The process of re-reading can be a strange one, I think. Personally I have never been one for doing much of it. There is always something ‘new’ to move onto, after all, and a book requires so much more time and attention than a record, say, or even a film. Both of those media reward our focus of course, but they seldom require immediate investment of more than a couple of hours at a time. Indeed the best long-player records can be over in a half hour. A film, an hour on top of that. A book though? A detective novel? Four of five hours maybe, and that spread over the space of days, weeks, depending on circumstances. I know some people take months to finish a book and that is fine because everyone’s lives and demands are different, but I struggle to remember what’s going on beyond three or four days. Occasionally I’ll manage a book in a single sitting but that is much rarer than it used to be and is surely as reliable a measurement of age as anything else.
I know too that many people have books they return to on a fairly regular basis. They are something of a comfort blanket perhaps. Familiarity with the magic of their prose, or with the resolution of their narratives lends a certain solace maybe. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times people can read Jane Austen, for example. I have tried reading her books and been defeated each time. I think the reasons are to do with the structure of the writing, but I am not intellectually informed enough on those things to be certain. Maybe one day it will click and make sense in much the same way Bruce Springsteen’s records did, though I admit my saying this is largely an excuse to put Springsteen and Austen in the same sentence.
Forcing myself to re-read books for this project then has been interesting. Mostly I realise how little I remember.
I do know however that it was 2003 when I was feverishly picking up and reading as much by Ross Macdonald as I possibly could because an old train ticket fell out of a copy of ‘Black Money’. It is one of those great Black Lizard ‘crime classics’ paperback editions with very period 1990s graphic design. The pages are now yellowed but it looks terrific in a photograph with a morning coffee, which is one of my ongoing projects, or habits or whatever. The photographs I mean, not the coffee, although of course it is both.
I’ll get back to Ross Macdonald eventually, I promise, but for now let me go off an on tangent and say that the photographs of beverages and books started in 2015 and that the first picture I made was of Joseph Hansen’s great ‘Fadeout’ alongside a coffee in a mug from The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Hansen’s short series of novels featuring his detective Dave Brandstetter are well worth seeking out. He’s celebrated mostly these days as being the first openly gay detective character, and that is to be applauded of course. There is certainly a degree of Hansen reclaiming the whole queer identity and reframing the language in positive ways within the books, but they are also just really well crafted detective stories that maybe help shine a light on the strange strained suffusion of homoerotic sexual tensions that exist in much of the hard boiled stuff. All those manly figures showing off their toughness to each other. Psychiatrists would have a field day.
Another of my early beverage and book photographs was made in the Boston Tea Party cafe in Exeter. I recognise the table grain and one of their big white mugs holding a black coffee. The book is Don Carpenter’s ‘Hard Rain Falling’, one of those really nice New York Review Of Books paperbacks with a terrific cover photograph by Ken Light. It’s not a detective novel, but it is a story of crime and punishment and redemption of sorts. Carpenter is Dostoyevsky if he’d been around in the Beat Generation. His fans include Jonathan Lethem, Anne Lamont and Richard Price, who all supply effusive copy for the back cover. There’s an introduction too by George Pelecanos, which is naturally worth reading.
Pelecanos should be given a lot of credit here because, when I think about it, he was maybe my line (back) into detective fiction when the Serpent’s Tail imprint published his trilogy of Nick Stefanos mysteries in 1998. That late 1990s period was a pretty hectic time for me. I’d been teaching art in a Devon high school for six years by 1998 but still somehow found the time to be writing pretty much non stop about music and books. By 1998 too the Tangents.co.uk website would have been running for a couple of years, growing as it did out of a decade or more of fanzine writing and publishing. I’m fairly certain I had blagged review copies of other books from Serpent’s Tail and that they sent me the Pelecanos trilogy as part of their regular publicity mail out. I’m glad they did because really those books hit me like a freight train. Something about elements coming together serendipitously at the same time, maybe, but Pelecanos seemed like a voice that connected. The intensity of his prose in those Stefanos books still prickles with the energy of the DC Hardcore punk bands he’d maybe have been seeing in his formative years. The Pop cultural references effortlessly root the stories to place and time but crucially never feel forced. That’s much more difficult than it sounds.
In his later books there is perhaps a sense of Pelecanos getting sidetracked by Issues based narrative arcs, but I would say his attempts to address more serious, grown up topics like political corruption never feel as lightly done as, say, Chandler managed. That can be taken as a criticism or as praise though, so take your pick. Throughout though Pelecanos has never lost his talent for capturing speech, being as skilled in that area as any of the tough school predecessors or indeed his contemporaries. He neatly continues the hard boiled predilection for detective characters who are tough yet sensitive, soft yet strong, maybe much like Pelecanos himself. That was certainly the feeling I got when I interviewed him at the tiny Nantos Hotel, a Greek place in London where he was doing some publicity back in 1998 to promote the his just published ‘The Sweet Forever’. At the time I was doing this thing on Tangents called ‘Mass Observation’ which was a bunch of questions split in two sections, one for the present day and one for when people were 16 years old. This conceit was all tied up in the notion that 16, or at least the conceptual age of 16 is when we are ‘born’, pop-culturally speaking. It’s a flawed conceit of course, but I mostly stand by it. Anyway, the opening questions went like this: “Where are you?” “Nantos hotel, London.” “What are you?” “A Greek American writer.”
And then the third question, which was intended as one about the creative output, and couched in British English colloquialism: “What do you make?”
“What do I MAKE?”. I thought Pelecanos was going to hit me. End of interview right there. Of course he naturally interpreted this from an American perspective and assumed I was being outrageously nosey about his income. “What do I MAKE?…” In the astonished pause, I quickly realised how he had taken the question and I just as quickly filled the pause with an explanation of the intention. Thankfully he laughed and went with it. “Books” was the blunt and pretty obvious answer, the unspoken part being, did I really have to ask?
Perhaps unsurprisingly that session with Pelecanos was the start and pretty much the end of my foray into the realm of the journalistic interview. Teaching increasingly took up my time, and that was a pretty tough job, even back at the end of the 20th Century. It’s much harder now, although that’s another story, the kind of story Pelecanos would probably tell really well. In fact he kind of did, though obviously from an American perspective, in season 4 of the TV show ‘The Wire’ in which the character of Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski takes on a job as a Math teacher in a Baltimore middle school. By season 4 Pelecanos had dialled back his involvement in the show to focus on a new book, but he still got some writing credits. I recall seeing Pelecanos’ name in the credits for the show when it screened in the UK and being so pleased because he had answered my Mass Observation question about what he wanted to be when he was 16 with “I wanted to make movies.” So ‘The Wire’ was not exactly a movie, but it was close. Maybe better.
So I think I’ve got a lot to be grateful to George Pelecanos for. He kind of scared the shit out of me, yes, but he hooked me (back) into the detective genre, so he is to thank for all of this. Or to blame. Take your pick.
Someone else who dug Pelecanos was James Sallis. His 2001 novel ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ is the sixth and final instalment of a tremendous series featuring detective Lew Griffin and at one point Griffin is to be found “reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name”. Elsewhere in the book Sallis drops references to the Rebel Inc imprint which was so enormously important back at the turn of the 20th to 21st Centuries with its reprints of such essentials as John Fante, Jim Dodge’s ‘Stone Junction’, and Emmett Grogan’s mighty ‘Ringolevio’. Sallis describes it as ‘a new publishing house in Scotland run by a bunch of kids’. The story of Rebel Inc is fascinating in itself, with its roots in the world of fanzines and the strange literate punk energies of Edinburgh. There is a fun story of Alan Warner sending some poetry for potential inclusion in the ‘Rebel Inc’ magazine back in the 1990s, and signing it all as being by/from Morvern Callar (Warner was still writing the novel of the same name at the time). Publisher of the ‘Rebel Inc’ ‘zine Kevin Williamson however recognised the handwriting on the envelope as being Warner’s. He says that “Warner probably thinks I’ve forgotten but I don’t forget anything like that. I remember everything.”
Lew Griffin remembers everything too. He’s forever bringing up quotations and peppering them through his books. Lots of philosophy, Emerson in particular. And of course I say Lew Griffin when I really mean James Sallis. It’s James Sallis who manages to pull up all sorts of delightful philosophical gems and he just happens to use Lew Griffin to give them voice. Such is the life of the writer. Of course Lew Griffin himself is a writer too as well as a teacher, an investigator and a drunk. Not that Sallis is all of those things, or indeed any of those things except writer, although perhaps somewhere inside we are all of us all of those things at some point in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, with more or less adherence to dictionary definitions. Anyway, to coin a phrase some of my Tangents writer friends and I used a lot, James Sallis writes like God.
But only sometimes. I once read his spy thriller ‘Death Will Have Your Eyes’, and it was not that great. But the Lew Griffin novels, now that’s another matter. Of course all the greatest Noir has always at core been about Identity, and this is probably why Sartre and Camus were such fans. Sallis understands this implicitly, and the Lew Griffin novels are notably as much about identity and spirit as they are about crime. Indeed, in ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Bluebottle’, crime barely comes into it, the books being much more about the nature of exploration or, if you will, investigation; looking for clues as to who and why we are what we are as much as to solve any misdemeanour. Perhaps also the only misdemeanour is our very existence on this Earth, but maybe that’s getting altogether too maudlin and end-of-the-world weary.
Sallis writes as much as anything about the splendour of books, and the splendour of life and people. He writes about the search for meaning in words and in faces, gestures, touches, kisses, words shared, exchanges… all of this thrown up and examined and found both life-affirming and wanting at the same time. Of course all great Noir is essentially existential, and Sallis writes the poetry of the weary existential outsider with a sparkling mix of the coolest prose in the warmest of lonely hearts. His books still feel special.
If Hollywood and Southern California in general could be thought of as important characters in the Three Investigators books (as, ahem, investigated last time out) then they are certainly key to the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ novels of Raymond Chandler. In many ways the landscapes are characters that people the texts just as much as series detective Philip Marlowe. Place informs person, person becomes place. Fact becomes fiction. Memory becomes twisted and the Time Machines of media seduce us into believing things that may not be true based on the available evidence.
Take ‘The Big Sleep’ for example. In my mind, Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Marlowe was certainly the first time I was exposed to Raymond Chandler, although it is difficult to prove this. The ‘genome’ Internet search facility of the BBC makes the nailing down of potential suspects easy, yet the results simply throw up more uncertainty. ‘The Big Sleep’ was screened on BBC2 at 11.35pm on a Saturday night in 1979, which would have made me 13 years old. Now as much as I would like to pretend (and in the past, certainly have) that I was a hipped-up and switched-on teenager, the truth is that it is highly unlikely I could ever have seen the film at this point. My protective parents simply would not have allowed me to still be out of bed at such a time, never mind be stuck in front of the television set. Another option then is two years later, when the film was again screened on BBC 2, this time as part of a season of Howard Hawks pictures. The start time of 8.15pm on a Thursday in July makes it more plausible until one takes into account the fact that at 9pm the sole television in our house would be religiously tuned to BBC1 for The Nine O’Clock News. One other fact that blows this possibility entirely out of the water is that ‘Butterflies’ was on at 8pm on BBC 1, and my mum would certainly have been settled in front of that. When, then, could I possibly have seen ‘The Big Sleep’? The next date of broadcast on the BBC is 1993, by which point I was living in Devon, struggling through a first year of teaching, and the memory that shimmers in my mind is certainly of having seen Bogart do his Marlowe thing when I was an impressionable teenager. It’s a conundrum.
