Past Times – Old Crime – fullybooked2017

KING DIDO . . . Past times, old crimes

Alexander Baron (1917 – 1999) is a writer who has returned to the consciousness of the reading public in recent times because the Imperial War Museum have republished his two classic WW2 novels From The City, From The Plough, There’s No Home, and the third in the trilogy, the collection of short stories The Human KInd. His compassion and his acute awareness of the highs and lows of men and women at war have embedded the trilogy into the culture of WW2, just as the poems of Owen, Sassoon and Gurney are inescapably linked with The Great War. King Dido (1969) is a book of a very different kind.

We are in the East End of London, and it is the summer of 1911, not long after the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. Dido is, by trade, a dock worker but, after a violent encounter with the district’s 1911 version of the Krays, he takes over the streets and becomes a kind of Reg. Not Ron, because Dido is not a psychopath, but the ‘tributes’ he collects make him a decent living. After a turbulent back alley encounter with a young waitress called Grace, Dido does ‘right thing’ and marries her. They live in redecorated rooms above the rag recovery business Dido’s mother runs. There has been a trend in crime fiction in recent years, which I call ‘anxiety porn’, but it is nothing new. More politely, these are known as ‘domestic thrillers.’ Mostly, they describe perfectly ordinary people whose lives gradually disintegrate, not through epic events, but because normal social tensions, misunderstandings, misplaced ambitions and tricks of fate turn their lives upside down. So it is here. Grace, blissfully unaware of how Dido earns his money, tries to put her feet on the next series of rungs in the ladder that leads to gentrification. However, the family’s journey on the board game of life becomes, via the snakes, a downward one, and it is a painful descent.

Baron grew up as Joseph Alexander Bernstein in Hackney, but he was actually born In Maidenhead, his mother having been evacuated there as a result of Zeppelin raids on London. His father was a master furrier, so it is clear that there is nothing autobiographical about his characterisation of Dido Peach. What is evident in the book is that Baron was aware of the existence of subtle strata within the East End poor. By 1911 the Huguenots had long since moved away, leaving such places as Christ Church Spitalfields and the elegant houses in Fournier Street as their memorials. There remained what could be called the ‘dirt’ poor, and then the ‘genteel’ poor – such as Mrs Peach and her family. What doesn’t feature in the novel, but was exactly contemporaneous, was the upsurge in activity by Eastern European activists, mostly exiles from Russia. The Houndsditch Murders and the resultant Siege of Sidney Street was that same year, while The Tottenham Outrage had been two years earlier. Both events remain writ large in East End history.

In the end, Dido’s downfall is a Hardy-esque orchestration of poor decisions, coincidence and the malice of others. He is denied the dramatic end given to Michael Henchard, Jude Fawley and – of course – Tess. Instead he is doomed – like Clym Yeobright – to still live in the world in which he once stood tall, but bowed and crippled now, alone except for the memories of the people and times he has lost. Baron’s prose here, just as in his better known books, is vivid, clear and full of insights.

June 16, 2025 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep was published in 1939, but the iconic film version, directed by Howard Hawks, wasn’t released until 1946. Are the dates significant? There is an obvious conclusion, in terms of what took place in between, but I am not sure if it is the correct one. The novel introduced Philip Marlowe to the reading public and, my goodness, what an introduction. The second chapter, where Los Angeles PI Marlowe goes to meet the ailing General Sternwood who is worried about his errant daughters, contains astonishing prose. Sternwood sits, wheelchair-bound, in what we Brits call a greenhouse. Marlowe sweats as Sternwood tells him:

“I seem to exist largely on heat like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”
“Not particularly.”
“They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

The General can no longer drink alcohol, but he enjoys watching men who can:

“The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lips slowly across the other with a funereal absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.”

“I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.”

Sternwood has two daughters. The elder, Vivian, was married to a an ex-IRA bigshot called Rusty Reagan, a man much admired by his father-in-law, but he has disappeared. The younger girl, Carmen, has gone off the rails completely, and has been sucked into a world of drugs, vice and pornography.

Initially, Marlowe’s brief from the General is to find out what is going in with Carmen. He soon discovers that she is involved with a pornographer called Geiger. He goes to Geiger’s house, and sits in his car outside, the rain teeming down.

“As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream cried out and lost itself among the rain drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died. There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow courts with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.”

