Author: The Good Reader

All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook

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I bought this when it came out in 2002. I knew at once that it was a book I just had to read, from a very short review that said the author David Seabrook had applied a sort of Iain Sinclair approach to the Medway towns and Thanet area of Kent. It was most definitely one for me.

I couldn’t know then what an influence it was to have on me over so many years.

If I had never read this book, I would probably not have read The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. And therefore, I would not have had the experience, years later, of feeling that I had stepped into the pages of Drood when I visited the area around Rochester cathedral. Nor would I have stood in front of the house that is believed to have been the inspiration for Satis House in Great Expectations.

In my earlier post Site-specific Reading I describe how I looked for the original thirty nine steps down to the beach at Broadstairs. It was from Seabrook’s writing that I found out about John Buchan’s stay at a house there, on the North Foreland and the origin of his most famous novel’s title. That, in turn, led me to think about Ian Fleming’s connection with Kent in a new way, that inspired my own writing on spy stories with particular reference to Moonraker.

The shelter on the seafront at Margate where T S Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land is a heritage site now, re-painted and well cared for. That too, is largely down to Mr Seabrook and, like so many others, I would probably not have sat there if it were not for him. I suspect that the 2018 exhibition at Turner contemporary, Journeys with the Waste Land, would not have happened had All the Devils are Here not been published.

In a broader way, Seabrook’s knack of making connections between places and writing inspired by them set my mind running down a particular track and that has continued to this day. You can see his influence on my own writing in other pieces on this blog.

Who was this mysterious figure who died at a comparatively young age, after publishing just one more book? He hints at personal tragedy and a difficult private life. Iain Sinclair wrote about him and his work far more eloquently than I am able to.

I was never able to find out if the “Thomas Jerome Seabrook” who wrote Bowie in Berlin was the same person, having a little joke with the name of the character played by Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. So rest in Peace, Mr Seabrook, whoever you were. You inspired me, although it took me years to realise it and you never knew.

And just what is it about this particular corner of England that has made it such fertile ground for literary endeavour? There is that marvellous 1940s landscape mystery, The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. If we look a little further west into Sussex, we find that at one time, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, and H G Wells were living not that far from one another. Lamb House in Rye, was home to Henry James, then E F Benson and much later, Rumer Godden. It must be something in the air; or the countryside, perhaps.

The title, by the way, comes from Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s Ariel who says “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”.

Site-specific reading

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I wasn’t at all well that summer. My doctor had diagnosed a balance problem and there was going to be a long wait to see the specialist.  A gentler than usual holiday was called for, so we booked a room in Broadstairs. We had asked for a sea view and there were two comfortable chairs that we moved to face the big window. One of the books I had taken with me was Agatha Christie’s N or M. I found that I was sitting in a seaside guest house, reading a second world war spy thriller about the search for a German spy in a seaside guest house. I can’t remember, though, whether I had chosen that book because of its setting or whether the match of reading and location was a happy accident.

Certainly, I was aware of other literary associations in Broadstairs. On one of the walks I was able to manage, we had a look at the North Foreland and wondered which set of steps cut into the chalk were the ones that had given John Buchan the title The 39 Steps.

On a later visit, the literary allusions came to us, without our looking for them. It was autumn this time. We went for a walk along the beach as the light was fading. As we turned to come back, we noticed a figure in the distance. The figure seemed to be following us. We stopped and the figure stopped too, moving off again as we did and keeping the same distance. We were experiencing in reality the situation from M R James. Eventually, the figure turned towards the cliffs. When we looked again, it had disappeared. Perhaps it had gone up the steps.

We stood under the cliff, discussing this strange occurrence. It was almost dark now, but on the edge of the cliff,  we could make out a sinister figure looking down at us. It appeared to have its arms folded. After a few minutes peering into the near darkness, the penny dropped as we realised that the strange figure was actually a chimney stack.

That was not the only time that I felt I had walked into the pages of M R James. We stayed at a hotel in North Norfolk, not far from the beach and with a golf course nearby. The hotel was quite old and in the past guests had come for seaside golf, like James’ characters. An old framed menu on the wall told us that dinner at 7.30 would be followed by bridge. A reassuring lack of choice in those days. There was a small sitting room, with some books on a shelf. Among them was a battered paperback copy of James’ stories. So I had the experience of reading Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad and A Warning to the Curious in a place very like the fictional locations.