This ad hoc investigation is interesting to me, I think, because it suggests that time is a slippery customer and memory of it an unreliable conduit. The ‘facts’ then are most likely that I have imagined this teenage viewing of ‘The Big Sleep’ as part of some elaborate construction of an alternative self, rooted in those youthful desires to be something we are not. It strikes me that this is an essential part of being young, although exactly where you draw the defining lines of ‘youth’ in terms of years is up for grabs.
Something I do remember with vividness though is when, in my first year of teaching, I rather foolishly volunteered to take a Year 11 assembly (bear with me on this). One of the reasons I did this, I believe, was to confront the terror I still felt at standing up in front of large(ish) audiences. A class of 30 I could just about handle, but the idea of some 270 fifteen and sixteen year olds would have been scarier than seeing The Green Ghost. So what did I talk to them about? Well, I started off by playing ‘Blank Generation’ by Richard Hell and The Voidoids, then wittering on about how the great uncertainties of our/their teenage years can be an opportunity to try on different personalities, to search uncomfortably but also uncompromisingly for who and what we want to be, rather than what our parents or teachers think we ought. I also read an extract from a Lester Bangs interview with Hell, which was something about the nature of being a teenager, about how they are the worst years of our lives full of zits and whatever, which raised a ripple of laughs. Anyway, when I’d stopped rambling and the bell for afternoon lessons rang, the hall rather unexpectedly erupted in applause. This was, I was reliably informed, unheard of. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it remains as one of the most pleasurable memories of some three decades of teaching.
I’m certain there were some kids in that assembly audience who forgot anything I’d said the moment I’d said it. Some too who would have thought me attention seeking, trying to look ‘cool’ or whatever. There may be more than a grain of truth in that. Some desperation to be seen to be something other than what I knew/know myself to be, which is something minor and largely forgettable. It is the same reason I am writing this some thirty three years later, no doubt. And that’s fine. The tension between reality and fantasy, dreaming and waking, fact and fiction is central to existence. Well, central to mine at least. I couldn’t shake it if I tried. And goodness knows I’ve tried.
We’re straying off the path here, aren’t we? Wasn’t this meant to be about Raymond Chandler? Or at least about when I could first have seen ‘The Big Sleep’? That’s the thing though, isn’t it? I have no idea when I could have first seen ‘The Big Sleep’ or ‘The Maltese Falcon’ or ‘Double Indemnity’ or ‘Murder My Sweet’ of any of those Noir films. The reality however is almost irrelevant next to the perception, which is rooted in an imaginary, constructed teenage period of indeterminate length. Something too, doubtless, about ‘The Big Sleep’ being tied up with the Scottish band Simple Minds, with whom I have had a complicated relationship through my life. Of course I say complicated but it is really quite simple. I loved them and then I hated them, before eventually maturing into a place where I could filter what I found uncomfortable and enjoy again what I once had found so mesmerising. Their song ‘Big Sleep’ is certainly one of those things I now, once more, find astonishingly beautiful. It is a song that pulsates and shimmers, full of the seductive sorrow of lost youth, lost love, lost memory, lost connection.
In many respects then it is similar to the Raymond Chandler novel, for these themes of loss are certainly central to the text. There is similarity too in that both song and novel are quite preposterously epic. Note the lack of capitalisation, which is as a hint at a smaller, human scale grandeur that Simple Minds, to my mind, would lose as they became more successful, but that Chandler retained, and indeed honed, in all of his further work.
Chandler’s The Big Sleep’ is flawed of course, and that is part of its charm. Both the novel and the film are just a shade too long, although I dare say that 21st Century film audiences would think two hours a ‘short’. The novel has the feel of several short stories bundled together, which is hardly surprising because that’s pretty much what Chandler was doing with his long form works. That patchwork, cut-up collagist approach is most evident, I think, in ‘The Big Sleep’ and this surely lends it a bizarre, almost Dadaist quality. It’s notable then that when the Coen brothers made their magnificent homage to the novel in their ’The Big Lebowski’ film of 1998, they threw some crazy Germanic techno conceptual artists into the mix, as if the brothers recognised the connections from the novel into the realm of the cut-up. Was Julianna Moore channeling Hannah Hoch in the film? Who knows. But it would make some kind of (non)sense if she had been.
Chandler’s short stories are great pieces, and for someone who has an avowed distaste for the short story in general, and the crime/detective short story in particular, that is really saying something. The tough school hard-boiled form of the stories published in the Black Mask pulp magazine work magnificently well however. It’s like the form was waiting for the American pulps to really explode into life. Bam! Pow! Whaaaam! Those stories are like Pop Art comic strips in pared back prose, all rusty shivs and snub nosed revolvers to the guts. Flowers in the dustbin. Under the paving stones, not exactly the beach but rather blood stains and withered hopes. And the American tough school short stories work in a way that English detective short stories do not simply because, for the most part, there is not really any mystery to solve. There is no puzzle other than the one of how to make a fast buck or escape an early death. There are primitive impulses in the tough-school short stories that are ultimately rewarding in such brief explosions of action. The English, by contrast, feel tiresomely trapped in attempts to condense the pleasure of the long-form detective puzzle into something that is not really fit for purpose. This is just a feeling I get, you understand, a set of personal prejudices and preferences not really backed up by evidence other than the frustrations felt when leafing through another one of those British Library Crime Classics collections of themed short stories. When will I learn?
‘The Big Sleep’ then is all marvellously disjointed and nonsensical. Of course Chandler plays the Christie card at the end when Marlowe, in what might just be a parody of Poirot, lays out all the facts and shows us his workings in the margins. If I’m being gleefully cynical too I might say that Chandler is taking a pop at Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s predilection for complexity and absurd cleverness. Marlowe never comes across as clever. Instead Marlowe is smart. Except when he isn’t, and then he’s showing us how human he is, which is maybe even better than being clever. Or smart.
Is there something then in ‘The Big Sleep’ about the need humans seem to have for making connections between things, and how ridiculous that can often be? How it can lead us into traps and blind alleys just as well as to enlightenment? There is something magnificently random (to coin a popular early 21st Century phrase) in ‘The Big Sleep’ which is exaggerated by Marlowe/Chandler making his explanation of the connectivity between those apparently random elements. One comes away from ‘The Big Sleep’ feeling that there is no real resolution to anything, that all the ‘making sense’ of things is just so much flim-flam and that it is in the embracing of the disjointed where enlightenment can be found. Don’t try too hard. Listen to the universe. Some things just happen… The Dude in ‘The Big Lebowski’ would undoubtedly agree with this.
Let’s get back to that idea about the nature of the American tough school of writing as found in the pages of the pulps, though, because there can be a temptation to applaud the gritty ‘realism’ of the writing as being ‘authentic’. This is something I do not hold with, for there is no such thing as authenticity in art. That’s a bold statement, I know, but there it is. Now I suspect that in 2024 there is much less discussion around the nature of authenticity in art forms than there was towards the end of the naughties. Back then it was all the rage, as I recall, to praise certain things as being ‘authentic’ and to damn others as being ‘manufactured’. This mostly happened in the realms of music criticism, specifically in the area of ‘alternative’ music where it was utilised as a means of elevating the critic’s and therefore the audience’s perceived taste. It was all utter nonsense of course, and Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker punctured the whole thing in their tremendous ‘Faking It’ book of 2007. Barker in particular is an interesting character to me, not least because of his work with the band Animals That Swim whose quirky, literate pop music remains criminally underrated and invisible. In 2012 he also published a book about the history of Britain’s (read England’s) curious obsession with hedges, but that is (literally) another story.
That notion of the authentic voice is certainly one that prevailed around the reception to the tough school of American pulp writing in the first half of the twentieth century. There was a feeling that the writers were writing of, and from The Street, that they were telling the authentic stories of the blue-collar worker, the hard working man and the devious, scheming woman. Gender and racial stereotypes guaranteed to split the atom of 21st Century opinion, yes, but also peculiarly tantalising period pieces. The writers of these short sharp stories gave off the feeling that they knew what they were writing about, that they were living on the same streets, eking out the same tough lives, striving for the same American Dream whilst simultaneously shining a flashlight on the corruption dwelling at the heart of that very dream. The filth and the fury. No surprise then that there would be something similar in the Rock’n’Roll aesthetic of the 1950s and in the Punk explosion of the late 1970s, peculiar flamboyant eruptions of outrage and Working Class rebellion that would both be so rapidly subsumed into the Capitalist Machine.
Dashiell Hammett might have once served some time as a Pinkerton detective agent before starting to write his hard-boiled prose, but the majority of the others were not writing from ‘experience’ of The Street at all, but rather were working to the template of the tough school form that very rapidly took shape. Having said that I do not hold with notions of authenticity it should be clear that I do not say this pejoratively. Indeed, whilst re-reading some of these old Black Mask stories, and Chandler’s novels in particular, it strikes me that there is a strong correlation between them and the the work of Bruce Springsteen, which is high praise indeed.
Now my relationship with the work of Bruce Springsteen is even more easily described than the one I have had with Simple Minds. In the most basic summation it goes something like: decades of hatred bleeding into a year or two of begrudging admiration (starting around 2003 when I heard a cover of ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ by obscure Scottish indie band Ballboy) blossoming into obsessive love from around 2015 onwards. The obsessive love has weathered in the past couple of years into something that I’d like to think of as more mature and measured, but it is no less passionate for all that.
It may have been that coming late to an appreciation of Springsteen allowed me to sidestep, to a large extent, the sense of his work as being some kind of authentic blue-collar documentary of Americana, but I admit that I laughed out loud when, during his acclaimed ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ performances of 2017, he explicitly ‘admitted’ to having made it all up. The ‘authenticity’ that was baked into the mythology of Springsteen was a sham, an artifice, an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. Well of course it was. Yet this does not make it any less powerful or less enticing to us. If anything it makes the magic even more special, takes the ‘everyman/person’ notion inherent in the narrative of the work and turns it inside out. The everyday becomes spectacular because it actually isn’t the everyday, but an artistic interpretation, where the deceit of manipulation is so cleverly disguised that the line between the mediated and the ‘real’ is magically dissolved. Each becomes the other in a never ending dance.
