A student’s take on Vera Caspary’s Laura
This semester I’m teaching two courses for the University of Liverpool’s Continuing Education: The Female Dick: Women in Crime Fiction and Star-Crossed Lovers in Literature. But instead of having my students write traditional essays, I’ve asked them to write blog posts. Why? There are two reasons: first, I think the blog is a great platform to discuss, debate, inform and analyse (if they simply wrote it as an essay for their tutor, it wouldn’t reach as wide an audience), and second, most of my students are entirely new to blogging. Many of them are retired, and they bring a wealth of professional and practical insights to the text.
I’ve posted the first, a review of Vera Caspary’s Laura, on Prevailing Westerlies. If you have time to leave a comment, word of encouragement or question, I’m sure it would be appreciated.
Unpublished James Ellroy Interview
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing James Ellroy four times: on three occasions by telephone and once in his apartment in LA. Three of these interviews are included in the collection Conversations with James Ellroy which I edited for University Press of Mississippi. The interview I excluded from the volume was the third telephone interview which took place in November 2008. After giving the matter some thought, I decided that the interview wasn’t up to the high standard of my other interviews with Ellroy. You have to make some very difficult decisions when you’re editing an anthology of this kind, and I wanted to ensure there was space in the book for some of the outstanding interviews Ellroy has given throughout his career to such figures as Duane Tucker, Paul Duncan and Craig McDonald. Plus Ellroy ended the conversations somewhat cryptically, saying ‘Steve, call me when you get bored. I’ll always pick up’ in a baleful tone which made me uneasy.
However, I came across the interview again recently when searching through an old thumb drive, and I thought there were enough interesting moments to share it with you here, published for the very first time. I’ve edited it down quite significantly to the highlights:
INTERVIEWER: I watched Zodiac last night. My wife and I watched it with the director’s commentary, and I was thinking you’ve been involved in a lot of documentaries, factual shows, well Murder and Mayhem, Bazaar Bizarre, the Zodiac DVD commentary. Why the change…
ELLROY: Bazaar Bizarre is just a horrible movie and a horrible performance on my part. I was coming off a crackup and taking some bad medication and my weight was up. I didn’t look good. It’s a bad, vile movie. Why mince words?
INTERVIEWER: I was wondering, you moved from your early fiction where there were lots of motifs about serial killers and murderers, psycho-sexual murderers, but then you moved into more factual explorations of serial killers. Why the move from fiction to factual interpretations?
ELLROY: Well… It started out with the bridge between those two types of works The Black Dahlia, which has the psycho-sexual aspect and the historical aspect in the King of psycho-sexual Los Angeles crimes, and the King of LA crimes period. And it was at that time that I determined to write the LA Quartet. And hence first LA history and then American history, and I have been synchronous ever since. And there may be some psycho-sexual aspects to individual crimes within a larger set of crimes in a given book of mine, but I will never write exclusively in that vein. I determined that I had taken it as far as it would go.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, I’ve been reading Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive, and it has very haunting photos. Very strange experience to look over those photos of Elizabeth Short, which are of course shocking. Your explanation as to the treatment, well, the torture of her body, and what happened to her hinges a lot on a kind of art, aestheticism, the Victor Hugo novel The Man Who Laughs and the painting. Is that something out of your research on the case or are you interested in any links between art, aestheticism and murder?
ELLROY: I made it up and what happened. And then subsequently, oddly, the writer named Steve Hodel who wrote the book Black Dahlia Avenger— he’s a former LAPD homicide detective– where he posits that his physician surgeon father did the job to imitate the art of Man Ray. It’s a quasi-factual book: it purports to be real, but it’s entirely theoretical and suppositional. But Black Dahlia Avenger made that connection. What a man [Ed Beitiks]. He’s a journalist. He’s dead now, may he rest in peace, Ed Beitiks told me. It was a very fine but still inadequate explanation of the horror visited upon Elizabeth Short that we’re trying to contain within some kind of reference, cultural reference, artistic reference of the horror inflicted upon her, and no level of detail can do that horror justice. And so the Victor Hugo The Man Who Laughs painting, which doesn’t exist, just came to me out of the blue. Someone told me about the painting as I was preparing the text to the book.