It started to rain, and we went to the bar for a drink. We sat looking out at the hotel grounds and beyond them the now deserted beach. It seemed a far less friendly place in the wind and rain. The cloth canopy of one of the tables on the terrace flapped against its pole. As the wind and rain whipped it back and forth, it looked to me, with my imagination no doubt primed by reading James, like the ghost under the sheet in Whistle.

The hotel might well have had its own ghosts. Another old framed menu was from the second world war.  It was for a very special occasion, the farewell dinner for the officers who had been billeted there, while training for D-day.  A poignant artefact that made me wonder how many of them had returned from Normandy. I would not have been at all surprised to encounter the shade of a young subaltern on the lonely beach at twilight.

One final thing. During our stay at the Norfolk hotel, there was a fellow guest, a lady, who could be seen each evening sitting quietly and writing in a notebook. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones to find our imaginations refreshed by this stretch of coast.

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis

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Is this a travel book or a war memoir? A bit of both, I would say. It was based on Norman Lewis’ diary of his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in Naples, but was not published until 1978. It is about a very specific time and place but has a hint of the universal about it. It is subtitled “An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth”, which sums up the situation the author found himself in nicely.

Lewis arrived as part of the American invasion of southern Italy. The Italians had switched sides and the Germans retreated northwards, leaving the allies in charge of the civilian population of a bomb-shattered Naples and the surrounding area.

Events of jaw-dropping random cruelty and absurdity are recounted. The occupying forces, whether American, British, or Canadian, do not come out of this well. You can imagine what happens when most of the women in the Naples area are near to starvation and will do anything for a meal. An arbitrary rule bans fishing from boats, so the Neapolitans make improvised rafts from anything they can find. Anything that can be eaten, is eaten, such as the rare fish in the public aquarium.

A booby-trap bomb explodes, killing many civilians and giving rise to a rumour that the whole city is riddled with bombs, set to explode when the electricity is switched back on. The entire population is hurriedly evacuated, but it turns out to be a German ruse to spread chaos.

Mysterious tapping sounds in the catacombs suggest that a squad of German soldiers has remained there, ready to come out and commit acts of sabotage; a search reveals nothing, and Lewis thinks that if they were there, they have been spirited away by collaborators.

The former head of the mafia gains a foothold in the new military government which quickly becomes completely corrupt. The American decision to send officers of American-Italian background looks increasingly daft, as it enables the Italian criminal elements to embed themselves.

Almost every sort of item brought in by the Americans is soon available on the thriving black market. Italians caught with illicit items that are freely available on stalls in the street are given hugely disproportionate jail sentences. The criminal gangs behind it all go free. Meanwhile, Canadian army blankets become a form of currency as they can be skilfully tailored into overcoats.

It gets so bad that essential items such as penicillin are soon more readily available on the black market than they are to the occupying forces.

Lewis witnesses the eruption of Vesuvius: “It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see”. A village is engulfed by a slow-moving column of lava, advancing at walking pace down the main street. Eventually it slows to a halt, seemingly stopped by the power of faith, leaving half the village intact.

Naples has been bombed back to the mediaeval era, thinks Lewis, and consequently old beliefs are revived. There are reports of effigies of saints in churches weeping, bleeding and talking. Is this just mass hysteria on the part of the traumatised population?

An attempt to check the spread of sexually transmitted disease is undermined by a corrupt doctor selling false certificates of health to the girls. Lewis reflects that the Italian system encourages corruption because police pay is so low. When he is posted to a village in the zona camorra he realises that it is a way of life, an established system, not quite corruption as it appears to a Briton. In this lawless region, a group of French colonial troops embark on a rampage of brutal sexual assault against the local women. They are dealt with by the men of the camorra in the time-honoured, equally brutal way.

This might sound like a depressing read, but it is not, partly because it is written in such elegant prose that you read on, fascinated. Lewis takes a slightly detached viewpoint, as his job obliged him to do.

Some of the British troops can’t wait to leave, but by the end of his year in Naples, Lewis has formed a completely different view. He has come round to a great admiration for the humanity and culture of the Italians. So much so that if he could be born again, he tells us, and choose the country of his birth, he would choose Italy.