I see this dance in the work of Raymond Chandler too, particularly in ‘Farewell My Lovely and his last ‘proper’ novel ‘The Long Goodbye’ (it’s fairly easy to sidestep the posthumously published ‘Playback’). In both these books Chandler finesses the rough edges of ‘The Big Sleep’ into something that is not exactly polished, but certainly somewhat more cohesive. Marlowe still moves through the world of the novel in such a way that he attracts coincidences from which he moulds connection and meaning, but the plots at least feel a little more considered. This is particularly true of ‘The Long Goodbye’ which is a masterpiece of detective fiction masquerading as a literary novel or vice versa. More than ever with ‘The Long Goodbye’ this is Chandler casting a withering eye over the landscape of America in its supposed post-war prosperity and finding it morally lacking. The book is threaded with observations and asides, many of them put in the mouth of Marlowe, that rail on the iniquity of wealth and the systemic corruption that supports and drives that iniquity. Not that Chandler seems particularly interested in making political observations or taking Political sides. Rather ‘The Long Goodbye’ is something of an existential take on ‘civilised’ society. It is a novel that is unceasingly bleak, its blackest depths lightened by Marlowe’s sharp one-liners that merely act to emphasise the depths into which he, and we, are made to look.
It is largely accepted that ‘The Long Goodbye’ is Chandler getting up close and personal to himself and, on the evidence of the two characters (alcoholic writer Roger Wade and alcoholic wastrel Terry Lennox) not finding much in himself to admire. As if to add insult to (personal) injury, the things that Marlowe does find to like in these characters turn out to be flickers of potential smothered by lies and deceit. Like I say, it is not exactly cheery stuff, which is no real surprise given that the novel was written as his wife Cissy was slowly suffering through a long illness. Cissy died the year after the novel was published. A long goodbye indeed.
For all that it remains a thoroughly readable book, its determinedly existential outlook made bearable and even perversely enjoyable by donning the garb of the detective novel. Robert Altman’s 1973 film of the novel managed much the same kind of trick, though this time oddly because it was positioned as a satirical take on the Noir/hard boiled school. If I remain somewhat unconvinced by Altman’s film it is likely because I think I have something of a mistrust of satire, and ‘issues’ based comedy generally. Much of it leaves me cold at best, irritated at worst. That’s no doubt the intended effect, and it all points to my being a cold and humourless fish, but there we are.
Not that Altman’s film is a comedy of course, and actually it no longer seems as irritating as it once did, and that is to its credit. Or perhaps to mine, who knows. It still feels definitively a 1970s picture in that it is pedestrian, vague, values visual style over narrative to a frustrating degree and outstays its welcome. Then again, I have yet to see an Altman film I did not think this about, which doubtless just goes to prove what an illiterate philistine I am.
If you had asked me twenty years ago I would have told you that Altman’s film is the poorest of all the cinematic adaptations of Chandler’s novels and massively overshadowed by the novel itself. That shadowing is still significant, but the film has at least managed to embed itself in the pack of pictures that are at least as good as each other. Or as bad, depending on which way the wind is blowing and how violently I happen to be considering the differences between the written and the filmic text, none of which I really know anything about except for instinctual reactions and feelings that hover somewhere on the edge of intelligence. As I am proving here.
My Texan friend William has told me that he remembers a critic making a comment about Altman’s film, something along the lines of Marlowe running around a lot but not really solving anything and this being evidence of Altman’s deconstruction of the Marlowe character. Which kind of begs the question of whether the critic in question might actually have read ‘The Long Goodbye’ or indeed any Chandler novel. ‘Running around a lot but not really solving anything’ is pretty much Marlowe’s raison d’être. It is what Marlowe does. All the time. His purpose is not to solve anything in the traditional detective novel sense, but to assemble meaning from disjointed elements. His is a character that acts as a conduit for events. Things happen to, and around Marlowe. He’s literally an agent of reaction, an ingredient that brings situations to their head. The whole ’solve a mystery’ thing is so far down the list of important elements in the Tough School of writers to the point of being an irrelevance, or maybe an irritation that the writer needs to scratch occasionally, knowing that scratching just makes the itch worse.
Reading Raymond Chandler in 2024 (or whenever) is to realise that whilst the challenges (and rewards) of existence may take on slightly different forms throughout history, the underlying irritations remain timeless. One of the roles of great artists then is perhaps to take on the burden of recognition, to make work that addresses those irritations and in so doing create a balm for the rest of us. Chandler’s preposterous tales of the human condition paradoxically create pockets of calm for us to linger in. He mined the dark recesses so that we might find them marginally less frightening. That’s a lot to be thankful for.
Kawa (River) – Hiroki Tamaki (from ‘Nippon Acid Folk 1970-1980’ LP) Lleisiau O’r Gorffennol – Ail Symudiad (from ‘Yr Oes Ail (Casgliad 1)’ LP) Wrong Place: Keith Seatman’s Sci-Fi Southsea Remix – Kevin Pearce (from ‘Sci-Fi Ballads Remix’ LP) An Ancient Ghost – Kitchen Cynics / Margery Daw / Grey Malkin (from ‘Weeping Stones’ LP) Calton Hill – Elizabeth Joan Kelly (from ‘LF17 / Edinburgh’ LP) Voices – Sorrow (from ‘Let There Be Thorns’ LP) Alpine Sketchbook – SKYRAY (from ‘Ice Rink Music’ LP) Secret World – Still Corners (from ‘Dream Talk’ LP) Curling – Tara Jane O’Neil (from ‘The Cool Cloud of Okayness’ LP) Egg Rush – Flowered Up (from ‘A Life With Brian’ LP) How D’ye Like Me – Gurgles (digital single) Where Did My Spring Go? – The Kinks (from ‘The Village Green Preservation Society: Rarities’) Chain Smoking – Comet Gain (from ‘Radio Sessions (BBC 1996-2011)’ LP) Makin’ The Same Mistakes – Vic Godard (from ‘Everybody’s Scared Now’ LP) Deleted Scenes – Ducks Ltd. (from ‘Harm’s Way’ LP) Brighter Spells – astrel k (from ‘The Foreign Department’ LP) The Best Years of Our Lives – Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (from ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ LP) Leaving California – The Tyde (from ‘Season 5’ LP)
Qualities Of Mercy – Penelope Houston (from ‘Eighteen Stories Down’ LP) Setting Sun – BMX Bandits (from ‘Dreamers On The Run’ LP) Reading Material – The Klittens (from ‘Butter’ EP) I Don’t Want You Anyway – Look Blue Go Purple (from ‘Still Bewitched’ LP) You’re Just Jealous – Crumbs (from ‘You’re Just Jealous’ LP) The Branch Line – Leaf Mosaic (from ‘Under The Bridge 2’ compilation LP) Is This Love? – Red Sleeping Beauty (from ‘One song a month series’ ) Paris is burning – Sofie Royer & Alexander Dexter Jones (digital single) The Long Goodbye – Lizzy Mercier Descloux (from ‘From Heaven With Love’ LP) Big Sleep – Simple Minds (from ‘New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)’ LP) An Immaculate Conception – The Wake (from ‘Harmony + Singles’ LP) Little Sister – Nico (from ‘Chelsea Girl’ LP) Crépuscule – Alison Cotton (from ‘Engelchen’ LP) Increasing Daylight – K I N B R A E (from ‘Cryptophasia’ LP) Mayfair (Main Theme) – Garden Gate (from ‘Magic Lantern’ LP) April (First Signs) – Birds In The Brickwork (from ‘Twelve Months / Volume Three’ LP) Signs and Cigarettes (Version 1) – Marisa Anderson (from ‘Music From ‘A Perfect Day For Caribou‘’ LP) Geese Flying in Broken Patterns – Afterlands (from ‘We Are the Animals in the Night’ LP) Marsh Blues – Pete Astor (from ‘Tall Stories & New Religions’ LP) The Man with Open Arms – Bring Your Own Hammer featuring Cathal Coughlan with Linda Buckley (from ‘My Grief on the Sea’ LP) New Moon – Laetitia Sadier (from ‘Rooting for Love’ LP) Hourglass – Hurray For The Riff Raff (from ‘The Past is Still Alive’ LP)
In the 1963 Poirot novel ‘The Clocks’, as we have seen, Agatha Christie uses one of the rare appearances of her little Belgian detective to engage in an amusing and informative exposition on the history of detective fiction. For the most part this focuses on some key French authors, a smattering of English (it would not do, one assumes, for Christie to be seen to throw either stones or bouquets in her own glass house) and a rogue appearance by the overrated American Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr. When the subject of the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ of detective fiction comes up, however, Poirot dismisses it “much as he would have waved [away] an intruding fly or mosquito.” “‘Violence for violence’ sake?” he continues. “Since when has that been interesting?”
It is a cutting riposte that, in the context of what he has just said about other authors and schools of thought, is perhaps a cute play on Christie’s part to show Poirot as being somewhat old fashioned and out of touch. In 1963, after all, the literary value of the hard-boiled school was surely well established whilst the publicity-seeking fencing between the protagonists on opposite sides of the Atlantic would be largely a thing of the past. Indeed, after a pause for breath and thought, Hercules Christie admits that they rate “American crime fiction on the whole” in “a pretty high place” and considers it “more ingenious, more imaginative than English writing.” One does of course rather wonder just what American crime fiction Agatha Poirot is thinking of here, if not any of the ‘tough school’. Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr? One sincerely hopes not. Ellery Queen then?
When talking about American detective fiction it is likely that the name Ellery Queen was amongst the first I became aware of. Not the novels or short stories, you understand, but the character played by Jim Hutton in the American TV series. Screened in the UK by the BBC in 1976, it is one of the few television shows I can recall watching with the rest of my family. Seeing it again in 2024 is something of a shock of nostalgia, the layers of time travel being overlaid with mis-remembrance. Do I remember the show as being set in the late 1940s? What would that have even meant to a ten year old in 1976? Did I confuse or conflate Jim Rockford’s 1970s California with Jim Hutton’s 1940s New York? When Hutton/Ellery turned to camera, broke the fourth wall and suggested that I was probably way ahead of him and had spotted the murderer, did I ever nod and smugly announce that I was and that I had? As if. What was the fourth wall anyway? And at what point did I realise that there were actual Ellery Queen novels other than the imaginary ones Jim Hutton was writing in the show? History is obscure on the answer to the last one, although I can at least say with some certainty that it was not until 2021 that I finally read some real Ellery Queen books. ‘The French Powder Mystery’, ‘The Spanish Cape Mystery’ and ‘The Greek Coffin Mystery’ all struck me as much more rooted in English detective fiction than the raw rough and tumble of the Black Mask school and whilst they struck me as adequate period pieces they did little to really thrill me. I’m sure that the more puzzle-orientated aspect of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee’s writing as Ellery Queen would have appealed to Poirot and Christie much more than they have done to me, and that is fine of course.