Forcing his way into the house, Marlowe finds an interrupted photoshoot:

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead. She was wearing a pair of long Jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.”

The drugged Carmen Sternwood had clearly been in the middle of a pornographic photo shoot and beside her is Geiger – shot dead. After taking Carmen back to the Sternwood mansion Marlowe returns to Geiger’s house, where he has left his car. He finds that Geiger’s body has gone and the crime scene has been interfered with. Wondering who has taken the corpse, he makes the celebrated comment:

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

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The plot then becomes something of a whirling dervish pirouetting in the California dust, sometimes moving so fast and in such unexpected directions that it is not easy to keep track of what is going on. We meet Joe Brody, a small-time spiv who is trying to muscle in on Geiger’s pornography racket. He is shot dead by Geiger’s homosexual lover, and then Marlowe becomes aware of a much more sinister figure – gangster Eddie Mars, who is connected to Vivian Sternwood. This mad dance however is subsidiary to the poetry of Marlowe’s view of the dark world he inhabits. Chandler’s genius portrays Marlowe as a man trying to keep his footing while tiptoeing along the crumbling rim of a volcano, gazing down into the furnace below and doing his best to avoid being scorched.

In the end, as in all great novels it comes down to who we as readers care about. We don’t care too much for Carmen. We don’t care at all for the scattering of underworld figures who populate the book. We care about Vivian, who is damaged but perhaps redeemable. We care about the dying general still trying to protect his daughters and his legacy. Another cruel irony for the old man is the fate of Rusty Reagan, his corpse long since dumped in one of oil wells that have brought the family their immense wealth Above all, however, we care about Marlow and the bruises – mental and physical – he sustains while trying to do his job.

The book began with an optimistic Marlowe:

“I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”

It ends with him making a bitter deal with Vivian, that she will take Carmen as far away as possible from the moral cesspit she has been bathing in, and that the fate of Rusty Reagan will be kept from her father.

“Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Reagan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as grey as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Reagan, would be sleeping the big sleep.”

The edition I read for this review was published by Penguin, and is part of their recent series of ‘Green Penguin’ crime classics. It is paired with Farewell My Lovely, and is available now.

November 14, 2023 0

BRAT FARRAR . . . Between the covers

I imagine that anyone who calls themselves a crime fiction fan will have read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951) which, justifiably, regularly takes its place in the charts whenever anyone produces a list of the top crime novels ever written. I had vaguely heard of her earlier novel Brat Farrar (1949), but until I was sent a copy – by Penguin – as one of their reissued ‘Green’ classics, I had never got round to reading it. Within the first few ages I knew I was in for a treat, at least in terms of style and humour, when I read these lines:

“At this same table had eaten Ashbys who had died of fever in India, of wounds in the Crimea, of starvation in Queensland, of typhoid at the Cape, and of cirrhosis of the liver in the Straits settlements.”

“‘What became of cousin Walter?
‘Oh, he died.’
‘In an odour of sanctity?’
‘No. Carbolic. A workhouse ward, I think.'”

Rather like TDOT, the plot idea of Brat Farrar is very clever, if rather more complex. In the un-named English county where Tey sets the story, there are two neighbouring families, both formerly rather grand. In Clare House the Ledinghams “had been prodigal of their talents and their riches”. Now, the family has more or less destroyed itself and Clare is now a boarding school. The Ashbys still live at Latchetts. The male heir (the parents had been killed in an air crash) was Patrick, but he mysteriously disappeared, believed to have committed suicide by drowning, and now his marginally younger twin brother Simon stands to inherit the family fortunes when he comes of age. A member of the Ledingham family, a struggling actor called Alec Loding, has fortuitously spotted a young man – Brat Farrar – who is the living image of the late Patrick Ashby. He grooms him, and persuades him to assume Patrick’s persona, and reappear on the scene (with a plausible explanation for the false suicide) and claim the Ashby inheritance. Loding’s terms are simple:

“All I want is a cosy little weekly allowance for the rest of my life, so that I can thumb my nose at Equity, and management, and producers who say that I’m always late for rehearsal. And landladies.”

Yes, of course the plot is breathtaking in its implausibility, but that it its design – to make us gasp, and also entertain us with dazzling use of language and sharp social observation. It is also escapist in the best possible way, and for readers in the impoverished and dour times of post-war Britain, a glimpse of a different world. Perhaps a world that, even then, no longer existed, but a world away from austerity flavoured with NHS orange juice and dried milk.