I must declare an interest. My father was in Italy during the second world war, but a little earlier and a little further south.

I discovered this book via the Italian documentary film, assembled from existing film clips and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Man Overboard by Tim Binding

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Tim Binding’s 2005 novel, Man Overboard, is the story of the World War 2 frogman, Commander Lionel Crabb, who disappeared, presumed drowned, during a mission to spy on a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.

The unauthorised dive caused a political furore at the time, as the Russian ship was carrying Kruschev on an official  visit to the UK. There has been much speculation over the years as to what really happened. A headless and handless corpse that washed up some months later in Chichester harbour was identified by the Coroner and buried as Crabb, but his widow insisted that it couldn’t have been him.

It’s been suggested that he was killed by the Russians, or captured and brainwashed by them. This fictionalised account of his life offers an alternative solution to the enduring mystery, which is unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved in our lifetime, as the relevant documents are not due to be made public for many years.

Crabb himself is the narrator of a comparatively short book, written in an intense and poetic prose, with suitably watery imagery. There is an awful lot packed into its 244 pages. Without giving too much away, Crabb looks back in old age from a sanatorium somewhere behind the iron curtain. He did not die beneath the murky, cold waters of Portsmouth harbour.

We get a clear picture of the sort of man Crabb is: Conservative, patriotic, royalist, religious and fatalistic. Yet he is a strange, dual personality, who needs to belong and yet somehow be an outsider at the same time. He is not one of those who believed in a better world to come after the war. It is the revelation of the Katyn forest killings that makes him realise the true nature of Russian communism.

He finds himself out of sympathy with what post-war England has become (“a land of buff-coloured envelopes”), but then he was always something of a square peg in a round hole. Although he didn’t know it, he was a man searching for something. He found his element, in every sense, when he first dived under the water in Gibraltar harbour. On your first dive, you feel as though you “have walked through a magic mirror or travelled in time”, as he puts it.

There is a touch of the visionary about him, but he undercuts his musings with a curt “lot of rot, probably”. His clipped, slightly old-fashioned language with its colourful slang seems completely appropriate for a man of his generation.

In Italy, clearing mines from the canals of Venice, he finds the catholic church and almost marries an Italian girl, but shies away at the last moment. His hesitant relations with women are something of a recurring problem. He is not gay, but oddly reticent about sex, prudish about lower-deck language. He finally seems to have found the right woman, who enjoys the pub and club life of London as much as he does, when circumstances, or rather Crabb’s patriotic devotion to duty, force them apart.

Many historical figures walk through the pages of this novel, such as Kruschev and Yuri Gagarin. Several names are familiar from spy scandals of the period; Anthony Blunt pops up from time to time and towards the end, Greville Wynne, businessman and part-time agent appears. Gordon Lonsdale and Peter Kroger, members of the Portland Spy Ring, are skilfully woven into the story. Sidney Knowles, Crabb’s wartime diving partner appears under his own name. However, Nicholas Elliott, who we now know to have been Crabb’s MI6 handler, is turned into the completely fictional “Smithy”, for reasons that become clear by the end.

There is no author’s note, so it is not clear what sources Tim Binding may have used to create his portrait of Crabb. I found myself wondering if he himself has underwater experience. Crabb does allude to the feature film that was made, The Silent Enemy, and also the biography by Marshall Pugh, both of which appeared after his presumed death.

Crabb’s wartime exploits in Gibraltar, the underwater battle with the Italian frogmen, are generally considered to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Bond’s underwater mission to plant a limpet mine on the hull of the motor launch in the earlier Live and Let Die also owes something to Crabb. I assume that Fleming, as a senior official in Naval Intelligence during World War 2, knew all about Crabb’s adventures before the general public did.

Recent events mean that the passage where Crabb is told about the Russians’ development of an underwater special forces unit seems strangely contemporary. But then Crabb tells us that “The England you know was made in the fifties and the rest of the world too”.

I enjoyed this book hugely when it came out, and found more in it on a recent re-reading. It is a powerful and haunting novel that deserves to be better known.

The Nightjar by Henry Newbolt

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It’s almost time for the nightjars, those most elusive and mysterious of birds, to be on their way after their fleeting summer visit to these shores.

