End Of The Century

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.

Be Thankful For What You’ve Got

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.

Investigating nostalgia with young Americans

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. 

I know how that feels.

Backwards and Forwards with Agatha Christie

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 Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club

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.

Past pleasures

One of the things that most frustrates me about crime and detective novels is when the author springs a piece of previously unmentioned information that allows the detective to solve the case, usually right at the end of the book. It’s a trait most commonly found in novels from the earlier end of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, back there in the 1920s or so when the genre became ridiculously popular and every chancer took a punt at writing a thriller. Clifford Witting employs the, ahem, ‘technique’ in his 1938 novel ‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ (republished recently by Galileo). Witting is such a fine writer, however, that not only does his deployment of this little trick of the trade fail to frustrate, it actually brings a smile of pleasure, for there is a strong sense here that the author is having a great deal of fun playing with the very traditions of the genre in which he is participating. ’Locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ element? Check. Glasses and fake beard disguise? Check. A victim who appears so perfectly unpleasant a character that we cannot but be rather pleased at his demise? Check. Romantic attraction between detective and suspect, setting up a professional duty/personal interest conflict? Check.

Everything makes for a tremendously well paced and entertaining piece of genre fiction that in its confidence both cosies into and transcends that very genre. Only historical hindsight allows us to position the book as a sort of knowing punctuation point in the genre’s development, yet it is nevertheless difficult to shake off that feeling. It feels faintly like an acknowledgment of the end of something. In this it seems to echo Witting’s ‘Midsummer Murder’, published the previous year (also reissued by Galileo) and filled with metaphorical threats of the approaching cataclysm. The symbolic elements of the 1937 novel may be missing in ‘Michaelmas Goose’ but is is nevertheless interesting to read the book at least partly as something which seeks to capture a last gasp of English society. One eye on an uncertain future, another on a past that is bound to failure. Things are not quite what they seem. Sacrifice is both honourable and despicable; money both an illusory source of freedom and of imprisonment. Love may not conquer all.

As mentioned, Witting employs the Second Rate Detective Novelist’s flimsy trick of withholding evidence from the reader until the end of the book, but gets away with it not just because he is a fine writer, but also because he splits the novel into two distinct books within the whole. The second of these is titled simply ‘The Killing’ and in it Witting employs another genre trope of unwinding the threads of a crime to which we already know the solution. Some readers will find these kinds of detective novels to be frustrating in themselves, simply because they do not allow the puzzle-solving mind to try and work things out and guess ‘whodunnit’, but I admit I find them, for the most part, very enjoyable. Their interest in the psychological and the process of policing feels more Modern and suggests the procedurals that become more prevalent in the post-WW2 years, and Witting does anticipate this to a degree. It also allows him to play to an extent with the traditions of the serialised thriller, and there are moments during ‘The Killing’ when one is put in mind of Ealing comedies ‘Hue and Cry’ and ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’. This is, as you will appreciate, No Bad Thing.

‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ then is both intellectually rewarding as a rumination on its own genre and a dashed fine read in its own right. It is also another piece of evidence that marks Clifford Witting out as one of the great unknowns, thankfully now reclaimed and given a new audience.

If we have Galileo Publishing to thank for bringing Clifford Witting back into the limelight, then we must thank them also for reissuing Joan Cockin’s work. Having already thoroughly enjoyed her 1949 novel ‘Villainy At Vespers’, in which her Inspector Cam character solves crime during a Cornish summer, I was looking forward to ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ in which Cam makes his first appearance. Although the cover blurb suggests it was also published in 1949, other evidence points to a 1947 first appearance courtesy of Holder and Stoughton. Regardless, ‘Curiosity’ shifts its action slightly Eastwards to the Cotswolds (although if one wanted to be pedantic the cover illustration is of the Exeter Guildhall and High Street in Devon) and takes the opportunity to examine the effects of Government intervention in the rural landscape. This intervention takes the form of a scientific research establishment transitioning from wartime weapons development to the invention of a new Super Fabric on which the success of Britain’s Export Drive depends. As with Witting, Cockin’s novel suggests another Ealing Comedy, this time ‘The Man In The White Suit’, although perhaps more important in the book is the conflict between urban and rural, between Progress and Tradition. There may also be something here about the local frustrations who see effort and resources being expended on the development of something for export rather than easing the difficulties of the home front, as it were. In this, the book does a fine job of gently puncturing the commonly propagated myth of a unified people grimly bearing hardship through wartime and peace. Here there are the human frailties of jealousy and greed, of passion and weakness of spirit and flesh. There is a thread too of espionage, where questions of betrayal of Nations and friendships rear their heads and are, naturally, uncomfortably confronted. Cockin sketches her characters with confident strokes, although oddly Inspector Cam comes across as just a little flimsy, as though the author is struggling to commit to him somewhat. Nevertheless, ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ is an excellent first outing for Cam, and the evidence of ‘Villainy at Vespers’ is that Cockin continued to develop her character and to write him some excellent mysteries. One can only hope that Galileo will also turn their hand to the third and final instalment of Cam’s investigations, the 1952 outing ‘Deadly Earnest’. I certainly have my fingers crossed on that front.

