Ellroy in New York
I have recently been in Michigan visiting family. On the journey home my wife and I stopped off in New York for a few days. It was my first visit to this amazing city, and the beauty and exuberance of the place just floored me. I had been due to visit New York as part of a high school trip in 2001. Part of our itinerary was a visit to the World Trade Center. 9/11 happened, and the trip was postponed, then cancelled. I never made new arrangements to visit. Finally I have made the journey, and it was worth every minute of the wait. It was moving to visit the 9/11 Memorial built on the site of the twin towers where so many people lost their lives. If you get a chance, I would also recommend the Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden at Hanover Square, founded in memory of the British and Commonwealth victims.
Whenever I travel I like to look up some of the tucked away places that either relate to my research or to crime fiction in general. A few years ago, I visited Los Angeles to interview James Ellroy and also visited some of the sites which were connected to key moments in Ellroy’s life. New York played a key role in the life-story of Ellroy. When his first novel Brown’s Requiem was published in 1981, Ellroy at the age of thirty-three moved from LA to Eastchester near New York. As he put it in an interview with Don Swaim, he ‘wanted to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep and boogie-woogie down Broadway to the Gershwin beat’. However, the cross-country move coincided with a difficult early stage of his writing career. Ellroy’s manuscript ‘L.A. Death Trip’ was turned down by seventeen publishers. Ellroy had not faced this sort of rejection with his first two novels, and he would take typically dramatic steps to turn his luck around. Renowned crime fiction editor Otto Penzler ran the Mysterious Bookshop at the time. It was, and is, popular with both readers and writers of crime fiction. In an interview with Poets&Writers, agent Nat Sobel describes Ellroy’s first visit to the Mysterious Bookshop, and how he marched into Otto Penzler’s office and announced:
“I am the demon dog of American crime fiction.” Otto said, “I’ve never heard of you.” James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy’s third novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy’s novel for his first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business.
Penzler may have been startled by the brazen Ellroy, but it would be the beginning of a long and productive partnership between the two men. The story of the meeting differs slightly between the numerous versions I have read over the years, but I find its most striking detail is Ellroy’s use of the Demon Dog name so early in his career. According to its website, the Mysterious Bookshop was originally located in midtown (it doesn’t specify where exactly). Its new address is 58 Warren Street in Tribeca. I found it to be a charming, characterful place with crime books of every conceivable style crammed onto the shelves of its four walls. Here are a few photos we took:
No visit to a bookshop of this calibre would be complete without buying some reading matter for the journey home. I purchased The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) by Sax Rohmer and Colour Scheme (1943) by Ngaio Marsh.
Another location in New York related to Ellroy’s career is the library where he began his research on the Black Dahlia case which was to lead to one of his most powerful novels. In one of my interviews with Ellroy, published in Conversations with James Ellroy, he describes the methods of research he used which laid the foundation for the novel:
I went out: I got three hundred dollars in quarters, put them in three triple reinforced pillowcases. Went into downtown New York City library, the one at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, and got on interlibrary loan the L.A. newspapers from that time. Fed quarters to it and made photocopies. Reprinted white on black and extrapolated off the actual facts of the case with fictional characters. That’s how I built that book.
The library on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue is the impressive Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Although, Ellroy may have been referring to the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York public library, which is practically next door and is somewhat nondescript by comparison. I spent a pleasant hour exploring the Schwarzman and admiring its beautiful old world design. It was nice to think of Ellroy researching the Dahlia case here almost thirty years ago and perhaps being inspired by the interior’s wonderfully musty atmosphere.
Third floor of the Stephen Schwarzman Building; picture shows objects behind an empty Librarian’s desk. By Blurpeace, 6 June 2009
Cover Art: Two Novels by Joseph Wambaugh
I’ve never blogged about cover art before, partly because I don’t know much about the subject, but I enjoy blogs such as Killer Covers and John D MacDonald Covers so much that I thought I would give it a try. Joseph Wambaugh is, in my opinion, one of the finest American crime writers working today, and over the years I have been impressed and intrigued by the cover art featured on his books, especially his books which have wrap-around cover art. In this post I’m going to briefly discuss the cover art on two books written by Wambaugh: Lines and Shadows (1984) and The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985). The artist is not credited in either edition I have selected, so if you happen to know who it is please get in touch via the comment thread.