In terms of The Americans though, I am fairly certain that before the Ellery Queen TV show came into my orbit, there would have been a few books on my childhood bookshelf bearing the names of Carolyn Keen and Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike the Famous Five and Agatha Christie paperbacks, none of these Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys titles survived the occasional purges of personal history that I would have scowled through in my teens and twenties, but they are certainly worth thinking about again now, particularly as my rudimentary research about the Ellery Queen TV series suggests that the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew TV show of 1977-79 was screened by the BBC during 1979. Oddly (or not) I have no recollection of this at all. Archive ‘Radio Times’ listings show that it was broadcast on a late Saturday afternoon, after the Sport and Regional News (‘Scoreboard’ in Scotland ) and before a Rolf Harris show. Has some strange subliminal cancellation process seeped from the Harris reference and erased my Nancy Drew memories? Is memory in fact like ferric cassette or video tape, breaking up over time? Well, mine has clearly unravelled from the case and no amount of rewinding with a pencil is going to help.
Looking online at the covers of the Drew and Hardy Boys titles published in the UK throughout the 1970s as Armada paperbacks brings slightly more of a flicker of recognition, particularly those yellow box Nancy Drew covers with the Peter Arthur illustrations. These may not be particularly memorable from a design perspective, but I admit that the sight of a red headed Nancy glancing over her shoulder in an anxious manner stirs the ancient memory of a ten year old’s crush. This is another piece of evidence for my not having seen the TV series, for I feel sure that my thirteen year old self could not have failed to have found Pamela Sue Martin incredibly crush-worthy. Then again, at that age I would have struggled to see further than a girl called Veronica who sat beside me in Chemistry classes. This, of course, decades before she would find fame on British television screens as Ronni Ancona and surprise me by cropping up as Steve Coogan’s PA in the tremendous second series of ‘The Trip’. Seeing her there on screen oddly transported me back to 1979, sitting at the bottom of the stairs for hours trying to summon the courage to phone her number and ask her out. The anti-climax of finally hearing her say ‘no’ was, of course, savagely dispiriting. The following week she had moved tables in Chemistry and to say I missed hearing her passionate raving about Dustin Hoffman in my ear would be an understatement. I wonder if she ever read Nancy Drew stories? Wonder too if she was ever famous enough to get to meet Hoffman in person. I hope so.
I did re-read some Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories recently and found it an interesting experience. The first few Drew novels, ghostwritten in the early 1930s by Mildred Wirt Benson still read as thoroughly enjoyable mystery adventures. Wholesome fun, fired through with the kind of old-fashioned conservative American family values that knee-jerk jerks of a right leaning proclivity might suggest they are fighting to protect today. Nonsense, of course, for what comes over in these early Drew stories is a fundamental sense of decency and fairness that would seem to be anathema to much of 21st Century America. Shame.
Have The Hardy Boys aged as handsomely? Well, not to my eyes, although this is admittedly based on a very small selection of Leslie McFarlane penned books from the late 1920s and early 1930s. These, such as the 1928 title ‘Hunting For Hidden Gold’, read now as ridiculously robust action adventures that are fuelled more by testosterone and machismo than by anything so subtle as a mystery to be solved. Did I enjoy this kind of nonsense as a ten year old? I like to think not so much, and see this is a reason for their exclusion from those bookshelves where Enid Blyton was allowed to stay. Nancy Drew should certainly have been given a reprieve though.
Then there would be the Three Investigators books. Or, more accurately, ‘Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators’. In truth these would have been my brother’s paperbacks and I know there are at least a couple still surviving in our childhood home. Indeed, we were discussing them just recently, me in the midst of some re-reading and him going through the tortuous process of remembering The Past. It is interesting how some very clear specific memories can become ensnared by other flickers of recollection, a process which itself transforms that specific reality into something different. For example, my brother vividly recalls something about how ultra-low frequency sounds, whilst being inaudible to our ears, can nevertheless generate feelings of unease and terror. He remembers reading that when he was a young boy and credits this with being the start of a lifetime’s interest in science. The thing is, he has for many years put that memory together with Enid Bylton’s Secret Seven books (he was Secret Seven, I was Famous Five), whilst in fact it is something that is key to the solution of the first Three Investigators book, ‘The Secret of Terror Castle’. Now whilst I know I also read ‘Terror Castle’ as a youngster that fact about low-frequencies made little or no impact, and it was only my recent re-reading that allowed me to reposition the ‘truth’ in my brother’s memory. Part of me feels guilty about this, a sadness at fracturing a decades old connection for him between Blyton and the mysteries of science. Part of me too wonders what ‘truth’ will stick in, say, another ten or twenty years time. Will the neural connections long established in my brother’s brain between The Secret Seven and low frequency oscillation reestablish themselves and once again triumph over the ‘reality’? There’s a science experiment for him to ponder.
So there is certainly something interesting about the pursuit of cold scientific proof in The Three Investigators. It’s all very ‘Scooby Doo’, particularly in the first few books, in that the mysteries of haunted houses, spectral apparitions and whispering Egyptian mummies can be debunked by the application of cool deduction and scientific process. And yes, the adult criminals would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the pesky kids…
There is also something interesting about the Three Investigators books being in many ways promotional materials for The American Dream. Start a business! Get a celebrity endorsement! Design a memorable logo and branding! Promote yourselves at every opportunity! Run another job on the side! Work all the hours under the sun! It’s all there. Of course the capitalist propagandising of those themes was way over my head as a ten year old but they stand out strongly when reading them again in 2024. Yet what also comes over in at least the early books is something about the triumph of the nerdy outsider. The Three Investigators may not be wacky Out There weirdoes, but neither are they the kind of archetypal privileged Californian kid that we were encouraged to despise in, say, John Hughes’ films of the 1980s. That kind of young adult is embodied by the Skinny Norris character in The Three Investigators, and although his is at best a bit part, he does remind us what Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are not. What they are is irregular regular kids, characters who inhabit a strange kind of mediated middle ground in society, strangely untouched by the weird Pop Sub-Cultural happenings that would have been exploding around them in their contemporary mid to late 1960s California. These early books penned by Robert Arthur at least seem to exist in a strange pre-Pop realm, one that casts back to a pre-war Hollywood, which is apt given that by 1964 Alfred Hitchcock had the vast majority of his film-making career behind him. The preponderance of Egyptian mummies, movie stars of the silent screen and the abandoned mansions and estates of dubious 19th Century merchants makes The Three Investigators seem like conduits for conservative nostalgia. Again, this would have been lost on a ten year old in 1976 as it likely would have been on a ten year old in 1966. Yet this layering of nostalgia, where multiple coats of mediated memory have built up over the space of many decades now lend these books a peculiar patina. They belong elsewhere, or at least elsewhen, and part of their charm now is that they no longer seem to know what that might be themselves.
Several books on sailing. A couple about English Springer Spaniels. Some James Herriot novels from that time in the 1970s when everyone read about vets, and some collections of Thirlwell cartoons. The bookshelf has not changed since my dad died just as 2014 blinked itself free of a new year’s hangover. In truth I don’t think the bookshelf had changed much in the preceding decades. Certainly the small collection of Agatha Christie paperbacks that I read in my youth are still there, the Tom Adams cover illustrations so very evocative of time and place.
Having said that, I have to admit that I am still not entirely certain when I would have bought and read them, (my) memory being such a fickle thing. Oddly, I see now they are almost exclusively later Christies, and hence hardly her finest work. ‘Postern Of Fate’. ‘The Clocks’. ‘Elephants Can Remember’. There is a 1978 edition of ‘Death On The Nile’ with Peter Ustinov cut out and pasted in front of the Sphinx and ’NOW A SPECTACULAR NEW FILM’ in the bottom corner. On the back cover a grid of stills from the film shows the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Lois Chiles, George Kennedy and Maggie Smith. Glancing at these images now, two key things occur to me. The first is that Jane Birkin looks fabulous (of course she does) and the second is that I wonder if this was the first Agatha Christie book that I bought. If so though, when, and why? I’m sure the two answers must to connected, but my cursory sleuthing does not help much. I’m almost certain I would not have seen the film at the cinema on its release, and the television premiere was not until Christmas Day, 1982, when it was the BBC’s Big Christmas Film. It started at 8.15pm, immediately after ‘The Two Ronnies Christmas Show’ (special guest David Essex!) so I feel much more secure (or do I?) in saying I would have watched it then. Was it then my first exposure to Christie and Poirot? It is certainly possible, yet this would have made me an angsty 16 year old, with barely a year of schooling still ahead of me. By Christmas 1982 I had already been to the Glasgow School of Art twice (once for an open day, once to a night time fashion show) and had my head blown, metaphorically speaking, by the weirdness and wildness I’d glimpsed there. Even in my cloistered bedroom existence then I’m certain that by 1982 surely Poirot and Christie would have felt tame and oddly childish. Wouldn’t they? This train of thought is certainly backed by the printing dates in almost all the other Christie’s in my childhood bedroom. These are are all 1978 or 1979, which rather suggests that the film tie-in might actually have been picked up at the time of printing rather than as a result of finally seeing it on television. More than this, I wonder if by this point, hovering close to my 16th birthday, I was not already tiring of Christie and preparing to reinvent myself as some miserable existential Art Student for whom books by the likes of Agatha Christie were so much frippery. Perhaps by the time 8.15pm on Christmas Day 1982 came around I was already ensconced in my bedroom with a smuggled-in bottle of red and Camus under the covers.
As if.
Why though would I have picked up any of Agatha Christie’s books at all? As with Enid Blyton, the answer is long since lost to me. Perhaps it was simply an extension of that childhood affection for mystery and adventure, multiplied by the small-town economic necessity of only seeing Big Names and bestsellers in the book store. Looking again at those Tom Adams’ covers, however, I do wonder whether it was this which prompted me to pick them up in the first place. Wildly imaginative and mildly hallucinatory, they are perhaps an homage to a 1960s/70s interest in progressive ideas that is nicely in contrast to the somewhat more conservative worlds inhabited by Christie’s words. Not that I would have any concept of such things at the time, just as I would have been wholly ignorant of notable New York musician/artist Lou Reed, who was certainly a fan. Whilst he might have been more inspired by Adams’ illustrations for a series of 1970s reissues of Raymond Chandler’s Noir novels (it is, after all, a long way from St Mary Mead to Manhattan, although it is amusing to think of Joan Hickson as Jane Marple replacing Mo Tucker to recite lines about the “Apelike and tactile bassoon” in ‘The Murder Mystery’ on the eponymous Velvet Underground LP of 1969) he certainly commissioned the illustrator for the cover of his 1972 debut solo album. A long way too from Warhol and his Pop Art bananas. Then again, perhaps not, for Adams’ works often look like hand painted collages; meticulous watercolour studies of Dada assemblages with visual references abounding.
Whether I was drawn to Adams’ illustrations or not, however, the reality is likely to be that I was reading and enjoying Christie in my mid teens, and there is something quite comforting in that thought now. Did I read more Christie in books borrowed from the library? Unsurprisingly, I do not remember, but I think it unlikely. Certainly when I started conscientiously reading the Poirot series in order back in 2012 there was little, if anything, that seemed even vaguely familiar. So no, I hardly think that I would have been as splendidly immersed in Christie as, say, detective fiction historian Curtis Evans, who admits to have been devouring Poirot when he was 12, or my friend Clare who similarly had read all of Christie’s works (encouraged, I believe, by a librarian parent) by the time she became a teenager. Another friend with whom I share almost identical interests in music and detective fiction tells me that, like Evans, he had read Christie when he was 11, led there perhaps inevitably from Sherlock Holmes. Chapeau to them all, even if they do make me feel ashamed of my ill-informed eleven year old self. Then again, don’t we all feel something similar about our young selves when we begin to glance into the barrel of our sixties?
