Author: The Good Reader

Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton

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For me, the broadcasting highlight of the holiday season was on the radio rather than the television. It was the play Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton. Actually, it wasn’t on the radio; it is a BBC recording from a few years ago that someone had kindly loaded on to YouTube.

A little research revealed that this was written for radio in 1937, shortly before Hamilton’s great stage success Gaslight. It is a gripping suspenseful piece, quite short and essentially a two-hander, a series of increasingly disturbing telephone calls. As the title suggests, it becomes clear that what we are dealing with here is blackmail. Part of the fascination for Hamilton admirers is the slow, insinuating way that “Mr Poland” tortures his victim. He talks round the subject in his dry voice and refuses to come to the point, stringing out the agony. It is almost Pinteresque.

This sort of thing features strongly in Hamilton’s novels. I am thinking of Mr Thwaites in The Slaves of Solitude, whose victims are stuck with him at the breakfast table. It might almost be a grown-up Ralph Gorse on the other end of the line. Those unfamiliar with this nasty piece of work, can make his acquaintance in my post about The West Pier.

The mechanics of suspense are worked out very cleverly. We are in the world where telephones were situated at a specific place, not carried in one’s pocket. The blackmailer leads his victim in a merry dance around the west end of London, from one phone booth to another. The telephone call provides many possibilities for radio drama. How do we know that the person on the other end of the line is who they claim to be? Francis Durbridge used this sort of thing to great effect in his Paul Temple series.

Thinking further along these lines reminded me of Ford Madox Ford’s 1912 novel, A Call. As far as I know, that was the first novel where the plot depended on the use of the telephone.

Without giving too much away about Money With Menaces, what seems to be increasingly absurd turns out to have a logical explanation. There have been later works on a similar theme by Roald Dahl and William Boyd.

I thoroughly recommend this as a gripping forty minutes or so on the radio – or should I say wireless?

Age shall not weary them, but perhaps it should

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I once read in an interview with Agatha Christie that she felt she had made a mistake with Poirot and made him too old. He had already retired by the time of his third appearance, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I suppose it never occurred to her that the demands of the public and her publisher meant she would be writing about him for the next fifty years. Poirot therefore had to be permanently suspended in late middle age, while the world he moved through changed around him. This is quite effective; the books set in 1960s England are very different to those set among international travellers in the 1930s.

There are occasional references to his age, though. At the beginning of Five Little Pigs (1942) his would-be client looks at him quizzically. Poirot realises that she thinks he is too old for the job. He explains that the “little grey cells” are still working perfectly. Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) begins with Poirot reflecting on what is now his greatest pleasure, the dining table, and lamenting that there are only three meals in the day. But Christie could never have aged him realistically; He was a first world war refugee, after all, and Captain Hastings was recovering from wounds when Poirot met him. Even if he was only in his forties then, Poirot would have been in his nineties in the books set in the 1960s.

Poirot contrasts sharply with John Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay, who made his first appearance in The Thirty Nine Steps in 1915. He ages realistically over the course of his five adventures and in the last, The Island of Sheep (1936), he has been knighted, become an MP and his teenage son takes an active role. This may have something to do with the fact that in the books set in the first world war, Hannay gains promotion, ending up as a senior officer. You can’t really have a character who progresses up the military hierarchy without them ageing. We can see this in C S Forester’s Hornblower series, where Hornblower starts as a midshipman and ends as an admiral. He must therefore age. Of course, both Hannay and Hornblower are parents, so if they did not age, their children could not, either.

The characters that Christie did age realistically, in a similar fashion to Hannay, are her detective duo Tommy and Tuppence. They first appeared as a pair of bright young things in Christie’s second novel The Secret Adversary (1922). Their final appearance as a married couple of mature years was in the last novel she wrote, Postern of Fate (1973).

John Le Carré had a Poirot-like problem with George Smiley, in that he had been very specific about his age in his first book, which made him a bit too old for the later books. In Call for the Dead (1961), we are told Smiley went up to Oxford in 1925, so he would have been born around 1907. Smiley leaves the secret service at the end of that book; we assume he has returned, because he appears as a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965).

He becomes the central character in Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974), but Le Carré had to change Smiley’s past and knock some years off his age to fit him into that story. Smiley had to be much closer in age to the generation who were at Oxford in the 1930s and still young enough to be forced into premature retirement in the early 1970s. That also made him vigorous enough to appear in the next two books of the Karla Trilogy. Again, one has to assume that when Le Carré wrote Call for the Dead, he did not imagine Smiley as the central figure in a much longer and more complex novel that he would write almost fifteen years later.

