Joan Fleming, “Young Man, I Think You’re Dying” (1970)

This is one of the worst books I’ve ever finished. Never mind winning a prestigious award, I’m honestly baffled it was ever published. I would have given up about 30 pages in were it not for a sense of duty to my four loyal readers.

Where to start? Perhaps with the plot. We have two protagonists, both young men. To begin with, the focus is on Joe Bogey (really), an essentially good lad who is led astray by his essentially bad childhood friend, W. Sledge. You might ask why this friend is styled “W. Sledge” rather than Sledge, or Winston. It’s because an obscure point is being made about his rejection of his given name. I think. Anyway, Sledge takes Bogey along as his driver on a robbery that escalates to murder. The rest of the book is about whether Sledge will get away with the murder and how many more people he’ll kill trying to do so. The focus shifts from Bogey to Sledge, at first gradually, then rather sharply as Bogey totally vanishes from the story about two-thirds through.

There are two possible sources of narrative tension here. First: has Bogey vanished because Sledge has killed him? Well, no, definitely not: we have been given an exhaustive account of all that Sledge has been up to, so we know he’s not had time to knock off his pal (turns out right at the end that he’s fled to Ireland, where he’s happily farming potatoes, because that’s what they do in Ireland). Second: will Sledge get away with it? Well, no, definitely not: his imminent death is foretold by a fortune-teller well before it actually happens. You might think that source leaves room for uncertainty, but we’re firmly told that this fortune-teller really does have the gift of extra-sensory perception, so no doubts there.

OK, so no real mystery, suspense, or tension to speak of. Perhaps we’re here for an acute psychological portrait of the killer, a study of the mind of delinquent youth, perhaps some examination of the conditions that engender criminality? This is what the cover text promises: “a fitting comment on the Youth Underworld of today” (sic for the Weird Capitalisation). The trouble is, Fleming has absolutely nothing precise, telling, or nuanced to say about any of this. Much like in her previous Gold Dagger winner (“When I Grow Rich”, 1962), you get the sense that she is writing about a world that she has absolutely no knowledge of, inventing her characters and settings on the basis of stuff she’s read in the more lurid parts of her evening paper. The lads grew up and live in a London tower block (shudder). They are rude to their parents. They consort with people who might possibly take drugs and they sometimes wear jazzy clothes. Etc, etc.

Now, in “When I Grow Rich”, Fleming at least gave the impression that she liked her main character and her setting, and wanted to be kind. Here, it’s clear that she views the whole lot with utter distaste. The characters and action are constantly distanced from the authorial voice, held with tongs and a hankie over the nose. We’re often reminded that the way in which Sledge’s thoughts are being described are not the way in which he himself would formulate them, being too thick to do so. Words and phrases are carefully set off in quotation marks when Fleming wants to be clear that she herself would never use them, or think in the terms they suggest: “foul play”, “bird”, “luxury flat”. I suppose, even given this obvious contempt for the subject, insight could be attained into it, but there’s no insight here. We are, more or less, given to understand that the difference between Bogey’s essential goodness and Sledge’s essential badness is down to how their parents treated them as kids. Bogey’s parents are loving salt-of-the-earth types; his father is a sympathetic cripple (obviously). Sledge’s took the piss out of his red hair when he was young and like to gamble a bit. So obviously he’s going to end up killing old ladies and pushing his wife off a balcony. (by the way, she’s a pliant teenage Indian, whose “caste mark” Sledge is given to kissing as a good-luck charm. I haven’t got the strength to go in to the portrayals of the minor characters, but I imagine that you can imagine)

I could probably stop here, but I’ve not yet nailed all the ways in which this book is woeful. Structurally, it is exhaustingly repetitive. There are stretches of several pages where literally all that happens is that characters recount to each other the events thus far, of which the reader is already painfully aware. Conversations and scenes are essentially repeated, to no cumulative effect—for example, numerous encounters between Sledge’s parents and a host of wooden minor characters.

Within these tedious conversational scenes, the dialogue is appalling, written with no feel at all for how anyone actually speaks. At one point, Bogey starts talking to his parents in itemised lists: (a) my first point, (b), my second point (with careful parenthetical), (c) my third point, and thus I conclude. Now, OK, I do know people who might speak like that, but not if they’ve spent the last 50 pages talking a crude approximation of London youth slang. Meanwhile, the action, when there is any, is described in a weirdly distant, passive voice that drains it of any vitality or zest—especially when it’s then described again, to no greater effect.

But the writing is awful at more basic levels than this, and that’s really what makes me wonder how on Earth this was ever published as it is. The whole thing has an air of a slapdash first draft. There are “this will do for now” paragraphs:

“It was, in fact, less risky than he thought, life itself continually offering far more coincidences than fiction, such as the announcement in the obituary column of The Times of the deaths of two unrelated people on the same day, called, for instance, Kipper”.

This has nothing to do with the rest of the story. There are no obituaries and no Kippers. This is just Fleming plonking down the first coincidental thing that comes to mind.

There are absolutely terrible similes. At one point, Bogey encounters another unlikely minor character, a posh runaway, sleeping on the tower block roof. She’s wearing a coat belted tightly at the waist, “making her look like some enormous damaged wasp”. Bad enough, but then a page later, the runaway gets angry, stands up tall, and so “in her wild and woolly coat she looked bigger than the biggest possible wasp, a wasp more like some crumpled and injured sea bird, crash-landed on the roof”. I’m trying to retain a cool air in these reviews, but here I have to ask: what the actual fuck?