INTERVIEWER: One of the things that was interesting about Zodiac (the film) was the Zodiac case is still officially unsolved, whereas a lot of the issues of crime fiction is the theory that everything connects or everything should connect. How do you explore that question of how everything connects or does everything still connect in things like historical fiction and real life?
ELLROY: It certainly does in real life, and the genius of Zodiac, which I think is one of the greatest American crime films, is that nothing ever quite fits and the three men, the three obsessive men, you know the Ruffalo, Gyllenhaal and Downey characters, simply go on and endure in not knowing. And when they know to whatever extent that they know, I’m talking about the scene with Ruffalo and Gyllenhaal in the diner at the end. So what? The guy’s not killing anyone else, and he’s still out on the loose working in a hardware store. And I was haunted by the movie. It influenced a TV pilot that I’m working on now about, although it’s not about the serial killers at all it’s about the cops and the Hillside Strangler task force, and I give Zodiac in the composure and the stillness and the quietude of that movie every credit.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes it’s a great movie. I very much enjoyed it.
ELLROY: Very slow isn’t it? It’s just boom.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, it takes its time– and just great performances. I guess on the theory that everything connects, there’s now that quite famous line in your first novel Brown’s Requiem which, I’m gonna have to paraphrase because I don’t have the book right in front of me, when Brown is in Mexico and spots a suspect presumably by chance, he said ‘This was odd. It’s proof of the existence of God.’ With the other references to God in your books, they’re rather ambiguous: Lloyd Hopkins very often prays to a God he admits that he doesn’t believe in. Do you think there is a presence of God in your literature?
ELLROY: Yeah I do. I do and I’m a Christian. I’m not an Evangelical Christian, but God and religious spiritual feelings always guided me during the worst moments of my life, and I don’t for a moment doubt it. Blood’s A Rover is the fullest expression of people from 1968 to 1972 including a woman who’s a Quaker activist pondering the existence or non-existence of God and talking about the nature of belief. And I always like getting in asides and putting it out there and stopping just short of preaching.
INTERVIEWER: There’s been a lot of criticism of your work, in my eyes completely unjustified, but you know people like Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz, a kind of unusual history of Los Angeles, he seems to think the racism of the characters by extension makes the author or the text racist. How would you respond to criticism like that?
ELLROY: Well the racism of protagonists in my book, the actual men that you’re supposed to dig, is a casual attribute, it’s not a defining characteristic. And most people who decry racism, most PCers want racism distilled in that manner. It’s defining, thus it’s indicted, and so casual racist asides from Jack Vincennes or Bud White or Buzz Meeks or Danny Upshaw or Pete Bondurant or, you know, Dwight Holly or any of these guys flummoxes people. And I don’t write from grievance. I’m not out to change the world. I would hope that my being would serve to influence them in some minor way, but I got no beef. And I write stories that are contained within plot boundaries, circumscribed arcs of time. People can think what they like. And I don’t engage in criticism of other writers for a couple of reasons: one, I’m too competitive and I don’t go on panels for the same reason. I’m out to take over the show rather than have a collegial chitchat. And so criticism like the criticism Mike Davis levied at me just, while it bugged me in the moment, goes in one ear and out the other. There are people out there they live on grievance, and I can understand why, and I’ve just gotta say ‘God bless em.’
INTERVIEWER: Your portrayals of LA in the forties and fifties of course the narrative relies not just on either third person or first person but FBI transcripts, newspaper articles, sleazy Hush-Hush tabloids. Why the use of these, you know, other means of communication or telling the story?
ELLROY: To update the actions of the characters outside of their limited viewpoint. Entirely to further the story from a different viewpoint. In the case of White Jazz, to alleviate the burden of the extreme language and update the reader simply from the slant that the protagonists have not seen.