I hope too that Galileo will be publishing more by Max Murray, whose ‘The King and the Corpse’ (also originally published in 1949) is another recent reissue. Set in the French Riviera, the book is a lightweight romance thriller, in which Murray, like Cockin, weaves threads of Tradition versus Modern, though this time using the vehicle of a deposed monarchy battling usurping anarchists/republicans/corrupt self-serving lefties, in whose conflict the U.S.A. inevitably has an interested hand. It’s all Rather Good Fun and in the spirit of the likes of Leslie Charteris, to whose Simon Templar character Murray’s (anti)hero Anthony Tolworth might to be at least on nodding terms. There is certainly a fine amount of rip-roaring adventuring to be had as Tolworth seeks to defend his sweetheart Eve Raymond from the clutches of the French police who are equally determined to pin a charge of murder on her. It’s all marvellously ridiculous, with Tolworth’s employer (the aforementioned deposed Monarch) enthusiastically drawn into both the adventure and the romance. Also pulled into the affair is Tolworth’s Aunt Ethelreda, accompanied by two young boys from the prep school of which she is headmistress, all of whom prove essential in eventually unlocking the mystery of the murder that is unveiled in the opening paragraph.


There is something of a rather earthy Jane Marple about the Ethelreda character, and, intriguingly, I found myself also reminded of L.C. Tyler’s Elsie Thirkettle from his marvellous ‘Herring’ series of books. The other key character in those books is, of course, called Ethelred, so you could say that, with a bit of fudging and squeezing at the edges, the pieces of the puzzle fit. There is certainly too a shared humour between Tyler and Murray, both being rather marvellously forthright and deliciously witty. In Murray case, it might be easy to fall into stereotypes and suggest that his, ah, rather direct but enjoyable coarseness is informed by a youth as a bush boy in Australia, but equally it is as likely to be the result of years spent working in newspaper journalism and scriptwriting for the BBC. Certainly one gets the sense from ‘The King and the Corpse’ that Murray might be somewhat dismissive of any unnecessary baggage. Cut to the chase. Tell the story and keep it all moving.

Apparently Murray squeezed twelve novels into the years between the end of WW2 and his death in 1956, eleven of them featuring the word ‘corpse’ in the title. I rather hope that the resuscitation of ‘The King and the Corpse’ is the prelude to more of those being, ah, unearthed in the coming years.

Three’s A Treat

Harriet Rutland first came to my attention back in 2015 or so when I read the Dean Street Press reissue of her 1939 detective novel ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’. This would have been around the time I first came across the Dean Street Press imprint, having gravitated further and further from an immersion in the world of American hardboiled Noir into the realms of the English Golden Age courtesy of the British Library Classic Crime series. This would have been a period when I was still buying more printed books than electronic, and a quick glance up at my shelves suggests that back in 2015 I was rating the likes of Robin Forsyth, Ianthe Jerrold and the Radfords as being of more interest than Rutland. All of those are fine writers whose books I have enjoyed enormously, yet it strikes me now as peculiar that I did not immediately pick up more Rutland’s, particularly as there are only two other titles in her, ahem, criminally small catalogue. Recent re-reading of ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’ assures me of its quality and of Rutland’s class, so I can only assume that I was feeling particularly befuddled by school when I first read it, or, as is perhaps more plausible, I simply ran out of Detective Novel steam and needed a change. Some eight years later, then, it is most certainly a pleasure to reacquaint myself with Harriet Rutland and her set of three almost pitch perfect novels, originally published over a four year period between 1939 and 1942.

As Curtis Evans points out in his typically well-researched and engagingly written introductions, Harriet Rutland was the pen name of one Olive Shimwell, who, with ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’ seemed to appear somewhat out of the blue as a fully-formed, bona-fide Top Quality new author in the detective fiction genre. The book is certainly great fun, laced with witty and intelligent references to literature assumed to be well above the genre’s scope, whilst managing to contain an entertaining puzzle within pages that glisten with the sheen of assured writing. It is a book that positively bristles with quotable outbursts from various characters, all of whom are sketched out in deft strokes, their foibles gently massaged into delicious caricature. It is also marvellously meta in so much as it features a would-be author of imaginary crime fiction within the book itself. This particular character is at one point asked if she writes for a hobby. “Oh no”, she replies. “I don’t like writing sufficiently well for that; it’s very hard work.”

The gift that Rutland/Shimwell has of course is to make it seem effortless. All three of her novels trot along at a perfect pace, which is to say just exuberantly enough to keep one turning the pages, yet with enough consideration to allow pauses for breath, reflection, and to take in the views. Speaking of which, there are some pleasant fictional views of Devon in ‘Knock…’ as the story is set in a fictionalised Paignton, with an additional nod to a faintly cloaked Newton Abbott, where Shimwell lived out her life, dying in 1962. This setting, though, with the Presteignton Hydro Hotel being likely modelled partly on what is now Paignton’s Esplanade Hotel, is apparently in itself transplanted from Shimwell’s experiences in Cork, Ireland. The obfuscation (along with Shimwell’s use of the Harriet Rutland nom de plume) is as well, because the characters who inhabit the pages of the book are hardly sensitively sketched. If they were, indeed, based even loosely on individuals encountered in the real Hydro hotel, then I dare say I would do my utmost to raise a smokescreen too.