Here is Henry Newbolt’s poem, The Nightjar, written towards the end of his life, 1936 I think. It’s a bit different to the earlier poems he is most remembered for today, Vitaï Lampada (Play up! play up! and play the game!) and Drake’s Drum.

No opinion or analysis this time, just a poem that I like. Walter de la Mare regarded it highly and wished that Newbolt had written more in the same vein. I found it in an anthology compiled by Kingsley Amis. I believe John Betjeman liked it too. See what you make of it.

The Nightjar

We loved our nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a blanket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she might well live – till suddenly
In the very moment of most confiding hope
She raised herself all tense, quivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes – why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve – full fathom five
To the soul’s ocean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was – her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird –
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

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The Ipcress File made a big impact when it was published in 1962, partly because it coincided with the release of the film of Dr No. Critics tended to see Deighton’s book as a more realistic take on the world of espionage.

Re-reading it again recently I was struck by just how cryptic and complex it remains. It’s a playful and modernist take on spy fiction. This is reflected in the visual presentation of the book. The black and white photograph on the dust jacket of the first edition, a stark image of a revolver and a coffee cup, was something new in book design. The novel is subtitled “Secret File No. 1” and the prologue starts with what looks like a copy of a memo, summoning the narrator to the Minister’s office to explain the case to him.

The conceit that this is actually a secret document is continued with the use of appendices. Quite important information about major characters, that would be incorporated into the main text in a more conventional novel, is given in this way.

We never find out the narrator’s name. When someone hails him as “Harry” he tells us: “Now my name’s not Harry, but in this business it was hard to remember whether it ever had been.” He has several sets of false identity documents as “a spy’s insurance policy”. Nor do we ever find out the full name of the department he works for, WOOC (P). War Office something something (Provisional) is as near as we get.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when the novel was filmed in 1965, it was perceived as a more downbeat alternative to Bond, despite being co-produced by Harry Saltzmann, one half of the Bond production team.

The book actually has some things in common with Fleming’s work, most specifically Moonraker. There is the authentic civil service atmosphere at the beginning and also the fact that it is the hero’s female assistant who discovers the crucial clue that cracks the case in both novels.

The film is justly remembered as one of the most gripping and believable of all espionage films, but it is quite different from the book. The book does have quite a lot of description of a changing London, although Deighton was to develop this further in Funeral in Berlin. There’s a sharp contrast between the “official” London of Whitehall and the War Office, and the location of the provisional unit in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia (“one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street”).

Whereas the film mostly takes place in London (possibly for budget reasons), in the book our hero travels to Beirut, as well as to a Pacific atoll where a hydrogen bomb test is about to take place.

One of the most interesting changes from book to film is the character of Jay. The book gives a lot of information about his Polish origins and earlier career as a spy and peddler of information. He is rumoured to have been the figure behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Crucially, he has friends in very high places, as the phone call to the mysterious “Henry” reveals. He ends up working for the British. So that’s why we are told his codename has been changed to “Box Four” in the memo right at the beginning! You really do need to read this more than once, and pay attention while you are doing so.

The title of the novel is an acronym. IPCRESS stands for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. The treatment of the brainwashing theme is more realistic in the book than in the film. It is based on recognised techniques, such as disorientation and sleep deprivation. In the film, crucially made a few years further into the 1960s, it has become a psychedelic sound and light show.

What was behind the 1960s obsession with brainwashing? I suppose it was the idea that “altered states” could have a military as well as a hedonistic purpose. There were those crazy American ideas about putting LSD in the Moscow water supply, for example. I believe there was also a fear at the time that television advertising, then relatively new, was manipulating peoples’ minds in ways they were not aware of.

I think the first novel to deal with it was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in 1959. A Clockwork Orange, with its suggestion that the minds of criminals could be re-programmed to alter their behaviour, was published the same year as The Ipcress File. Many books and films used the brainwashing idea and the interest was still going strong in 1967, when the first episode of The Prisoner shared a certain feel and a couple of cast members with the film of The Ipcress File.

On a more personal note, it is wonderful what a little internet research can reveal these days. The first TV screening of The Ipcress File was in 1972, 28 May I think. That’s when I saw it for the first time and thought it was the best film I had ever seen. I vividly remember the preview clip, the land rover crashing through the factory door, and thinking this was something I had to see.