INTERVIEWER: Another thing that may be linked to communication is the portrayal of institutions: the FBI, the CIA, the Mafia. Some illegal, some governmental institutions, and in the Underworld USA, their interests often overlap. How do you render concisely, and where do you get this inspiration for these incredibly complex and convoluted institutions?
ELLROY: Part of it’s just having lived through the era and having soaked up a good deal of doublespeak. A lot of it’s instinct. I’ve never had the instinct to do a great deal of research. I want coherent facts in front of me as I like to extrapolate. A lot of this overlap of agency and obfuscatory talk and the jockeying of men, I’m talking about the political books, aligned with various bogus male authority derive from my reading of Libra.
INTERVIEWER: Yes Libra is a fascinating novel, and I just recently read Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Would it be an inspiration on The Cold Six Thousand?
ELLROY: No, I actually read it after I wrote The Cold Six Thousand. I also think it’s very, very pretentious and flawed. I think it’s a great, great novel, at times I thought this is the greatest novel I ever read. But God does he go on! Did you find that, he just goes on?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, definitely. It’s rather unusual some segments like the nuns and the…
ELLROY: The nuns go nowhere don’t they? I wanted it to stay with the baseball. Yeah and the baseball changing hands, and then it just kept going here, here, here and here and felt more and more undisciplined.
INTERVIEWER: I quite liked Lenny Bruce, the comic monologues which link the story. Would you say that Lenny Bruce and his kind of insult comedy, his highly and wildly adrenalised, neurotic schtick. Was that an inspiration for Lenny Sands?
ELLROY: No, I just liked the idea of Lenny as a name with no dignity. And I also think that Lenny Bruce was nowhere near as good as the monologues that Don DeLillo wrote for him. I mean DeLillo wrote those monologues. He didn’t say that shit. I guarantee you he did not say that shit. I guarantee you he was not that smart and omnivorously gifted. I mean he was a dope fiend who was entirely hit and miss.
INTERVIEWER: I guess a lot of what makes the monologues so fascinating in Underworld is that they’re caught in the moment, particularly around abut the Cuban missile crisis everyone thought they were gonna die in a nuclear holocaust and in the monologues he plays off that fear
ELLROY: The story American Tabloid is entirely inspired by Libra and DeLillo’s tripartite theory: Mob, renegade CIA, crazy Cuban exiles. It’s the line in the prologue ‘Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.’ And it’s so diligently about the inner lives of the assassins that it creates empathy. YOU WANT JACK DEAD. You want Jack dead because you dig these guys and you’re in their head. It’s only after the fact that I think most people, most people who liked the book think, Oh shit. Why do I feel such great empathy with those who killed John F. Kennedy?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes, that is unusual and the ending with the cancer victim Heshie. His death creates this empathy with the death of JFK as well.
ELLROY: ‘Don’t nod out Hesh. You don’t get a show like this every day.’ Pete tells him, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: The history of Los Angeles, it’s your birthplace it’s intensely romantic to you. You’ve lived in a fair few places in in the US: New York, Connecticut, Kansas City. Do any of those settings particularly inform or inspire your writing?
ELLROY: I’m from LA, and it’s a life sentence. As a fount of inspiration, I can write about LA wherever I find myself. LA was what I first saw and I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I have an instinct in this stage of my life to get to places that are a little bit more peaceful and we shall see.
Conversations with James Ellroy is available to buy on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Blogs of the Year 2012
I’m delighted that J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet has selected the Venetian Vase as one of the best blogs of 2012. It was only last year that David Mattichak (check out his blog here) nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award and now this! The Blog of the Year 2012 award was started by The Thought Palette and the rules are as follows:
1. Select the blogs you think deserve the “Blog of the Year 2012” Award.
2. Write a blog post and tell us about the blogs you have chosen–there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required–and “present” them with their award.
3. Please include a link back to this page, “Blog of the Year 2012” award at The Thought Palette, and include these “rules” in your post.