Lines and Shadows is one of Wambaugh’s works of non-fiction, or the ‘non-fiction novel’ to quote the term coined by Wambaugh’s mentor Truman Capote. It follows the Border Crime Task Force of the San Diego Police Department from 1976 to 1978. The writing is at its sharpest when focused on the personal lives of the policemen or discussing the politics behind their assignment. The drawbacks of books of this kind, however, is that the writer is hostage to facts, which does not always lead to the strongest narrative. For this reason, the book drags, and the story never feels quite as interesting as it should be.
The front cover of this book is not outstanding: just a small image set against a black backdrop. But when you open the book, the excitement begins with a cast of characters crammed into an intriguing collage: there’s a hero on a motorbike, beautiful women, a boisterous gangster-type, a grizzled hardboiled looking man smoking a cigarette and lots of gunplay. It reminds me a little of the posters of Bruce Lee films or some of the James Bond films of the 1970s where a lot of the action set-pieces of the film were crammed into small images on the poster. They could be a bit too busy at times but certainly conveyed the sense of an epic, exciting story.
The Secrets of Harry Bright was a return to fiction for Wambaugh and is a wonderfully absurdist mixture of black comedy, tragedy and mystery set in the fictional Mineral Springs, California. I’ve written a full-length review of the novel here. This cover image is wonderfully minimalist. I like the way the reds and oranges convey the blinding, oppressive heat of the Sonoran desert. Unlike Lines and Shadows, in which the inside pages extend the cover art, for The Secrets of Harry Bright, the style is completely different. We’re back to the action-packed images, which is odd, as it is not a novel that relies on much action. The car explosion, if I remember correctly, belongs to the back-story. The inside cover art seems to reassure the reader that you’re still in a Wambaugh story, even if the promises of action made by the artist aren’t delivered in the story.
Holiday
I’m currently visiting family in Michigan. I’ll be blogging again in early July.
The Two Men Who Saved James Ellroy’s Career
As much as any contemporary crime writer James Ellroy is a household name, a celebrity author whose appearance on a chat show can turn mundane television into electrifying entertainment. What other crime writers can we say this of today? Needless to say, it hasn’t always been this way for the author, and Ellroy has gleaned much material from his harrowing early life. But even after Ellroy began his writing career there was a period when it seemed his early promise and the luck every successful author must possess had run dry, before two men, Otto Penzler and Nat Sobel, were to rescue his career and, by doing so, take a role in reshaping the modern American crime novel.
Otto Penzler
Credit: Carolyn Hartman
In the early 1980s, Ellroy had published two novels with Avon, Brown’s Requiem and Clandestine, both to moderate success. Although they were not groundbreaking works, there is no doubt that these publications were an incredible boost for Ellroy. It was only a few years earlier that Ellroy had been battling drug and alcohol addictions. For many first time writers, finding a publisher is usually a much more difficult process than writing itself, but Ellroy was to find a home for his first two novels remarkably quickly. He moved from Los Angeles to New York City in the hope of breaking out and living the writer’s life. But Avon rejected his third manuscript ‘LA Death Trip’. Now things started to go downhill as Ellroy describes in his memoir The Hilliker Curse:
My publisher rejected my third novel. They found the sex-fiend cop and his feminist-poet girlfriend hard to believe. They were right. I wrote the book in a let’s-ditch-L.A.-and-find-HER-in-New-York fugue state. My quasi-girlfriend agent sent the book to 17 other publishers. They all said nyet. My quasi-girlfriend dropped me as a client and pink-slipped me as a quasi-boyfriend.
