It’s All One Case

Last time out I suggested that James Ellroy had a lot of traumatic childhood weight to carry and to process, and the same could be said of Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald – see, I promised I would eventually get back to him) and it is perhaps one of the reasons that Ellroy dedicated his 1984 novel ‘Blood On The Moon’ to the then recently deceased Millar. In an inscription pictured in the magnificent ‘Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ Ellroy draws attention to the dedication and writes that “He was a master: He kept me tremendously sane during bad years.”

To say that Millar was a master is to possibly understate things, for there is a certainly a compelling argument to be made that Millar was THE master of the American detective novel. In a series of eighteen books written between 1949 and 1976 the series detective Lew Archer saw his creator Ken Millar change his pseudonym from John Macdonald to John R. Macdonald to John Ross Macdonald and finally to the now familiar Ross Macdonald. The sequential name change was made in order to avoid confusion with another contemporaneous writer of detective fiction, John D. McDonald. John D.’s novels featuring “salvage consultant” Travis McGee are fine enough thrillers but largely leave me cool, even on re-reading. Personally I would stick to the ‘Cape Fear’ film (either Scorcese’s 1991 effort or the 1962 feature with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum) of the 1957 novel ‘The Executioner’ but I know others will disagree. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to change my mind over the choice of Macdonald/McDonald made back when the 21st Century was in its infancy and I was an impressionable and opinionated thirty-something.

But why did Kenneth Millar not just publish under his own name? Well, by the time Ken had anything significantly published his wife Margaret was making significant headway. Her 1945 novel ‘The Iron Gates’ was particularly well received at the time and still stands up as a terrific period piece, whilst the 1956 Edgar Award winning ‘Beast In View’ is rightly considered as something of a classic of the psychological mystery genre. Margaret’s many other mysteries are also fine, but perhaps any lasting popularity has been hurt by her not really having any ‘series’ character to speak of. Husband Ken made sure he had that in Lew Archer.

The first Lew Archer mystery that I ever read was ‘The Chill’, issued in a neat paperback edition back in 2001 as part of Canongate’s Crime Classics series. At the same time I would also have picked up Macdonald’s ‘The Drowning Pool’ and Charles Willeford’s ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’, all of them featuring the generic cover that showed what looked like a Saul Bass take on the Black Dahlia corpse viewed through a vaseline smeared lens. Willeford is certainly a writer worth exploring, and I devoured a lot of his work during the early naughties. The cover blurb for ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ promises “an amoral update of Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’ set in 1970s Miami” and it delivers in spades. Willeford did write terrific detective crime stories, notably the great series featuring his Hank Moseley character, but ‘The Shark-Infested Custard’ is really a crime book starring criminals, falling into a genre that would include the likes of the great Jim Thompson and Richard Stark (a pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake), whose ‘Parker’ series of novels are arguably the gold standard. All three of these writers are firmly rooted in the hard boiled tough school of Noir fiction and are massively entertaining. Ross Macdonald, though, is a step or two apart and Lew Archer is way ahead.

‘The Chill’ is the eleventh book in the Lew Archer series and was originally published in 1964, two years before I was born. Now oftentimes I like to start any extended series of books at the beginning and to read them in order of publication. You can blame a certain amount of Poirot-esque OCD for this if you like. This approach is relatively easy these days given that so much is readily accessible via the Internet, but it was not always so. Even at the turn of the millennium, when Canongate reissued ‘The Chill’, it was difficult to just walk into your local book store and see the entire sequence of any writer’s work ranged in front of you. Even in a city, and even with the big names like Christie, Sayers, Allingham or whoever, there would be gaps. If you were charity shopping then the odds of finding what you were after were even less, though balanced by the possibility of finding unknown gems for a few pence. It was a case of take what you can and be thankful for it. There was a peculiar pleasure in that too of course. Still is.

If there is any author whose novels featuring a series detective can easily be read and enjoyed out of order though it is Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer books. Macdonald/Ken Millar was fond of using the phrase “it’s all one case” as a means of tying all the apparently disparate elements of the arcs and characters in any given novel into one cohesive conclusion, and indeed to define the gestalt of the entire Archer series. It’s not so much that all eighteen Lew Archer books are the same story re-written and refined each time (though one might argue this is the case to an extent), it’s that Millar weaves the same themes throughout everything. Unrelentingly and unapologetically so. Concerns about identity, familial discord, moral corruption wrought by money and Freudian psychiatric theories run blatantly throughout. Relationships between fathers and daughters are high on the agenda, as are sons looking for lost fathers. It might all quickly become a bit overpowering if it was not so perfectly crafted.