4. Let the blogs you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the “rules” with them.
5. You can now also join the Facebook group–click “like” on this page, “Blog of the Year 2012 Award” Facebook group, and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience.
6. As a winner of the award, please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award–and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar.
Chris Routledge and I started VV back in 2009 and it’s been a joy to do. I tend to blog about what research I’m doing at the moment, what I’m reading or just to plug my own books! It can be hard work coming up with enough material to keep people coming back to the site, but when they leave positive comments, subscribe, link back to my work or select VV for awards like this one, it makes the whole thing worthwhile. Sometimes I’m stuck for something to write about and then an idea starts to grow and the urge to write about it is too hard to resist. Another pleasure of blogging is that WordPress gives you excellent porn (stat porn that is). Most visitors to this site come from, unsurprisingly, English speaking countries, but VV also gets plenty of hits from France, Germany, Sweden, Spain etc. It’s nice to know that people from far afield visit the site. I also occasionally get hits from random countries like Saudi Arabia where, I imagine, crime and detective fiction is probably illegal.
I enjoy blogging, and as long as people find the site entertaining, I’ll continue to do it. No blogger will get very far unless he reads other blogs to keep up with what’s going on: it’s both a source of inspiration and a means of learning the craft. Below is a list of blogs which have delighted me that I’d like to name as ‘Blogs of the Year 2012’ (I’ve limited my selection to genre fiction/true crime related blogs, oh, and some of these blogs have already been named as Blog of 2012 but I’m sure they won’t mind winning twice!):
James Ellroy’s 1984 Interview for Armchair Detective
Regular readers will know that last year saw the release of Conversations with James Ellroy, a collection of interviews with the Demon Dog of American crime fiction which I edited for University Press of Mississippi. When I was editing the anthology one of my tasks was to contact writers and publications to obtain the copyright for interviews I wanted to go in the book. Many fans of James Ellroy admire his 1984 interview with Duane Tucker for Armchair Detective. It shows a young, ambitious crime writer with just a few novels to his name but with a clear vision and talent that in the years to come would make him one of America’s greatest crime writers. Here’s an excerpt in which the young Ellroy talks about his future writing plans:
Ellroy: I’m going to write three more present-day L.A. police novels, none of which will feature psychopathic killers. After that, I plan on greatly broadening my scope. How’s this for diversity: a long police procedural set in Sioux City, South Dakota, in 1946; a long novel of political intrigue and mass murder in Berlin around the time of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch; the first complete novelization of L.A.’s 1947 “Black Dahlia” murder case; and the reworking, rethinking, and rewriting of my one unpublished manuscript—“The Confessions of Bugsy Siegel,” an epic novel about the Jewish gangsters circa 1924–45.
As it happens Ellroy wrote two more ‘present-day L.A. police novels’ and only one of the other novels he mentioned came to fruition, but it would be one of his most powerful works of fiction – The Black Dahlia. Naturally I wanted this interview to be included in the book, and I contacted Duane Tucker to obtain copyright permission. However, Mr Tucker informed me that he had no recollection of conducting the interview and suggested Ellroy may have written it himself and used his name. Intrigued, I contacted Ellroy about this and received a reply from his assistant that ‘like his friend Duane Tucker, James has no recollection of the interview’. Ellroy and Tucker are close friends, and Ellroy dedicated his novel Killer on the Road to him. Armchair Detective is out of print now, but its editor in 1984 was the legendary Otto Penzler. I contacted Otto about the interview, and he was very adamant that a ‘fake’ interview would not have been published. His explanation was that Mr Tucker simply forgot about the interview as it has been nearly three decades. In the end I obtained the copyright without any difficulties, Otto was generous in offering me the copyright ‘absolutely free of charge’. The interview was published in the collection, and I addressed the authorship question regarding the Tucker interview in the introduction.