The fact that he was dating his agent suggests Ellroy was not receiving objective advice about the manuscript. There’s no doubt that this was a crisis for his still fragile literary career. Ellroy had never before faced the rejection that is a rite of passage for most writers starting out. His solution was appropriately dramatic, and typical of the flamboyant persona which has come typify Ellroy’s public image. In an interview with Poets&Writers, Nat Sobel describes the New York literary scene that he had a hand in shaping at the time and that was to help Ellroy immeasurably:
Years ago, my lawyer was, and still is, the lawyer for Otto Penzler and the Mysterious Bookshop. He thought Otto and I should get together. I’ve been Otto’s agent for many years. Anyway, I liked Otto a lot, and we couldn’t figure out how a bookseller and an agent could do anything together. I got the idea, or maybe it was Otto, to form the Mysterious Literary Agency. This was really at the point when I was just beginning to represent authors, and the idea was that Otto had this wonderful bookshop where crime writers came in all the time, and he would send writers to me who asked how to get an agent. So we started the Mysterious Literary Agency. We did a whole thing where our letterhead had no address and no phone number. If you wanted to find us, you had to solve the mystery.
Ellroy must have solved this little mystery as one day he arrived at the Mysterious Bookshop, walked into Otto Penzler’s office and announced:
“I am the demon dog of American crime fiction.” Otto said, “I’ve never heard of you.” James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy’s third novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy’s novel for his first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business.
Penzler was clearly taken aback but also impressed with Ellroy after their first meeting. In a profile of Ellroy by Martin Kihn, republished in Conversations With James Ellroy, Penzler was quick to diagnose the problem with Ellroy’s writing at the time:
I thought, “This is an extraordinary original talent who doesn’t really know how to write a book.” A very powerful stylist, but they weren’t particularly well constructed plots. But he was such a bright guy and had so much raw talent, I never thought for a moment he wasn’t going to be a monster.
Nat Sobel
Credit: Pieter van Hattem
It wouldn’t be plain sailing for the self-proclaimed Demon Dog, though. Ellroy had written half of a historical fiction novel titled “The Confessions of Bugsy Siegel”, and no doubt he wanted to finish it and see it published, but Sobel and Penzler had other ideas, as Kihn remarks, ‘During a meeting at Penzler’s store, Sobel and Penzler told Ellroy that Siegel was out to lunch but “Death Trip” could be reworked.’ However, Ellroy was withholding information from his two mentors: ‘Of course neither Otto nor I knew that James’s previous agent had had seventeen rejections on this novel. But we had done a lot of work on the book.’ Sobel also reveals that Ellroy was no pushover when it came to the editing process of ‘LA Death Trip’, which was finally published under the title Blood on the Moon:
I wrote Ellroy a rather lengthy editorial report about that first novel I represented. I got back what looked like a very lengthy kidnap letter. It was written in red pencil on yellow legal paper, and some of the words on it were like an inch high: I AM NOT GOING TO DO THIS. I thought, “Oh, I’ve got a loony here. Somebody who calls himself the demon dog? Maybe he is a demon.” But it was a very smart letter. He was very smart about what he would do, why he wouldn’t do certain things. And he did do a lot of work on the book. I’ve edited him ever since. Nearly all of the editing is done here. He’s been wonderful to work with.
Although Ellroy moved on from the Mysterious Press some years ago his professional relationship with Penzler and Sobel continues to this day (Penzler and Ellroy edited The Best American Noir of the Century (2011) together). I’m not saying that Ellroy would have never published again were it not for Penzler and Sobel. Ellroy had the talent, drive and determination to succeed regardless of how many times he faced rejection. If he hadn’t found them, he probably would have found someone else. Still, Penzler and Sobel deserves credit for spotting a great talent when he was down and not letting him slip away. Fans of Ellroy and crime fiction have a lot to thank them for.
