Tag: John le Carre

John le Carré and Nicholas Blake

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David Cornwell was educated in the 1940s at Sherborne, one of the great Public Schools of England, and he didn’t like it very much. Some years later, he took his revenge, when as John le Carré, he published his second novel, A Murder of Quality (1962).

Sherborne became Carne, an unpleasant institution, riddled with snobbery and class prejudice. Those who run the school are not above a bit of blackmail when it comes to getting a teacher in on the cheap.

Unusually for le Carré, this is a detective story rather than a spy novel. It’s actually an extremely good example of a genre with which he is not usually associated. (Although you could argue that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is really a whodunnit.) Here, a newly retired George Smiley plays detective.

Like all le Carré’s early fiction, this novel has its roots in the second world war. Smiley becomes involved in the mystery because a wartime intelligence colleague contacts him about it. It turns out that one of the masters at the school, and a potential suspect, is the brother of Smiley’s wartime boss. Smiley therefore feels obliged to take the case on.

Oddly enough, le Carré was not the first old boy of Sherborne to write a detective story set in a school. In 1935 Nicholas Blake had published A Question of Proof. This was the penname of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, formerly of Sherborne and like le Carré, a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time writer. I don’t think either of them ever returned to teach at Sherborne, though. Le Carré taught at a prep school and then Eton; Day Lewis taught at several other schools.

Day Lewis had much fonder memories of Sherborne than le Carré. He wrote warmly about his time there in the poems The Chrysanthemum Show and Sketches for a Portrait. Sudeley Hall in A Question of Proof is a prep school in the heart of the country, not a grand institution like Carne. Dark deeds take place against the background of a rural idyll, when the body of the school’s most unpopular boy is found in a haystack on sports day. The climax comes after a second murder a week later, on the day of the parents versus pupils cricket match.

The atmosphere is that of the inter-war years with references to the first world war, the general strike and the scarcity of jobs. It feels like an accurate portrait of life at a school of that type at that time.

The main character, a teacher who comes under suspicion of murder, is having an affair with the headmaster’s wife. I have read that this nearly cost Day Lewis his job at the time, as the chair of governors of the school in which he was then teaching, refused to believe that this was fiction.

A Question of Proof was the first novel to feature the amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, who appeared in many more, including The Beast Must Die (1938).  Blake was still publishing in the 1960s, as le Carré was getting started, so the careers of the two writers overlapped.

Carne is not the only school to feature prominently in a le Carré novel. Thursgood’s prep school in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a rather seedy establishment, named after its owner. He is unaware that Jim Prideaux, last-minute replacement teacher at the beginning of the term, is a retired spy. Buried in the countryside, it’s an ideal place for someone who wants to lie low. Jim seems like a man out of his time, with his Alvis sports car, and fondness for reading Jeffrey Farnol to the boys. In fact, both he and the school belong more to the world of A Question of Proof than the 1970s.

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.

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.