It’s not an unusual practice for authors to write their own interviews: Norman Mailer wrote one as a conversation between himself and a Prosecutor in court and the Guardian did a whole series on the subject back in 2010. However, in both those cases, the author is well established and the reader is on the joke. Could Ellroy have written the Tucker interview as a way of announcing himself to the crime fiction world in the early 1980s? As I say in Conversations with James Ellroy, there is no definitive proof that he did, but circumstantially there is enough to suggest that he may have done. For instance, throughout the interview the word icon is consistently misspelled with a k, ikon. This spelling has appeared in several Ellroy novels. Also, the introduction to the interview describes Blood on the Moon as ‘contrapunctually-structured’. This unusual term was coined by Ellroy to define how Blood on the Moon switches from the perspective of the detective to the serial killer and back again. Now if Tucker transcribed and wrote the interview, then why does it feature these conspicuous spellings which are so quintessentially Ellrovian? The more I read the interview, the more I found the interaction between Tucker and Ellroy to appear staged. However, I make no definite claims. It’s every researcher’s worst nightmare to be caught out, AN Wilson style, and there could just be a reasonable explanation for all this.
Still, it’s a fascinating interview, and perhaps it gives us even better access into Ellroy’s mind as a writer than we previously thought. So, if you didn’t get the Christmas present you wanted last month why not pop over to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk and treat yourself to a copy?
Skull and Bones
I had a wonderful time on Tuesday night speaking at St Bart’s Pathology Museum. I hope to post a video of the event when it becomes available. I particularly enjoyed meeting so many lovely people including, for the first time in person, crime writer, critic and social butterfly Mike Ripley:
Mike and I.
Johnny Stompanato and James Bond
Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner
In his review of Sir Sean Connery’s book Being a Scot, Euan Ferguson laments that Connery’s decision to write a book on the subject of Scottish identity, rather than a straight autobiography, means we will never hear his account of ‘the impossibly other-age story of his on-set headbutting of feared Mafia hitman Johnny ‘Stompy’ Stompanato’. Before he shot to fame as James Bond, Connery was making the film Another Time, Another Place (1958) with Lana Turner in London. Stompanato, an enforcer for Los Angeles’ Mob Kingpin Mickey Cohen, was Turner’s boyfriend at the time, and when rumours began to circulate of Connery and Turner having an affair, Stompanato flew to London and, so the story goes, threatened Turner and Connery with a gun, only to have Connery wrestle the gun from him and beat him up. A few months later, Stompanato was killed by Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane. Crane stabbed him to death, so it is believed, in a heated moment when he was threatening her mother. Connery was in LA at the time filming Darby O’Gill and the Little People and had to go into hiding as Cohen suspected he was involved in the luckless Stompanato’s death.
As Ferguson suggests, the whole fascinating, sordid little story sheds light on a bygone Hollywood era. But it was only when I was reading the memoir of another onscreen James Bond, Sir Roger Moore’s My Word is my Bond, that I discovered Moore had his own frightening encounter with Stompanato around the same time as Connery. Moore had been friends with Lana Turner ever since they starred together in the historical drama Diane (1956). While she was in London filming Another Time, Another Place, Turner invited Moore to a party where the confrontation happened:
As the guests arrived, Lana pinned a label on them, mine read ‘Roger Boy Knight’, in reference to Ivanhoe of course. One of the other guests was a rather swarthy individual who carried the label ‘Johnny Dago’. I actually saw very little of him during the evening, which progressed from drinks to food to more drinks and music to dance…
At some point, as the other guests started to thin out, Lana asked me to dance – not one of my talents I must admit. As I shuffled around the floor with her in my arms, probably standing on her toes several times, I felt a cold breeze on the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder to find ‘Johnny Dago’ leaning against the doorjamb and staring, unsmilingly, at Lana and me.
A little voice in my head said, ‘Roger it is time you went home!’ I didn’t need a second prompt. I excused myself and made for the door.