Early Ellroy
Thirteen years ago, I read my first James Ellroy novel, American Tabloid, and it remains my favourite to this day. Most Ellroy fans were probably introduced to the author through a LA Quartet or Underworld USA novel. Indeed, if you read some of the critical appraisals of Ellroy’s work, it sometimes seems like his career started with The Black Dahlia in 1987. It’s easy to forget that Ellroy wrote six strong and distinctive novels before The Black Dahlia, so in this post I’m going to take a look at early, somewhat forgotten works:
Brown’s Requiem (1981)
Ellroy’s first novel is something of a Raymond Chandler pastiche. Repo-Man cum PI Fritz Brown is hired by the strange, potentially psychopathic golf caddy Freddy ‘Fat Dog’ Baker to keep an eye on his musician sister Jane. Brown obliges, falling for Jane along the way, and becomes embroiled in a case which involves Mexican Hitmen, Neo-Nazis and corrupt police. There are shades of Ellroy in Brown, which he copped to in an interview with the Paris Review: ‘I started to plan a novel about a guy who gets involved with a bunch of country-club golf caddies, who does some process serving, who grew up at Beverly and Western, who was a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy with glasses, all of which is me.’ But what Ellroy doesn’t mention is that ‘Fat Dog’ was similar to the Demon Dog himself before he became an author. Fat Dog’s bigotry and homelessness (he sleeps on golf courses) has parallels with the harrowing early life of Lee Earle Ellroy. Brown’s Requiem is a solid, entertaining debut imbued with naive charm and Ellroy’s idiosyncratic quirkiness. The problem is a plausibility gap, not that crime novels have to be realistic, but authors need to convince you that the events could happen in the world they create. Brown’s Requiem never quite convinces or compels. Final thought, Ellroy’s preferred title for his first effort was the very non-genre sounding ‘Concerto for Orchestra’.
Clandestine (1982)
Ellroy’s second novel is meatier fare which features the first appearance of Dudley Smith here in a supporting role. The book is essentially split into two halves: narrator Freddy Underhill charts his rise and fall within the LAPD in the first section, and in the second section, Underhill is a self-appointed avenger determined to solve the murder of a woman with whom he had an ill-judged one night stand. There’s a lot of interesting themes at play here, such as ‘the Wonder’: Underhill’s appreciation for the awesome mystery of human existence. It was also Ellroy’s attempt to solve the murder of his mother in fictional terms: ‘I wanted to get rid of the story. I wanted to prove myself impervious to my mother’s presence and to get on with it.’
Blood on the Moon (1984)
With this novel, Ellroy introduced his first series character Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of the LAPD who would return for two more novels. It may have been a lucrative choice for Ellroy to start a series, but Blood on the Moon suffered a difficult gestation. It began life as ‘LA Death Trip’ which was turned down by over a dozen publishers. It finally found a home with Otto Penzler and the Mysterious Press but had to be extensively rewritten. The end result is a taut, competent thriller as Ellroy put it ‘contrapunctually structured’ between the viewpoints of detective and serial killer.
Because the Night (1984)
Ellroy’s second Hopkins novel was inspired by his reading of Thomas Harris’ Manhunter. Unfortunately, it’s not an influence that works well. Sinister psychiatrist Dr John De Havilland just seems like a pale Hannibal Lecter imitation, minus the cannibalism, and the plot is so convoluted and confusing that by the end I just didn’t care. On the plus side, Hopkins, an intellectually brilliant and impulsively violent sex maniac, is still an interesting lead character.
Suicide Hill (1986)
The final novel in the Hopkins series is the best. Hopkins is shifted to a relatively minor role, and the focus is on the tragic young criminal Duane Rice, who is motivated entirely by his love for a woman with a heart of stone. A sub-plot about growing Evangelical influence within the LAPD is also brilliantly done.
Killer on the Road (1986)
Probably Ellroy’s most bizarre novel. First published as Silent Terror before being reissued under Ellroy’s preferred title, the first person recollections of 
serial killer Martin Plunkett make for grim and gripping reading. As with Fat Dog Baker in Brown’s Requiem, Ellroy isn’t shy in imbuing an essentially despicable character with some autobiographical traits. Ellroy fans may recognise Plunkett’s voyeurism, alcoholic mother and semi-detached father as taken from the author’s life. There is a twist about halfway through the novel that will leave you reeling, although that’s partly down to it being completely implausible. Killer on the Road is an interesting novel to read over a quarter-century since it was first published as it shows Ellroy’s development and future direction as a writer with its multiple viewpoints and multiple sources of information. The diary entries of FBI agent Thomas Dusenberry and newspaper articles, which appear between chapters, both work well.
Of his first six novels, I would probably say Clandestine narrowly beats Suicide Hill as my favourite, and Because the Night is the least impressive. However, I’d be happy to hear from Ellroy fans who disagree. As always, your thoughts are welcome.