Brat Farrar is an ingenious invention. He is an orphan, and even his name is the result of administrative errors and poor spelling. He has been around the world trying to earn a living in such exotic locations as New Mexico, but has ended up in London, virtually penniless and becomes an easy mark for a chancer like Alec Loding. He is initially reluctant to take art in the scheme, but with Loding’s meticulous coaching – and his own uncanny resemblance to the late Patrick – he convinces the Ashbys that he is the real thing. But – and it is a very large ‘but’ – Brat senses that Simon Ashby has his doubts, and they soon reach a disturbing kind of equanimity. Each knows the truth about the other, but dare not say. The author’s solution to the conundrum is elegant, and the endgame is both gripping and has a sense of natural justice about it.

Josephine Tey was one of the pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952) Her play, Richard of Bordeaux (written as Gordon Daviot) was celebrated in its day, and was produced by – and starred – John Gielgud. She never married, but a dear friend – perhaps an early romantic attachment – was killed on the Somme in 1916. She remained an enigma – even to friends who thought themselves close – throughout her life. Her funeral was reported thus:

“A small party of mourners, including Gielgud and the actress Dame Edith Evans, gathered at Streatham crematorium in South London on a cold, dreary day to say their farewells. “We talked to Gordon’s sister, whom we were all meeting for the first time,” *Caroline Ramsden recorded, “and she told us that Gordon had only come south from Scotland about a fortnight before, when she had stayed at her Club in Cavendish Square, on her way through London. What she did or thought about during that period was her own affair, never to be shared with anyone…. All her close friends were within easy reach, but she made no contacts—left no messages.”

*Writer, sculptor and racehorse owner, Caroline Ramsden was one of the oldest residents of London’s Primrose Hill ‘village’. Her abiding passions were horse racing and the theatre. Her memoirs encompass over 60 years of English social and cultural life, being a font of pleasure and information not only for racing and theatre enthusiasts, but for anyone who simply enjoys a glimpse of the past.

Brat Farrar is a wonderful book which simply does not date, despite the very different world in which we live. Tey’s prose is often sublime:

“She turned in at on the south porch of the church and found the great oak door still unlocked. The light of the sunset flooded the grey vault with warmth and the whole building held peace as a cup holds water.”

This edition is part of Penguin’s reissue of their ‘Green’ Modern Classics and is available now.

October 26, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . Maigret’s Revolver

Perhaps there’s a PhD to be written on the character of Madame Maigret, and none of the TV or film versions have made much of her, but here, at least for a while, she takes centre stage, in rather an unfortunate fashion. A young man, terribly nervous and ill-at-ease, arrives at their apartment, 132 Boulevard Richard Lenoir, asking to speak to the great man. Perhaps because he seems shy and inoffensive, she lets him in to wait while she finishes cooking lunch. A little while later, she breaks with their normal convention and telephones her husband at work. Hesitantly, she explains what has happened and, shamefaced, saying that the young man has now left, but she believes he has taken a revolver – presented to Maigret by the FBI – some years earlier. The revolver may seem to be ceremonial, as it is engraved with Maigret’s name, but it is far from a museum piece. It is a Smith and Wesson .45 and a very powerful agent of death in the wrong hands.

In what appears to be a separate strand of the plot, we learn that the Maigrets have recently dined with a long-standing friend, Dr Pardon, and that another guest – Lagrange – who was apparently very anxious to meet the celebrated policeman, failed to show up. When they visit Lagrange at his home, they find a man who appears to be extremely ill. Pardon confides in Maigret that Lagrange is something of a problem patient. Bedridden though he may appear to be, it transpires that he had enough strength to hire a taxi late the previous evening and, with the driver’s help, convey a heavy trunk to the left luggage office of the Gare du Nord. There is a very satisfying ‘click-clunk’ when it emerges that the young man who took Maigret’s revolver is none other than Alain, the sick man’s son. And in the trunk? A dead body, naturally, and it is that of André Delteil, a prominent – and controversial – politician, shot dead with a small calibre handgun.

