Tag: C S Forester

The Pursued by C S Forester

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The Pursued is the third of C S Forester’s inter-war crime novels. It was written in 1935 but not published at the time. The manuscript somehow went missing, to be rediscovered and finally published in 2011. Like the two earlier novels it’s a tale of dark deeds in suburban London, but it’s slightly different in that here the female characters are given more prominence. I suspect that the real reason it was not published at the time was a frankness about sexual matters unusual for an English novel then. It’s also perhaps the closest of the three to the writing of Patrick Hamilton, with the same sensitivity to the position of women in that era. Like many crime novels of this vintage, there is an echo here of the events of the real-life Thompson and Bywaters case.   

Housewife Marjorie Grainger, ten years married with two small children, returns from a night out visiting an old school friend. She finds a strong smell of gas in the kitchen and her sister Dot, who has been babysitting, lying dead on the floor with her head in the oven. At the inquest it is revealed that Dot was pregnant and a verdict of suicide is returned. It is a mystery as to who the man responsible could have been. Dot was twenty-eight, had always lived with her widowed mother and her job did not bring her into contact with men very often.

Marjorie is puzzled by her discovery of two broken wine bottles in the dustbin. She has already noticed her husband Ted’s unusual excitement on the night of Dot’s death. Then she finds that he has lied about his movements on that night. And he works at the local gas showroom and is knowledgeable about gas appliances.

When her chatterbox four-year-old son blurts out what he saw on the night of his aunt’s death, Marjorie realises in a flash that it was Ted who had an affair with Dot, got her pregnant and then killed her by getting her hopelessly drunk and leaving her with the gas tap turned on. It appears that Marjorie’s mother, Mrs Clair, has reached the same conclusion, because she says that the boy will not repeat what he has just said. It’s crucial to what happens later that the two women never really have a direct and open conversation about what they both suspect.

Marjorie suggests that Mrs Clair could now come and live with Ted and her. Ted is not keen on this and proposes instead that Mrs Clair, who lives nearby, takes on his junior employee George Ely as her lodger.

The auditors are due at Ted’s firm, so rather than cancel the usual family holiday in Sussex, they agree that George should take Marjorie, her mother and the children in his new motor car. For Marjorie, this is a longed-for break from her sexually demanding husband who she no longer loves and now believes to be a murderer.

For Mrs Clair, it is something rather different. She has realised that if Ted were convicted of murder, it would ruin Marjorie’s life and taint the children forever by association. She is coldly planning a different sort of revenge on Ted. During the long sunny days, she takes every opportunity to bring Marjorie and George together. She suggests that they go out for evening trips in the car. As she has intended, the inevitable happens and Marjorie and George become lovers.

When Marjorie tells her mother that she does not want to return to her husband and hints at her belief that he is a murderer,Mrs Clair pretends to misunderstand. She plays the innocent leaving Marjorie to think that she alone knows the truth and that her mother has no idea that she and George are lovers. George and Marjorie spend the last few days of the holiday in a panic about what they are going to do. Ted is George’s boss. Ted’s manager Mr Hill is very strait-laced, and will sack anyone at the merest hint of impropriety. Marjorie realises that it may be fear for his job that led Ted to kill the pregnant Dot.

Marjorie returns to the family house but George is unhappy about this. He doesn’t want her to submit to George’s sexual demands. There is a path running along the back of the houses next to the railway line. George uses this to visit Marjorie for snatched moments of passion in the garden. He is a tender and gentle lover, younger than Marjorie and a complete contrast to her husband. What neither Marjorie or George realise is the extent to which they are being manipulated by her mother.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clair is planning her next move, buying a hatchet from the hardware store and hinting to the local police constable that Ted is in a peculiar state of mind.   

Marjorie has put Ted off with excuses about her monthly cycle but she knows that he will work that out soon enough. When she finally tells him that she will not submit to his demands anymore, he threatens to hurt her daughter if she does not give him what he wants. A distraught Marjorie runs to her mother’s house. This is the crisis that Mrs Clair has been working to bring about. The now furious George, Marjorie and Mrs Clair return to Marjorie’s house. Mrs Clair is carrying the hatchet in her bag, and utters the fateful words “we’re going to kill him”. This dramatic moment is not the end of the story by any means.        

This is a short novel, only just over two hundred pages, but it’s very intense with a lot packed into it. Forester is a master of succinct prose and there is not a word too many. The final most tragic part makes the reader think about the difference between moral guilt and physical guilt, and the plot shows how chance events can disrupt the best-laid plans. This is not a novel that the reader will forget and it leaves one at the end thinking about just who is a villain and who is a victim. A final twist in the very last sentence reveals that for one character at least there has been a sort of natural justice.