Angels Unaware: a review
Anyone who has enjoyed the company of the talented Mr (Mike) Ripley will know that he is a devilishly funny chap. I discovered this myself surrounded by skulls and pathology equipment at St Bart’s back in January, and since then I resolved to find out if he’s as funny in his writing.
I recently finished reading Angels Unaware, the fifteenth outing of private eye Fitzroy Maclean Angel, who seems more at home in a pub quiz (especially if it has a round on ancient history) than in navigating the 21st century legal restrictions of being a private detective. Angel is no Mike Hammer– he’s not prone to throwing punches unless he has to (and even then, he’s usually hurling bike helmets or bottles of wine rather than engaging in hand-to-hand combat), and he’s surprisingly PC, defending a civil partnership from his rather old fashioned colleague. But Angel moans about the strictures of Health and Safety and about working as part of a female-dominated, modern detective agency. He also doesn’t seem capable of operating any technology without breaking it, including a mobile phone.
From the very beginning of the story, Angel is a man trying to escape: when old friend and city man Terrance Patterson comes to Angel asking him to find a missing scriptwriter in Manchester, Angel is all too happy to leave his new domestic restraints in Cambridge (his fashion-designer wife, their newborn and his ‘helpful’ mother who has uncomfortably installed herself in their home). However, Angel’s jaunt up north, and his pairing with the wonderfully audacious P.I. Ossie Osterlein, end up being more serious than the obligatory line dancing, fry up and borrowed Huddersfield socks would suggest. As the bodies pile up, Angel never loses his sense of humour:
All I had to do was find my client and ask him what the hell was going on, then I could go home with a clear conscience. I’d found a body, met a porn star, visited a red-light district, helped the police with their enquires, been shot at and forced to line-dance. Good God, I’d even had to go up north. Surely I deserved a few weeks’ holiday or at least compassionate leave.
I found Angel a strange mixture of types. Perhaps only by marrying him to a fashion designer could Ripley continually put the part pub-loving man-of-the-people part elitist Londoner and historian in his place. Yet his wife Amy May is herself a conundrum: a successful professional woman, whose designs are known by and appeal to a huge swathe of the population (including female cops?). I’m not sure if May could exist, (could you imagine Stella McCartney married to a PI?) and if she did, what she and Angel would see in each other besides the ability to trade pithy insults over the phone.
Although Angel might use his wife’s fame to make witnesses or police more amenable, Ossie’s ideas go further:
‘Well, I’ll ask [my client] if you call your friendly Greater Manchester police lady and chase up how the autopsy went.’
‘Why on earth would she tell me?’
‘She might, she seemed quite taken with you.’
‘She’s more a fan of Amy’s clothes than of me.’
‘Get the wife to send her some free samples then.’
‘Give me some legal advice, Ossie: would that be bribery or corruption?’
‘I think it depends on who complains,’ he said, seeming to give the matter some serious thought. ‘Anyway, you should always keep in touch with friendly coppers.’
Ripley is undoubtedly good at one-liners, and he does paint a lovingly quirky picture of London, Northerners and pub culture. I did enjoy this novel, not least of all for it’s hyperbolic northerner Ossie Osterlein.
James Ellroy – What’s in a Name?
The information released so far about James Ellroy’s forthcoming novel reveals that it is provisionally titled Perfidia and is the first book of a new LA Quartet, which precedes the original Quartet chronologically and will show Quartet characters at earlier points in their lives. Perfidia is the title of an Alberto Dominguez song, much covered since, which Ellroy fans may recognise as the song Lee Blanchard and Kay Lake dance to on New Year’s Eve, 1946, in The Black Dahlia (1987).