A few weeks later I read that ‘Johnny Dago’ – better known as gangster Johnny Stompanato, with whom Lana was romantically involved, having recently divorced Lex Barker – had been deported by Scotland Yard for having physically abused Lana, and for having entered the UK illegally using a passport in the name of John Steele. He had, I read further, also turned up on the set of Lana’s film and threatened Sean Connery with a gun. Sean wrestled the gun from him and decked him with a right hook: all very Bondian. Johnny was convinced that Sean was having an affair with Lana, also very Bondian.
Roger Moore and Lana Turner
Moore’s encounter with Stompanato was not quite as heroic as Connery’s, but it is interesting to surmise how Stompanato’s rage must have been building step by step, first in his encounter with Moore and later Connery. Both men would achieve massive success as cinema’s greatest hero – James Bond. As Moore said, the whole affair was ‘all very Bondian’. Moore also had another interesting encounter with a gangster, this time Mickey Cohen:
I once met Cohen at a nightclub where I had gone to see the great Don Rickles, a fantastic comedian who became known as the ‘master of the insult’. Gary Cooper was also there that night, and Rickles, having made a few cracks at Cooper and then dismissing me for being a pretty boy at Warner Brothers, turned his attention to Cohen. He called him a dirty hood, then – obviously thinking better of it – dropped on his knees and held his hands together in a prayer towards the gangster, saying that he was only joking and he loved MISTER Cohen SIR!
If you thought Connery was brave taking on Stompanato, then you’ve got to admit Rickles was pretty damn brave calling Cohen a ‘dirty hood’ to his face!
I’ve never read Being a Scot: it struck me as an acquired taste, but I would highly recommend My Word is my Bond as a fascinating insight into a life well lived. The only false note is Moore’s constant dismissal of his talents. Sir Roger’s self-deprecating sense of humour is part of his charm of course, but it does get a little wearing for those of us who enjoy his work.
Black Dahlia Lecture at St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum
Elizabeth Short
January 15th, 2013 is the 66th anniversary of the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s corpse in Los Angeles, which was the genesis for the most enduring mystery in LA’s history – the Black Dahlia murder. To mark the anniversary, I’ll be giving a talk titled ‘I Never Knew Her in Life: Cultural Depictions of the Black Dahlia Case‘ at St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum. I’m delighted that Carla Connolly has invited me to speak in such a beautiful, Grade II listed building, and I’m thrilled to be sharing a stage with Professor Peter Vanezis OBE who will be giving a talk titled ‘The Investigation of Dismembered Remains’.
Do come along if you have the chance. You can book tickets for the event here.
England, His England: The Sceptical Patriotism of John le Carre
John le Carré at the “Zeit Forum Kultur” in Hamburg on November 10th 2008.
By Krimidoedel
In his long career John le Carré’s (the pen name of David Cornwell) greatest achievement would probably be merging genre fiction with the literary novel. This is no mean feat. Most authors tend to be great at one but awful at the other, although to be fair le Carré’s one non-spy novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover was scathingly reviewed and probably deserved it. I have just finished reading The Tailor of Panama and found it to be one of le Carré’s best, and perhaps the best of his post-Cold War work. The plot concerns ex-con Harry Pendel, who has built himself a comfortable life as the owner of Pendel and Braithwaite, Panama’s most successful tailoring business. Pendel caters to a rich and powerful clientele, which includes His Excellency, the Panamanian President. One day Pendel receives an unwelcome visit from a young Foreign Office employee Andy Osnard. Osnard knows all about Pendel’s criminal past and wants him to spy for British Intelligence in the build-up to the American handover of the Panama Canal. But what plausibly can Pendel tell Osnard? Soon, he lets his imagination run away with him and events spiral wildly out of control.