Does Mrs Clair take her motherly devotion too far? Or is the course of action she chooses the only one she can take, given her circumstances and those of her surviving daughter?

For this is the world of shabby suburban London, where the furniture and carpets are threadbare, people have just enough money to get by on and the neighbours take a keen interest in each other’s doings. This was the time when it was a woman’s role to run the house, with even a fit young man like George not expected to lift a finger to help. Ted expects domestic and sexual slavery from Marjorie as no less than he deserves in return for earning the money. For women the only alternative is to live in a cramped bedsit in a boarding house for professional women as Marjorie’s schoolfriend does.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Mrs Clair is only fifty-nine. She is constantly referred to as elderly and I thought she must be over seventy at least. That’s another way in which the world has changed.

Plain Murder by C S Forester

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Plain Murder was the second of C S Forester’s crime novels and was published in 1930. It’s really a portrait of what came to be known later on as a psychopath, although Forester does not actually use that word. It’s comparatively short and fast-paced, with not a word wasted and a good balance between plot and character.

Forester writes in a rather detached style, and the overall effect is like a cross between Patrick Hamilton and Georges Simenon, with a similar sense of the characters being trapped by circumstances and their own limitations. The nineteen thirties atmosphere is like a black and white photograph. It’s no surprise that these books have been called “London Noir”.        

It’s set in an advertising agency and when the story opens, three young men who work there are discussing what to do about the fact that their scheme to bribe clients has been discovered. Morris is the ringleader and he has rather pushed his colleagues, Oldroyd and Reddy, into going along with it. They fear dismissal without a “character” (a good reference), which would make it almost impossible to get another job. This is London on the verge of the great depression with no welfare safety net.

Morris realises that the manager, Harrison, has not yet told the owner of the company that he is going to sack the three of them. Noticing that the next day is Bonfire Night, he persuades the other two that the only way out is to murder Harrison. Oldroyd has a pistol and Reddy has a motorcycle; their participation is necessary for the plan to work and Morris convinces them that he alone will be criminally responsible. He carries out the killing, the noise of the shots covered by the fireworks, and then scornfully tells the other two that they are accessories to murder who could face hanging if discovered, so must keep their mouths shut about what he has done.

Morris appears to have got away with it. The police make no headway with their investigation and he is promoted to take Harrison’s place. The irony is that the working-class Morris is a much more vigorous and dynamic manager than the rather languid Harrison ever was.

Morris becomes more and more convinced of his cleverness and superiority, both as a successful criminal and someone who is going places in the world of advertising. Meanwhile, young Reddy’s conscience is troubling him deeply. Morris realises that Reddy is likely to blurt out exactly what has happened. He begins to think that he will have to be disposed of too. He approaches this problem like an artist thinking out a creative difficulty. Inspiration strikes when he sees his wife pushing their son’s pram at the top of the hill on the estate where they live. If she let go, there would be nothing to stop the pram running down the hill into the busy traffic on the main road at the bottom.

He contrives a meeting with Reddy and invites him to tea. While he is there, Morris slips away and tampers with Reddy’s motorcycle. Shortly after he leaves, the drive chain comes off because Morris has loosened it; the brakes won’t work because Morris has loosened them too and Reddy is unable to lose any speed as the bike accelerates down the hill and into the stream of traffic where he is killed. The police assume that the drive chain snapped accidently and the brakes were damaged in the subsequent crash. Forester suggests that the German police system, where every citizen has a file, might possibly have led the police to connect Reddy to Morris. If they had realised that Reddy worked at an office where the manager had been murdered in mysterious circumstances and that he had just left the house of another man who worked there, they might have taken a different view of events.

Morris has got away with it again. He now feels that he is a sort of superman and he starts to view other people as “mere tools and instruments that he could use and throw aside”. Forester tells us that the main characteristic of a criminal is “an unusual idea of the importance of his own well-being compared with the importance of the well-being, or the opinions, or the ideals of other people”.

The business goes from strength to strength and more staff are required. The owner brings his daughter to work there and Morris thinks she is a very attractive girl. If only he was not shackled to his wife! Here is another little problem for him to give some creative thought to. He is detached from reality now, completely misinterpreting the young girl’s mild flirting. And he realises that Oldroyd is becoming a problem for him too.

To go beyond this point would spoil the book for anyone who has not read it. I’ll just point out that there are three murders, one that the police can’t solve and two that are never thought to be murders at all. No-one is punished, or at least not by the law. The resolution is very satisfying to the reader. It’s a novel that is almost a hundred years old and has lost none of its power.