Perhaps Ian Fleming came up with the best solution to this ageing problem. James Bond always seems to be about the same, unspecified age; mid to late thirties perhaps, old enough to be experienced and confident but young enough to be fit and tough. But the books link in to one another, with a consistent cast of characters. There is a chronology, and Bond is scarred by his experiences, but he is oddly ageless.

This can be seen particularly towards the end of the series. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) opens with the hunt for Blofeld, the criminal mastermind behind the atomic bomb plot in Thunderball (1961). At the beginning of You Only Live Twice (1964), the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have left Bond a broken man, on the point of being dismissed from the service; by the end, he is missing in Japan, presumed dead. The Man With The Golden Gun (1965) opens dramatically with the brainwashed Bond returning to try and assassinate M. He is then given a dangerous mission to redeem himself.

Fleming was careful never to pin down Bond’s exact year of birth. In the (premature, as it turns out) obituary in You Only Live Twice, M writes that Bond became a commando “in 1941, claiming an age of 19”; that would make Bond’s year of birth about 1923 or so. So, if we do apply realistic time, he would have been in his early forties when he turns down a knighthood at the end of The Man With The Golden Gun, the last Bond book.

Sooner or later, Fleming would have had to solve the problem of how Bond should age, and it’s interesting to speculate what he might have done. Perhaps he would have inserted an earlier adventure into the timeline, as Conan Doyle did with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, Fleming died at the comparatively young age of 56. Like his creator, Bond never had to cope with old age.

Don’t Look Now: great story, great film

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Memory is a funny thing. I know this happened but I’m not sure exactly when and the details are hazy. Our local cinema used to have late-night screenings on a Friday night. Not the latest releases, but what you might call cult classics, in the days before they were available on video. We are talking about the mid to late seventies here.

One Friday after the pub we trooped along to see a Nicolas Roeg double bill, attracted by the prospect of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. That was on first, so it must have been well after midnight when the second film started. I had heard of Don’t Look Now, but I didn’t know much about it, except that it was adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, known to me as the author of Rebecca.

I have never seen any other film that generates such a sense of unease and dread. Even something seemingly innocuous, the interview at the  police station, is full of. . . well, what exactly? The same feeling that runs through the whole story, that there is something you can’t quite grasp, out of reach, until everything that seemed fragmentary is connected horrifically and tragically at the end.

They used to turn the heating off, so imagine watching those scenes of a dank and wintry Venice in a cold cinema. Then think of the ending and imagine walking home in the early hours of the morning after that. I would never forget this chilling story of bereavement and second sight.

I have seen it several times since on the television, and I have read Daphne du Maurier’s story more than once. It’s fascinating to compare the story and the film. It’s only fifty pages or so, a longish short story, but too short to be called a novella.

The prologue in England was added for the film, but what Roeg also did was to take the story and make it more visual, as you would expect, by creating the repeated images of the colour red, water and breaking glass. The colour red was something of a theme with Roeg in his earlier films as director of photography, such as Fahrenheit 451 and Far From The Madding Crowd.

Something that could not really be transferred to the screen was the fact that the viewpoint character is the man. Thus we have a female writer looking critically at a woman through the eyes of a man. Also, the film was set roughly contemporary to when it was made, in 1973. In the story, there are indications that it is set a bit further back, in the nineteen-fifties, say. The fame of the film has rather overshadowed the story, but I feel that although they are distinct works in their own right, it should always be remembered that the original ideas that drive the film came from the fertile imagination of Daphne du Maurier.

Du Maurier was a favourite writer of my parents. My mother was particularly fond of the novel The King’s General. There was always a bit of a problem with Du Maurier’s reputation in that, for all her fame and success, she was regarded as a writer of “romance” or “women’s fiction”. That probably put me off reading her work when I was younger. Don’t Look Now and the other short stories place her in quite different territory, much closer to Patricia Highsmith or Shirley Jackson who were her true peers, rather than Georgette Heyer, say.

Around the time of the centenary of du Maurier’s birth, in 2005, I saw a stage production that was an adaptation of the story, rather than the film. I think the stage design of this was done by people who had worked in the opera. It looked like real water seeping down the dark walls. At the interval we walked up to the front, to get an idea of how it was done, and found it was indeed real and there was a gutter at the lip of the stage. The play had also taken the story back to its original time.