Following a formula is one of the keys to success in genre fiction of course, just as it is in music, painting, cinema, whatever. It should not be read as criticism to say as much either. No-one sits in a room full of Rothko paintings and complains that they all look the same, after all. At least not if they have even a grain of humanity in their body.

The early Macdonald novels and the first number of Lew Archer stories certainly do largely follow the formula of the hard boiled tough school. Ken Millar needed to make a living, after all, so best not mess too much with the tried and tested formula. There was plenty of competition in the 1940s/50s detective fiction marketplace of course, particularly in the USA, and there was certainly too a degree of literary snobbery about some of the more popular authors. Millar in particular seemed to have issues with the enormous popularity of Mickey Spillane and Erle Stanley Gardner. Spillane’s stories featuring the ultimate tough-guy detective Mike Hammer sold millions, as did Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books, and it would be easy to suggest that Millar, who seemed always to be caught between the intellectual pull of literary academia and the desire to make money writing, was simply playing the sniffy snob role about wildly successful popular, or populist culture. Like other critics such as Millar’s English crime novelist friend Julian Symons, Millar had a point when he expressed distaste for Spillane’s rock bottom roughhousing no-holds-barred style for what Millar called the “kick-’em-in-the-teeth crowd”, but then again Spillane had come up writing for comics in their own Golden Age, penning stories for ‘Superman’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Captain America’. This in a time long before the elevation of comic book writing to an ‘art form’, and instead in a realm where Bang! Pow! Shazam! short sharp hitting was the order of the day. In such a context I think that Spillane’s books are great entertainment, though most certainly not for everyone, particularly in the second decade of the 21st Century. Stanley Gardner’s books are more sedate by comparison, but are neatly plotted and often give the reader a fine mystery where good always outwits evil and American Values emerge victorious. His books written as A.A. Fair featuring the Donald Lam and Bertha Cool characters are harder edged than the Perry Mason stories and remain great favourites of mine. Hardly the height of fine literature that Ken Millar aspired to (and eventually attained) with his Lew Archer books, but tremendous stuff regardless.

Oddly, perhaps, Millar seemed to have had more time for the work of Michael Avallone, whose enormously popular work included the first ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ novel in 1965. Avallone’s series of books featuring his Ed Noon character are preposterous tales, a blend of James Bond spy thriller and tough guy detective with some bizarro American propagandising thrown in the mix. The Ed Noon books read like Stateside Leslie Charteris stories with a Red China fixation in the later books and are just as entertaining if you like that sort of thing. Ken Millar particularly dug the 1973 title ‘Shoot It Again Sam’ and Avallone considered it his definitive Ed Noon novel, probably because it is the one where Avallone runs riot with Noon’s predilection for quoting from old movies, and Noir pictures in particular. If you only read one Ed Noon it should be this one, though don’t be surprised if you find yourself intrigued to read more despite a nagging feeling that you really oughtn’t.

Outside of some of his contemporaries and competitors though there is certainly a lineage to be seen going from Hammett through Chandler to the early Lew Archer stories. Millar seemed to get a bit antsy about the continual comparison to Chandler, however, mostly because Chandler went out of his way to disparage Millar’s early work as being a copy of his own. Such sparring is understandable in the context of a time when their working lives overlapped but feels largely irrelevant today. There is undoubtedly a Chandler influence in the Lew Archer books but whereas Chandler’s plots often come across as wildly disjointed semi-abstract collages always on the verge of collapse, Millar’s by comparison are equally convoluted but hold together with astonishing poise and ultimate cohesion. No pieces feel like they have been forced into place. Everything does actually fit.

One thing that certainly fits in the Lew Archer stories are the connections out to Kenneth Millar’s own life experiences. Whilst hardly necessary in order to enjoy the Ross Macdonald fiction, if you ever read a Lew Archer book and get hooked (five on a ten says you will) then doing even a modicum of background reading will bring an intriguing level of insight. Tom Nolan’s superlative biography is probably as much as you’d need, although tracking down ‘It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ by Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery and Jeff Wong is well worth the effort, even if just to enjoy all the period jacket designs.

From a 21st Century perspective, and particularly for anyone involved in the education sector, there are elements of the father/daughter themes in the Lew Archer novels, and in the troubled behaviours of Millar’s teenaged daughter Linda through the 1950s to set off safeguarding klaxons. Underage drinking and relations with older boys came to a head in 1956, when Linda was charged with the hit and run killing of a thirteen year old boy in Santa Barbara. Three years later, whilst on parole and under psychiatric care she disappeared from her college dorm room, sparking a widely publicised eleven day police hunt. The Millar’s themselves recruited private investigators to search for their daughter, and whilst this in itself seemed like a case of truth mirroring fiction, Ken Millar went a step further, recycling events in future Archer novels, notably with a gender flip in ‘The Goodbye Look’ published a decade later.