Individual sentences and parts of them are astonishing artefacts of prose. Some shabby pall-bearers are “shiny-seated as to trousers”. The tower block at night? “It was an imaginary tower of the ‘young-Roland-to-the-dark-tower-came’ kind of tower”. Sledge’s bright yellow trousers? “snazzi-pants”. There’s something like this every other page. Even the sentences that aren’t remarkable in this way are remarkable in their clunkiness, and at times in their ungrammatical structure. There are commas scattered randomly, there are rambling long sentences that lose the run of their clauses, there are perversely fussy interjections and constructions (till now, I had only ever seen “up with which he would not put” as the punchline to a weak joke about grammar).

It really, really is puzzling to me how any editor at all could read any of this and say, yes, sure Joan, this is great stuff, let’s get it out there. It’s fundamentally incompetent writing, from the top levels of structure and plot and theme down to the basic level of putting words together such that they make sensible sentences. I have no idea at all how this won the Gold Dagger. Only plus point: whatever is next can only be better.

Peter Dickinson, “A Pride of Heroes” (1969)

The first time that the Gold Dagger was won by the same person in consecutive years. Only happened once since. And not just the same person: the same protagonist, Jimmy Pibble, again defying his dreadful name, investigating a good old-fashioned country house murder.

The setting allows Pibble to indulge again his lively interest in architecture and also this time to show some fairly recherché knowledge of painting. It also seems to encourage Dickinson to let himself all the way off the leash. The last book, one got the sense that he was being polite, neutral and restrained as he negotiated the slightly tricksy subject matter he’d set himself. This one, with the setting and dramatis personae entirely and quintessentially English, there is no neutrality or careful handling of character. With the exception of Pibble, pretty much everyone important in this book is mad. We have mad old generals, mad retainers, mad businesspeople and mad daughters. They’ve all been driven mad by the second world war, which is not a thing that’s been in thematic focus in any of these books for a while, but provides sufficient explanation of the madness here.

The mad old generals own a big country estate. In an obvious parody of a trend of the time, they’re trying to coin it from American tourists by converting their estate into a sort of combined Olde Englande live-action experience and safari park. This allows Dickinson to introduce many useful bits and pieces early on: lions, a gibbet, antiquated firearms, a little train, a watermill. With pleasing adherence to the Chekovian maxim, all are employed later on in the book.

While it does teeter on the edge of excess, the book never quite falls over. At its core, it’s a kind of thriller-mystery cross, not quite a whodunnit as the target keeps shifting, but tricked out with the trappings of one anyway: clues, red herrings, all that. I found the solution a little unsatisfying, but I think that’s down to a predilection of mine rather than a fault of the book. It’s a highly enjoyable read, and again pleasingly short (barely 150 pages in my copy). Once I’m done with all these I might well chase up the rest of the Pibbles. Still a terrible name though.

Peter Dickinson, “The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest” (1968)

The cover of my copy carries an illustration of a dark-skinned person wearing some kind of grass skirt and an enormous stylised mask, and carrying a spear. The back cover trails “dark rituals . . . a high-class call girl, a dead New Guinea tribal chief, [and] a homosexual marriage”. Things aren’t promising, folks, and as the casual racial epithets pile up in the first few pages, it seems like they’re going to deliver on that failure of promise.

But actually, you know what, this is not bad—neither aesthetically nor morally. In fact, it’s pretty good. The plot is essentially a well-structured whodunnit, resolved satisfyingly, with the solution hidden in plain sight if you knew where you were looking. The protagonist, Jimmy Pibble, is cursed with an awful name, but doesn’t seem to have let it get to him: he’s a thoughtful and somewhat put-upon copper with a general air of decency and duty about him. He has a remarkably deep knowledge of architecture. The style is straightforward, somewhat writerly in places but never overly so, except perhaps in a stream-of-semi-consciousness passage towards the end. One nice touch: this is the first of a series, but there are scattered allusions to previous cases and incidents, in a tone of familiarity. This somehow makes the reader feel comfortably at home with the character and the setting. It’s a neat trick which I always appreciate when it’s pulled off well.

Hang on, though: what about all that lurid and dubious material with which we were threatened? Is that not all a rather large problem? Well, the blurb oversells; the book doesn’t titillate. It is true that the plot centres on a very small Papua New Guinean tribe that has wholly relocated to London under the care of an anthropological white saviour in the aftermath of the second world war. Now, this is a fantastical contrivance, though Dickinson manages to make it just believable enough. But it’s not in itself an abhorrent notion, and the main purpose of the contrivance is simply to provide the structure for the whodunnit: the closed list of suspects, the interlocking interests and motives. It is, again, true that there is plentiful material about the rituals and customs of the tribe, but this is all given a very straight description, as if the author has been immersed in and is dutifully reciting the most neutral anthropology he can find: there’s nothing much by way of exoticisation here. The “homosexual marriage” is between the white saviour (a woman) and a male tribe member; it’s homosexual by virtue of the white woman being treated as a man under the customs of the tribe. This is the sort of detail that I feel couldn’t possibly have been made up. And it is, again, true that there are rather more racial epithets than one might like, but they’re mainly deployed in a morally inert way in accordance with the insensitivities of the time. In fact, we’re carefully given a scene involving Pibble and some London locals whose sole purpose is to demonstrate that he, unlike them, is pure of any hint of racism.