Titles are an important detail for an author to get right. A good title can make the difference between someone buying your book or not. Several of Ellroy’s novels have gone through title changes as part of the creative process. Although we should remember that Ellroy went through a significant name change himself, the alcoholic and drug addict Lee Earle Ellroy was very different from the bestselling author James Ellroy. Here are a few examples of title changes in Ellroy’s work which are fairly commonly known (I’ve put rejected titles in quotation marks and the published titles in italics):
Ellroy’s writing career had started promisingly, but it stalled with his third manuscript, which told the story of a violent, chaotic battle of wills between Detective Lloyd Hopkins and serial killer Theodore Verplanck. Ellroy titled it ‘LA Death Trip’, and it was turned down by a total of eighteen publishers. It was only after Ellroy’s fateful meeting with legendary crime fiction editor Otto Penzler in the Mysterious Bookshop, New York, that Ellroy’s luck changed and the novel was published by Penzler’s Mysterious Press, extensively rewritten and re-titled Blood on the Moon (1984). It was the first of three novels featuring Lloyd Hopkins.
In 1986, Avon published one of Ellroy’s most bizarre novels, written as a memoir of a serial killer. Ellroy’s preferred title was ‘Killer on the Road’, but Avon insisted on the title Silent Terror. In 1990, the novel was republished in the US as Killer on the Road, although it is still in print and being sold as Silent Terror in the UK.
Expectations were high for the second volume of Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, especially as the first volume American Tabloid (1995) had been Ellroy’s most extraordinarily complex and rewarding novel to date. Somehow word got out that the follow up novel was to be titled ‘Police Gazette’. It seems Ellroy did consider the title for a while, but it was quickly dropped, and any interviewer who mentioned it to the author, including yours truly, received an irritable response. The novel was eventually released as The Cold Six Thousand (2001).
There are a couple of other examples of title changes in Ellroy’s career that are less well known. I discovered them while I was doing research at the James Ellroy archive at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina and included the information in my book Conversations with James Ellroy.
Ellroy wanted to title his first novel ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, but it was at Avon’s insistence that it was published as Brown’s Requiem (1981). ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ barely sounds like a crime novel at all, but it reflects the lead character’s love of classical music, specifically the work of Beethoven and Anton Bruckner. The romantic interest is also a musician. In the denouement, the villain reveals he also admires the work of Bruckner, and the music generally reflects the themes and emotions of the story. ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ was used as the title of the fifth and final section of the novel instead.
Before The Black Dahlia elevated him to literary prominence, Ellroy was planning a fourth Lloyd Hopkins novel. The plot is revealed in an eighty-four page outline, which is available at his archive. Hopkins is investigating a series of murders of high-class hookers. Lynn Dietrich is a hooker working for New Age Enterprises, the legitimate front for a prostitution ring. Her dream in life is to save six thousand dollars and then emigrate to the town of Xuatapul, Mexico, as in Xuatapul, a person can buy a year of luxury living for the sum of six thousand dollars. Whenever she is close to reaching the required amount, she wastes too much of her savings, thus she is periodically sabotaging her own ambitions.
Oh, and the title of the fourth Hopkins novel? Ellroy planned on calling it ‘The Cold Six Thousand’. It was probably no loss to Ellroy that he never wrote the novel. He was destined for greater things. It is remarkable to think that he filed this title for about fifteen years and returned to it in his Underworld USA novel The Cold Six Thousand. The Underworld novels are nothing like the Hopkins novels. Ellroy’s style had now achieved dazzling levels of complexity and scope, but in The Cold Six Thousand the title refers to a sum of money the character Wayne Tedrow Junior is paid for a contract killing. He fails to carry out the killing at first, with disastrous results, and he spends much of the novel with his $6,000 obligation unfulfilled, which is very similar in theme to Lynn Dietrich’s ambitions in the unwritten Hopkins novel.
So, titles are important, and with his forthcoming novel Ellroy has picked a fairly interesting one in Perfidia — if he sticks to it.
Should Crime Novels Be More Political?
John le Carré’s latest novel A Delicate Truth has just been published, and from the extracts I have read serialised in the Telegraph, it looks set to be one of his best works in years. Part of the criticism of le Carré’s recent novels is that they have been too preachy and angrily left-wing. There are not many writers producing work at the age of 81 who can produce as much buzz as le Carré, but with A Delicate Truth continuing his general leftward trend – the plot involves a cover-up of a disastrous counter-terrorism operation which left an innocent mother and child dead on that last outpost of Empire, Gibraltar – has le Carré made the right choice in giving his work a more partisan edge?