It is, then, the darkly humorous manner in which Rutland depicts her characters and their relationships that is at the heart of what makes her books so entertaining. Catty exchanges and The Ultimate Vengeance abound in ‘Knock…’ with some withering glances cast at class distinction and social (im)mobility along the way. There is too, in all three of Rutland’s novels, a particular distaste shown towards the relationships between men and women. Reflective, perhaps, of Shimwell’s own experiences at the time (she divorced her first husband shortly after the publication of ‘Blue Murder’), there is something darkly pleasurable in the misogynistic attitudes displayed by some her male characters, most notably in ‘Knock…’ by the typically hapless local Police Inspector Palk who possesses “the greatest contempt for women writers” and whose estimation of the fictional writer of detective fiction goes up when “he realized that her books were still unprinted”.

The ‘star’ of the first two books is the rather elusive Mr Winkley of Scotland Yard. I say ‘elusive’ because he is not a Yard Inspector, but rather a back-room boffin recruited from the Intelligence Services after WW1 and, in normal circumstances, apparently tucked away in a room surrounded by years’ worth of evidence scraps that eventually, with a trick of his puzzle solving brain, he might connect in some way that shines light on previously unsolved crimes. His appearance in Rutland’s books is not even ‘official’ Yard business, but rather Winkley having something of a Busman’s Holiday. It’s a neat touch, for it allows the character to straddle the realms of amateur and professional; a foot in both camps of the genre, as it were. He’s a strange character compared to the others in Rutland’s books too in the sense that he often seems barely there. He sort of drifts wraith like through the first two novels, listening, looking and sifting, yet one almost gets the sense that he is never ‘investigating’. This, presumably, is a nod to his grounding in the Intelligence services, and it feels like a neat play by Rutland, anticipating in some ways the Cold War character of spooks that will come in the future. Certainly there is no notion that Winkley might possibly have come out of a Buchan novel, and certainly too there is nothing of the Holmes about him. This, I suggest, is A Very Good Thing.

Rutland’s second novel ‘Bleeding Hooks’ followed closely on the heels of her first and whilst it is again thoroughly enjoyable, it does perhaps suffer a little from being just a little hasty, with one or two characters feeling more lazily drawn than in ‘Knock…’ This is particularly true of two more, ah, youthful characters who are rather unfortunately named Pussy and Piggy. There is a notion that these two characters are intended as a lighthearted critique of Christie’s popular Tommy and Tuppence, and with much of Rutland’s work being quite transparently ‘about’ the whole nature of how detective fiction works (or doesn’t) then it’s easy to give this suggestion traction. What feels more interesting to me, though, is the way in which Rutland captures something of the timeless tensions that inevitably exist between generations. In one priceless moment she knowingly structures an exchange wherein a more elderly character exclaims to Pussy that “You Bright Young Things can’t keep your noses out of affairs which don’t concern you. It’s the result of all those wild Treasure Hunts, I suppose.” It is marvellously funny to see such a wildly out of date reference being made in 1940, and it is met with understandable distaste: “Pussy violently disliked the appellation. To her, Bright Young Things were antiquated. Most of those whom she knew had already become “hags”, and by this time had acquired several babies or divorces, or both.” I admit that I do enjoy this kind of obviously exaggerated generation gap, and whilst there is much to be frustrated about in the characters of Pussy and Piggy, there is a certain amount of warmth in how they are portrayed that is less visible in her more elderly characters. The humour has an almost Margery Sharp quality to it, and Rutland permits her nice Mr Winkley to reflect: “He wondered what kind of men and women they would become, and tried, ineffectually, to remember whether he had been quite so gauche, and yet so sophisticated, in his twenties.” In other words, even, or especially if we cannot remember, the chance are that we WERE all so gauche and yet so sophisticated in our twenties. It is the charm and the curse of the age. And we ought all to be so pleased to get beyond it.

As a ‘fishing’ detective novel, ‘Bleeding Hooks’ fits neatly within a sub-genre that also features such luminaries as Ngaio Marsh, Cyril Hare and the aforementioned Radford’s, whose ‘Murder Jigsaw’ was also resurrected by the Dean Street Press. One of the elements of such ‘activity-specific’ tales is the need for technical extrapolations (remember Sayers, ahem, clanging on interminably about bells in ‘The Nine Tailors’?) and Rutland rather unfortunately rises to the challenge here. Unless one is a fly-fishing aficionado, perhaps, in which case there is likely nowhere near enough technical detouring, and what there is tainted by the dilettante’s – or the fiction writer’s – inaccuracy. It’s hardly a deal breaker, however, for elsewhere in the book there are lovely undercurrents with subtle observations on notions of privacy, secrecy and the difficulty in making meaningful connections with other humans.

The possible Tommy and Tuppence reference aside, there is also more post-modern meta-fiction at play in ‘Bleeding Hooks’ to tickle our trouts, as it were. Little asides are peppered through the novel: “if this were a thriller, he’d definitely turn out to be the murderer”; “detective novels are not real reading, they’re recreation”; ““It sounds to me like one of those yarns you fishing fellows tell,” he said, “or else a plot by a lady novelist.””; ““Everybody knows that people commit suicide with prussic acid…” “In books,” put in Paget. “The lay public knows so little about it, that it’s a positive godsend to the writer of detective fiction.”. This last, incidentally, might notionally be considered A Spoiler, but frankly the whole story is so delectably mixed up in terms of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ (or ‘fiction’ and ‘meta fiction’) that it hardly matters. ‘Bleeding Hooks’ then might be the weakest of the three Rutland books, but only by the width of a gnat’s wing.