Lagrange, when questioned, descends into a state of paranoia and behaves like a feverish child. Maigret cannot decide if this is genuine, or an attempt to defer the inevitable investigation into the corpse in the trunk. Playing safe, he sends the man to hospital. But what links the murdered politician, the babbling Lagrange – and his fugitive son? Simenon comes up with a very elegant – and deadly – connection in the shape of a wealthy socialite called Jeanne Debul who collects rich men like some people collect stamps. He uncovers a deeply unpleasant melange of blackmail, obsession and greed and concludes that Alain Lagrange is convinced that his father’s downfall can be laid at the door of Madame Debul. And he is at large, with Maigret’s revolver and a box of recently bought ammunition.

Maigret is not best pleased to learn that Jeanne Debul has flown to London, followed – on the next flight – by Alain Lagrange. It’s a rotten job, but someone has to do it, and Maigret follows the socialite and her would-be assassin to London, where he books into the same hotel as Madame Debul – The Savoy, no less. Helped – and hindered – by his Scotland Yard counterparts, our man awaits the collision of hunter and hunted, and this section of the story is a delightful flourish by Simenon where, via his great creation, he describes every little irritation and frustration that an urbane Frenchman could possibly encounter in the buttoned-up world of 1950s London.

As ever with Simenon, this story is a masterpiece of brevity – just 150 pages – and where lesser writers might take a page or more to describe a person, an atmosphere or a situation, he does the job in a paragraph. This edition of Maigret’s Revolver (first published in 1952), translated by Siân Reynolds, is one of the new Penguin Modern Classics and will be available on 5^th October

October 3, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISTED … SS-GB

I had been aware of this book for ages – it was first published in 1978 – but had never read it until now. My initial reaction was to be intrigued by Deighton’s premise. It is November 1941, the Germans have invaded and the pastiche document, headed Geheime Kommandosache at the beginning of the book tells us that Britain surrendered on 19th February. So, my first thought was “What happened?” Was there no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain? What became of The Royal Navy? Presumably Rudolf Hess never made his bizarre flight to Scotland and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is still unbreached. What of Reinhard Heydrich? Is he just a couple of months into his new job as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia? I read on, hoping that Deighton’s rather audacious re-write of history would be plausible.

We open with what appears to be a relatively mundane murder mystery. A prominent – and successful black marketeer is found shot dead in his flat-cum-warehouse in London’s Shepherd Market, and Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer (whose boss now is Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman) is sent to investigate. It rapidly becomes obvious that the corpse identified as one Peter Thomas is no such person, and that his death has triggered a dramatic response from Berlin, in that Standartenführer Huth, a senior SS investigator, has been sent to London to take over the case.

In fairness, a few chapters in we disciver that Churchill has been shot by a firing squad in Germany and King George VI, like the long lost princes, is imprisoned in The Tower of London. Deighton also teases us with furtive appearances from the British resistance movement, and hints that the death of ‘not Peter Thomas’ may be connected with something deeply dangerous, perhaps connected to the search to make a nuclear weapon. Huth establishes himself, at least superficially, as the very worst kind of SS officer, but around half way through the book Deighton pulls a couple of very clever rabbits out of the hat, in terms of the plot. Regarding Oskar Huth, wise readers will reserve their judgment. Archer becomes involved with Barbara Barger, an influential American war reporter and, because of his apparently willing co-operation with the German authorities, he reaches number one on the assassination hit list of the resistance movement.

We learn the answer to the Molotov-Ribbentrop conundrum when, with a wonderfully Baroque flourish, Deighton turns the story on its head by describing a heavily orchestrated ceremony to disinter the remains of Karl Marx from Highgate and move them to Moscow. It all goes spectacularly wrong, and Archer is swept along on the tide of events. The focus of the story soon becomes clear, and it is the possession of vital information that will allow those who own it to make a nuclear bomb.

Deighton’s meticulous historical research allows him to put to good use the dichotomy between the regular German army and the ‘upstart’ SS, and the deep distrust which Hitler’s inner circle felt for the Abwehr, the intelligence agency for the army. He also describes the German unease about royalty. Remember that ‘Kaiser Bill’, the last German royal ruler was, in the autumn of 1941, only a few months in his grave. Our reluctant monarch, King George VI plays a part in the denouement of this story. Already a sick man, he is used as merely a piece on the international chess board, and not a very potent one.