All in all, this was pretty enjoyable, all the more so for being short (157 pages of admittedly rather small type). Which is lucky, because next on the menu is more Dickinson and more Pibble.

Emma Lathen, “Murder Against The Grain” (1967)

This was like a pint of lager after a moderate walk on a sunny day. Satisfying, functional, and welcome in the moment, with almost no lingering impression. I finished it a few days ago and I’m already struggling to recall details. It’s a fairly tight whodunnit leavened by light-comic digressions and irrelevancies, none of which get too out of hand. The tone is light and even without being whimsical. There are some annoying tics to the writing, but mostly it sails along smoothly enough. It’s the kind of book which you’d be happy to pick up for three quid second-hand for the purpose of whiling away a long train journey.

None of this is criticism. Smooth reads that will nicely fill a few hours without taxing you too much are great things. I am slightly baffled, though, that such a book could possibly have been the best crime novel published in 1967. Perhaps the prize-givers wanted a relaxing year after having to deal with Davidson last time round.

A slightly mysterious extra-textual coda: my (second-hand) copy of the book is a horrible object, very cheaply made, apparently typeset in Word. It seems that the rights to the Lathen books may have been bought by an unscrupulous pseudo-publisher, who is producing both these disgusting editions of the originals and apparently appalling new books under the Lathen name (one is described in the front matter of my book. It does indeed sound dreadful). This here blog gives more sordid background.

Lionel Davidson, “A Long Way To Shiloh” (1966)

Part of the fun of mystery novels is trying to work out puzzles, and I quite enjoyed chewing over a puzzle presented by this one: why do I dislike this so much?

There was an obvious answer: the protagonist and his portrayal. Our narrator, Casper Laing, is a loathsome sex pest, an irresponsible drunk, and a heedless narcissist. Now, you can’t write a character quite so flawed without noticing that you’re doing so, but Davidson apparently thinks that his creation is, overall, a good egg. At the crucial moments, Laing dashingly displays all the heroic virtues, and earns absolution for all his vices, none of which turn out to be too consequential anyway. The object of his affections (most often referred to as “the girl”) turns out to consider relentless badgering the very best of foreplay; his drinking results in nothing much more than chucklesome antics; and the headlong charges after his own interests deliver outrageous success more often than not. There is much to dislike here, but after some thought I concluded that this was a red herring. Too obvious. The answer had to be deeper.

Was it, perhaps, the plot? The plot is unarguably preposterous, a caper across the plains and deserts of Israel in search of McGuffins. Laing is a brilliant young professor of archaeology, or philology, or some such thing involving very old Middle Eastern languages (don’t worry, though—we’re assured early on that he’s the sexy “intuitive” kind of brainy, not the frumpy thinking-hard-about-stuff kind). He’s hired by people vaguely connected with the Israeli establishment, at first to find and interpret an ancient scroll, and subsequently to find and recover the treasure whose location the scroll reveals, all before the Bad Guys get there first. Escapades and shenanigans ensue: scrapes, escapes, fights, heights, chases, even a courtroom scene. It’s all deeply, deeply silly, a succession of set pieces tenuously connected. But dislikeable? Surely not. Who doesn’t like a silly pseudo-archaeological adventure, done well? (it’s easy to believe that George Lucas absorbed quite a lot from this book that later shaped Indiana Jones)

But wait: that’s it. Done well! Or, in this case, not. Here’s the thing: to successfully pull off this kind of caper, you need to dissuade the audience from thinking too closely about what’s going on. The writing needs to be fluent, pacey, and smooth: it needs to speed the reader along, not trip them up. And for far too much of this book, the reader is stumbling around. Furthermore, this is due to clearly deliberate style choices. It’s as if Davidson has taken far too much heed of two bits of common writing advice. First: “show, don’t tell”. Yes, fine, avoid clunky exposition, but not at the cost of leaving your descriptions so vague and oblique that the reader frequently has to pause to work out what the hell is actually being described. Second: “avoid cliché like the plague”. Again, fine, but if the alternative is convoluted syntax, dangling pronouns, pile-ups of adverbs and modifiers, and the occasional gobstopping thesaurus word (“inpissated”, anyone?) . . . well, you might be better off just laying out some boilerplate now and again. The whole thing reminded me somewhat obscurely of Beckett, and that would be a compliment if the work were one where a tricksy style ought to be to the focus, but in this case it’s definitely not a compliment.

I’ve analysed all this as if the problem is that Davidson is trying to be A Writer, rather than just writing. The other slightly worrying possibility is that he thinks he has faithfully recreated how brainy people actually speak and think. Whatever the cause, it’s all a bit of a shame, because when he forgets being A Writer and just writes, he can put a tense, gripping scene on the page, and he can manage evocative description of locale. I can see why a lot of people like this. But I didn’t much.

Ross MacDonald, "The Far Side of the Dollar" (1965)

This was the first Gold Dagger winner from anywhere but the UK, which struck me as so odd that I wrote to ask the CWA whether there was a nationality restriction prior to 1965. To my great delight, they actually wrote back. They said no.

A further oddity: I think this was the first winner to feature a well-established lead character (the previous winner introduced a character who went on to become established). The book is MacDonald's 12th of 18 featuring Lew Archer. I've read a couple of the others. In the early books, Archer is a fairly derivative Marlowe-style LA private eye in the Marlowe style. By this one, he has his own character and MacDonald his own style, out of Chandler's shadow.