Now it is certainly the case that if The War (or the state of England in the shadow of it’s inevitable approach) is strangely all but invisible in Rutland’s first two books, it is certainly a feature in ‘Blue Murder’. It may be the best of the three, and opens spectacularly with what must be one of the most sharply withering lines about The Male Gaze: “Mr. Hardstaffe had reached the critical time of life when elderly gentlemen gaze at the legs of schoolgirls in railway carriages.”

This rather sets the tone for what is perhaps Rutland’s most direct assault on masculinity and the patriarchal society. Throughout the book there are barbs about the role of women, and the nature of women, very often put in the mouths of women characters themselves. The appalling Mrs Hardstaffe (it’s no spoiler to say that She Gets Her Comeuppance) spews out such gems as: “Girls are quite above themselves nowadays, with all these uniforms and high wages. I shudder to think what they’ll be like after this war.” And should one be in any doubt as to her personal leanings (in current times one rather imagines her as Suella Braverman) she comes out with this about, inevitably, Hitler: “I must say this is the first time I’ve felt any sympathy for ‘That Man’,” remarked Mrs. Hardstaffe, “but if all Jews are like her, I don’t wonder he cleared them out of the country, do you?”

The ‘her’ in question is Jewish refugee Freda Braun who has found employment as the Hardstaffe’s maid, and Rutland uses all of her characters to very effectively express a distaste for the anti-semitism and rampant nationalism that led Europe into the darkness of war. Rutland sides naturally with the oppressed and the worker, but also with the Younger Generations in whom, here, she seems to find some kind of Hope, even if it is tempered with a degree of bleak existential darkness.

Whilst there is, then, an understandable element of bleakness to the story, Rutland sets this off with her trademark black humour and clever critiquing of the genre in which she is working. There is a sense, indeed, of Rutland rather pulling out all the stops in this one, as she pushes the ‘fiction within a fiction’ play for all it’s worth. Mr Winkley is absent (perhaps recalled to the Intelligence Services to Serve His Country) and is replaced by struggling author Arthur Smith as the amateur sleuth looking for materials for a detective story that will bring more success than the dwindling returns from his Romances. Thus we see Rutland addressing the ‘psychological’ approach to investigation alongside the red herring of the individual confession, with typically amplified delight. It all makes for a thoroughly enjoyable and well written piece of period detective fiction, and one that anyone interested in fiction both written and set during WW2 ought to find space for on their shelves.

As previously mentioned, Curtis Evans’ introductions are informative and engaging, yet he offers no explanation as to why there were no more Harriet Rutland stories published after ‘Blue Murder’. Perhaps there was simply the realisation that she had pushed her meta-fictional critique of the genre as far as she cared to take it; that to do more would be to inevitably, eventually, dilute the entire process and end up being insufferably smug and repetitive. Perhaps too the ‘need’ to write (both from a financial and creative perspective) no longer lingered. It is, after all, “very hard work.” Or then again perhaps it was simply that her second marriage (in 1948) proved rather more pleasant than her first, and that perhaps as a result she found it rather more difficult to write with the pointedly, wickedly amusing scorn that makes ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’, ‘Bleeding Hooks’ and ‘Blue Murder’ so marvellously appealing. Whatever the reason, it is has left us with a marvellously unspoilt snapshot of Harriet Rutland as an author and three tremendous pieces of detective fiction that belong in the very top tier.

From Lunesdale to Budleigh-Salterton.

Regular readers of the Unpopular Guide To Crime and Detective Fiction, if there be such a thing, will know that I have a particular penchant for books where an effective sense of place is evoked. A decent setting, preferably in a landscape where the real is either barely fictionalised or easily recognisable is almost guaranteed to have me hooked and spending my time between reading bouts poring over old OS Maps. George Bellairs is a master of this, particularly with his books set on the Isle of Man, as is E.C.R. Lorac, whose books set in Lunesdale are one of the greatest pleasures in her impressive catalogue. I have written about this before, of course, but the recent publication of her ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ in the British Library Crime Classics series makes a re-statement of Lorac’s tremendous appeal worthwhile.

First published in 1946, ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ (it’s title in the U.S.A. was ‘Murderer’s Mistake’) is another one of those terrific post-WW2 novels that captures a sense of the age and gives an astute nod to the immense social shifts that are inevitably occurring in the English landscape, both physical and metaphorical. The theft of clothing coupons acts as one such contextual marker in the book but is significant only in so much as to mark out a character as one of those Spiv type chancers whose actions are bound to be dubious and whose sticky end we find difficult to mourn. That said, there are numerous references to the importance and value of fabrics throughout the book, which feels faintly quaint to anyone rooted in the disposable culture of our own times, but which effectively captures something of the austerity of the times. There is too something of the way in which old, well-worn, tatty overcoats and raincoats are seen as a symbol of pride amongst the gentry (I’m reminded of this again in a wonderful Harriet Rutland novel that I’m currently reading), and indeed it’s the ratty, smelly (“all good tweed smells!”) overcoat used in a reconstruction that helps nail the murderer.