Going back to my initial reservations, Deighton doesn’t explain how Hitler’s forces managed to invade Britain in spite of what we know as the serious military impediments in his path. We do learn that Hitler and Stalin, at least on paper, are still best pals, but my overwhelming response to what is a fiendishly clever reworking of history is simple: thank God for Dunkirk, the RAF – and America. This edition is from Penguin Modern Classics and is available now

September 21, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Mask of Dimitrios

The opening part of this book, in geo-political terms, is gloriously old fashioned. Istambul, with its reputation as being the place where east meets west, home of mysterious Levantine traders and treacherous stateless misfits has long since been pensioned off, at least in the world of crime and espionage fiction. It is worth remembering, though, that it was the starting point for Bond’s adventures in From Russia With Love when it was published in 1957, and was still thought to have a suitable ambience when the film was released in 1963.

Charles Latimer is an English academic who has found that writing thrillers is much more to his liking (and that of his bank manager) than lengthy tracts on political and economic trends in nineteenth century Europe. While in Istanbul he is invited to a house party where he meets Colonel Haki, an officer in some un-named sinister police force. Improbably, Haki is a fan of Latimer’s novels and, when they become better acquainted, Haki reveals a current real-life mystery he is investigating. The corpse of a man known only as Dimitrios – once a big player in the espionage world of the Levant and The Balkans – is fished out of the sea. Having attended the post mortem, Latimer decides to investigate just who Dimitrios was, and how he came to end up as he did.

Published on the eve of world war two, when previous atrocities would be dwarfed in scale, the novel reminds us of the horrors which took place in the region after the Armistice. The brutal civil war between Turkey and Greece, with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, the Armenian genocide, and a succession of coups d’états in Bulgaria had left the region rife with intrigue and foreign meddling. By the late 1930s, Europe was desperately ill at ease with itself. Latimer observes:

“So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies of war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen: men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had thought, had been tortured and died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion.”

As he criss-crosses Europe via Athens, Sofia, Geneva, Paris – by train, naturally – Latimer is drawn into the world of a mysterious man known only as Mr Peters, memorably described thus:

“Then Latimer saw his face and forgot about the trousers. There was the sort of sallow shapelessness about it that derives from simultaneous overeating and under sleeping. From above two heavy satchels of flesh peered a pair of blue, bloodshot eyes that seemed to the permanently weeping. The nose was rubbery and indeterminate. It was the mouth that gave the face expression. The lips were pallid and undefined, seeming thicker than they really were. Pressed together over unnaturally white and regular false teeth, they were set permanently in a saccharine smile.”

The 1944 film of the book took many liberties with the story and, bizarrely, changed the clean-living, rather prim Charles Latimer into a Dutch novelist named Cornelius Leyden, and then compounded the felony by casting Peter Lorre in the role. What they didn’t get wrong, however, was in re-imagining Mr Peters. Check the quote above, and if it isn’t Sydney Greenstreet to the proverbial ‘T’, then I will change my will and donate my worldly wealth to The Jeremy Corbyn Appreciation Society. In his travels, Latimer also meets a rather down-at-heel nightclub manager called La Prevesa:

“The mouth was firm and good-humoured in the loose, raddled flesh about it, but the eyes were humid with sleep and the carelessness of sleep. They made you think of things you had forgotten, of clumsy gilt hotel chairs strewn with discarded clothes and of grey dawn light slanting through closed shutters, of attar of roses and of the musty smell of heavy curtains on brass rings, of the sound of the warm, slow breathing of a sleeper against the ticking of a clock in the darkness”

Quite near the end of the book, Ambler drops a plot bombshell which not only damages Latimer’s own sense of being able to spot a lie when he sees one, but puts him next in line for a drug-dealer’s bullet. He is in Paris, but this is not the city as envisaged by, apparently, Victor Hugo:

“Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.”

Latimer sees a rather different city:

“As his taxi crossed the bridge back to Île de la Cité, he saw for a moment a panorama of low, black clouds moving quickly in the chill, dusty wind. The long facade of the houses on the Quai de Corse was still and secretive. It was as if each window concealed a watcher. There seemed to be few people about. Paris, in the late autumn afternoon, had the macabre formality of a steel engraving.”

With this book, Ambler created the anvil on which the great spy novels of the final decades of the Twentieth Century were beaten out. As good as they were, neither Le Carré nor Deighton bettered his use of language, and in this relatively short novel, just 264 pages, Ambler set the Gold Standard. This latest edition of the novel is published by Penguin and is available now.