To a degree every narrative will be political. Some crime writers are well known for their political beliefs: Sara Paretsky and David Peace are broadly leftist, PD James and James Ellroy are conservatives. John le Carré is one of the most interesting writers to read through the prism of his politics. I like to think of him as a sceptical patriot.
His most famous creation is the aging spymaster George Smiley. In the trilogy of novels Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979), Smiley is jaded, understated, underestimated and often humiliated: his promiscuous wife cheats on him, and yet through the application of his intellect, intuition and dogged perseverance, he always triumphs, albeit at a heavy price. Part of Smiley’s appeal is his pragmatic patriotism. He knows the West has to win the Cold War because communism is an evil force, but yet he sees on his own side abuses of power which are (almost) as bad. By contrast, the traitor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, codenamed ‘Gerald’, who was based on Kim Philby is much more brashly English. Yet behind the mask of his patriotism, Gerald is sending British agents to their death.
le Carré was in his late forties when he completed the Smiley vs Karla trilogy, and it is often presumed that people who start on the political left become gradually more conservative with age. Yet right at the age when you would expect le Carré’s values to start corresponding more closely with Smiley’s. the author suddenly turned against him:
My impatience with George Smiley is that I am no longer able to resolve his excuses. There is something specious to me now about his moral posture. The notion of Smiley’s was that he sacrificed his moral conscience so that decent, ignorant people could sleep at night. He goes through life saying, “I give up all moral judgments; I take upon myself the lash of my own guilt.” We Empire babies were brought up thinking that we messed with things so that others could have clean hands. But I believe that someone who delivers up the responsibility for his moral conscience is actually someone who hasn’t got one.
With his follow-up novel The Little Drummer Girl (1983), le Carré found what he regarded as a radical cause, to portray the Palestinian people sympathetically in a work about the Middle East. In the novel, a radically left-wing English actress ‘Charlie’ is used by Israeli Intelligence in an elaborate scheme to penetrate a breakaway Palestinian terrorist group. le Carré conducted a huge amount of research for the novel, interviewing members of Mossad and meeting then PLO leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut. In writing the book le Carré, in his own words, ‘fell in love with the Palestinians’:
(I) became astonished really with one very simple perception that seems to me to have made no headway in the West at all: that one can, indeed as I am, be greatly in favour of the state of Israel and wish for its survival but that in the making of Israel a great crime was committed, not numerically commensurate with the crime that was committed against the Jews, but appalling all the same. Millions of people displaced, others subjugated with total alien types of rules, turned into second-class citizens. The image of the Palestinians, largely invented, as crazies carrying guns and so on was so far removed from the reality of the majority of the Palestinian people that it needed saying, it needed demonstrating – and not by some maverick Trotskyist, or something, but somebody like myself who has written extensively, with great passion I like to think, about Jews in the past but found in this situation an injustice which needs reporting.
I’m not sure that portraying the Palestinians sympathetically would be seen as radical today. It seems to be the broad view of people in the arts, but perhaps in 1983 the issue was perceived differently. The irony is that le Carré said he didn’t want the novel to be the work of ‘some maverick Trotskyist’, but Charlie in the novel is on the Far Left. Charlie was partly based on le Carré’s sister, the actress Charlotte Cornwell, and partly, it is believed, on the well known left-wing firebrand,Vanessa Redgrave.
le Carré would then turn to a radical examination of his own life story. His most autobiographical novel, and for many his greatest, A Perfect Spy (1986), is not particularly political (in examining the nature of betrayal here le Carré seems uninterested in ideology). The end of the Cold War was to prove challenging for many spy writers, but le Carré was ahead of his contemporaries with The Russia House (1987), an examination of how glasnost and perestroika was changing the Soviet Union. Since the fall of the USSR, le Carré has examined a wide array of espionage subjects, with mixed results. The 9/11 attacks and the resulting War on Terrorism seemed to fire his passion again as a writer. Absolute Friends (2003) was a scathing critique of the ‘Special Relationship’. le Carré, like Smiley, had previously held the view that Britain needed to be the junior partner of the US after the war in order to defeat communism, but now the Coalition angered him. Reviewing the novel in the Telegraph, George Walden wrote ‘a once entertaining writer is subsiding into ranting moralism […] All it says is that the Americans are making a cock-up of everything, and that they, not the terrorists, are the greatest danger to civilisation.’ Highly critical of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, le Carré wrote an article for the Times titled simply ‘The United States of America Gone Mad’.