Both character and style are, in a sense, minimal. Where Chandler's Marlowe is (for example) somewhat unsubtly erudite, Archer leaves the poetry stuff to other characters (mind you, MacDonald had a PhD in literature gained under the supervision of WH Auden, no less).. Where Chandler through Marlowe is given to some extravagant metaphorical flourishes, MacDonald through Archer employs only the most plain similes. There is a clear lineage, but also clear differentiation.

That said, this book offers a fairly Chandleresque proposition. A missing scion of a well-to-do family, a PI on the hunt, both scion and family gradually revealed to be harbouring secrets that can't go unrevealed if the case is to be solved. There is seedy LA underworld, there is a dame of sorts, there is a faint Hollywood connection—all the scenic elements you'd hope for.

The plot unravelled against that scenic backdrop is sufficiently gripping that you can overlook the fact that the middle third is essentially a sort of picaresque quest as Archer methodically follows lead A to find clue B from which to deduce fact C which provides lead D ... and so on. After all that, the parts are in place, and are gradually pulled together in a satisfyingly tight configuration, with just one piece held back to provide some last-page closure.

There is, arguably, more psychological depth and insight here than in Chandler; this is often said to be a way in which MacDonald managed to exceed as well as succeed his model. Mind, I do think that MacDonald's wife, Margaret Millar, is greater still at precisely showing human minds in all their particular peculiarities. MacDonald, incidentally, agreed that Millar was the better writer, and accordingly ceded to her the use of their real married name.

I am, frankly, a sucker for this kind of mid-century American detective fiction. It's not at all cosy—that's part of why I like it—but it feels somehow like sinking into something supremely comfortable, at least when it's done well. Perhaps it's partly the fact that, compared with the UK stuff I've read recently in this series, it's pleasingly, smoothly even in mood. There's none of the jarring shifts between whimsy and brutality you get in Keating, or Davidson, or the like. Humour is confined to occasional sardonic commentary, and otherwise you feel that Archer and his ilk will forever be cruising in unseasonal drizzle round the unglamorous fringes of glamourtown. I could happily drive around with them for eternity, too.

HRF Keating, "The Perfect Murder" (1964)

HRF Keating was a grand old figure in British crime writing of the later 20th century, in large part due to the success of the series inaugurated by this book. The setting is Mumbai; the protagonist is Inspector Ghote, who will go on to feature in 25 books or so, along with the odd film (notable that this is the first in this CWA series to feature a serial detective, though there's more to come).

Now, look, Keating is held in great affection by many, and no doubt Ghote is too, so perhaps the kindest thing to say is just that this book now feels very dated, without pursuing post-colonial critique too fiercely. I mean, and I wasn't in Mumbai in the 1960s, and for all I know it could be that every cliché of urban India was in fact true of the time and the place. And for all I know every Indian did speak some more or less schooled variant of the mannered English on the lips of all the characters.

I say "on the lips". We also get a fair amount of this stuff when the free indirect authorial voice comes close to the Inspector's thoughts. When the voice is distant, it often adopts a sort of light-comic Wodehouse tone that seems to have been almost a default mode for crime writing around this time. I suppose a lot of people like it, but it sets my teeth on edge, and I'm glad we now have a sub-category for the kind of stuff likely to be written in this style ("cosy crime") so that I can safely ignore it.  

Behind the Indian hokum and the bantering nonsense about traffic, there's a fairly decent formal structure to this story. A pretty classic locked-house deal: small circle of suspects, all with prima facie motive for the central crime (assault that might become murder). It ticks along OK without really getting going; I realised three quarters of the way through that, although I had been told that the suspects all had motives, I couldn't really grasp what they actually were. The twist at the end is predicated on your having paid a bit more attention than I did.

Overall: OK, but I'm not going to rush to read the other 24.

John Le Carré, "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1963).

This is the first of the books in this CWA winners sequence that was a re-read for me. You'll no doubt know already that it's a very highly regarded book by a very highly regarded author, though opinions seem to differ about why he should be highly regarded—that is, which of his works reward sustained attention, and which are negligible. "The Spy", though, is almost always placed in the former category. A quick search will find many appreciations far more accomplished than what I'll offer.

The story centres around Alec Leamas and his role in a complicated plot hatched by the British secret services to protect their interests in East Germany. Leamas himself is somewhat in the dark about what the plot and his role in it is. For the sake of those who might be reading this before reading the book, I won't say much more about that. But it is worth noting how the story coheres with the storytelling. Part of what keeps the novel tense is that we are mostly uncertain what the plot is or what the interests being protected are. Elisions, ellipses, and doubts abound; at no point can we rely totally on what we're apparently being told about what's going on; we are repetitively forced to revise our understanding as the solid ground shifts; and yet the reader doesn't feel manipulated or cheated, and this in a novel that is entirely concerned with manipulation and cheating. That's a very difficult trick, convincing the reader to trust you while constantly betraying them.

The other notable thing about the novel is the air of absolute amorality. Le Carré was surely not the first author to present espionage as essentially a high-stakes game among equally compromised players, but the point here is that even the players seem to acknowledge this. There are some half-hearted attempts at justification of deaths and lies and accommodation of evil in pursuit of further goals, but the sense is that those goals are merely further, not higher. We go on because we have started and we don't see how to stop.