September 12, 2023 0

PAST TIMES – OLD CRIMES . . . 1974 and 1977 by David Peace

This occasional series of retrospective reviews seeks to ask and – hopefully – answer a few simple questions about crime novels from the past. Those questions include:
How was the book received at the time?
How does it read now, decades after publication?

I have departed from the usual format by examining two books, published in 1999 and 2000 by Serpents Tail. They were the first two in a quartet of novels by David Peace (left), which have come to be known as the Red Riding Quartet. The books are set in West Yorkshire, and each references real criminal events of the time

1974 is set in a bleak December in Leeds. Edward Dunford is the crime correspondent for a local paper which publishes daily morning and evening editions. He is keen to make his mark, but is overshadowed by his more experienced predecessor, Jack Whitehead. Mourning the recent death of his father, Dunford covers the abduction of a schoolgirl, Clare Kemplay, whose body is later found sexually assaulted and horrifically mutilated. Wings, torn from a swan in a local park, have been been crudely stitched to the little girl’s back. Dunford is convinced that the killing is connected to earlier missing children, but then his search for answers becomes tangled up with crooked property dealers, blackmail, corrupt politicians and a dystopian police force. Dunford receives several graphically described beatings, there is violent, joyless sex and, in almost constant rain, the neon-lit motorways and carriageways around Leeds and Wakefield take on a baleful presence of their own.

1974 was praised at the time – and still is – for its coruscating honesty and brutal depiction of a corrupt police force, bent businessmen who have, via brown envelopes, local councillors at their beck and call in a city riven by prostitution, racism and casual violence. In a nod to a real life case David Peace has a man called Michael Myshkin, clearly with mental difficulties, arrested for the Clare’s murder. It is obvious that this refers to the ordeal of Stefan Kiszko (right) – arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of Lesley Molseed in 1975. He remained in prison until 1992, but was then acquitted and released after the case was re-examined.

1977 is a re-imagining of the how the Yorkshire Ripper murders began to imprint themselves on the public’s imagination, and baffle police for many years. It is the early summer and we are reunited with many characters from 1974, including Jack Whitehead, DS Bob Fraser and several of the senior police officers who made Eddie Dunford’s life a misery. Apart from the obvious mark of Peace’s style – jagged paragraphs of single figure words, stream of consciousness narrative, fevered sequences of bad dreams and relentless brutality, there are other thematic links. Eddie Dunford’s father has just died, shriveled to a husk by cancer; Bob Fraser’s father in law is just days away from death from the same disease. Both Whitehead and Frazer have their sexual demons, and in Fraser’s case it is a prostitute called Janice who he first arrested, and then became transfixed by. She is murdered, and he is arrested.

When straightforward narrative clarity is abandoned in favour of literary special effects, the downside is that it is sometimes hard work to know who is imaging what. Someone in 1977 is referencing the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and, in particular, the destruction of Mary Jane Kelly in Millers Court. Likewise, someone is using the slightly artificial jollity of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee as a sour counterpoint to the carnage being inflicted on the back streets of Leeds. The novel ends inconclusively, but it seems that both Whitehead and Fraser become the victims of their obsessions.

It is worth looking at the chronology of what I call ‘brutalist’ crime fiction (aka British Noir). The grand-daddy of them all is probably Jack’s Return Home, (1970) later re-imagined as Get Carter, and featuring corrupt businessmen, although there is little or nopolice involvement. This was Ted Lewis’s breakthrough novel, but aficionados will argue that his GBH – a decade later – is even better. 1974 and 1977 are explicit, bleak and visceral, but we would do well to remember that I Was Dora Suarez, the most horrific of Derek Raymond’s Factory novels, was published in 1990, and featured a similar leitmotif to 1974 – that of wounds, pain and suffering. To revisit IWDS click the link below.

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/i-was-dora-suarez/

As compelling as these two novels are, David Peace wasn’t exploring ground unvisited by earlier writers. Tastes and descriptions in crime fiction are all relative. Val McDermid’s excellent Tony Hill/Carol Jordan novels were lauded as visiting dark places where other writers had feared to tread, but they were relatively mild, at least in terms of gore and viscera. Great stories, yes, from a fine writer, but not exactly pushing boundaries. Given the free use of vernacular words to describe ethnicity and sexual preferences, had Peace’s novels been submitted by an unknown writer in 2023, it is improbable that the books would see the light of day, given the cultural eggshells on which mainstream publishers seem to tiptoe.