This is le Carré’s most unique novel, as instead of the dour Cold War world of espionage, the tone is openly satirical and at times farcical, being heavily indebted to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It is a joy to read le Carré’s acerbic descriptions of the great and good English institutions. He seems both scathing of their failings and, nonetheless, strangely fond of them. This leads to some glorious comedy when the habitually lazy Osnard, an old Etonian, is trying to decide on a career:
The question was how. He had no craft or qualification, no proven skills outside the golf course and the bedroom. What he understood best was English rot, and what he need was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away. His first thought was Fleet Street. He was semi-literate and unfettered by principle. He had scores to settle. On the face of it he was perfectly cut out to join the new rich media class. But after two promising years as a cub reporter with the Loughborough Evening Messenger his career ended with a snap when a steamy article entitled ‘Sex Antics of our City Elders’ turned out to be based on the pillowtalk of the managing editor’s wife.
A great animal charity had him and for a while he believed he had found his true vocation. In splendid premises handy for theatres and restaurants the needs of Britain’s animals were thrashed out with passionate commitment. No gala premiere, white-tie banquet or foreign journey to observe the animals of other nations was too onerous for the charity’s highly paid officers to undertake. And everything might have come too fruition. The Instant Response Donkey Fund (Organiser: A. Osnard), the Veteran Greyhound Country Holiday Scheme (Finance Officer: A. Osnard) had been widely applauded when two of his superiors were invited to account for themselves to the Serious Fraud Office.
After that, for a giddy week he contemplated the Anglican Church, which traditionally offered swift promotion to glib, sexually active agnostics on the make. His piety evaporated when his researches revealed to him that catastrophic investment had reduced the Church to unwelcome Christian poverty. Desperate, he embarked on a succession of ill-planned adventures in life’s fast lane. Each was shortlived, each ended in failure. More than ever, he needed a profession.
‘How about the BBC?’ he asked the Secretary, back at his university appointments board for the fifth or fifteenth occasion.
The Secretary, who was grey-haired and old before his time, flinched.
‘That one’s over,’ he said.
Osnard proposed the National Trust.
‘Do you like old buildings?’ the Secretary asked, as if he feared that Osnard might blow them up.
‘Adore them. Total addict.’
‘Quite so.’
With trembling fingertips the Secretary lifted a corner of a file and peered inside.
‘I suppose they might just take you. You’re disreputable. Charm of a sort. Bilingual, if they like Spanish. Nothing lost by giving them a try, I dare say.’
‘The National Trust?’
‘No, no. The spies. Here. Take this to a dark corner and fill it in with invisible ink.’
Le Carré’s Cold War novels were partly constructed as a defense of British, or more broadly Western, values. He has never been the flag-waving type; indeed, as a man of the left he is critical of the English class system. Perhaps this dates back to his early life when his criminal father could swindle enough money together to have him educated at the Sherborne School and Oxford, but he was never, understandably, respectable enough to be truly part of this privileged world. And yet there is a real humour and fondness in his Englishness: in The Honourable Schoolboy a sex scene between Peter Guillam and Molly Meakin is described simply as ‘She surprised him with a refined and joyous carnality’. In an excellent profile of the author Peter Love, goes as far as describing le Carré as a ‘Radical Tory’. I think le Carré would probably shudder at the label. After all, in The Tailor of Panama Tories are described as ‘Empire-dreamers, Euro-haters, nigger-haters, pan-xenophobes and lost, uneducated children.’
Subtle.
Nevertheless, I think le Carré would comfortably describe himself as a patriot, and his more recent work has conveyed an aging man’s anxiety at the future direction of the country. In works such as Absolute Friends, it is clear le Carré does not regard the War on Terrorism as justified a cause as the Cold War and has become increasingly bitter about Britain’s ‘Special Relationship’ with the US. Now, anti-Americanism aside, perhaps this sceptical patriotism, combined with an affectionate and disarming portrayal of the flaws in our national character, is the best type to have.
British Politics Review
The British Politics Review is a Norwegian publication whose goal is to raise the interest and knowledge of British politics in Norway (although more people in Britain should read it too!). I was delighted to contribute an article to the latest edition, the theme of which is the connections between politics and literature. The issue includes a touching piece by Kaja Schjerven Mollerin on George Orwell, Charles Ferrell on British writers’ response to the General Strike in 1926, Juan Christian Pellicer on the politics of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Howard J. Booth on Rudyard Kipling and Imperialism and Alexander Beaumont on politics in contemporary British fiction. My piece is called ‘Tony Blair, Robert Harris and the ghost of a literary feud’.