The authorial backstory inclines us to take this as an accurate account of how things really stood in early Cold War spying. Le Carré was himself a secret agent, and so seems to be a reliable storyteller in some respects, however much his technique depends on unreliability. There's much to question about how reliable he is—the things he often said about the genesis of this novel are flatly contradicted by evidence. One thing that does ring true is his claim that he wrote, or least edited, in a rush. This is because the chronology of the novel makes absolutely no sense. This should actually matter greatly for its success, given that the story really revolves around the pedantic recapitulation and confirmation of chronologies and their details. It's a mark of how good the storytelling is that it doesn't matter. (one might say the same about the fact that there's an important role for a gullible young woman whose gullibility is arguably exaggerated to a point of implausibility)

I could dig deeper into analysis of the book, but as I mentioned, others have excavated more ably, so I'll just end by saying that the minor weight of my opinions is added to that of those others: this is a properly great novel.

Joan Fleming, "When I Grow Rich" (1962)

You might fear that a 1960s middle-class English writer setting a novel in Istanbul would be prone to the worst kind of exoticising description of the city, the people, the religion, even the stray cats. In this case, you'd be absolutely right.

It's an interesting question whether Joan Fleming ever visited Istanbul (actually, it's not, but let's pretend). The case against: everything said about the city (etc) is said in a plodding, didactic manner that suggests diligent book-learning being recited. The case for: everything said about everything is said in a plodding didactic manner. We can't get through a description of a character building a rockery without a little digression on the formation of basalt. The dialogue is similarly appalling. You'd think it was an insulting characterisation of Turkish people to make them all so windy and stiff, were it not for the fact that the English characters are also so windy and stiff.

So that's the setting, the style, the writing. Is there something in the characters? Well, the principal villain is a one-time member of the Sultan's harem (I kid you not) sunk into old-age avarice, bitterness, and vanity. She gets angry a lot. She cackles. She is called Madame Miasma (again, I kid you not). She is attended in her schemes by a eunuch, also from the harem, who is secretly in love with her (once more, or perhaps twice more I kid you not). I will not describe the other characters.

Oh, the plot? It's barely there, and the few elements it has are laid out in front of us over and again: foreshadowed, occurrent, recalled. It's hard to tell what the central mystery, suspense, or drama is even meant to be.

All in all: a stinker. Hard to see what the 1962 prize-givers saw in it; remarkable to see that an Ambler novel came second to it; dismaying to see that there's more Fleming coming up in 1970. Perhaps she spent the decade learning how to write. But let's not worry about the far future now, because it's 1963 next, and this one is a stone-cold classic.

Mary Kelly, "The Spoilt Kill" (1961)

Each year's prize is no doubt influenced by the year before's, but more than influence, there's a faint sense of actual trolling here. The 1960 winner involved faked industrial espionage, rendered airily and unconvincingly; the 1961 winner involves real industrial espionage, rendered in convincing, concrete detail. I learnt a lot more about pottery than I had expected, and ended the book with a faint desire to buy fine china. The espionage strand of the plot is woven with with a murder strand, with the relation between the two unclear for a fair part of the book. Both strands are of fine quality, resolved satisfyingly. Characters are well-written, often identifiably human, not just contrivances of the plot. The Staffordshire setting is terrific. The final few pages are really excellent, downbeat in a very unexpected and very welcome way.

So all in all, you can see why the novel won an award, and it's got a lot going for it. But the accolades in  the introduction to my copy—"masterpiece", "one of the finest British stories about a private investigator"—strike me as rather hyperbolic.

The first point of demerit is the writing, which has a tendency towards the purple and some peculiar passages in which the author seems to exhaustively test out a stylistic device---for example, three pages where five of or eight paragraphs begin with a single-word sentence. The narration is first-person, and I suppose one could attribute all this to the clever capture of a slightly pretentious voice, but I rather think that the author quite likes their narrator, and reckons the prose does him a favour. I'm not sure it does.

The second point of demerit is the relentless appraisal of women's appearances, by the narrator, other men, and other women. It's not just that they're all evaluating looks all the time; it's also that they're all drawing ridiculous inferences from appearance to character. There's even a bit of meta-judging, where the narrator makes judgements of some other men's characters on the basis of their judgements of women's appearances (and whether their judgements accord with his). I suppose this again could be very clever writing: a woman accurately capturing the way in which male gazes imposed verdicts on women in that time and that place, in the cause of undermining the power of that gaze. I don't much doubt the accuracy of the description, but I do doubt the emancipatory intention; again, the author seems to like the narrator, and it's the narrator whose judgements we hear about most often, in most detail. Also, women get blamed for a lot of things in this book. Really a lot.

All in all, I think this one is excellent if you're prepared to credit the author with a sophisticated dislike of the narrator, and fairly good if you're not. I'm not.

Lionel Davidson, "The Night of Wenceslas" (1960)

The basic plot of this novel involves a fairly stupid young man who ends up shuttling back and forth between the UK and Prague, engaged in what he's been told is mild industrial espionage, but turns out to be rather more serious spy business. There's the same shift from light comedy to mortal danger that we saw last time with Ambler, though this time more abrupt; there's again the shadow of Greene ("The Third Man" gets an oblique nod).

Now, It must be quite hard to write sympathetic stupid characters. Easy enough to write total chuckleheads, I suppose, characters to laugh at; hard to write someone who's daft enough to make the wheels of the plot turn, but appealing enough for the reader to hope the wheels turn in their favour. The trouble here is that the protagonist is not sympathetically stupid. He is really, really dumb, and not from some sort of lack of schooling or deficiency, just from blithe carelessness, selfishness, failure to spot the very very obvious. He keeps doing very clearly stupid things. This is a problem because, as one stupid move follows another, as his stupidity gets him into scrapes and out of them again and into them again, the reader loses their senses of verisimilitude (surely nobody could be this dumb?) and involvement (if someone is really this dumb, I don't think I care what happens to them), and so doesn’t really care by the time he finally finds some gumption and rescues himself from the worst of the scrapes.