Final verdict? I’ll answer the two questions I posed at the top of this piece. Firstly, the contemporary reactions were pretty enthusiastic, and included, from Time Out (remember that?):
“The finest work of literature I’ve read this year – extraordinary and original”
The Independent on Sunday enthused:
“Vinnie Jones should buy the film rights fast!”
The Guardian offered:
“A compelling fiction – Jacobean in its intensity.”

They are not wrong about the books, but I suspect that the soundbites were from reviewers who perhaps did not have a very great overview of what had gone before. As for how they read these days, I came to them new, via a Christmas present from my son, and they certainly grab you by the throat. I read both books in two days but did I care very much about what happened to Eddie Dunford, Jack Whitehead or Bob Fraser? Not much, to be honest. The Aeschylean/Shakespearean view of a tragic figure is that he/she is someone who is basically a decent person brought low by a combination of fate and accident. For me, Eddie, Jack and Bob might have appeared to tick the first box, but actually didn’t. The two later books in the quartet were published in 2001(1980) and 2002 (1983) so they fall outside this remit. As for Vinnie Jones buying the film rights, the books were filmed as a trilogy, more or less omitting 1977 altogether. They were broadcast in March 2009.

May 16, 2023 0

PAST TIMES – OLD CRIMES . . . Whatever’s Been Going On In Mumblesby? by Colin Watson

I make no apology for returning to one of my all time favourite authors, the unassuming and hugely underrated Colin Watson. For a closer look at the man and his work, you can have a look at my two part study which is here. Whatever’s Been Going On In Mumblesby? was published in 1982, a year before Watson died and is the last of The Flaxborough Chronicles. This, then, is the final appearance of Detective Inspector Walter Purbright, and his earnest assistant Detective Sergeant Sydney. Love. The fun begins with this announcement in the local newspaper.

Mr Loughbury had since remarried, as they used to say, a much younger model, the undoubtedly attractive but ostensibly rather vulgar Zoe. Purbright becomes involved when, after the funeral of her husband, Zoe Loughbury, née Claypole, is discovered locked in the bathroom of The Manor House while someone seems to have set fire to the building. The fire is soon put out, but Purbright becomes aware (with the help of Miss Lucy Teatime, a local antique dealer who may not be entirely honest, but is scrupulously observant) that the late solicitor had in the house a collection of very valuable artifacts and paintings, all of which seem to have been ‘acquired’ from former clients, without a single bill of sale involved. Most bizarre among this collection is a piece of wood supposed to be a remnant of the True Cross.

Screen Shot 2021-06-08 at 18.43.59 The true provenance of this is only revealed when Purbright investigates an apparent suicide which happened in the village church. Bernadette Croll, the wife of a local farmer was, in life, “no better than she ought to be”, and in death little mourned by the several men who shared her charms. Purbright eventually sees the connection between Mrs Croll’s death and Mr Loughbury’s collection of valuables, when he discovers that the wood came from somewhere far less exotic than Golgotha.

One of Colin Watson’s more unusual achievements is that he is supposed to be one of the few people to have successfully sued Private Eye. He took exception to their writer describing his work as ‘Wodehouse without the jokes.’ He took them to court, and was awarded £750 in damages. Watson was no Wodehouse nor, I am sure, would he have claimed to be, but his jokes are not bad at all. Here. he reacts to a report from Sergeant Love:

“Love’s accounts were robbed of dramatic point somehow by his customary obliging, pleased with life expression. He would have described a public execution or a jam-making demonstration with equal cheerfulness.”

Purbright has a good but wary relationship with his boss, Chief Constable Chubb. They are discussing the vagaries in the behaviour of one of the females in the case:

“Mr Chubb waved his hand vaguely. ‘Who can say? Nervous trouble? Change of life?’ Menopause loomed as large in the chief constable’s mind as central heating and socialism.”

The owner of Mumblesby’s main restaurant has a wife who is not in the first flush of youth, but maximises her charms:

“She wore a dress of such deep cleavage that it resembled a long pair of partly drawn curtains, with a glimpse of navel at the bottom of the V, like the eye of an inquisitive neighbour, peeping out.”