In terms of the murder, it is a little difficult to say too much about this aspect of the book without giving away spoilers, but suffice to say that Lorac seems to use the book to tentatively explore those notions of the changing positions of class in the structure of the English landscape so vitally prevalent in the post-war period. There may still be a degree of mistrust in the itinerant working-classes, but Lorac does a decent job of attempting to play a fair hand. It’s notable of course that in her Scotland Yard character of Inspector MacDonald she allows the body of the Police force to be seen as decent and entirely reasonable, something that would, I’m sure, feel sadly alien to many in our 21st Century times. Whether the portrayal is any more accurate of the state of policing in 1946 is, of course, entirely up for debate.

The book really though is about that division between rural and urban that seems to have coloured much of the immediate post-war period. Lorac makes the point early, noting that “In the [rural] north-west of England the war effort had not been concerned with the nervous energy required by resistance to bombs or doodles or rockets: it had been the strain of sustained physical effort.” Later, she has characters discussing this divide, with one asking “Why the devil do we equate civilisation with cities?” before noting that the open fire before which they sit is “worth more than the proximity of cinemas and shops.” Finally, at the book’s conclusion, Lorac has her Inspector MacDonald reflect that “The life of the land was incomparably more important than the deaths of two men who had never realised that man still lives by the land and that its tilling is more fundamental to human needs than the accumulation of money.” No doubting where Lorac’s sympathies lie in that urban/rural debate, then…

Headon Hill’s ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ was written nearly a quarter of a century before Lorac’s and it shows. Many novels inhabiting the crime/detective genre from this period seem to me to be caught in a place where the author cannot quite decide if their book is a mystery or a thriller/adventure and end up with a foot in both camps, with neither convincingly planted. ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ is certainly such a book, but has more than enough charm to make up for this fact, particularly for anyone familiar with the Devon coastline around Budleigh Salterton, which here becomes Bicton-On-Sea.

The ‘mystery’ alluded to in the title refers to the death of a ne’er do well character tramping the coastal path who rather fortuitously stumbles on a letter in an overcoat pocket (those damned tatty overcoats of the gentry again). Said letter remarkably alludes to a wife deserted by the tramp some seven years previously who now, even more remarkably, appears to be living in Budleigh and planning to marry a retired Colonel. Such scarcely believable coincidences (which are unfurled in the first few pages of the book, incidentally, so I’m hardly giving the game away here) do rather set the tone for the book, which romps along in much the same way for it’s entirety. Naturally there is a Scotland Yard element (both retired and serving), alongside mystery romance novelist Claude Raven (which if one were to be enormously generous one might suggest lends the novel a gossamer thread of postmodernism) and his daughter who lends a romance element of sorts. Throw in an illicit distillery, a melodramatically evil financier (“with the coal-black hair and the Hebraic nose”, naturally) and a gaudy stage celebrity whose star has waned, plus sundry stereotypical Toughs and Wrong’Uns and you have a concoction that fairly bubbles with entertaining action. It’s hardly top-drawer stuff, and if the final third of the book dissolves rather into run-of-the-mill adventure yarn, that’s fair enough. Still, it is more than worth the 79p admission price for a Kindle edition. One might be excused for asking for a new cover, however, as the design of the Black Heath Classic Crime series books really are universally appalling. Many is the time I have shuddered and passed on their titles when they are ‘recommended’ by the algorithm, and I would certainly have done the same with this one if not for the local setting. As such, the cover shown here is my own replacement, dashed off in a few idle moments. If I ever pick more of the Black Heath reissues (and after this one, I admit, I could be tempted) I can see the template being re-used (publishers please note that I’m for hire)…

‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ does capture its setting remarkably well, however, and it is obvious that Headon Hill must have been intimately familiar with Budleigh Salterton and its environs. The old Rolle Hotel for example becomes Royal Hotel (see what Hill did there?!), whilst the importantly positioned ‘Peak House’ is most likely the red-brick late Victorian villa that sits above the site of the former Rosemullion Hotel, its garden gate vitally giving direct access to the cliff-path. I admit that I am uncertain if the Rosemullion would have been built at the time Hill wrote his novel, but nevertheless the inclusion of Claude Raven as “a household word on four continents as a writer of sensational fiction with a punch in every chapter” seems a rather nice nod to the fact that Sir Henry Rider Haggard enjoyed spending some of his last days at the hotel. Entirely possible too that this is merely my projecting knowledge onto the fiction, but that is half the fun of such things, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the retired Scotland Yard detective sergeant and his wife keep a lodging house on the Parade, which these days is commonly referred to as ‘Millionaires Row’. So a shrewd investment for their future family I should have thought. Elsewhere, the golf course (where Noel Coward’s Elvira Condomine would spend “seven hours of every day”) is of course in play, as are the cottages and villas of Victoria Place and the imposing holloway of Dark Lane. Also, as is not uncommon in such books, there is a mixing of real and not-quite-real place names. Exeter, Sidmouth, Ladram Bay, Brixham (with specific reference to the brown sailed trawlers at work in Lyme Bay) and the distant Berry Head are all named, but Newton Poppleford rather bizarrely becomes Newberry Poppleton.

Of course one of the downsides of having local knowledge is in seeing peculiarities amongst accuracies. As such, anyone with a working knowledge of the area (and now, by default, anyone reading this) cannot help but wonder why anyone going from Budleigh (okay, okay, Bicton-On-Sea) to ‘Mucklepath Farm’ (which is supposed to be very close to Ladram Bay – so perhaps the real ‘Sea View Farm’) would go all the way up to Newton Poppleford and then back down the lanes. Why would they not just cross the river by the Otterton bridge and cut several miles off the journey? It is possible that Hill was overthinking things (as indeed I have just done a century later) in order to extend the time needed to get there from here (or vice versa). Such are the vagaries of landscape, fact and fiction.