Millar’s fixation on father/daughter relationships tails off a little through the Lew Archer books of the 1960s, but is front and centre in the 1950s and surely anyone involved in the 1956 hit and run case who read any of Ken Millar’s novels would have raised eyebrows, if not concerns. Different times, certainly.

Then again, when I first read the Lew Archer novels at the turn of the millennium I had been teaching for ten years and I do not recall being particularly bothered by some of what I read in the books. As a teacher and tutor of course the importance of child safeguarding was always paramount, and whilst I was aware of some pretty sorrowful cases, it is also true to say this was as nothing compared to the level of heightened awareness throughout the second half of my thirty year teaching career. In a leadership role during that period I could not help but be made more and more aware of safeguarding concerns, which perhaps explains why, when I re-read the first twelve Lew Archer novels in the first months of my early retirement in 2021/22 I could not help but be drawn up short by a lot of the content. It would be easy to pull questionable quotes at length, but here’s one from ‘The Chill’ in 1964: “when Dad gets upset it has a peculiar effect on me. It’s like sympathetic vibrations: he goes to pieces, I go to pieces. Not that I’m blaming him.’” Archer responds with: “‘I’m blaming him.’” Which might read as Millar blaming him, and which might then also read as Millar blaming himself. And whilst there is surely a large element of truth in the suggestion that Ken Millar writes Lew Archer as a character who keeps rescuing daughters because to a large extent Millar could not save his own, there lurks beyond all this the suggestion of something darker, perhaps. There is an intriguing line in Ed Nolan’s biography, discussing Millar’s attitudes to all of this. Millar suggests that his wife Margaret “had a need for “a jealous and exclusive love,”” and he “thought his wife hypersensitive to “the fairly normal incestuous content in the father-daughter relationship.””

Different times, as I say. Or maybe not. Maybe things just get talked about differently, brushed under carpets differently, obscured differently. Maybe nothing fundamentally changes in human nature at all or maybe everything is a result of the ways in which our popular cultures mediate and manipulate perceptions of ‘normality’, shifting as they do with every passing generation. Maybe too I have been overly sensitised through thirty years of teaching. It is also possible that Millar’s preoccupation with saving young female characters is simply a symptom of an instinct common amongst fathers with daughters. Not being a parent I have no reference point for this at all, but it seems plausible. Plausible too is that it is as a result of prolonged exposure to media coverage of crime and tragedy. Indeed in his 1951 novel ‘The Way Some People Die’ Lew Archer reflects that he “keep(s) thinking of the Black Dahlia, all the young girls that have been stolen away and destroyed by evil men.” Millar and Ellroy connected again.

So yes, it is possible to dive in at pretty much any point in the Lew Archer series and come up trumps. If pushed to pick one Lew Archer mystery though, I think that it would be the eighth instalment, 1959’s ‘The Galton Case’. Some critics have suggested this is the novel in which Ken Millar really finds his mature voice, and there is a strong case to be made for that. Although the somewhat obsessive theme of father/daughter relationships will continue to crop up in various guises in future books, in ‘The Galton Case’ it is replaced with a more successful musing on the nature of identity. The book engages with typical detective tropes of missing persons, this time most explicitly referencing Millar’s difficult childhood and detachment at a young age from his own father. It is not important to know any of this to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the book, but it does add an extra layer of interest, particularly when one considers the ideas of identity with regards author and character. Where does Ken Millar end and Ross Macdonald begin? And how does that persona of the writer blend with the character of Lew Archer in particular? It is true that as consumers of art and media we ought to be wary of projecting the qualities of the works onto the creators, and this is particularly true in the realm of fiction writing. The clue is in the word ‘fiction’, after all. Yet Millar is certainly a case where this boundary between truth and fiction is particularly finely poised. So much of Millar’s own experiences undeniably do find their way into his writing, so it does seem perfectly valid to wonder whether Lew Archer is speaking with a voice of imagination or of Millar’s personal experience. Never quite knowing is surely a large part of the continuing appeal.

One thing in ‘The Galton Case’ that almost certainly reflects Millar’s own cultural taste is that he uses the book to cast a curious and somewhat supercilious eye over the Beat Generation. It’s clear that Millar has little time for this particular incarnation of Youth Culture, yet typically he cannot quite allow Lew Archer to be wholly dismissive.

Ken Millar did share a love of jazz with the Beats, however, and at times he talked about wanting to construct his novels the way jazz musicians approached musical pieces. I’m not certain that comes over in his texts, but in ‘The Galton Case’ he certainly writes a nightclub jazz scene that, whilst much more restrained than Kerouac, is equally good: “The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night. The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.”

Archer gives over the feeling that Ken Millar might prefer the jazz to be slightly different in style and performance, but he certainly digs it just the same.

