kincaid’s ‘The Widening Gyre’ in the LA Review of Books from the same year, in which Paul compares three of the annual ‘best of’ anthologies in an attempt to answer the perennial question: ‘Is SF exhausted?’, a question that – to those of us who are in deep with these matters at least – is becoming as over-familiar as ‘Is the novel dead?’
In ‘The Last Lap’, Chris points to symbolism in SF as ‘a passing fad’, just as ‘the death of the space story is upon us’. He fears that SF is ‘like a racing car that, having shown its paces around the track, now rests in the pits’. His essay is in this way similar to those that went before and many that came after – including a fair few of my own – that protest the condition of SF without being entirely sure of how, specifically, it should be remedied. In the end, what all these essays come down to is: SF should be less like [writer/s I don’t like] and more like [writer/s I do].
This is normal, natural, even healthy. I’ve enjoyed writing essays like that, mainly because they get me thinking, asking myself the same questions the essay is asking of others, and for this reason alone I would not be foolish enough to promise I’ll never write another. But the deeper conclusion that must be drawn is that nothing really changes: the state of play is always vexed, the industry is always toxic, and SF is always exhausted. The opposite is equally true. By the time he and I met, Chris had (almost!) given up on the idea of SF as a unified entity. ‘There’s no such thing as “the field”,’ he would say, ‘there are just individual books, by individual writers, many of which are bad, some of which are great.’ It was these individually great books and authors, he maintained, that we should read and pay attention to, that we should discuss with reference to themselves, and to literature as a whole, rather than subjecting them to an artificial analysis within the confines of a genre that had outlived – in terms of criticism at least – its usefulness.
How I feel about this argument varies – according to my energy levels, my state of mind, even the book I happen to have just read. But what is absolutely not in dispute is that there are and have always been superlative individual novels and writers of the fantastic, books that break boundaries and challenge norms even in the midst of the most conservative periods of genre complacency and orthodoxy. These are the books and writers that ultimately matter, that shape the literature going forward, even when, in the present moment, they appear to be outliers with zero chance of influencing anything, such is the quantity of identikit cosy fantasies and interchangeable space operas stacked against them.
I have spent the past year – the past two years, really – in the literary company of JG Ballard, a writer who, in his essays and reviews for New Worlds in the early 1960s, produced some of the greatest and most resilient ‘SF is exhausted’ polemics in the secondary literature. His novels, even when they contain no outwardly speculative elements, were from the first until the last written with what I like to describe as a science fictional sensibility: that is, through a lens of deeper imagining, through a habit of questioning and subverting the status quo. For Chris at the time he wrote ‘The Last Lap’, Ballard was a key inspiration, one of the outliers, the writers who showed by example some of the ways in which SF might reach its full potential. His decision to embark on a full-length study of Ballard’s life and work in the late autumn of 2022 was a kind of homecoming.
Working to complete that project has been a vital source of intellectual and emotional sustenance for me through the difficult, bewildering months of 2024, the only thing that made sense, firstly because it’s been so challenging and in the pursuit of writing at least that is what I thrive on, but mainly because it is the continuation of a conversation that will never end.
Keep asking the questions. Keep striving for better. Keep feeding the fire.
My reading through 2024 has been dominated by the demands of the Ballard project, taking in books about JGB as well as re-reads of most of Ballard’s novels. This kind of deeply immersive, intimate engagement with the work of one writer is something I have not experienced in the same way since writing my Masters thesis on Nabokov, getting on for thirty-five years ago now, but it is one that completely fits my mindset and that has, in some sense, reset my thinking and aspirations for where I might want to go as a writer, further down the line.
Other than that, it has been a strange and somewhat erratic year all round. From the first half of 2024 I would have to make particular mention of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story simply for existing and being there for me to read, with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue being in their own way similarly consolatory. Miranda Seymour’s wonderful biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, and Richard Morton Jack’s superb Nick Drake: the Life were both exactly what I needed to remind me of what I was doing and why I was doing it. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos was an extraordinary reading experience, one that was personal to me in unexpected ways, and I was thrilled to see Erpenbeck, after several previous nominations, finally win the International Booker Prize.
Moving through into the second half of 2024, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands and its follow up, Thunderclap were both equally magnificent, revealing Cumming in my eyes as one of the most accomplished writers working in Britain today. Janet Frame’s posthumously published short novel Towards Another Summer is a quiet, devastating miracle, and I could use exactly the same words of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, though the two books could not be more different. I was delighted to finally catch up with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, which is a very good book indeed, and also – from somewhat further back – with Barry N. Malzberg’s Galaxies, which follows Ballard’s prime example in revealing science fiction as a radical, knotty form that is capable of just about anything. Indeed, one of the side-effects of the Ballard project has been a re-engagement with the ideals of the British New Wave and the literary possibilities of a mode of literature that – no matter how it is used, abused, sidelined and devalued – remains as powerful and significant as any given writer chooses to make it.
Will 2025 be the year I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy setting myself reading challenges, but I’m going to hold off on doing that, just for the moment. I would like to leave the reading horizon open and uncluttered, a space to inhabit as feels useful, inspiring and necessary, a year of new discoveries.
… and what better time to finally catch up with a classic of weird fiction that I have read a lot about but never read?
Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is one of those books. Written in 1895, this collection of stories has inspired and influenced writers all the way from HP Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto (and can you believe it has already been ten years since the first showing of True Detective??)
‘The King in Yellow’ is the title of a text-within-the-text, a play that brings insanity on anyone who reads it. I find it remarkable and rather wonderful, that the ‘cursed text’ trope is a hundred years old and more. So much of the power of the weird lies in its timelessness, the enduring appeal of its ideas and imagery. In the first story, ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, Hidred Castaigne is obsessed with the forbidden play, which he has read while convalescing from a head injury sustained in a horse-riding accident. Whether his madness stems from this accident or from reading ‘The King in Yellow’ is for the reader to decide. The glorious uncanniness of the story hinges on the fact that as readers we are drawn into Hildred’s delusion – that he is heir to a vanished kingdom – that we experience both shock and horror as his plan to assassinate his cousin in pursuit of his destiny comes closer to being enacted.
That the story is also science fiction – it is set twenty years in the future – adds another level of weirdness. The ‘future’ Chambers imagines is dark and sinister. There are suicide booths on street corners, a palpable sense of unease even in the most ordinary actions and interactions. All colours seem heightened, somehow. What I loved most about this story is how modern it feels.
Only the first four stories in the volume are explicitly bound by the ‘King in Yellow’ mythos. The remaining tales have often been dismissed or excluded from newer editions for not being weird enough, but I think this is a mistake. They are weird – very. There is a time-slip romance – a young man loses his way and ends up betrothed to a falconer in mediaeval France (very reminiscent of Le Grand Meaulnes) – and a brutal war story set during the Siege of Paris, which took place just twenty-five years before The King in Yellow was written. The chaos of war is written as a kind of haunting:
The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, then vanished, while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized and bore him with them through the mist.
Even in those stories where ‘lost Carcosa’ is not explicitly named, there is a sense that the realm of the lost king is there, waiting to reassemble itself, that the world we inhabit is the delusion, a temporary structure that might be swept away at any moment:
From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint.
That the overt weirdness of the stories recedes, reined back in the later tales to a suggestion, a supressed memory almost, makes the collection as a whole still more memorable and mysterious.
So much is left unsaid and unexplained. As if the writing of the book was interrupted, or prevented. It is unsurprising to me, that so many writers since have fallen in love with its atmosphere and – I use the term in its truest sense – obscurity. That they have felt bound to explore the yellow kingdom for themselves.