I know I shall read the story and watch the film again, but I feel that neither are to be taken lightly. Both are masterpieces but not exactly uplifting. One has to be in the right mood. I was lucky to see the film with no prior knowledge of it, so I could react to the film itself, and not any preconceived idea of it.

I later met someone who said that they didn’t like the film, which surprised me. But then they had been obliged to watch it as part of a film studies course, a different thing entirely. Nothing kills your appreciation of a film like being told in advance it is a classic.

 

 

So, farewell then, Anthony Price

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I knew he was quite elderly, but his death wasn’t reported that widely and I only found out some time after the event. He actually died in May 2019. I suppose it wasn’t considered big news, because his books had somehow fallen out of favour in recent years, and most of them are out of print now. I think that’s a great pity, because they are well worth reading for anyone who enjoys the cold war spy genre.

His approach to the spy novel is original, combining as it does a taste for military history combined with cold war intrigue. His first novel, The Labyrinth Makers (1970), opens with the discovery of a wrecked plane from the second world war in the English countryside. Why are the Russians so interested in it so long after the war? This intrusion of the past into the present is perhaps seen to best effect in Other Paths to Glory (1974). Why is someone is prepared to kill to get hold of a piece of first world war trench map? There are two stories here, the tale of a group of soldiers on the western front, and a modern-day espionage plot. They turn out to be connected, the riddle of what happened to the soldiers providing the answer to the main mystery.

Price’s spy master is Dr David Audley, historian and leading light of the counter-intelligence unit known simply as “Research and Development”. He is also a great enthusiast of the works of Rudyard Kipling. He lives in a country house of great antiquity, not unlike Kipling’s Batemans in Sussex. He appears in almost every book, along with a recurring set of characters, but he is not always the main character. Price has a habit of introducing someone completely new at the start of a novel and telling the story from their point of view. The series was not published in chronological order, either. This may be one of the reasons for Price’s comparative lack of popularity. It can’t have been obvious to readers that the books did in fact form a series and I don’t know if his publisher promoted them in a way that made this clear.

Actually, the books that depart from the main chronological sequence and are set entirely in the past are some of the best. The Hour of the Donkey (1980) is the story of two young British officers in France in 1940. It is also a slice of alternative history, with its explanation of why the German tanks stopped short of Dunkirk. Alert readers will spot several characters who appear in the books set later. The ‘44 Vintage (1978) shows the young David Audley in France in 1944, when he becomes a member of a commando unit operating behind enemy lines, along with Jack Butler, who features in many of the other books. This is the start of his intelligence career, the sort of thing that Ian Fleming hinted at in the Bond books but never got round to writing about at length. Soldier No More (1981) is perhaps the closest Price comes to Le Carre, with its complex double agent plot, set just after Suez in 1956 with Audley indulging in a spot of lotus-eating deep in the French countryside.

So why isn’t Price better known today? After all, his novels won prizes and were highly praised at the time. As well as the reasons I have outlined above it may be something to do with the lack of successful film or TV adaptations. The first three novels were televised (under the title Chessgame) but were altered somewhat and Price was unhappy about the casting. A more popular and continuing series might have made Audley a figure to rival Inspector Morse. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has another go at some point. There is a lot of material there.

Perhaps I’m on the wrong track, though. It’s often difficult to point to one particular reason why a writer’s works fall out of favour. It may be the military history that puts some readers off, but on the other hand I think that is a great deal of the appeal of Price’s writing. Perhaps there was a confusion with his near namesake Anthony Powell. It may simply be the passage of time and the question of availability. When the Cold War came to an end, Price stopped writing new books, about 1990, and his old ones started to drop out of print. If readers can’t find them, they can’t read them. Well, thanks to the internet, secondhand copies are easily obtainable and I believe some of the titles are available electronically. It’s time for an Anthony Price revival.

 

The Round Dozen by W Somerset Maugham

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This one was a real charity shop bargain. Twelve stories in a nineteen forties hardback, six hundred or so pages for one pound. Some of these were familiar, but from so long ago that it was time to re-assess them. Others were completely new to me. Another point of interest is that this is Maugham’s own choice. There is no foreword, though, and the dates of original publication are not given, although I think most of them date from the nineteen twenties. This is a very strong selection with not a weak story in it.

Actually, he’s cheated a little on the title, because one of the stories was three separate stories in its original published form, but more of that later.