Chapeau also to Lucy Worsley, whose BBC show and accompanying book (or was it the other way round?) in 2023 were both highly entertaining and informative. In all of her work Worsley pulls off the tremendous trick of being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible, which is not unlike Christie herself of course (or Agatha as Worsley says repeatedly in her book/show as if she is on chummy first name terms, which I’m sure would be the case had they been contemporaries) and no doubt explains something of their continued success.
That point about Christie’s work being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible is, I think, critical to understanding her appeal. Like Enid Blyton, Christie appears to have almost sub-consciously understood what appeals to the audience and then delivered it in truck loads. Both authors’ almost supernatural abilities to channel the elements necessary for success is uncanny. It is easy to throw such a notion in the air, of course, but whilst I do believe there is more than a little magic involved in the process of such successful writing, what should also never be overlooked is the sheer amount of time put in at the coalface, as it were. Endless hours spent tapping it out. Tap tap tap, typewriter keys reverberating in solitary confinement. Putting in the hard miles. No shortcuts. Though having the magic on your side helps soften the pain, perhaps.
Critically speaking, one will certainly find more people willing to take up the defence for Christie than for Enid Blyton (Nicholas Royle and his tremendous ‘David Bowie, Enid Bolton and the sun machine’ book notwithstanding), but she remains too often a sniffy shorthand reference for being intellectually substandard. For example, in a review of the 2024 film ‘Wicked Little Letters’, Claire Armitstead in The Guardian suggests that the screenplay “blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories”. Now I’m not going to haul Armistead over the coals for this line, and nor have I seen the film in question, but nevertheless I do think it a somewhat lazy observation, a slightly tired and jaded repetition of a widely accepted notion that is not really supported by the evidence of Christie’s writing. Indeed, to my mind there is actually very little, if any, ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction that is ‘cosy’. ‘Cosy’ feels to me instead a style that is a more modern reinterpretation of Golden Age detective fiction, one inevitably additionally influenced by other media, notably television, film and the entire Nostalgia Industry. Where I do agree with Armitstead though is in the pejorative use of the word, for ‘cosy crime’ to me is certainly something best avoided. I know the style has innumerable supporters and I am very happy about the pleasures they get from the books, but whilst I have tried some of the self-proclaimed ‘cosy’ books/authors of the contemporary era I find them (with only the rarest of exceptions) unutterably dull. Can you see my eyes rolling and my head lolling off to sleep?
Christie does use the word, of course, notably early in ‘Murder Is Easy’ when she describes a certain Miss Pinkerton as being “very cosy and English”. Of course it’s not Christie who says this at all, it is her character Luke Fitzwilliam, a somewhat vapid young chap who is certainly one of the more easily forgettable of Christie’s amateur sleuths. Now ‘Murder is Easy’ is one of Christie’s standalone pieces, but whilst Christie had written only one Miss Marple novel when it was published, one rather thinks that Jane was on her mind. The books is filled with old ladies about whom, as with Miss Pinkerton, there is “something very cosy and English” but that also “are as sharp as nails in some ways”. One can’t help but wonder if the book might have begun life as a prototype Marple before Christie decided that the (spoiler alert!) serial killer theme leant more towards the blood thirsty realm of the thriller than the more subtle disquiet of the Jane Marple universe. Indeed, the book does rather get lost in its latter stages, falling a little too much into the rampaging action of the thriller genre for my tastes, but it is all carried off exuberantly well regardless. And this is the crux of the thing with Christie, and with ‘Murder is Easy’ in particular. For whilst it is too easy to think of Christie books as being ‘cosy’, so too is it to play up the darkness that underpins the (multiple) crimes committed in their pages. Christie (like many Golden Age crime writers) is more complex than that, but crucially, only slightly more so. It is the combination of those contrasting flavours and the injection of the intangible Entertainment ingredient that make them so enjoyable. As Christie says herself in ‘Murder Is Easy’: “Gossip and malice and scandal – all so delicious if one takes them in the right spirit!” Quite the cocktail.
Perhaps more interestingly Christie uses the word ‘cosy’ in a late Poirot novel (1963’s ‘The Clocks’). As much as such a thing is possible in a Poirot mystery, it’s a throwaway line at the end of a chapter. Someone has found a dead body and is recovering from the shock with a nice cup of tea. “It all sounds very cosy”suggests Colin Lamb, one of the book’s narrators, and it is. Of course it is. It’s Agatha Christie poking fun at herself. On your 34th Poirot novel you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?
‘The Clocks’ is not, I think, regarded as one of the better Poirot novels but I admit I find it enormously entertaining and interesting. It reads now like an author throwing caution to the wind, a writer being a little lackadaisical but still reassuringly having their wits about them. ‘The Clocks’ feels like Christie playing with the form, teasing the expectations. So it’s a Poirot mystery where Poirot (now getting on a bit in years) barely appears, and apart from making a flourish with the solution at the end, is mostly there to put some kind of proof to the eternal Poirot insistence that it is in the exercising of “the little grey cells” where mysteries are solved, not in the running around looking for clues. Poirot and Christie leave this to the aforementioned Colin Lamb and Detective Inspector Hardcastle who, for relatively minor Christie characters, are pleasantly sketched. The mystery at the core of the novel, Poirot suggests as soon as he is appraised of the facts, is so apparently complicated that it must, in truth, be very simple. Naturally he is proved to be right, but not before the author takes us on something of a rollercoaster ride of investigation.
The other, perhaps more important (and certainly more amusing) role that Poirot plays in the ‘The Clocks’ is to provide us with an exposition on detective fiction itself, thereby positioning the novel as an enjoyably post-modern meta-fictional work. Well, perhaps that is over-stating the case, but whatever.
Now I told myself that I would not pepper this piece with lengthy quotations, yet the sequence in which Poirot waxes lyrically about detective fiction is so marvellously done that it rather demands it. Poirot/Christie kicks off with Anna K. Green’s 1878 novel ‘The Leavenworth Case’, a copy of which he hands to Lamb, who comments that it is “going back quite a long time… my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.” Poirot though insists that “It is admirable… One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama.” Lamb has a point, for ‘The Leavenworth Case’ is a mite ‘old-fashioned’. Unusually for a 19th Century novel, however, it does not leave me cold and indeed is certainly worth, ahem, investigating. Christie/Poirot too, though, is quite right about its “deliberate melodrama” and its “period atmosphere.” Of course the writer is making the same point about her own work, looking backwards and forwards through time. She acknowledges the criticism. Celebrates it even.
Poirot continues to Maurice Leblanc’s ‘Adventures of Arsene Lupin’ of which he enthuses: “How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.” Here too Poirot/Christie makes a fine point, for the stories of Leblanc are great fun and there is certainly something of Lupin in, say, Leslie Charteris’ character of Simon Templar, aka The Saint. It’s interesting that when Christie was writing ‘The Clocks’ Simon Templar himself was being resuscitated by Roger Moore in a TV show for Beat Boom Britain. The slippage of time backwards and forwards, repeating.
The next piece of classic detective fiction on Poirot’s (or is it Christie’s?) agenda is Gaston Leroux’s novel of 1907 ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’. “Ah, that is really a classic!” gushes Christie (or is it Poirot?) “I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach!… Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.” The novel is certainly another excellent point of reference, but I wonder how accurate it is to suggest that, in 1963 it should be “almost forgotten.” Certainly by 1981 it was anything but, being rated as the third best locked room mystery by a poll carried out amongst mystery writers and reviewers. Since then it appears to have been seldom out of print. Perhaps Poirot/Christie helped to revive interest?
Then, of course, there is Arthur Conan Doyle, about whom Hercules Christie opines that the “tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived.” This is an opinion that I’m in wholehearted agreement with, the Holmes stories and novels never quite connecting with me beyond the thrill of rollicking adventures. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I did come to Holmes and Conan Doyle later in life, and anyway, the short story form has never really done much for me. However, before one can nod too much in agreement, Agatha Poirot continues with a qualification to the opinion, stating that “the art of the writing—ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.”
The reference to Watson is, naturally, an excuse for Christie (and one gets the sense it really is Christie and not Poirot, even though the words are voiced by the little Belgian) to bring up her own Watsonesque construct. The use of the estimable Hastings as the narrative voice for many of the earlier Poirots is unquestionably in homage to Conan Doyle and one rather gets the feeling from this particular scene in ‘The Clocks’ that Christie is expressing regret at leaving him behind, as it were, having banished the poor chap to the depths of Argentina. Perhaps too it is a sneaky preview of Hastings’ return in the final Poirot novel ‘Curtain’, written some twenty years previously and locked in a vault awaiting final publication. After ‘The Clocks’ there would ultimately be another decade and a bit (and three further novels) to wait, but perhaps Christie was getting antsy, or maybe just looking in the eyes of fate and wondering how much longer there would be before…
Interestingly too there is a nod in the ‘The Clocks’ to the first novel (1934’s ‘‘Unfinished Portrait’) that Christie published under her pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Now I cannot in all honesty recommend ‘Unfinished Portrait’ for it feels laboured and tediously self-indulgent to my mind, although admittedly, as a piece of semi-autobiographical writing it does provide some insights into Christie’s life. Lucy Worsley perceptively makes something of this in her book/show but is generally more positive than I can bring myself to be. Instead, I enjoy rather more the fleeting piece of self-reference in ‘The Clocks’, where our friend Mr Lamb happens to stumble upon a young girl observing the world (and, crucially, The Scene Of The Crime’) through opera glasses from an upper flat window. The young girl is confined to the flat in a plaster cast, so it is all very ‘Rear Window’, but there is much in what the character says and thinks that recollects the young Christie/Westmacott of ‘Unfinished Portrait’. Whilst the whole scene is, like much of the entire novel, preposterous (did no-one think of safeguarding measures in 1963?!) it is, I think, intentionally so. Detective fiction is by definition preposterous after all. Hasn’t Poirot already made that clear to us in his little exposition? Perhaps then my suggestion that ‘The Clocks’ is a piece of meta-fiction about the process of making fiction is not so wide of the mark? I shall let the academics argue that out in private whilst I settle back with a sherry.
Let’s go back to that Poirot exposition for moment though, because he’s not finished. With bright eyes he suggests that we “take the works of John Dickson Carr or Carter Dickson, as he calls himself sometimes”. Me, I call the American author John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr and if I were Lamb I should answer with the riposte of “let’s not.” Except… except I cannot quite escape from mentioning John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr, if only to point out what I think is one of the more interesting aspects of Christie’s work. It’s all to do with cleverness, or assumed cleverness, or imagined cleverness, or no cleverness at all. To puzzle or not to puzzle, that might be the question.