I should, perhaps, note that the name of this stupid protagonist is Nicolas Whistler, which is uncomfortably close to home, which might be why I take so much exception to his rank idiocy. But anyway, even if you can overlook that, there's also some big gaping holes in the plot. Nobody likes pedantic exposition, and nitpicking complaints about tiny gaps in the machinery are tedious, but here there really is a sort of authorial shrug at a couple of pretty crucial moments.

Furthermore, once you're sufficiently irritated by the stupid protagonist and the vacant plot, there's plenty else here you can get irritated at. For example, this is a book in which no bosom goes unnoticed or undescribed---a litany of descriptions irritating in their frequency, their obtrusiveness, and their vague insufficiency (what exactly is a "bomb-like" breast? Are we talking a sort of classical spherical thing with a long fuse, or one of those sleek pointy ones with fins, or perhaps something more like a grenade? The niche campaign group Perverts for Precision demands answers).

All in all, I was not impressed by this one. I'm not sure how much you should trust my judgement—plenty of other people seem to really like it—but I note with mild dismay that I have two more Davidson books to look forward to in this series.

Eric Ambler, "Passage of Arms" (1959)

My copy of this one is in a Penguin Modern Classic edition, with that seductive eau de nil spine. Maybe I'm just being impressed by the cover, but I think this is the first of the run that I would recommend even to those without much interest in the genre.

If it's not the cover, it might be the setting that's getting to me. We seem to have spent a lot of time recently in dingy, straitened parts of southern England, and so it's a pleasant change to be instead in the South China Sea in the post-war era. I really don't know as much about this time and place as I might, but the picture painted here is of a febrile set of countries, bubbling with revolutionaries of various kinds, jockeying for political and territorial position to take advantage of the inevitable withdrawal of British colonial power—but, importantly, safe and exotic enough to allow enterprise and attract tourists.

The plot concerns the arms of the title: an abandoned cache of weapons, discovered by a lowly Indian clerk, Girija. He wants to sell them. He needs a middleman, for which he enlists a fairly shady family of Chinese businessmen with connections around the Sea. The need a dupe to launder the arms and present them for sale to a group of guerrillas, for which they enlist an overconfident American cruise-tourist and his wife. The plot follows the progress of this convoluted deal. 

There are two things that are done wonderfully as the plot unfolds, and these are the things that lead me to recommend the book widely. The first is structural. The book starts with Girija and ends with him, but in between the focus shifts further and further out from him, towards the Chinese and then the Americans, and then back again in the opposite direction. It's as if the book slowly takes in a big breath of air, holds if for a while, and lets it out again. It's a very, very neat structural trick if you can pull it off, and Ambler does.

His other neat trick is tonal. We start in a faintly comic mood, and we barely notice as things become more and more serious, until they're suddenly somewhere close to horrific. A lot of books (and perhaps even more films) aim for this shift, but don't manage it nearly as well; you can feel the wrench as the ratchet is turned. This is much more subtly done, more like that poor frog you hear of in the slowly heating water.

You can see from these two things why Ambler was highly regarded in his time and considered worthy of Penguin reissue today (my copy is from 2023, though whoever had it before me gave it quite some reading). Both Greene and Le Carré are mentioned in the blurb, and you can also see how he stands somewhat in between the two—the righteous adventuring of Greene dissolving slowly into the amoral stalemate of Le Carré (perhaps that's unfair. I really should re-read some of the tougher Greene).

One might worry that the combination of settings, peoples, and author (very much British, very much 1950s) would lead inevitably to a degree of stereotyping, if not outright racism, sufficient to spoil all the good things of the book. But I think Ambler still gets away with it. There certainly is national stereotyping, some vital to the plot, some not (there's a French character who seems only to be French to afford an opportunity to poke fun at the French), but it's not egregious for the most part, and it's probably the Americans who come off worst. In fact, at a couple of points, there is some subtle stuff about who is offended by what that shows at least some authorial awareness of how the sausage is being made. I even wonder if one could read the book as allegorical: it seems plausible that the preoccupations and preferences of the various characters are synecdochical for their nations' policies and politics in the region, though I would need to do a fair bit of reading to substantiate that hunch.

Anyway, the point is, one could find offence here if one were looking for it, but one can also certainly find a very well-structured, tonally assured, tightly written book. I enjoyed it very much and I certainly intend to read more Ambler. Give it a go if a copy comes your way.

Margot Bennett, "Someone From the Past" (1958)

I'm going to spoil the ending of this one to some degree. I'll try to say some general things first, so you can tell whether you care about the spoiling.

This is another novel reissued as a British Library Crime Classic—just this past year, 2023. Margot Bennett was the first woman to win the Gold Dagger (though there was at least one woman on the shortlist every previous year). She never wrote another crime novel after this one, mostly turning instead to writing for television. Did she quit on a high?

In some ways, yes. The book is a fairly successful marriage of the classic form of the whodunnit with some then-contemporary psychological content. As in the previous winner, the psychologies of the main characters are foregrounded and examined as putative explanations for their actions—murder is more than base motive. But, unlike with the previous winner, there is a genuine, well-executed mystery at the core of the novel: which among four suspects, all complete shits of varying consistency, murdered the protagonist's friend? 