Rain, perhaps his most famous story, is here of course. It is a tale of the moral battle between a missionary and a prostitute in Samoa and I found it just as compelling as before. The pacific setting is vividly evoked, but perhaps the most impressive thing is a feature that it shares with several of the others here, the sense of proceeding to a dramatic climax with perfect pacing.

I have always preferred The Letter, I suppose because it is a crime story. A woman is on trial for shooting an intruder. The problem for the defence is that she fired all six bullets into the man. I enjoyed that one again, as well. It’s like a whole novel in miniature. This is a common opinion, I know, but I think the stories of the dying days of the British empire in Malaya are some of Maugham’s best work. They are written with ironic, clinical detachment; he did train as a doctor, after all. There is probably a thesis waiting to be written about doctor-writers. Conan Doyle and C S Forester of Hornblower fame are others.

The Outstation stuck in my mind for years, because of the light it throws on a particular quirk of human nature. The two men at the lonely jungle station in Malaya are so different in background, temperament and general approach, that they cannot help but irritate one another. One of them has the Times delivered from England. The newspapers are of course long out of date by the time they arrive, but he opens them in strict date order, one at a time. The incident that brings the friction to a head is when his rival takes the whole bundle and reads them in one go, leaving them in a mess on the floor. Here is the perfect illustration of two different approaches to life, deferred as opposed to instant gratification.

The title story was new to me. With its out of season English seaside setting and the tale of a bigamist it reminded me rather of Patrick Hamilton. It’s also quite funny. As with several of the others, he avoids any problems of construction or point of view by making the narrator a sort of version of himself. The narrator’s presence in well-to-do or artistic circles is explained by characters being aware of his reputation as a writer.

In The Creative Impulse, the tale of the husband of a “highbrow” writer who runs off with the cook, he is sending up the literary world and saying something about popular taste and literary success. The writer has depended on the income provided by the dull husband who her smart friends disparaged. It is the cook who gives the writer the idea of writing a detective story which then becomes her only bestseller. Maugham himself walked a fine line between the popular and the “highbrow”, and was in his day hugely successful as novelist, short story writer and dramatist.

I had worried how Mr Harrington’s Washing would work outside the context of the entire set of Ashenden stories. It’s a little difficult for me to tell, as I am very familiar with that book, but I think it works perfectly on its own, based as it is on Maugham’s first-hand experience of revolutionary Russia, when working as a spy. This is the long story that was originally three separate ones, but combined like this it becomes the entire tale of Ashenden’s time in Russia. Again, this story of American innocence abroad proceeds to a poignant climax. In the Ashenden book as a whole, Maugham brought something new to the spy story, a sense that it is a complex game and a nasty business, very influential on later writers and quite different from the patriotism of Erskine Childers or John Buchan.

One of the best of all is The Door of Opportunity, a story I had not read before. It begins with a couple returning to London after a long time in the east. We realise that all is not well between them, in fact the wife is on the point of leaving the husband. Then in a long flashback, we find out what happened in Borneo to make her lose faith in him, a man who was destined for the very top of the colonial service. There is an echo of Lord Jim here and indeed it’s difficult not to think of Conrad when reading Maugham’s eastern stories. In the story Neil Macadam, Maugham puts quite a stinging criticism of Conrad’s work into the mouth of a character. Was this his own view, I wonder?

Just how good is Maugham as a writer of short stories? Pretty good, I would say, because they remain highly readable and the best ones have that tendency to lodge  firmly in the memory. I think he’s at his best when writing about abroad, because he is able to sketch a foreign location very clearly with few words, and his detached style works well to convey the loneliness of characters in remote, isolated locations.

A good illustration of Maugham’s character as a writer can be found in the introduction to his choice of Kipling’s stories. He considers Kipling’s The Bridge Builders to be a good realistic story that has gone slightly wrong because of the “mystical” interlude in the middle. Maugham did not share Kipling’s view of the empire as a benign, civilising enterprise. His concern was always the vagaries of human nature, nothing else. The world he wrote about may be long gone, but human nature does not change. It’s quite something to have looked so keenly into it that his stories have fascinated generations of readers.

A Private by Edward Thomas

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A poem by Edward Thomas, not so well known, but one of my favourites of his and appropriate for this week. Lest we forget and all that. . . .

 

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frosty night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen and all bores:
“At Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush,” said he,
“I slept.” None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond “The Drover”, a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France – that, too, he secret keeps.

Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley

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Sometimes, a work is so influential that it vanishes. I mean that the influence becomes so widespread it is almost invisible; no-one can imagine that anything was ever any different. I think that is what has happened with that fine Edwardian detective story Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913.

As far as I know, it was the first such story to feature the false solution, which became a convention that has proved remarkably enduring in the crime genre. Indeed, the other night, I was watching a recent Belgian detective drama on the TV and there it was, near the end, the confession that seemed to wrap things up neatly – or did it?

In Trent’s Last Case, the investigator makes an assumption about what has happened early on in his work on the case. He allows his heart to rule his head. He finds out eventually that he has been completely mistaken, and goes back to find the true solution to the murder mystery. He thinks he has succeeded only for there to be a further surprising twist right at the end, when the real perpetrator is revealed. Philip Trent, amateur sleuth, declares that he will not investigate again, hence the title.

This is an elegantly written and highly readable novel. It’s a serious story but with a neat touch of humour. The characters are drawn in some depth; indeed I used to think that if Ford Madox Ford had written a crime story it would have come out something like this. The murder victim, a ruthless American business tycoon, is a thoroughly dislikeable individual. Present-day readers might think that some things never change.

It seems to be sending up the conventions of the genre before they have become firmly established, pre-dating as it does the earliest works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and the “Golden Age” of the detective story. Both those writers admired Bentley’s book. Margery Allingham borrowed directly from it.

Bentley wrote Trent partly as a riposte to the Holmes stories, which he did not like. He was a friend of G K Chesterton’s and presumably preferred the more humanist and intuitive approach of the Father Brown stories, the first of which had appeared in 1910, to the cold and logical Holmes.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley is best remembered today for the comic verse form that bears his middle name. I think Trent’s Last Case is due for a revival. There’s always a pleasure in going right to the source and it’s a much better read than many of the detective stories that it inspired.

 

Ten of the best ghost stories

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M R James called them “Ghost Stories”; E F Benson preferred the term “Spook Stories”; H P Lovecraft’s stories were published in the magazine Weird Tales; Robert Aickman called his productions “Strange Stories”. Dave Allen’s 1970s anthology was called A Little Night Reading. Whatever we call them, we know what we are talking about.

The Dave Allen book was in our local library when I was young. I’ve often wished I was in the position to choose the stories for such an anthology myself. Here, then, in no particular order and in time for Halloween, is my selection of ten pretty good ones.

The Monkey’s Paw by W W Jacobs (1902). Three wishes that lead to tragedy. It’s impossible to read the last few words of this tale without that feeling of a shiver up the spine, no matter how many times you have read it before. Be careful what you wish for, in case you get it, indeed.

The Signalman by Charles Dickens (1866). No other form of transport has featured in as many ghost stories as the railway. This is a story of premonition and disaster that Dickens wrote after being involved in a major train crash himself. I’ve looked at it in more detail here.

A Warning to the Curious by M R James (1925). I could have picked any one of half a dozen stories by James, but this one wins out, I think, for the East Anglian coastal setting and the feeling that it is something to do with the recent war. The framing narration makes Seaburgh remote in time as well as place, then the second narrator introduces a note of melancholy, as he casually mentions his dead friend. Nowhere else is the characteristic James atmosphere so strong, that feeling of the light fading on a deserted beach on a late November afternoon.

The Music of Eric Zann by H P Lovecraft (1922). I am not altogether a fan of Lovecraft. I tend to think of him as a writer I enjoyed in my teenage years, then left behind. All those slug or wormlike monsters! Too easy to dismiss as things that do not exist. This one, though, is quite different. Paris by night and strange violin music coming from the garret at the top of the stairs. . . .what can one see from the window?

A Small Place off the Edgware Road by Graham Greene (1947). The place in question is a cinema. This is very creepy and all it is, really, is a chat between neighbours in cinema seats. It’s an all too believable tale of the incursion of the uncanny into the everyday world that I think may show the influence of Walter de la Mare.

Naboth’s Vineyard by E F Benson (1928). Just as with M R James, I could have picked any one of half a dozen by Benson. In fact, his range was a bit wider than James. Some are very English ghost stories, with clearly recognisable coastal settings, whereas others lean closer to the Lovecraft style. As I have written about Pirates elsewhere, for this selection I’ll go for another favourite. Here is a very satisfying tale of property appropriated and revenge from beyond the grave. It couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow. . . .