Ultimately, like Walden, I have reservations about crime writers using novels to preach their political views, even if they are distinguished as le Carré. The danger is that they will alienate the readers who will disagree with them and bore the readers who don’t. Of course, they could convert a reader or alert them to issues which are not widely discussed elsewhere, that is, however, a formidable task.
Should crime novels be more political? Probably not.
Here’s the trailer for A Delicate Truth:
The two interviews quoted in this article are ‘The Little Drummer Girl: An Interview with John le Carre’ by Melvyn Bragg from The Quest for le Carre (London: Vision Press, 1988) and ‘John le Carre on Perfect Spies and Other Characters’ by Thom Schwartz from Writer’s Digest, 67 (February 1987), pp.20-21
Moby Dick on the Mersey
From May 4th to May 6th there will be a marathon reading of Moby Dick at Merseyside Maritime Museum. The event has been organised by fellow VV founder Chris Routledge as part of his continuing research into the connection Herman Melville had with Liverpool. My wife and I will both be reading chapters alongside many other readers. You can volunteer to read here if you are interested. This promises to be a wonderful, epic event. Do come along if you can. More details here.
Lunchtime Classics
I’m delighted to be giving another talk at Waterstones Liverpool One as part of the Lunchtime Classics series. The series was started by Glyn Morgan last year and consists of readings and discussions of classic stories and authors by ‘literary experts’ (or me depending on which talk you attend). Last year I spoke on James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, this year I’m discussing John Le Carre and the George Smiley novels. The full list of speakers confirmed so far is pasted below, and the speaker booked for the week after me is rather fetching I can tell you.
All readings are 1-2pm in the Illy Café at Waterstones Liverpool One.
Wednesday 24th April: Glyn Morgan (Ph.D Researcher, University of Liverpool) on H.G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds.
Wednesday 1st May: Michelle Yost (Ph.D Researcher, University of Liverpool) on E.M. Forster’s
‘The Machine Stops’.
Tuesday 7th May: Dr Deaglàn Ó Donghaile (John Moore’s University) on Joseph Conrad’s The
Secret Agent.
Wednesday 15th May: Dr Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool) on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels.
Tuesday 21st May: Lee Rooney (University of Liverpool) on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Wednesday 29th May: Dr Danny O’Connor (University of Liverpool) on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Thursday 6th June: Dr Ben Brabon (Edge Hill University) on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Tuesday 11th June: Maria Shmygol (University of Liverpool) on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovich.
Wednesday 19th June: Dr Matthew Bradley (University of Liverpool) on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Gray.
Wednesday 26th June: Dr Chris Pak (University of Liverpool) on Stanislaw Lem.
Wednesday 3rd July: Steve Powell (University of Liverpool) on John Le Carre’s Smiley Trilogy.
Wednesday 10th July: Dr Diana Powell (University of Liverpool) on Walter Scott’s The Bride of
Lammermoor.
Tuesday 16th July: Andy Sawyer (University of Liverpool) on the work of Saki (H.H. Monroe).
Monday 22nd July: Dr David Hering (University of Liverpool) on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale
King.
Waterstones Liverpool One, 12 College Lane, L1 3DL. Tel: (0151) 7099820
And speaking of Waterstones Liverpool One, Harlan Coben will be in the store on April 25th at 12:30 PM signing copies of his new novel Six Years, which is already in development to be adapted into a film starring Hugh Jackman. I’m disappointed that work commitments means I can’t attend this one, but do go if you can.
Finally, on the topic of crime fiction superstars visiting North-West England, did Richard Roundtree a.k.a Shaft visit my home city of Chester back in 2000? These photographs seem to suggest that he did. Lovely to see he went walking on our famous Roman Walls.
The Venetian Vase 