Also running on TV around the same time, was a series called Spy Trap. The BBC in their wisdom have wiped the tapes of this one, so it exists in memory only. It was actually very good, with Paul Daneman as the ex-navy officer head of a counter-intelligence department. The funny thing is, it was originally shown in the early evening slot across four days of the week. A spy soap opera! This was the cold war and spies were the thing, not the lives of people in east London. Perhaps these were the formative experiences that pointed me towards a lifelong interest in spy fiction.

 

The Regent’s Canal in fiction

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Just what is it about this North London canal in fiction?

How did the area by the Regent’s canal in Maida Vale come to be known as Little Venice?

A London guidebook I had suggested that the term had first been used by estate agents in the 1950s. I was therefore surprised to find that the name is used in Margery Allingham’s 1934 art-fraud detective story Death of a Ghost.

In the novel, it is not the area but a house that is called “Little Venice”. An artistic clan left over from the Victorian age inhabits the stucco house by the canal basin. So it appears that an estate agent had read Allingham and borrowed the name.

There is a little bit more to it than that, though. This was where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived, sometimes rowing out to the island in the basin.  Allingham mentions “the Crescent”, presumably Warwick Crescent to the south of the canal basin, and Browning’s house was here. Allingham is linking her fictional Victorian painter, John Lafcadio, with Browning, who was rumoured to have commented on the resemblance of this area of London to Venice. There has even been a suggestion that the name was coined by Byron.

Personally, I think it’s all down to Allingham and the rest is an attempt to pull in the tourists. For example, the island is now known as “Browning’s Island”.

I could write a lot more about Allingham and London. I write as one who once spent an afternoon in Bloomsbury, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the square with the little church that features so memorably in The Tiger in the Smoke.

Maida Vale makes its next significant appearance in fiction in Books do Furnish a Room, the tenth volume of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence, published in 1971, but set in  1946/47, finishing in the freezing winter of that year. This novel introduces a new character, the writer Trapnel, based on Julian Maclaren-Ross. When Pamela Widmerpool embarks on her extra-marital affair with Trapnel, she lives with him in a seedy flat in this area, a bit north of the canal itself.

Jenkins, the narrator, makes an excursion into this netherworld to deliver a book for Trapnel to review. He notes that the area by the canal had not at that time become what he calls a “quartier chic”, as it did later: “The neighbourhood looked anything but flourishing.” There are gaps along the canal where houses have been reduced to rubble by the recent bombing. This now run-down zone is Trapnel’s stamping ground, a suitable locale for a bohemian writer.

The canal proves fatal to Trapnel when Pam throws the manuscript of his novel into it, destroying both the physical pages and Trapnel’s resolve and determination as a writer. It is followed by Trapnel’s death’s head swordstick, which he throws in a despairing gesture. The oily canal, with floating litter of all kinds, might as well be the Styx.

We are in the late 1940s literary scene here, the world of little magazines such as Horizon. Widmermool, MP, businessman and all-round establishment figure, is the proprietor of the magazine Trapnel writes for. There’s a sharp contrast between his West End Parliamentary world and altogether shabbier milieu that Pam has moved into with Trapnel.

Trapnel is supposed to live in a succession of flats in the Paddington area borrowed from acquaintances at his favourite Fitzrovia pub, The Hero of Acre. Powell enthusiasts have identified this as being probably based on The Wheatsheaf. We tend to think of Fitzrovia as a time and place of the1940s, but it appears in the Allingham novel too, which is set in 1930. Campion goes to The Robespierre in Charlotte Street, “that most odd of all London pubs”.

A few years later a location further along the canal appears in John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The address of the safe house where the mole meets his Russian contact is 5 Lock Gardens, Camden Town, in reality St Mark’s Crescent. It is one of those houses with a walled garden backing on to the canal. Peter Guillam waits on the other side of the canal for the signal that the traitor has arrived. The towpath is closed to the public after dark, leaving it to lovers and down-and-outs, a smell rises from the water and the trains that pass are empty.

John le Carré has always been quite precise about the social status of particular London districts. “The neighbourhood possessed no social identity” is his verdict here. This is a long way from the Pall Mall clubland world of the senior spies. It’s somehow suggested that this is a marginal zone, a very suitable place for undercover activity.