Bad Company by Walter de la Mare (1955). De la Mare’s ghost stories are not so well known today. He is a master of doubt and ambiguity, close to the psychological style of Henry James. Again, one is spoilt for choice, but this short tale has stuck in my mind. London by night this time, and a reminder of why it doesn’t pay to look too closely at your fellow passengers on the tube. A strange encounter in the underground, followed by a lonely walk through a cold and deserted city to an empty house.

Man Size in Marble by E Nesbit (1893). Like De la Mare, Edith Nesbit is best-known today as a writer for children. I found this in the same anthology of ghost stories for children as the De la Mare one above. All I can say is, it must have been for children with strong nerves. The idyllic early days of a marriage between two artists, a cottage deep in the countryside. What could go wrong? There is a local legend that once a year, the stone effigies in the nearby church are able to walk. . . on Halloween, of course.

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman (1964). We are in East Anglia again, that zone of the uncanny, and this is a sort of zombie story, with elements of what is now known as folk horror. What makes it so fascinating, I think, is the relation of the main story about zombies to the second layer of meaning bubbling away under the surface, about the marriage of an older man to a much younger woman.

‘They’ by Rudyard Kipling (1904). This may be a surprise to those whose image of Kipling comes from The Jungle Book and poems of the army and empire. Many of his stories have a supernatural element, and none more so than this one. When the narrator discovers an ancient house, hidden in the Sussex countryside, he catches fleeting glimpses of children at the windows and in the garden. A blind woman holds the key to the mystery. It is made all the more poignant when you realise it was written after the death of Kipling’s own small daughter, and that the house resembles Bateman’s, Kipling’s Sussex home.

I’m aware that I’ve skipped over the surface a bit here, but my intention is to whet your appetite. All these stories have hidden depths that will repay repeated readings. Perhaps the secret of a really good story of this type is that it can be given more than one interpretation.  There are many others. Which ones would you choose?

The Lamplighter by Robert Louis Stevenson

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I was amazed when I found out that there are actually still gaslights in London. So on National Poetry Day, here is a picture of one of them to go with Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem.

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My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky.
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.

Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And oh! before you hurry by with ladder and with light;
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!

The Signalman by Charles Dickens

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A railway journey could be a dangerous undertaking in the 19th century. We take safety for granted today, but most of the devices that ensure it came into use after several awful accidents. Dickens himself was a passenger on a train that was involved in a serious accident in 1865. He helped rescue the survivors of the Staplehurst crash in Kent. Out of that experience came his short ghost story The Signalman, published in 1866.

No other form of transport has produced as many ghost stories as the railway. Here, I think, is the first suggestion that there is something uncanny about railways, the whole apparatus of awaiting, arrival and departure, the particular architecture of stations, embankments, cuttings, and viaducts.

The signalman lives out his life in a strange and gloomy environment, alone in his signalbox at the bottom of a deep cutting. In one direction is a dark and foreboding tunnel entrance, in the other the dripping and dank walls of the cutting as far as one can see. Not much light penetrates to the bottom of this place.

His job is a strange one, calling for him to be in attendance and constantly alert, but leaving him with long stretches of inactivity. We learn that he is a man of some intelligence, but who missed opportunities earlier in life and has accepted his role in life. He tries to fill the time with academic exercises, such as algebra and language learning.

The narrator thinks that the signalman might be a contented man, until he reveals that he is haunted by a mysterious figure that appears as a premonition. Indeed, right at the beginning he mistakes the narrator, who calls down to him from above the cutting, for the spectre. Why this should be we find out at the end of the story.

The wind produces an eerie moaning in the telegraph wires. The spirit announces its arrival by a ghostly ringing of the telegraph bell that only the signalman can discern.

The apparition has appeared twice, and the narrator has made two visits. His third and final visit reveals the real meaning of the ghost. Part of the eerie power of the story comes from the feeling that there is some kind of connection between the narrator and the ghost. It has something in common with other “double” stories of the era, such as Conrad’s Secret Sharer. It deserves its reputation as one of the truly great ghost stories.

Neither the signalman nor his visitor are named. It is written in a plainer prose style than is usual for Dickens, a bit more like his writing in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens had written earlier about the impact of the railway in Dombey and Son (1848), which has a description of the destruction of old buildings in Camden to enable the lines to reach Euston.

The Signalman was unforgettably filmed by the BBC in 1976 as part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series. It was an early screenplay adaptation by Andrew Davies. The film is very faithful to the story and Denholm Elliott gives a wonderful performance as the tormented signalman.