Personally I don’t think I have ever particularly bothered about the puzzle for the puzzle’s sake in any piece of mystery or detective fiction and I strongly believe that Agatha Christie would side with me on this one. For whilst it is inescapable that the puzzle aspect of her mysteries is one of the most enduring facets of the work, it never seems to overpower everything else. Indeed, the puzzle can often just be the arresting hook on which to hang everything else, which are conversations and observations and a strong narrative drive. Let’s Get On With The Story indeed.
The solutions to the puzzles of the crimes in Christie’s books do sometimes feel tortuously convoluted, yet, as Poirot pointedly makes clear in ‘The Clocks’ they are also often fiendishly simple because the motivations behind the crimes are such. I don’t think one ever comes away from a Christie novel feeling that the author has been insufferably clever. Her characters, arguably, sometimes, and Poirot, yes, certainly and almost all the time. This is one of his defining characteristics after all and I suspect one of the reasons that Christie grew to despise him. Jane Marple? Heaven forbid. Which is probably why Marple is Christie’s greatest character and perhaps the one most like herself. She is disarmingly, self-deprecatingly, charmingly yet incisively clever.
The same also feels true of, say, Dorothy L Sayers. Her Lord Peter Wimsey character can sometimes come across as insufferably smug yet, despite often spending an interminable amount of time unpacking the finer details of train timetables, Sayers herself never comes across as intellectually aloof. John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr on the other hand most assuredly does, as do several other male authors I could name but won’t partly because I don’t want to fall into the trap of negativity but mostly because my memory fails me and I can’t think of any names off the top of my head.
John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr novels are always preposterous but only occasionally pleasurably so. More often, as with every book I have had the misfortune to read featuring the appallingly insufferable Dr Gideon Fell, they are simply interminably dull expositions of the novelist’s thought processes barely disguised as Fell unravelling the puzzle to find the solution. Some people, I know, just live for this kind of thing and that is fair enough. To me, though, the Gideon Fell mysteries read like John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr showing off what he considers to be his astounding cleverness, and what an irritatingly masculine cleverness it is. As dull as reading/hearing people’s drug or dream stories.
Perhaps all of this is about the subtle difference between character and writer, fiction and autobiography. Or is it that just what I want to believe? Subjectivity playing tricks on objective logic. Then again, photographer Richard Avedon has suggested that his portraits are more about him than they are the people he photographs, whilst Mary Ellen Mark has said that “every photograph is the photographer’s opinion about something”. In other words, the art is about the artist even when it appears to be objective. So is the difference between Christie and John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr ‘just’ to do with the manner in which each does/does not blur the distinction between self and character? Any number of academic treatises no doubt exist to prove and disprove this. Meanwhile, thank you for indulging the meagre meanders of my mind.
Is there more to be said on Christie? Assuredly yes. For example there might be the absurdity of 21st Century film producers ‘reimagining’ her stories with themes, characters and narrative arcs that are nowhere to be found in the original texts. I don’t by default object to this notion, incidentally. Weaving past and future together into the fleeting moment is what artists do, after all, Christie included. That said, it does amuse me to think of someone coming to the original novel of, say, ‘Murder Is Easy’ after seeing the 2023 BBC adaptation and being surprised to find few of that production’s themes in evidence in the text. Similarly, anyone reading the Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’ on which Kenneth Branagh’s ‘A Haunting In Venice’ film is allegedly based will struggle to find anything remotely similar. Vastly superior, certainly (and it is a ‘lesser Poirot’), but with only the flimsiest of connections.
There could be something to be said too about the sense of place and landscape in Christie’s work. Poirot in Egypt, for example, or Miss Marple in the Caribbean, but mostly something about perception of English landscapes. Cities and villages. The darkness lurking in the shadows, of course, but also their lightness and charm, their cool sophistication and rustic warmth. Perhaps I will revisit these ideas at a later date. For now, though, I’m putting my Christie’s back on the shelf. They might now physically sit there next to Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but in a corner of my mind they are back in a teenage bedroom, rubbing jackets with James Herriott, Thirlwell and books about Springer Spaniels.
The sight of the sun going down may no longer make me cry but the passing of things into darkness certainly brings a chill of melancholy. This is the inevitability of age of course, as inescapable as the cycles of nature. Things end. Things begin. Blink and you miss them.
Much of this is captured in ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’, the new, and perhaps the last, record by epic45, an artist I first came across back in 2002. The introduction was via Anthony Harding and his July Skies project, whose remarkable ‘Dreaming Of Spires’ LP I was fortunate enough to write about for ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ magazine. For me that record was like opening a doorway into a secret garden within a secret garden, a strange space inhabited by those eking out artistic existences beyond the reach of even the ‘underground’ never mind the mainstream. This was a realm of small country churches and derelict WW2 airfields. OS maps and the tracings of Beeching’s vandalism. Electricity pylons marching through forests. Ladybird books, Lone Pine paperbacks; the illustrations of Robert Lumley and Bertram Prance. Peculiarities at the end of the 20th Century.
Not quite so peculiar now, perhaps, as many of these infatuations have become more readily accessible in the intervening two decades thanks to the sprawl of the Internet and social media. Yet there remains something appealing and slightly Other about them. Profoundly analogue, perhaps, even whilst propagated and experienced in digital arenas. There is something of nostalgia at work, certainly, but equally certainly nothing so stultifying as a preoccupation with the past. This nostalgia is instead about drawing emotional strength, synthesising knowledge and experience into something new. The creative process (and the learning process) in a nutshell.
That nod to The Field Mice in the opening line here is apt too, for there are surely some shared points of interest and influence at work between epic45’s Ben Holton and Bobby Wratten of The Field Mice, Lightning In A Twilight World and others. Something to do with a certain kind of oddly assured fragility that casual misinformed cynics might wrongly classify as limp or fey. A fascination with the temporal distortions of liminal spaces, both physical and psychic. Spirits in their houses, ghosts in their machines. Usborne’s book on their childhood bookshelves. Things we all invent and project on our eyelids to make sense of what we feel around us. Music, photographs, words. Whispers or whatever.
Musically, it is certainly possible to listen to the thirty two minutes of ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ and to hear echoes of the likes of The Field Mice or Sarah labelmates Blueboy, more so perhaps than on any previous epic45 record. Album opener ‘New Town Faded’, with its humorous nod to a Joy Division title, could be the kissing cousin to something from the delicious ‘Unisex’ album, for example; ‘Be Nowhere’ an amorphous echo of the lilac 10” sleeved ‘Snowball’. If such comparisons make you shudder then that is most likely your loss. But then again we all blink and miss something sometimes.
There is also, in the music of epic45 and also throughout the nigh-on-20 year existence of Holton’s Wayside and Woodland imprint, a fascination with suburbia, for there are few more liminal spaces after all. Tracey Thorn has written eloquently about suburbia in her ‘Another Planet’ book of course, but she would likely agree that her heart was always in the city with the suburbs as something to escape, a place and a set of feelings to leave behind. Fond memories, perhaps, but only in hindsight and only with the weight of age to temper their adolescent frustration.
It is perhaps inevitable that anyone with a creative impulse would feel constrained by suburbia, its insistence on uniformity apparently the enemy of individual expression. Yet it is not necessarily the case. Artist John Myers spent most of the 1970s making photographs of the “garages, TVs, electricity substations, new builds and [his] neighbours” in Stourbridge. Collected in the 2017 book ‘The World Is Not Beautiful’, Myers’ photographs in fact suggest just the opposite. Beauty is in the everyday and God is in the mundane. In the work of epic45 there feels something of the same impulse. An embrace with suburbia where both parties naturally hold each other a little distantly. It wouldn’t do to be too familiar, would it? Holton, like John Myers is a recorder, making notes on the spaces he exists within and passes through. This is done musically of course, but in recent years it is increasingly also through photography, much of which finds place within printed books supporting the sounds, an excellent alternative means of giving physical artefacts to digitally distributed music.
There is an acceptance too, in the work of Myers and of Holton, I think, of the tension inherent in suburbia. These are spaces that by definition look both inwards and outwards, forever ripped and torn by duelling impulses that create a certain kind of neurotic anxiety. Agatha Christie recognised this in her 1969 Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’, a book which Kenneth Branagh made almost unrecognisable as the 2023 film ‘A Haunting In Venice’. Christie’s writing in the novel may be a long way from her finest, but although there is a distinct clumsiness about everything in the book, Christie does at least recognise the sordid repression of suburbia and the incipient mental health conditions it might generate.
It is this duality of existence that epic45 capture in the closing track on ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’. A six minute post-shoegaze, ahem, ‘epic’, called, appropriately enough, ‘Finality’, the song suggests movement and stasis at the same time. Travels to find “another place, another town” are plagued by both the disappointment and relief at finding them all the same. Suburbia being by default about uniformity. Everything is nowhere and nothing is everywhere. You can hear the echo of adolescent anger in the almost buried, shouted, vocal that counterpoints the same electronically treated sung lyric. It is both heartbreaking and oddly celebratory, like the work of David Lynch or the peculiar surrealism of Skids’ ‘Sweet Suburbia’ whose single sleeve oddly predicted New York anglophile band My Favorite’s ‘Detectives of Suburbia’. 17 years and an ocean apart. What was that about nods, whispers or whatever? Blink and you miss them.
‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ then is a punctuation mark in the creative journey of Ben Holton and epic45. A period perhaps, but only time will tell. It may unfurl in the future as a semi-colon, an elongated pause for breath before another plunge. One certainly suspects that even if this record sees the ‘end’ of epic45 there will be future Holton projects. His ‘Twelve Months’ work of music and photography as Birds In The Brickwork for example is already at volume three and must surely promise more. I admit I have not purchased the accompanying calendars (like most of the limited runs of physical artefacts from Wayside and Woodland, they tend to sell out quickly), but the cover image for the 2023 edition is thoroughly entrancing, like a West Midlands suburban Todd Hido outtake from ‘House Hunting’ or Robert Adams’ ‘Summer Nights, Walking’ in Water Orton instead of the Colorado Front Range. Looking for the echoes of Lawrence and Maurice Deebank rather than Emily Dickinson. Crumbling the antiseptic beauty, indeed.
‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ is out now on Wayside and Woodland. Don’t blink. Don’t miss it.