A Moffat Mooch

“Old age really must be creeping upon me at last,” said Susan Armstrong. “I find more and more that what I most enjoy is a quiet evening at home by the fire, with a book.” – Molly Clavering, ’Touch Not The Nettle’

The Scottish Borders has long been, for me, a land to pass through on the way from here to there and back again. At first, by car with my father behind the wheel, then by train and finally again by car, this time driving myself. Going to somewhere and home again, and eventually vice versa. Places I would know only by railway stations and road signs. Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Moffat. Then into the edges of Dumfries and Galloway with Abington, Leadhills and The Mennock Pass, which I think of as less Borders and more edging into Ayrshire and onto the dark, neglected former mining villages with guttural names. Glespin. Muirkirk. Sanquhar. Ardoch. Places where Scots meets Klingon.

Then I read D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering, both of whom settled and worked in Moffat during the interwar years and post-WW2, turning out book after book of romantic fiction which were often set in the Borders and, in Stevenson’s case particularly, proved to be enormously popular in their time. Having been, for much of my adult life, so dedicated to crime and detective fiction, I admit that romantic fiction as a genre was one that I always looked upon with no small amount of disdain. Yet in recent years the cracks have appeared in my armour, thanks largely to the beautiful grey covers of the Persephone reissue imprint. Indeed, it was through Persephone that I stumbled on Stevenson with her delicious Miss Buncle books, a trilogy that acted somewhat as the final thrust to demolish my defences. Much of the Persephone catalogue, it must be said, would probably think of itself as being A Cut Above the romantic fiction genre, and that is fair enough. There is nothing pejorative in suggesting that someone may have pretensions, after all. The Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, on the other hand, would more likely raise a glass of sherry (a Harveys Bristol Cream as opposed to a Bodegas Alonso Oloroso) and celebrate its entrenchment in the genre, and Hurrah! for that too. Their sizeable catalogue of Stevenson reissues continues to be a source of great pleasure to me, and, as previously noted, the second two thirds of the Drumberley trilogy in particular make for a tremendous evocation of the Borders landscape.

Which brings us back to Moffat, and an afternoon mooch in early September as I walked the unexpectedly leafy residential streets of the market town in search of the ghosts of Stevenson and Clavering. Stevenson is fairly easy to find, for a simple plaque is affixed to a small garden gatepost that leads to an overgrown path through mature trees. There is not much to see of the house in which Stevenson and her family lived, for the leafy growth of the garden obscures much of the views from the road, which is as one might expect for such a well established and (at least once) Well To Do neighbourhood. Nevertheless, it’s fun though to picture the setting that Stevenson’s friend Molly Clavering captured so well in ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’, although one wonders how so large a house could possibly have been thought of as being too small. There is a very definite feel of a once prosperous town having fallen on rather harder times in Moffat, particularly within the environs of North Park where Stevenson’s former home sits. Other similarly large Victorian and Edwardian properties look neglected and worn around the edges, some of them turned into nursing homes or split into smaller apartments but most seemingly just about clinging on to their dignity. A spectre of faded glamour hangs in the humid air, a tale of slowly haemorrhaged wealth whispering through the hawthorns. It is, I must admit, rather marvellously appealing.

Also rather appealing are two of Clavering’s novels from the 1930s, ‘Susan Settles Down’ (1936) and ‘Touch Not The Nettle’ (1939), both of which are also very much a celebration of the Borders landscape. Published as part of a small run of novels where Clavering (and/or her publishers) experimented with the pen name of B. Mollet, the two books form a diptych, although it’s fair to say that the latter struggles a little to meet the charm of the former, which is a light hearted melodramatic romp in which Everything Turns Out As Expected In The End, but not before we have been taken on some detours through misunderstandings, miscommunications and maddening masculine attitudes. Of all the romantic fiction I’ve encountered thus far (and I appreciate that I have barely smudged the powder on the nose of the genre) these books of Clavering’s feel the most likely to bring feminist blood to the boil, for they are certainly fired deeply in the fires of tiresome tropes of women’s subservience to men and, more pertinently, women apparently enjoying being in such a position. ‘Nettle’ in particular has some moments that feel despicably uncomfortable, although there are some awkward encounters in ‘Susan Settles Down’ too. The characters involved (most specifically the male ones) are, from a 21st Century perspective, obviously emotionally damaged, but it feels like Clavering rather falls into the trap of allowing this damage to excuse rather than merely explain their appalling behaviours towards women. It would be easy to dismiss the books out of hand because of this, and I have no truck with anyone who would follow this line, yet to do so, it seems to me, would also be to miss out on a lot of pleasure. Primarily it would be miss Clavering’s obvious love for the landscape and for the nature that inhabits it. The books are threaded with evocative descriptions of the hills through the seasons and of the colour and scents of the trees and flowers experienced by the characters as they move through the narrative. There is too, despite the books being reflective of the still rigid class structure in place in 1930s Britain, an obvious warmth shown to the workers of the rural environment, perhaps because, as Clavering has a character observe, “the country people, so strongly individual in character that they were not yet all cast in one mould like their town-dwelling contemporaries, had a sturdy independent pride in their ‘place’ and would not, from self-respect, have forgotten it”. Again, this kind of attitude does rub awkwardly up against 21st Century progressive political ideology, but I for one would rather be made to feel uncomfortable in order to experience attitudes from outside my own echo chamber, and besides, that warmth towards The Working Class does filter through Clavering’s words, even if they might seem a little condescending to our contemporary eye. There is a love too of the Borders dialect, and both of these books are filled with dialogue that one suspects many modern readers might find impenetrable. Now I admit that I found Irvine Welsh’s use of written Scots dialect to be a frustrating affectation when I attempted to read ‘Trainspotting’ in the mid 1990s, yet Clavering’s liberal use of it some sixty years earlier feels as refreshing as a morning mist drifting down from the Lammermuir Hills (are these the hills that Renton and his mates visit in their nature break in the film/book? It would be funny if they were). Another case of context being everything, perhaps.