Payment Deferred by C S Forester

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Payment Deferred, published in 1926, is an early novel by C S Forester. In theme and tone it is quite different from the Hornblower series he is most famous for today, or his other later novels based on military and naval history, such as The General or The Good Shepherd.       

This is a crime novel in the true sense of that term, a psychological study of the effect of a murder on its perpetrator. It’s startlingly different from detective stories that were published the same year, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and it’s still quite surprising that something as black as this was written almost a century ago.

The tone and sort of life described is rather reminiscent of the novels of Patrick Hamilton, but without the humour. Something, perhaps the sex references, highly unusual in a British novel of this vintage, reminds me strongly of the work of Georges Simenon, the standalone novels that do not feature Inspector Maigret, that he called “romans durs”. There is also a reference to the 1920’s flu pandemic that today’s reader can’t help noticing.

Mr Marble is a bank clerk, married with two children, living in a shabby south London suburb in the years immediately after the great war. He is in serious financial trouble when temptation presents itself in the form of a wealthy nephew on a visit from Australia. Mr Marble’s hobby is photography, so there is a convenient bottle of potassium cyanide in his cupboard. The murder takes place offstage; it is hinted at by the scream that Mrs Marble thinks she has heard when half asleep and her puzzlement at the muddy state of her husband’s suit.

The whole tragic sequence of events that unfolds derives from the fact that Mr Marble has buried the body in the garden. He takes to sitting alone with his secret in the back room, blotting out his fear of the hangman with whiskey, while keeping an eye on the untended scrubby garden to make sure no-one notices anything.

The house is rented. Mr Marble becomes obsessed with getting enough money to secure the freehold to prevent someone else moving in and finding the body. His frantic desperation spurs him on to use his financial knowledge as a foreign exchange clerk to do a little insider trading. The irony is that it is only his guilt that makes him daring enough to take the risk. His scheme succeeds beyond his expectations, making him wealthy, but the problems for this most unhappy of families are only just beginning.

Mr Marble can drink all the whiskey he wants now, as he contemplates the garden, while reading a book from his newly acquired library on crime. Eventually, of course, things move beyond his control.   

The novel is grimly compelling, because the reader can see from quite early on that things will end badly and that Marble’s crime will be discovered. The suspense comes from wondering exactly how it will all play out. The end, when it does come, is both a surprise and bitterly ironic. The title is highly appropriate for a novel where money plays such an important role.    

The Good Shepherd by C S Forester

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The Good Shepherd by C S Forester is a novel of the second world war at sea, published in 1955. It’s the story of a convoy making its way across the Atlantic from America to Britain in 1942. It is concentrated into a short period of time, about forty eight hours. There is really only one fully developed character, Commander Krause of the US navy, and we see everything through his eyes. He commands the escort force, but four ships are not really enough to protect a convoy of thirty seven merchantmen as they sail towards the u-boat wolf pack that Krause knows lies ahead to meet them.

His job has a diplomatic element to it, because the four ships are from four different allied nations, America, Canada, Great Britain and Poland. This is his first command, as he was passed over for promotion before the war. Now by a quirk of seniority, he finds himself in charge of men who have been at war for several years.

The novel brilliantly captures the physically draining effect of constant vigilance. Fate has put Krause in this position. He must rise to the occasion and bring all his ability and experience to bear. As we read on we come to realise the loneliness and responsibility of command.

Krause’s mind is constantly occupied with calculations: navigation, time, distance,  fuel consumption. If a ship detaches itself from the convoy to hunt a submarine how long will it take to get back into position? When the sonar indicates a submarine ahead, which course should the escorts steer to try and intercept it? How can they know what course the sub will steer to try and evade them? We find out that Krause was a fencing champion before the war. Now his opponents are the German submarines.

Krause must constantly think of the effect of his actions, on the men of his ship as well as those on the other escorts. He must analyse whether men under his command will do the right thing under fire; it is the first time in action for all of them. He is under relentless pressure.

What makes this book a little different to other stories on a similar theme is that Krause is a devout Christian, the son of a Lutheran minister. His thoughts are full of biblical quotations. What God is to Krause, he must be to the ships of the convoy, as he attempts to get them across the Atlantic to safety.

There is an intriguing feeling at the end that even things in Kraus’s life that seemed negative were somehow part of a higher plan that put the right man in the right place at the right time.

There is a short introduction and a short coda, but the main body of the novel is not divided into chapters; the only breaks are the changes of each watch. The book brings the reality of a trans-Atlantic convoy starkly to life. The reader is there on the bridge of the USS Keeling living every minute of danger and drama along with Krause, the good shepherd.