The Letter Burning – Alison Cotton (from ‘Engelchen’ LP) Seratonin – Rachel’s (from ‘Handwriting’ LP) Pencil Of Spheres – Mark Van Hoen (from ‘Plan For A Miracle’ LP) Frogspawn – Letters From Mouse (from ‘Clota’ LP) February (After Rain) – Birds In The Brickwork (from ‘Twelve Months / Volume Three’ LP) The Colourfield – The Colourfield Just Who Are The Cockleshell Heroes? – Action Painting! (from ‘UNDER THE BRIDGE 2’ LP) Missing Person – Dragged Up (single) Half a Mind – The Holy Modal Rounders Overture: WCPAEB, Pt. II – West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Time Turns To Memories – Otherworldly Things (from ‘Heavy Dream Cycle’ EP) Twisting The Knife – Pale Lights (from ‘Waverly Place’ LP) Shelf – Withered Hand, Kathryn Williams (from ‘Willson Williams’ LP) Castle Night – James Jonathan Clancy (from ‘Sprecato’ LP) High, Low and in Between – P.G. Six (from ‘Old Man on The Mountain Single‘ single) Nothin’- Townes Van Zandt Instant Coffee Blues – Guy Clark Go Your Way – Anne Briggs What Have They Done to My Song, Ma? – Melanie Never Again – The Shangri-Las Red’s Theme – Moonbears (from ‘Four Sides For Red’ LP) Sunset Dean – McPhee (from ‘Ballads Of Seduction, Fertility And Ritual Slaughter’ LP)
What is the first book that you can remember reading? For me, as with many of my age/generation, it would probably be something by Enid Blyton. Or, more specifically, a Famous Five adventure/mystery. ‘Five Go Down To The Sea’, perhaps, or ‘Five Go To Smugglers Top’. Possibly even ‘Five On A Treasure Island’, although I doubt that personally I would have been so lucky as to have started reading the series at the first instalment. What I do know for certain is that it was not until my later years that I read all the books in their published order, such things being so much more difficult when one is a child with limited pocket money and libraries have gaps in their inventories. It is tempting however to put a degree of certainty on ‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’ (ironically their penultimate outing), for its 1971 Green Knight cover illustration by Betty Maxey is the one that reverberates most, although whether that is down to the ghostly garden sculpture appearing through a break in the greenery or to the lustrous blonde of Anne’s hair I could not say for sure. It is a great adventure regardless, with an alluring island, stolen treasure, secret passages and Unpleasant Characters to be defeated. All the essential ingredients, in other words.
Yet whilst there is some uncertainty about which of their books I read first, even less clear to me now is how I came across The Famous Five at all. Was one of their books a present from my parents or a relative? Did a friend lend me a copy? Was it a librarian’s recommendation? This latter seems unlikely, for although the boycotting of Blyton by the UK’s librarians in the 1960s had eased somewhat by the early 1970s when I had reached an age to be interested, I am sure that a certain sniffiness remained. Still, at least we were fortunate to have libraries at all, and I do have a deeply ingrained memory of visiting the old sandstone library building on Troon’s Templehill, although the details of the books I borrowed have long since evaporated of course. Years later, with the ‘new’ library already matured into its setting opposite the town hall, I revisited that sandstone building to make benefit claims, this being something that university students could still do outside of term time in the 1980s. The past is a foreign country sure enough.
As for a book being borrowed from a friend, well, that is possible. I do recall wandering out across the fields (long since built over) behind our house with a couple of friends, exploring abandoned farm houses and imagining that we were on the trail of some unidentified adventure. The abandoned cottages were haunted, of course, and the barns used by smugglers. One evening we ran away from these smugglers and hid in a field of barley. The smugglers were farmers and they shouted at us to get out of their fields and to stay away from their barn. Being a fragile and largely obedient soul I did as I was told.
A colleague at the school I ended up teaching at for 30 years (and who I am sure was much less fragile as a child) told me once that reading Famous Five books as a youngster set the seeds for a lifetime’s fascination with the outdoors. A straight line from ‘Five On A Hike Together’ to Ten Tors Expedition Co-Ordinator. Me? I ended up as an art teacher, as perhaps all sensitive children inevitably do.
Finally then, were the Famous Five books gifts from my parents? I asked my mother and she told me that she honestly cannot remember. I do recall that books were common Christmas gifts in my younger years, but that they tended to be the typical Annuals (a Basil Brush one stand out), or non-fiction things like the ‘Usborne Book of Ghosts’ that everyone of A Certain Age seems to remember so vividly. Indeed, non-fiction books are the thing I remember seeing most around the house in my childhood. I certainly do not recall ever seeing my father look at books that were not mostly filled with diagrams and photographs. As I grew older I also became aware of the fact that he avoided writing too, although it was not until I trained as a teacher that it dawned on me that he very probably struggled with dyslexia. Books, then, and certainly the idea of reading fiction for pleasure, were not high on his agenda. As for my mother, well I do not recall seeing her reading much either, although I suspect she must have read some fiction. I asked her recently what she read in her younger years and she was, perhaps understandably (she is 91) a little vague. Neville Shute stood out, and the romance stories in ‘The People’s Friend’ magazine. These days she, like me, thoroughly enjoys the post-war romantic fiction of D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering. She would likely have been unknowingly familiar with Clavering in the past too, for she had more than 20 works serialised in the aforementioned ‘People’s Friend.’ (Clavering, not my mum). Funny how things cycle around.
Reading then was encouraged to a point by my parents, but not visibly reinforced by their own practice, and all of the books we owned were easily contained in a small wooden bookcase holding around 50 books in total, amongst those the collection of ubiquitous Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopaedias. These days I would fill that bookcase in six months, which perhaps says as much about levels of disposable income and the culture of consumption and accumulation than it does about anything else. Still, research by the National Literacy Trust in 2021 suggests that 6% of children and young people in the UK do not have a book of their own at home so perhaps things have not progressed as much as some of us would like to imagine.
However I happened to come across The Famous Five, then, I am eternally grateful, for I suspect that reading Blyton’s stories at the very least planted a seed of reading pleasure. Did these tales of mystery solving and daring adventure colour my later immersion in crime and detective fiction as an adult? Perhaps. Certainly, thinking back, it is interesting to see how strongly childhood threads feed into early adulthood and beyond. For example I recall how, at age eighteen, I spent several summer weekends with friends camping out in a woodland gorge outside Mauchline in Ayrshire. Even though our evenings around the campfire were fuelled more by Tennents Special than ginger beer, a shared attachment to a Blyton-esque idyll prevailed. Around this same time The Comic Strip were making their own spiky vision of Blyton with their ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ comedy routine. Was it supposed to be a Left Wing satirical take-down of Middle Class escapism? I think it was, but watching it again now, it all strikes me as being a bit lazy, picking on easy targets and not nearly as funny as I thought it was.
On reflection, ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ is probably just an example of how Blyton and The Famous Five have long been perfectly positioned to be an effective weapon in Culture Wars, with The Comic Strip’s use of parody and satire itself, in hindsight, a rather quaint 1980s raspberry blowing in the wind. These days, with their roots firmly set in the Middle Class milieu of an historically more conservative England, the Famous Five books are perhaps doomed to be interpreted as either examples of archaic values in desperate need of the more extreme action of ‘cancellation’ or amber-encased evocations of A Better Time that must be preserved at all costs. Inevitably, of course, the intended audience of children for the most part have never cared much about such things. Having always been open to influence and inspiration from fiction, they are rarely quite as gullible or ignorant as many adults imagine. This has always seemed remarkable to me. Perhaps there is something peculiarly blinding about parenthood? Thirty years of working in an English High School suggest that this may be so. In all that time I found parents much more difficult to deal with and understand than their children, but this likely says as much about me as anything. Emotionally blocked, or something.
Certainly Blyton seems to have suffered from a degree of arrested development due to the childhood trauma of not only a breakdown in the family structure between her parents, but also in the manner in which her mother pretended it had not happened. This kind of ‘for appearances sake’ approach would not have been particularly unusual (especially within the upper middle classes) in the Edwardian age but it does seem to have had both a profound physiological and psychological effect on Blyton. In a 2004 biopic filmed by the BBC, Helena Bonham Carter gave a typically marvellous depiction of Enid. The actor said she “was attracted to the role because she was bonkers. She was an emotional mess and quite barking mad.” I suppose one could get away with saying such things in 2004, especially if one was Helena Bonham Carter, but I think it is a tremendous quote. The actor also points out that Blyton was “unbelievably modern. She was a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman. She knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature.”
Attempts to make the books, characters and narratives more ‘relevant’ to contemporary audiences are doomed to be divisive of course. Yet commerce demands that such attempts at ‘modernisation’ continue. The Past must be exploited, after all. Stakeholders/shareholders must be paid and there are mortgages on second or third homes to service. A ‘reimagining’ of The Famous Five by the BBC in 2023/24 has predictably sparked fevered accusations of ‘wokeism’ on Social Media. Even those arguing against such allegations cannot help but distance themselves from actually ever enjoying the books at any point in the(ir) past. Finding anyone willing to tread a middle ground in these times is an almost impossible task. Moderation, after all, does not sell.
Personally, I rather enjoyed the BBC show for its balancing act of projecting contemporary 21st Century anxieties onto a mediated fictional 1930s tableau. In this it owes far more to the Indiana Jones films than to Enid Blyton’s books, but that is how media works after all. Most Children, I suspect, will care nothing for this and will focus their attentions on the fun and frenzy of being a child. Fancying the actors/characters and their escapist universe, as all children (or, if you insist, ‘young people’) have done since the invention of television or the printed word (and possibly since hearing stories around campfires in caves). Goodness knows ‘reality’ is grim enough. Nor do I have any particular issue with, for example, English Heritage alerting audiences to strains of racism, sexism and xenophobia in Blyton’s work. These are after all, to a large degree, objective observations, albeit themselves somewhat (but not entirely) directed by the historical context in which they are made. Adding a negative reference (as English Heritage has also done) to the literary merit of Blyton’s work does, however, feel a mite subjective. It seems to me that making such critical assertions misses a crucial element, which is in the challenge of making something so ‘simple’ and apparently ‘lacking in literary merit’ so massively successful. We do need to remind ourselves sometimes that ‘simple’ does not equate to ‘easy’, just as ‘successful’ does not automatically translate as ‘critically lacking’.
It might be argued that the best way in which to avoid Culture War weaponisation in the present is to simply not have been the most successful artist operating at any period in the past. Well, that and to not have reflected any racism, sexism or xenophobia inherent to the particular point in history during which they worked, which is a tough ask. I suppose one might simply ignore everything that was created before any arbitrary date one might care to come up with. Belle And Sebastian and Bob Dylan suggested that we ‘Don’t Look Back’, after all, but I am not sure they meant it in this manner. Nor, really, did the ‘Punk Rock’ year zero pose, although I admit that I was ignorant enough at that time to take it on board as a model for living for a while. I rather think that many generations do a similar thing. In other words, whenever one is in that range of teens to twenties (and often beyond), one sees oneself as being Right and True and Pure, and that not only is anyone older automatically Wrong, they will also Never Understand. This is the blessing and the curse of being that age.
All of which is a rather meandering way of introducing Malcolm Saville. Saville was a contemporary of Blyton, and indeed was instrumental in getting her established with the Newnes publishing house in the late 1930s. Yet whilst his output was almost as prodigious and his books very successful in their time, they have, unlike Blyton’s Famous Five, never been constantly in print. Abridged paperback editions of his Lone Pine Club series appeared in the late 1960s and early 70s but thereafter there was a thirty to forty year gap until the small Girls Gone By imprint started republishing the series in their original form. In the past year or two I have been devouring this Lone Pine Club series and enjoying them enormously.