Speaking of context, it ought to be said that whilst there is much in the general patina of these two books to place them within the historical period in which they were written, only a reference to the 1937 Castelcary snowstorm train disaster in ‘Touch Not The Nettle’ gives any real connection to the age. There is no hint whatsoever, certainly, of the impending disaster waiting not so quietly in the wings, as it were. If this feels like an opportunity missed then it is perhaps entirely understandable given the fantasy escapist nature of the genre. In her post-war novels there is certainly more of a sense of Clavering acknowledging contemporary political and social change, but even here there is a distinct conservatism (and, it might be argued, Conservatism) in her work that does, it must be said, prickle rather. Personally, I’m quite happy with that for, as previously mentioned, I should hate to surround myself solely with voices that echo my own particular views.

There are several more Furrowed Middlebrow reissues of Clavering novels sitting on the shelves waiting to be read, alongside many more Stevenson’s, although given that reading both authors amounts to much the same experience as gorging on candyfloss, I might just divert my attention back to some murder mysteries for a time. There is too, a 1953 non-fiction book by Clavering called ‘From The Border Hills’ in which, I believe, she recounts something of the wanders through the landscape which must surely have informed her fiction. If I can find a cheap second hand copy of that I expect it will work its way to the top of the ‘to be read’ pile rather quickly, where no doubt it will accompany much delving into the archive of OS maps and marking of Places To See on my next Moffat mooch. Something to look forward to in the Autumn, perhaps.

Why would anyone need a map or a compass?

If Mollie Panter-Downes and Barbara Euphan Todd pulled me out of the existential ennui brought on by too much Georges Simenon with their marvellous WW2 and post-war writings, then Molly Clavering has just pinched and patted my cheek and sent me on my way with a spring in my step and song in my heart. You certainly must read her books. You will love them.

The song, incidentally, might be something by Bothwell’s finest Friends Again, for there is something in Clavering’s writing that conjures a similar lightness of touch, an earthy delirium that speaks of late summer morning dews and early autumnal crackling wood fires. There is a parallel too perhaps in their relationships with other, more storied contemporaries. For whilst the Friends Again gang were reportedly deemed too uncool (and a little late) for the Postcard party, so too did Clavering suffer perhaps a little next to the successes of her great friend D.E. Stevenson. So whilst Stevenson’s books sold in terrific numbers, Clavering’s, apparently, whilst hardly bombing, nevertheless sold significantly less. Perhaps then it’s more akin to comparing Friends Again to, say, Haircut 100, with whom they shared a similar chunky knitwear aesthetic but failed to break the charts (or youngsters’ hearts) in quite the same manner. Certainly the band members might have borrowed their look from the dashing young men who feature in Clavering’s books. All shaved back and sides, floppy fringes, plus the sturdy leather boots and Aran sweaters of Naval Officers. I am basing this entirely on the evidence of two books, you understand, but apparently the whole Naval Officer character is a recurring theme in Clavering’s novels. She clearly had A Thing, then. Whether she enjoyed the look or sound of Haircut 100 or Friends Again is unknown, however. She would have been in her 80s when they were making records, so the chances are she would have been unimpressed, but you never know.

My first Clavering, then, was the utterly delightful ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’. First published in 1953, this is another of those post-WW2 novels that prickles lightly with post-war austerity and the sense of Life Returning To Normal, where Normal is something altogether New. There is less of the sense of that new age being as discomfiting for the Middle Classes (as the characters in the book assuredly are) as there might be in other post-war novels, but there are slight nods of acknowledgement. If there is a criticism of the book it is just that those nods are so slight, particularly in the case of one of Mrs Lorimer’s daughters who spent the war flying aircraft from one place in the UK to another and now appears to struggle to return to earth, as it were. The daughter in question seems hardly to exist in the novel, being mildly ignored by Clavering and the rest of the extended Lorimer family; not exactly Cast Out, but certainly existing on the edges, as if no-one (Clavering included) seems to know quite how to figure her. She would make a fine jumping off point for a historical novel. This is picking hairs, however, for ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’ is hardly positioned as a novel that intends to make Serious Points about society, people or anything else. Rather, it is an unashamedly light hearted book that giggles and glistens in the sunlight, unafraid to unravel its threads into occasional trip hazards in its relentless and joyous pursuit of pleasure.