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If Powell, looking back from 1971 was able to suggest that the gentrification of Little Venice had already taken place, no such improvement is evident here. In 1974, Camden market has not yet brought the area back to prominence in the minds of a younger generation.

I’m sure there are many other examples of the strange appeal of the canal being used in fiction. After all, Ruth Rendell was a resident of Little Venice. I believe her last novel was set close to home, but I have not read it. So, I would encourage you to explore this fascinating area of London both in reality and on the page.

 

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)

 

H V Morton: poetic snapshots of a lost London

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The short pieces that make up H V Morton’s The Nights of London were originally published as newspaper columns in the 1920s, but had a long afterlife in book form. My small blue hardback is dated 1948 and it had been reprinted fourteen times by then.

Morton was a star journalist, making his name by being present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He went on to become a successful travel writer, the Paul Theroux of the inter-war years.

Here, Morton is our guide on a series of lone, nocturnal tours of London. He was aware that the idea of London by night had already become something of a cliché and he strove to avoid that.

He starts out at two in the morning in front of the Bank, cold, dead and deserted. It’s immediately clear that we are in the company of a sort of poet of London, as he walks on to London Bridge: “No sound, but that of a stray, petulant siren downstream. . . the rush of lit water and a sudden puff of steam from the Cannon Street railway bridge.”

Part of the fascination of this book is reflecting on what has changed and what has not. Morton’s attitude to the Chinese in Limehouse is not that of today; on the other hand he is broadly sympathetic to those struggling to make ends meet.

He visits the Suicide Station under Waterloo Bridge, where the police wait with a small dinghy to fish would-be suicides out of the dark water.

He accompanies the maintenance men on the tube and hopes that the current in the live rail really has been turned off, as they so confidently assure him.

He passes the time in a warm and cosy cabman’s shelter.

When he visits Fleet Street, we feel the journalist’s love for “the astonishing thunder of the press”. There is something of Rudyard Kipling here, as he describes the huge printing machines, “ready to tell today about yesterday”. There is also a reminder in his language that this is London just after the first world war: “In Fleet Street it is zero hour. The first edition is just going over the top into a new day.”

Similarly, the firemen in the station he visits remember dealing with the recent Zeppelin raids.

The pieces on evening classes and hospitals, remind us that we are in a harder world than today, before the expansion of public education and public access to health care.

He spends an evening in the East End, watching boxing bouts in a smoky hall.

The steam engine Sir Percivale pulls the night Continental boat train into Victoria Station, bringing the romance of the Mediterranean into London along with his train of Pullman cars. A touch of Kipling again, as Morton imagines the engines talking to each other in the engine shed.

He reflects on the sad atmosphere in an afterhours club, where people dance on into the small hours, people “who dare not be alone with themselves”.

A long bus ride north takes him to the very edge of London, where a development of new houses is reaching out into the countryside. His young companion proudly shows him the unfinished house, waiting for him and his young bride. On the other hand, a Bloomsbury boarding house straight out of E F Benson or Patrick Hamiliton is inhabited by retired Indian army colonels and shabby-genteel widows.

On a trip down the river on a police launch, time slips away in the dark and Morton sees London looking much as it always has done. This is an experience certainly not available to us today. What would Morton make of the view now?

The penultimate piece is slightly longer and was not previously published. Morton goes to stay in a candle-lit room at The George in Southwark, the coaching inn even then regarded as a miraculous survival from Victorian London. Even more miraculous is that it is still there today, now looked after by the National Trust.

His nocturnal wanderings end with a beautiful evocation of early morning over London: “The feeling of other worldliness has vanished with the dawn light”.

“London in the dawn is a clean, unwritten page”, Morton tells us. What will the new day bring for the millions of Londoners?

Goodbye Bernie Gunther, farewell Philip Kerr

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For many years now the publication of a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr has been something to look forward to, but this time it’s a sad occasion as well, because Philip Kerr died in 2018, before this book was published. It is therefore our goodbye to Bernie Gunther and our farewell to his creator.

It was a brilliant idea to take a Raymond Chandler-style, wise-cracking narrator and make him an ex-policeman, now a private detective, trying to make a living in Nazi-era Germany.