I have wondered previously about why no-one ever told me about Malcolm Saville when I was younger. At that time I suggested it may have been because Malcolm Saville is very certainly An English Thing, like donning fancy dress at any opportunity and being sniffy about the French. I stand by that suggestion and still strongly suspect that the librarians of my day would have turned their noses up and pointed mine towards Good Scottish Authors like Stevenson (Robert Louis, not D.E.) and Scott. Both of whom I found dull beyond belief, incidentally.
Would I have enjoyed the Lone Pine Club books if I had read them as a youngster? It is a moot point, certainly, for by the time I might have progressed from The Famous Five to their slightly more grown up narratives (there are some marvellous elements of romantic tension between characters completely lacking in Blyton, for example) I rather think I had developed (if that is the right word) into a Typical Boy with a predilection for Non Fiction. If memory serves correctly (and it probably doesn’t) by the time I was entering my teens, time in the local library was spent almost exclusively looking for books about cars, motor sport, tanks and WW2 aircraft.
It is entirely possible too that as a Scottish youngster I might have agreed with my imaginary librarians about the books being Too English. For whilst the Lone Pine Club adventures are remarkably fine at capturing real landscapes, they never head north of the border (Yorkshire seems to about as far as they are willing to venture). Nor, for that matter, do they consider treading into the realm of Wales, which is a little more peculiar given that so many of the books are set in and around the border countryside of The Long Mynd in Shropshire. Yet why should this be a criticism? Saville seems certainly to have been interested in the idea of what Englishness meant, at a time when it did not seem to be fully encumbered with negative images of rampant xenophobia, regardless of what Enid Blyton’s books might have suggested. There is certainly an argument to be made that Saville lamented what he saw as the passing of a traditional, rural English way of life, and that his stories were at least in part a way of capturing that. Indeed his own favourite amongst his books was ‘Jane’s Country Year’ which I wrote about here.
A love of nature and landscape is central to ‘Jane’s Country Year’ and this passion is crucial to almost the entirety of Malcolm Saville’s output. Indeed, he is rightly celebrated for setting his children’s adventure stories in real places (often, delightfully, with accompanying maps in the end papers). In contrast, Blyton instead veered more to the imagined and generic landscape. True, Kirrin Castle (but not the island) is supposedly inspired by Corfe Castle, and ‘Whispering Island’ (‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’) modelled on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, but without that knowledge one would struggle to recognise Blyton’s love of Dorset in her writing. Even when the books are set in a named place such as Cornwall (‘Five Go Down To The Sea’) it is difficult to read the landscape as anything other than an imaginary ideal. The un-named Rye that features in ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ is, of all her landscapes and places, perhaps the most accurately sketched, although perhaps one needs to have at least been to Rye to realise this. Either that or to have read the third book in the Lone Pine Club series. Malcolm Saville’s ‘The Gay Dolphin’ is filled with real places and is hugely evocative of the area around Rye. Look, here is Winchelsea (where Saville himself lived for a period, perhaps as a neighbour of Spike Milligan?) and over there is Dungeness. This is Camber Castle and this the military canal. Over there beyond the dunes is the golf course where Mr Morton will at one point go for a round and, eventually, this space will fill with a holiday camp and the sounds of fey indie bands. Naturally too there is hidden treasure and a secret passage through the walls of Rye. Indeed, in many respects ‘The Gay Dolphin’ and ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ share remarkably similar DNA, and with both being published in 1945 it is intriguing to conjecture about who borrowed from whom. Ask any Lone Pine Club fan and they will no doubt suggest that Blyton must have, at the very least, taken on board Saville’s ideas following a conversation at the publishing house. Blyton fans on the other hand will likely point to coincidence…
The question of Rye aside, there does certainly seem to be a degree of mutual mistrust between fans of Blyton and Saville and I suspect that this distancing is rooted in those kinds of tribal allegiances that many of us naturally make in our youth. I can never quite decide if these impulses are entirely natural and simply exaggerated by the manipulation of Capitalism or if they are in fact constructs of materialist exploitation. Either way, the divisions seem real and also to be very much opened up along those lines of class distinctions and snobbery. Perversely, perhaps, it is most likely within the ‘educated middle classes’ to whom the fictional Famous Five characters and their parents belong that one finds criticism of Blyton and affection for Saville. This kind of inverted snobbery is intriguing. It is certainly the kind of thing I have practised with regards to music throughout most of my adult life. You know the kind of thing: “What sort of music do you like?”, “Oh, obscure things that you’ll never have heard of, and even then I prefer the unreleased demos. I have a copy of those you know, because I interviewed the singer for my fanzine when he was in his first band when he was twelve and I was eleven. We bonded over a mutual love of The Velvet Underground.”
To continue that musical theme, then, Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.
In this imagined realm of Children’s Authors as 1960s Pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness. Nostalgia is baked in.
Such notional connections are entirely personal ones, of course, attachments to (and rejections of) cultural streams being entirely subjective after all. Both Blyton and Saville would doubtless have been at best bemused and at worst horrified by such comparisons. Which is part of the fun of making them.
That notion of nostalgia is certainly critical in considering Blyton or Saville in the 21st Century, although I think too there are ways of defining what one means by nostalgia. For the most part I’m in agreement with musician and author John Darnielle in so much as I consider nostalgia as “an emotional attachment to the past but not a preoccupation or fixation on it”. In my ‘Young and Foolish’ book I posited a vague theory that our lives (specifically in terms of musical consumption, but also in a much broader way) move in orbits around a central point. The suggestion, which I largely stand by still, is that whilst we head off on a variety of new trajectories (some lengthy, others intensely brief) we are always drawn back to this centre, where we might recharge before embarking on our next journey. That centre is, at some basic level, rooted in a sense of loss, or absence, these being what I still regard as the essential qualities of great Pop. I did not then, and do not now, see that as being necessarily a place of sadness or sorrow. Perhaps, though, that centre of nostalgia does drain something of our souls even as it recharges us. A vampiric deal with the devil, or something similar. Perhaps we reach a point when the trade is no longer in our favour and, lacking the energy to break free on a new trajectory, we sink deeper into the mire of The Past. Which is not even ‘our’ past, but instead one painted for us by media controllers with vested interests in maintaining status quos. A space that echoes to the bewildered mutterings of ‘much better in my day’ curmudgeons.
The audience for Malcolm Saville’s books in the 21st Century then is most assuredly the more, ahem, ‘aged’ generations who are enjoying both the nostalgic element of books from their own youth or, like myself, finding pleasure in writing rooted in landscapes that remain largely unchanged even after more than three quarters of a century. Landscapes that can still be visited, paths that can still be walked, towns and villages that would still seem seem largely familiar to the books’ young protagonists.
As for children of the 21st Century? Well despite, or because of the best part of three decades spent teaching teenagers, I am in no position to make any informed judgement on that. Friends With Children suggest that Blyton holds no great interest and Saville is naturally invisible, except where those parents themselves might have old Lone Pine adventures on their shelves. Even here I suspect there would be an instinctive mistrust of anything ‘old’. One friend told me that whilst his daughter expressed an affection for ‘Mystery At Witchend’, she actually much preferred Robin Stevens’ ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series.
I can see why Stevens’ stories would appeal, for they are, like Alan Bradley’s ‘Flavia De Luce’ books, of which they remind me, great fun. They are, of course, fired through with contemporary issues projected onto the kind of fictionalised comic-book vision of 1930s England that perhaps only an American (or a Malta dwelling Canadian) can conjure. This is a compliment, incidentally.
It could be argued that both these series of books are rooted in the adventure and mystery genres of The Famous Five or The Lone Pine Club, but both also unashamedly play the game of putting the individual at the heart of the narrative. The notion of the identity obsessed individual living a progressively liberal existence in opposition to a conservative society in Stevens’ books seems particularly On Point for the 21st Century, and is something one might alternately admire or abhor. An anti-Blyton for the 2020s, perhaps.
Will Steven’s ‘Detective Club’ mysteries be The Famous Five of their age, doomed forever to remain in print and to plague future (further) enlightened generations with as yet unforeseen problematic depictions of identity and/or history? Or will they be The Lone Pine Club, destined to occasionally flourish in one or two bursts of nostalgia over the forthcoming half century, adored and ignored in almost equal measure? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile the actual Blyton brand will, I am sure, prevail for some time to come yet. Commerce, after all, insists upon it.
January (Ever Decreasing Circles) – Birds In The Brickwork (from ‘Twelve Months / Volume Three’ LP) Thelwall Viaduct – Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan (from ‘Live at Iklectik Art Lab’ LP) Lune Gorge – Black Zephyr (from ‘M6 Travelogue’ EP) Branches – Trembling Blue Stars (from ‘Bathed In Blue’ EP) Shining Spires – Harp (from ‘Albion’ LP) Welcome To Bellevue – The Bathers (from ‘Sirenesque’ LP) Had It All – James Jonathan Clancy (from ‘Sprecato’ LP) Secret World – Still Corners (from ‘Dream Talk’ LP) Incandescent – The Guild League (from ‘Speak Up’ LP) Heal Thyself – The Tyde (from ‘Season 5’ LP) Keeper Of The Flame – Nicky Wire (from ‘Nicky Wire’ LP) Hollowed Out – Ducks Ltd. (from ‘Harm’s Way’ LP) My Days – Withered Hand (from ‘My Days‘ EP) Change is in the Air – Robert Rotifer (from ‘Holding Hands in Petropolis’ LP) Here It Comes – East Village (from ‘Drop Out’ LP) Bleach & Salt Water – Moonshake (from ‘Eva Luna’ LP) The Road Back Home – F.J. McMahon (from ‘Spirit Of The Golden Juice’ LP) Daily Nightly – The Monkees (from ‘Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.’ LP) Green Eyes – Pale Blue Eyes (from ‘This House Bonus Disc’) Never Be The Same – Montjuïc (digital single) End Is Important – Odd Nosdam (digital single)
Remember The Future, Pt. 1 – Nektar (from ‘Remember The Future’ LP) The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years – The Wild Swans (from ‘ English Electric Lightning’ 10”) Winter Bones – Jodie Lowther (from ‘The Cat Collects Seasons’ EP) Renfrew – North Atlantic Explorers (from ‘solo piano versions’ LP – original version on ‘All The Ships At Sea‘ LP) North Atlantic Drifter – Lo Five (from ‘Sailing 1975’ LP) Swimmer – Helena Deland (from ‘Goodnight Summerland’ LP) I don’t want the money – Man Rei (from ‘Health’ LP) Almost Touch – Abstract Concrete (from ‘Abstract Concrete’ LP) Rae – Autechre (from ‘LP5’ LP) The Grey Maids – Gordon Chapman-Fox (from ‘The Nine Travellers’ LP) Blue – Purelink (from ‘Signs’ LP) The Glory of the World is Surely Over – The Inward Circles (from ‘Before We Lie Down in Darknesse’ LP)
Unpopular 