The novel is, I believe, to a degree autobiographical. Mrs Lorimer appears to be a thinly disguised D.E. Stevenson, with her dear friend Grace Maxwell as Clavering. The portraits of both women are warm and quietly admiring, and if one might arch an eyebrow and suggest that Clavering has been particularly kind to herself then by all accounts the depiction appears to be accurate, for contemporary descriptions of Clavering describe her as a figure with an marvellously positive outlook and a cheery disposition. Notable dissenters to this opinion at the time of the book’s publication were Stevenson’s children, all of whom necessarily are given at least one prickly character trait that Clavering teases at and weaves her narrative around. By all accounts the irritation did not last long however, and that is no real surprise, for all the little nuances are really just genre-related literary devices and rather obviously so. Still, it’s perfectly understandable to see how they might have irked, particularly in the rather highly strung character of Phillis who is a bit of a spoilt and hysterical adult-child. Whilst we do get glimpses into how the pre-war family experiences might have moulded these characters, this is perhaps not as deeply explored as it might have been in a more, ah, ‘highbrow’ novel. If that kind of interminable raking over of The Past is the kind of thing you enjoy then I dare say that ‘Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer’ would be sniffed at in distaste and left untouched on the shelf. Whilst understandable (we each of us have our Points Of Interest and Areas Of Pointed Ignorance, after all) I cannot help but suggest such an attitude would be a shame, for ‘Mrs Lorimer’ is one of those wonderfully undemanding novels that romps along with a deceptively easy step, every so often dropping a line or two that, whilst not exactly shatteringly insightful into the nature of existence, nevertheless causes one to nod sagely. The more so, I expect, if one has reached the same sort of age that Clavering was when writing (53, since you ask). There are, in particular, some lovely observations on the process of maturing, or not, and when Lorimer/Stevenson reflects on “…what a silly little fool one was at twenty-three” and Douglas/Clavering responds with “Most of us were. Some of us still are. It’s a safeguard to realise it…” one rather hopes that anyone of a similar age or older will recognise a universal truth lightly proclaimed. I know I do.

There is something too, I think, of Clavering in the character of the elderly Miss Balfour in the 1956 novel ‘Near Neighbours’. I understand that this is an unusual entry in Clavering’s catalogue in that it is set largely in an urban (Edinburgh) rather than rural setting. The fact that I have a lifetime ambivalence about Edinburgh no doubt informs my thoughts that the place hardly matters in this context, but unlike in ‘Mrs Lorimer…’ where the lightly fictionalised landscapes around the Scottish border town of Moffat are evidently fired through with knowledge and love, Edinburgh in itself hardly seems to figure beyond some tourist brochure references to the castle and Princes Street (though oddly no mention of the one-o-clock gun going off…). Instead the setting of ‘Kirkaldy Terrace’ (somewhere in the West End?) is little more than a vehicle for placing the characters next door to each other, winding them up and then sitting back to watch them race around bumping into each other. If that sounds harsh, then it is not meant to be so, although it must be said that, as in ‘Mrs Lorimer’, there is enough additional evidence in ‘Near Neighbours’ to suggest that Clavering is just a little clunky in her writing. As I say, that’s not necessarily a criticism, more an observation. There are rough edges. Pieces don’t quite fit together. There are little cracks in the plaster work and some splodgy paint work on the window sills; the gloss not quite so carefully applied as it might be. Yet it is a charming awkwardness rather than an irritating lack of skill. To pull in another obscure musical reference, Clavering reads rather like Marine Girls sounded. The appeal of breathless wonder and purposeful naïveté should never be underestimated, after all.

It is difficult to say anything in detail about ‘Near Neighbours’ without throwing in spoilers, but suffice to say that the novels oscillates mildly between the aforementioned Miss Balfour (in her late 60s and recently come into sole ownership of her large terrace home after the death of a domineering elder sister) and the Lennox family who live next door. It’s the Lennox daughters (all named after trees) and, to a lesser extent the son (not named after a tree, but rather a mint…) who largely dominate the book as each in their own way navigates the post-war landscape of youth and young adulthood. Romance inevitably dominates (it’s Romantic Fiction at heart, after all!) and inevitably too there are numerous roadblocks and diversions on the route to True Love And Happiness for all of them. What raises the novel above the level of Workaday Romance, however, is the figure of Miss Balfour as a kind of unifying element. She acts almost as a peculiar fairy godmother, an angelic figure spreading peace and goodwill. There is, indeed, a lovely line which suggests that “What she did not know and would not have believed was that the people who knew her could not help living up to her belief in their good qualities, or that their virtues were sometimes no more than the reflection of her own shining honesty and kindliness.”, whilst the novel’s closing lines delicately suggest a surprised saintly figure beatifically providing the light by which the other characters travel into this and that.

So whilst there is perhaps something of the character of Clavering herself in Miss Balfour, it’s also unlikely, given the small amount of research I have carried out, to suggest that Molly Clavering would have the nerve to suggest herself as anything approaching saintliness. And yet, perhaps too there is something of a knowing smile behind it all. A twinkling of the eye as the soloing Clavering who, like so many of her generation Never Married, perhaps cast her sight forward to the woman she might (have) be(en). A deliciously soft self-aggrandisement shot through with a wicked barb of deflationary wit as when we are told that “one is usually apt to dislike the unfortunate person whose praises one hears sung too often…. like the books people say you must read because you’ll be certain to love them.” Touché.