Then there is an amusing swipe at Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ when the poet performing at the club takes “a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket” before proceeding to perform: “Death Is Tabu,” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat.” As critiques go it is certainly less cutting that Truman Capote’s “that’s not writing, it’s typing”, but it’s still a soft swipe.

The fictional poet in the nightclub (named Bolling) is based not on Kerouac but on Kenneth Rexroth, who The Beats saw as something of a significant influence and who Millar saw as being better than what he begat, as it were. There is certainly a degree of warmth shown towards Bolling by Archer, who notes that “Like other performers, he had a public face and a private one. Each of them was slightly phony, but the private face suited him better.”

My friend Joe suggests that the scene where Archer and Bolling visit the San Francisco shore and the poet talks about building a new Athens there is a deliberate echo of the opening of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. Unlike Joe I am no academic literary expert, but I am quite certain that he is correct. Elsewhere in Millar’s novels there are Classical and other literary references (notably to Samuel Taylor Coleridge) that go way over my head, but that is fine. There is no need to ‘get’ the references to enjoy the novels. And whilst they might be described as Easter Eggs hidden in the text to delight any unsuspecting literary experts lured into reading detective mysteries I suspect too that their very existence lends Millar’s writing the elevated sense of magnificence that ‘ordinary’ readers like me sense without really understanding. Millar keeps the brilliance delicately cloaked, and therein lies its magic.

If Lew Archer, and by association Ken Millar, seems to hold something of a disliking for the Beats and a degree of bewildered lack of understanding of their youthful audience then it is perhaps a reflection of that state one gets to when one suddenly no longer seems to understand younger generations. It is a feeling, I think, that appears to work by stealth, and on reflection one can never pinpoint the moment it happens. I do not think this is any big deal, incidentally; no longer believe it is in any way related to hazy notions of ‘selling out’ or whatever I used to proclaim when I was younger and even more foolish. Archer/Millar looks on the Beat kids in ‘The Galton Case’ with a degree of generational detachment, then, and whilst he continues to do so through the remainder of his books he retains always a certain protective warmth towards youth. In 1962’s ‘The Zebra-Striped Hearse’ Archer encounters some post-beat teenage surfer kids, and then nine years later chances up against what would be their natural development in ’The Underground Man’, all long hair and mistrustful looks and attitudes. Archer can’t help but be grudgingly admiring of their Outsider pose, even as he tacitly acknowledges that he himself is emblematic of The Man. It’s like Millar is nodding towards the knowledge that it is inherently difficult for youth to recognise salvation/help in older generations and/or in established structures, just as the opposite relationship can be equally impossible. Millar positions Archer to be the pivot upon which that eternally problematic relationship hinges and he does it exquisitely well. He is careful too not to get drawn into commentary about specific cultural phenomena, and Archer’s dialogue in particular treads the fine line between Californian street/beach vocabulary and sound fictional conventions. It’s just one of the factors that make the Lew Archer books so very evocative of time and place whilst simultaneously appearing timeless. Awareness of the value of being seen to be informed by, but equally outside of contemporary events might explain why Millar turned down two financially lucrative offers to write (as Ross Macdonald) about the grisly Manson murders in 1969. If Millar was to artfully blur the boundaries between fact and fiction then they should at least be his own personal ones.

As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s it could be said that the final three Lew Archer books (‘The Underground Man’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Blue Hammer’) seem to almost imperceptibly fall away in terms of quality. If they were by any other writer it could justifiably be said that they contain flashes of brilliance, but set beside the white heat brilliance of previous Macdonalds they just feel to be in their shadow somewhat. Then again, perhaps this can only be sensed when reading an extensive batch of Archer mysteries in one go. To have experienced them in their contemporary contexts (1971, ’73 and ’76) would doubtless have been a terrific experience, yet I still cannot help wonder if that “anticipation is so much better” line so eloquently used by The Delta 5 in their ‘Anticipation’ single of 1980 might have applied even to an Archer fan at the time. Certainly by the time of 1976’s concluding ‘The Blue Hammer’ Ken Millar was starting to show signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually consume his brilliant mind. In the tremendous extended interview sessions with Paul Nelson that forms the basis for ‘The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives’ there are moments where memory fails. For the vast majority of the interviews Millar is astoundingly sharp and erudite, remarkably well-read and marvellously rounded. He covers up the memory slips admirably, but you can just about see the cracks starting to appear and it is heartbreaking.

Best by far then to remember Ken Millar as the Ross Macdonald (and vice versa) of the 1950s and 1960s, books filled with characters and plots that like the author are complex, challenging, troubling, intricately interconnected, intellectually stimulating and endlessly entertaining. He was simply, as James Ellroy suggested, the master.

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.