The protagonist is a youngish woman, Nancy, who is a writer for magazines. Her dead friend is Sarah. The four suspects are all terrible, terrible men with whom Nancy, Sarah, or both have romantic pasts or presents. I say "romantic". This feels like a euphemism here, since none of the relationships described are obviously loving, in the sense we should hope to use that word. 

The book works, insofar as it does, because the four male suspects are all convincingly bad. One of them is actively trying to frame Nancy for Sarah's death, and going some way to succeeding. She doesn't know which of them it is, and the police are on to her (not without reason—she doesn't always help herself). Meanwhile, all four terrible men take turns at being personally horrible to Nancy, each in their own entirely believable way. So we believe that any of them could be capable of the crime, and we don't know which it is until the last few pages. This engaging, well-wrought plot  is written up tightly enough to create tension, with adept use of flashback to fill in the characters. It's all helped along by snappy, funny dialogue; the introduction by Martin Edwards speculates that Bennett identified with Nancy, and she certainly gets all the very best lines.

There are two reasons why I'm not entirely sold on this book. The first is that it is so appallingly, irredeemably squalid. Perhaps this is exactly as it was for young women writers in the 1950s, but oh dear, the grime and the stink and the horrible, horrible men make you itch as you read. This is an achievement, in a way, but not a pleasant one. The second reason is more serious, and involves the spoiler. After the mystery is solved, after all is settled, after we know which of the shits is a murderer, after we and Nancy know they are all shits: after all that, she falls swooning into the arms of the worst of the shits, the one who has treated her most appallingly, whose only positive quality appears to be his innocence of murder.

Now, there is a question of how seriously this ending should be taken. It's possible that Bennett meant it as a sort of tragic coda—that she sees the obvious problems with the proposition, and sees Nancy as deserving of them, as no better than she ought to be. But I don't think this is so. I think this is meant to be a consummate, cheering resolution. To modern sensibilities, it is certainly not cheering, and really not believable—in fact, close to incomprehensible. It mars what is otherwise a very fine book, worth reading for its plot, its dialogue, and its itchy squalor.

Julian Symons, "The Colour of Murder" (1957)

Everyone in this book is awful, pathetic, or both. Not terribly so: just ordinarily awful, mundanely pathetic. And I suppose not quite everyone. There's a barrister whose only character flaw is a measure of egotism, and a likeable prostitute. But every other character, minor or major, is composed in a rebarbative key. It's quite an achievement to make even the brief walk-on parts believably unpleasant.

The narrative centres on John Wilkins, a minor-league fantasist in denial about his drinking problem. His fantasies and his drinking owe much to his grasping, social-climbing wife, May, and his overbearing, meddling mother. Their intertwined lives induce an atmosphere of intense entrapment. The reader is given to wonder how many similar miserable situations have been avoided by the liberalisation of the divorce laws and the loosening of stifling middle-class social norms since the 1950s. If John and May could just have separated painlessly, and acceptably to all, none of the plot happens.

Since they can't separate, the plot happens. John's fantasies lead him into a tangle of lies and a delusional semi-affair with a young woman; his lies, along with his drinking and concomitant blackouts, contribute to the credibility of the murder case against him when she's found dead. The book has two parts. The first is a long pre-trial interview between John and a psychiatrist. He was irrationally involved with her. He may have killed her. He doesn't know. He can't remember. The second is the trial itself. An epilogue seems intended to cement the ambiguity surrounding the murder case, but rests on a coincidence so far-fetched that the ambiguity instead collapses. The book might have been better without it.

The Colour of Murder was reissued as a British Library Crime Classic in 2018, so it wasn't just a prize-winner in 1957; it is esteemed today. Both accolades deserve inquiry.

Why did it win a prize in 1957? Perhaps because of the forensic focus on the states of mind of the central suspect. The introduction to the BL edition highlights this as a novelty at the time, and certainly in comparison to novels from the "Golden Age" of crime novels, there is considerable depth, nuance, and plausibility to the psychological characterisation. This is mostly in the first part of the book. The trial part is nicely done, and I might have appreciated it more had I not recently read Grierson's similar, better effort. The introduction claims that Symons uses this part to "explore the nature of justice", but I can't say I found much exploration worth considering.

Symons' reputation in the world of crime fiction now rests mostly on his history of the genre, Bloody Murder, rather than on his own novels. So why reissue this one (and one other, The Belting Inheritance)? While it certainly has merits as a novel, it's also fascinating as a social document of the 1950s. The introduction notes this, but in relation to concrete facts about the prevalence of "television parties" and racism. I was more struck by what the book tells about the claustrophobic, small-minded, straitened nature of lower-middle-class 1950s life: among other elements, how painfully important it was to cleanse oneself from any taint of unsuitable social origins or associations, and how temptingly easy it was to re-associate oneself to disastrous effect. If you ever want to read a novel that makes you both aware and glad that the not-too-distant past really is the past, this is one to consider.

Edward Grierson, "The Second Man" (1956)

Several of these early winners are out of print. My copy of "The Second Man" is a yellowed, liver-spotted hardback. It smells of dusty libraries and dingy storerooms. It's delicious.

The book itself is less redolent of its times than you might fear from a synopsis, though it still has a distinct 1950s air. The central character is Marion Kerrison, a barrister newly arrived in an unnamed northern town that is clearly Sheffield and has clearly never seen a woman wearing a barrister's wig before. You might expect this setup to lead inevitably to her game conquest of the man's world, allowing the author displaying their impeccable egalitarian credentials—after all, would you premise your novel so if you were going to do your heroine down? And expecting this, you might be wary, because often what looked impeccably egalitarian in the 1950s is apt to seem rather cringeworthy today.