As ever, Purbright’s mild manner and courtesy are totally underestimated by the criminals and schemers in and around Flaxborough. He has a steely perception which is more than a match for the rich but vulgar farmers who are up to their necks in the death of Bernadette Croll and, to show that he is no respecter of persons, he is equally merciless with the impoverished gentry. The jokes and comedy aside, for Walter Purbright justice is, indeed, blind – at least to class divisions and the county social hierarchy.

The Flaxborough novels are redolent of another time, certainly, and I suspect that they may well have been even when they were first published. Watson is a craftsman rather than a showman, but his plots are clever and intricate. His humour, which failed to impress the literary critic of Private Eye, is in the indisputably English vein of George and Weedon Grossmith, and JB (Beachcomber) Morton, and I suggest it has modern echoes in the Bryant and May books by Christopher Fowler. Flaxborough is a place I continue to visit, and it never fails to please. Finally, thanks to Peter Hannan and Stuart Radmore for the lovely map of Flaxborough used in the feature image, which was originally created by Salim Patel.

June 21, 2021 0

PAST TIMES – OLD CRIMES . . .The Little Man From Archangel by Georges Simenon

Was Georges Simenon the greatest ever Belgian? He was certainly the most prolific both in his literary output and his apparently inexhaustible sexual appetite. Best known for his Maigret novels and short stories, he also wrote standalone novels. One such was Le Petit Homme d’Arkhangelsk, first published in English in 1957. This new edition, translated by Siân Reynolds (who is the former Chair of French at the University of Stirling) is, like most of Simenon’s books short – just 185 pages – but as powerful a story as he ever wrote.

We are in an anonymous little town in the Berry region of central France, and it is the middle years of the 1950s. Jonas Milk is a mild-mannered dealer in second hand books. His shop, his acquaintances, the café, bar and boulangerie he frequents are all like spokes of a wheel, and the hub is the bustling Vieux-Marché. Jonas appreciates his neighbours, such as Le Bouc behind the counter in his bar, Gaston Ancel the butcher, with his booming voice and bloodstained apron, and the Chaignes family in their grocery shop. Jonas values these people or, to be more precise, he values their acceptance of him, because he is an outsider. Sure, he has been in France since he was a small boy, his family – from the port on Russia’s White Sea coast – having sought refuge in France during the Revolution. They have all returned to their homeland, and Jonas does not know if they are alive or dead. He is also a Jew, but because of his fair hair and complexion he survived the attention of the Nazis during the Occupation.

Jonas Milk has a wife. Two years earlier he had converted to Catholicism and married Eugénie Louise Joséphine Palestri – Gina – a voluptuous and highly sexed woman sixteen years his junior. No doubt the frequenters of the Vieux-Marché have their views on this marriage, but they are polite enough to keep their opinions to themselves, at least when Jonas is within earshot. But then Gina disappears, taking with her no bag or change of clothing. The one thing she does take, however, is a selection of a very valuable stamp collection that Jonas has put together over the years, not through major purchases from dealers, but through his own obsessive examination of relatively commonplace stamps, some of which turn out to have minute flaws, thus making their value to other collectors spiral to tens of thousands of francs.

Gina has had her flings before, though, seeking physical excitement that Jonas does not provide. He has born his shame in silence, and it has never occurred to him to challenge her. This time, however, when he makes his morning purchases – his croissants, his cup of espresso – and is asked where Gina is, he makes a fatal mistake. Perhaps through embarrassment, or irritation perhaps, he tells a small lie.

“As a rule, Gina, in bedroom slippers, often with her hair uncombed, and sometimes wrapped in a flowery dressing gown, would do her shopping early on market days, before the crowd.
Jonas opened his mouth and it was then that, in spite of every instinct telling him not to, he changed the words he was going to say.
“She’s gone to Bourges.”

Four words. Each of them harmless on its own, but together, something entirely different . What happens next is a masterpiece of brilliant storytelling, as in just a few days, the world of Jonas Milk begins to unravel. Simenon’s ability to describe profound events while framing them with little inconsequential moments of observation – a blackbird pecking at crumbs in a back garden, a café owner turning his face away from the steam of his coffee machine, a wife not cleaning up the frying pan after cooking herrings – is astonishing.

You will probably read this book in a couple of sessions. Yes, it’s a short book, anyway, but my goodness, what an impact it makes. The Little Man From Archangel is published by Penguin Modern Classics, and is out on 1st April.

March 24, 2021 0