You can read the whole issue here.
PD James’ The Private Patient
NHS Hospital Ward in 1973
Sometimes we start reading the works of authors for unexpected reasons. I decided to read some of PD James’ novels after coming across a rather grubby letter a certain writer wrote to the Society of Authors claiming Baroness James should step down as the President of that organisation as she voted for the government’s controversial Health and Social Care Bill when it was brought before the House of Lords (perhaps he thought she had “unsuitable views for a woman”?)
Interestingly, from 1949 to 1968 James worked as an administrator in the National Health Service and she has drawn upon this experience for several novels such as Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Mind to Murder. Although Philip Roth has just announced his retirement, stating that he has no more books left in him at the age of 79, it did cross my mind that Baroness James, now 92, published her most recent novel just last year and that her writing remains as sharp as ever.
The Private Patient (2008) explores the rather murky world of plastic surgery. It has a wonderfully grotesque and Dickensian cast of 
characters whom James spends more than the first hundred pages introducing before the appearance of her legendary detective and poet Adam Dalgliesh. Rhoda Gradwyn is a successful and unscrupulous tabloid journalist (the sort showcased recently by the Leveson inquiry). She checks into the fictional Cheverell Manor in Dorset, a magnificent country house transformed into a private clinic run by the arrogant and ambitious Dr George Chandler-Powell who is having an affair with the voluptuous Sister Flavia Holland, a nurse with a heart of stone. Gradwyn wants a scar, which she received from her abusive father during childhood, removed from her face: ‘Because I no longer have need of it’. Some of the staff are weary of a woman of Gradwyn’s reputation coming to the clinic, and, indirectly, Gradwyn contributes to the destruction of the clinic’s reputation when she is murdered within twenty-four hours of her successful operation. The newly engaged Commander Dalgliesh travels to Cheverell Manor to solve the murder case of a woman who was herself an enigma, thus the title carries a double meaning referring both to private healthcare (always a controversial subject in the UK as we have seen) and the mystery of the individual victim.
There are shades of Golden Age detective fiction in the novel as the characters are isolated in a remote setting and all possess plausible
motives for wanting to see the ruthless Gradwyn dead. The downside of this is that some of the characters’ portraits border on caricatures to the modern reader, such as the superstitious kitchen worker Sharon Bateman who is obsessed with the seventeenth-century burning of a supposed witch on the grounds of the Manor. Bateman was a bit too parochial for my tastes. However, this is more than offset by the eloquent and often moving prose which, used as I am to a more hard-boiled American style, never failed to impress. As evidenced in the scene where Dalgliesh first set eyes on Gradwyn’s corpse:
Dalgliesh knew that speculative gazes fixed on a corpse – his own among them – were different from the gazes fixed on living flesh. Even for a professional inured to the sight of violent death there would always be a vestige of pity, anger or horror. The best pathologists and police officers, standing where they stood now, never lost respect for the dead, a respect born of shared emotions, however temporary, the unspoken recognition of a common humanity, a common end. But all humanity, all personality was extinguished with the last breath. The body, already subject to the inexorable process of decay, had been demoted to an exhibit, to be treated with a serious professional concern, a focus for emotions it could no longer share, no more troubled by. Now the only physical communication was with gloved exploring hands, probes, thermometers, scalpels, wielded on a body laid open like the carcase of an animal. This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career’s accumulation of pity, anger and impotence.
Dalgliesh finally puts all of the pieces together, but with the solving of the case there always remains a void, as though the deeper mysteries of human existence can never be solved, not even by the most celebrated of detectives. And yet the final note is one of optimism, decent values have triumphed and life is worth living.
A superb novel.