But Grierson doesn't actually seem that interested in his clash-of-genders premise, nor in proving that he's on the right side. The novel is narrated in the first person by a chambers colleague of Kerrison. This is a neat distancing trick that proofs against posterity; we don't quite know whether the condescending stuff about women's emotional nature and so on is due to the author or the character. But it also distances the narrator from the protagonist. Kerrison very sensibly avoids the boy's clubs of the lawyers' mess and such, and so is often absent as the narrator drinks loyal toasts, passes port, and sinks snooker balls. The narrator positions himself between his overtly reactionary colleagues and those who fall over themselves to offer patronising support. He doesn't seem to care too much; nor does the author.

So what does the author care about? Not the central plot: there's some mystery, but we're effectively told whodunnit early on, and the remaining howdunnit questions aren't especially taxing. Not the quarter-hearted romance subplot, which really seems to be there due to a vague sense of novelistic necessity. Rather, and rather nicely, he cares about the practice of the law: the conduct of trials, the nuances of cross-examination, day to day life in chambers and courts.

Given that Grierson was a barrister who wrote fiction and crime novels on the side, perhaps this isn't too surprising, but it's still striking, and strikingly well done. The book is excellently paced, with a few short chapters leading up to two long ones that describe in great detail the trial at the novel's heart. After these, a few more short chapters wrap things up briskly. It's really those two central chapters where the interest of the novel lies. They are very good, written with verve, dramatic without melodrama, the obvious product of deep involvement with what's being described. They're worth reading the book for. The defendant at the trial is also a well-drawn character, perhaps better drawn than the protagonist or narrator.

Very well. A good, competent, engaging legal mystery. But why exactly did this win an award? Was competent and engaging good enough in 1956? (I suppose reading the other books shortlisted that year might provide a clue, but life's too short) Was the award jury swinging back towards the familiar certitudes of law and trial after the dalliance with ethical thinking the year before? Hard to say, but I'd more happily read further Grierson than further Graham.

Winston Graham, "The Little Walls" (1955)

Why would you start a literary prize for genre fiction? Publicity, obviously. But why would you want publicity? Because you're confident that your genre has reached a point of maturity from which proselytising might reap converts? Or because you're quietly anxious that the genre is ailing, and the congregation might dwindle without reinvigoration?

As the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, "The Little Walls"  supports the latter speculation. It's an anxious novel. The most enduring work of Its author, Winston Graham, is the series of Poldark novels, inspiration for multiple Sunday-night-sexytimes TV adaptations. But he turned his hand to various forms and genres, and he certainly had a keen sense of the competition in the crime genre; through his characters, he ventriloquises jabs at private dicks "who risk their lives and their virtue for ten dollars a day and expenses" and "literary Catholics" (apparently the only case in which religion is still fashionable).

Considering the award it won, the book hasn't much crime in it, nor much mystery. It's a manhunt and a womanhunt combined, and both are essentially solved two thirds of the way through the book. So what's left? For the hunted man and the hunting man to fight over the hunted woman, as a direct reckoning over past sins and as a proxy for a clash of values. 

Ah yes, the clash of values. The book's action is accommodated to a battle-of-ideas framework in which a dogged Christian morality incorporating a firm belief in right and wrong is set against an anarchist live-as-you-will tendency very loosely inspired by a mix of Freud and Nietzsche. This framework is somewhat laboriously constructed from elements of set-piece dialogues, reconstructed diary entries, and the protagonist's private musings. No prizes for guessing which side wins. It wins by winning the woman, who (perhaps unsurprisingly, but not pleasingly all the same) seems to lack much by way of agency, and a fair bit by way of character---though she definitely has a physical appearance. Another period trope to tick off the bingo card is a disabled person whose disability is quite explicitly presented as an outward marker of inner corruption.

All the same, there's enough here to see why it might have won an award; it's not badly written, the bloviating about the nature of morality gives it an air of superiority over the mere genre stuff, there is some interest in the plot and some nice observations of particularities of feeling, thought, and action. Several minor characters seem superfluous, but do allow the author to efficiently invoke an atmosphere and a milieu.

This last seems faintly incredible from 70 years distance. The book is set in a post-war Europe in which it is very possible for a member of the monied, educated upper middle class to arrange personal meetings with senior police officers in multiple countries, to turn up in Capri confident of ingratiation into a society circle, to all in all act as though the world is very much at their command. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I suppose it's not unbelievable. The population was much smaller, and the percentage of the population occupying this particular social stratum was smaller. Perhaps a person within that stratum did indeed get to have the doors opened for them by other members of it.

To be more generous about the ideas, the book's atmosphere also imbues a sense that this is a Europe shaken by the war and the Holocaust, sitting loosely now on its moral foundations, where a kind of ethical anarchism might really be an appropriate intellectual stance, not just a convenient excuse for knavery. In a Europe like that, one might feel the need to have one's protagonist shore up the foundations, and to do it with something besides brute force. All the same, it's hard not to conflate the book's anxiety about the moral state of Europe with the CWA's anxiety about the state of the crime novel—as if it's time for the genre to reflect on its own moral state, and to do so through introspective reflection. I'm all for introspective reflection, but one can have too much of a good thing.