For this last appearance, Kerr takes us back to where the whole story began, Berlin in 1928, with a youngish Bernie still haunted by his experiences in the trenches and newly appointed to the murder squad. Despite the first three novels being re-issued as an omnibus volume under the title Berlin Noir, not all of the saga takes place there. Over the course of 14 novels and approximately 30 years, Bernie finds himself in many of the conquered territories of the Third Reich and, after the war, in Vienna, the South of France, Greece, and South America, re-visiting Berlin in flashback.

For me, though, the scenes set in Berlin have a special quality, so this last novel is a real treat, as Bernie delves into the neon-lit night of the metropolis in search of a serial killer. Or is it two killers? Bernie has to offer himself as a potential victim to find out. Detection isn’t really the point here, though, it’s merely the pretext for a portrait of Berlin in all its 1920s wildness.

Kerr has always mingled real-life characters with his fictional ones, but as this is the only one of the books set before the Nazis came to power, several of the real-life characters here, rather than the familiar villains such as Goebbels and Reinhardt Heydrich, are the artists of the Weimar era.

Thus, Bernie becomes a somewhat unwilling sitter for both George Gross and Otto Dix. Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife and screenwriter, asks for Bernie’s inside help with a crime story she is planning. Bernie’s impersonation of a disabled war veteran brings him into contact with the theatre world as well. At the theatre where his make-up is being applied, the music that Bernie doesn’t care for is The Threepenny Opera. The singer he thinks can’t carry a tune turns out to be Lotte Lenya. There’s a sly vein of humour in that Bernie’s taste in art and music is conventional. He’s quite disdainful of the works that we readers of 2019 regard as modern classics.

There is a another film reference too, when Bernie “accidently on purpose” mistakes the actor Gustaf Grundgens for Emil Jannings. Grundgens was the basis for the character in the film Mephisto, the actor who stayed in Germany and worked under the Nazis.

Kerr has planted film references in his Bernie novels before. In A German Requiem, set in Vienna in 1948, there’s a British film crew shooting in the streets at night, a nod to The Third Man. Dalia Dresner in The Woman from Zagreb, was a (fictional) UFA star.

And so to the neatest film reference of all. The novel takes its title from Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic fantasy film. The black joke about the killer having the word “murderer” chalked on his back, and the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect whistling a classical tune, point us in the direction of another Lang film, however. The attentive reader who has seen the film in question, will spot what is going on here by the appearance and behaviour of one character in particular.

Bernie has already suggested to Thea von Harbou that, in a film about serial murder, the audience might inclined to think that if the victims were prostitutes, they deserved their fate. It would work better with children as victims. He has also told her that detectives need contacts in the criminal underworld. And so, after the way events play out towards the end of the story, Bernie says he has another film idea for her. It’s left for the reader to realise that this is Lang’s classic M, and it’s a clever conceit that the idea for it came from Bernie Gunther, based on his own experience.

I saw M for the first time on TV, on the BBC many years ago. Now, the world in which one could stumble by accident on a classic film such as this in the middle of the evening, seems as remote as the Weimar republic itself.

However, Kerr also suggests that a certain public cruelty is not unique to the Berlin of that era. The Cabaret of the Nameless, where talentless individuals are tricked on to the stage to be mocked by the audience, is alive and well on British television today.

Of course, no novel in English as steeped in Weimar culture as this one is, would be complete without a reference to Christopher Isherwood and there it is, at the visit to the grisly Berlin mortuary. Philip Kerr takes his place alongside Isherwood, Len Deighton and John le Carre as a British author who has found literary inspiration in Berlin.

We will never know where Kerr might have taken the series had he lived to write more. There’s an intriguing loose end in the penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. There is a suggestion that the 60-year-old Bernie is going to work for the Israelis hunting down Nazi war criminals on his return to Germany. This would have fitted in nicely with Bernie’s dealings with Eichmann in earlier books. Bernie could have played a role in the capture of Eichmann, which would have been atonement for the things he was forced to do on the Eastern front.

I must say I enjoyed this book hugely and it might even rival The Lady From Zagreb as my favourite of the whole series. I particularly like that one for its delving into a murky area of history, and the nice black joke when the clean-cut young SS officer who is chauffeuring Bernie reveals that his name is Kurt Waldheim. And the lady herself, Dalia Dresner, has to be the ultimate femme fatale.