ASK THE READER

Brian Nellist

Q 

I go to Stratford regularly and read George Eliot and Anne Michaels for CE classes but for my own pleasure I used to read John le Carré and nowadays it’s John Grisham; in those complicated plots I forget everything else. Yet this is condemned as escapism. What’s wrong with that?

A 

Calm down; don’t be so defensive. From what you have just said I rather suspect that you yourself could hazard a guess at two things that are slightly askew. It is not that you refer to Shakespeare as though he is a medicine to be taken for one’s mental health (‘regularly’) which is true in a way but rather that you are limiting the meaning not of Shakespeare but of pleasure. I am reminded of the use of the term by Wordsworth who is the great apostle of its gospel. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads he credits poetry with only a single limitation, ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’. The harm comes from trivialising the word, he believes, because in essence man is a creature who seeks pleasure; ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.’ Pleasure always involves the satisfaction of desires, so the argument goes, and the deepest pleasure must be given by what meets our profoundest, not our most immediate, needs. Hence for Wordsworth, surprisingly, all acts of sympathy, even with those in intense pain, whether in literature or in life, are grounded in pleasure because they embody our need for kinship, fellow feeling, pride in human endurance. Of course, we should not pervert this into pleasure in suffering itself but grant that in its acts of understanding literature encourages a tenderness and fineness of feeling that fulfils a need in us; ‘wherever we sympathise with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure’. So, feel free to acknowledge that Stratford and Middlemarch, without any juvenile sense of schadenfreude, are also sources of pleasure.At the moment you are turning literature into hard slog for which you compensate by guilty weekends of holiday reading. As you know, the greatest pleasures demand effort as much as the greatest anything else. It is natural if you enjoy playing bowls that the pleasure will be increased if you work seriously at your game.

But the second thing, from what you say, that you are not taking seriously enough is that word ‘escapism’. To get out of gaol is generally classed as beneficial to the prisoner. All literature in its attempt to make sense of things, even in expressing the fear they make no sense at all, is to that extent a liberation from the cell of non-meaning. We use this accusation too easily. I note from the dictionary that Punch (!) in December, 1939, significant date of course, thought the reading of the big Victorian realist novel an ‘escape’; ‘Many a publisher has had the good idea of advising you to escape thoroughly by way of an eighthundred-and-fifty page novel about family life in the Victorian era.’ Yet I remember after World War II being told by someone from GCHQ (or whatever it was called then) that the World’s Classic Trollope had preserved for him a sense of moral normality that very directly helped to sustain a belief in what he was doing.

But I am evading the issue now, I agree, because your point concerns not the use to which we put books that are ambitious in their aims but what used to be called light literature, a branch of the entertainment industry, to be dismissive of it. Those complicated plots by which you ‘escape’ are often the means by which the sense of friends and foes are identified with good and evil but by complicated routes to make the belief tenable to our sceptical minds, so that their identities become fluid and there are crossovers between the categories. The modern thriller has to complicate the sense that judgement was once a lot easier yet the resolution of the plot, however tentatively, gives you the reassurance that in the end the balance works out on the right side. Popular literature is often close to myth in the clarity with which it will work out its resolutions and a part of your guilty delight in it, I suspect, is the desire for an easier life than more complicated literature allows. Fairy stories do that, of course, and John Grisham may be closer to ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ than to Middlemarch but that does not make it necessarily suspect. Behind the excitements of the Lord of the Rings, for example, we notice that Sauron is destroyed less by action than by suffering, including Frodo’s own corruption, that indeed fighting is part of that corruption and that unless it is registered as suffering there is no value in the fight. When we read quickly for plot and event we do not necessarily register these things but that does not mean they are not being noted somewhere inside us or that we do not feel refreshed in consequence.

Yet if it is a pleasure sometimes to read quickly, be conscious that you may have to do that because otherwise not enough is going on to hold the attention and also to avoid being irritated by how much better you could have expressed it yourself. Inattention in the reader can begin as an excuse and end as a habit; take care that you do not blunt your capacity for still greater pleasure, Paradise Lost or Women in Love.

(Remember: you can purchase all of these books, plus many others, through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.)

The Big Sweep

Loitering in Lime Street train station,
With newspaper and white carnation,
I was suddenly aware
Of a lady with pink hair
Approaching in great expectation.

At twenty-past five I duly set off for Lime Street with a newspaper tucked under my arm and a white carnation skewered ludicrously through my coat. Jen and Lee came along to help (and to laugh) and went in ahead of me to reconnoitre the ground and make sure I wasn’t about to be mobbed. I wasn’t. In fact, after loitering without intent for a couple of minutes, I was starting to think the whole thing might be a complete waste of time. But then – to my surprise and relief – a lady with bright pink hair looked very pleased to see me (first time I’ve been able to say that) and dashed over to recite the magic words and claim her prize. Tempting as it was to act dumb at this point, I congratulated her and handed over the books, which we’d tied in a nice gold ribbon, along with a few copies of The Reader magazine. Her name was (and still is) Wendi Surtees-Smith and she was (and probably still is) very, very excited. She’d been waiting since five o’clock, with a friend and small child, and couldn’t believe her luck. Neither could we.

Still, I felt we’d done our bit to celebrate and commemorate, in some small way, America’s greatest writer of detective fiction. And had a good time into the bargain. How many other hopefuls had been waiting and had left disappointed will almost certainly never be known…

But this Chandleresque assignation
Was not such an odd situation.
Quite the opposite, I’d say -
Just an ordinary day
At The Reader Organisation.

In Chandler’s books the tough, modern world of twentieth century Los Angeles is channeled through the much older worldview of Philip Marlowe, a detective who laments the upending of a romantic code of honour and courtly love.

Click here to read Chris Routledge’s article ‘Chandler’s Reverse Romances’ in full.

To claim this wonderful prize you must follow these instructions:

Listen very carefully. We will say this only once. Go to Liverpool Lime Street railway station on Thursday 26th March at 17:30 precisely. One of our undercover agents will be waiting. The agent will be wearing a white carnation and carrying a copy of the Liverpool Daily Post. The merchandise will be given to the first person to make contact with these words: “Excuse me. Do you know who killed the chauffeur?”

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog and our website for more clues over the next twenty-four hours.

Perhaps you’re soon to meet a fair stranger?

Good luck on your mission. This message will not self-destruct.

Ross Macdonald was one of the many pseudonyms of Kenneth Millar, creator of the fictional private detective Lew Archer, and one of the most important twentieth century American detective fiction writers. Lew Archer follows in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe as one of the great literary detectives: he made his first appearance in The Drowning Pool (1950), and continued through many novels until The Blue Hammer (1976). In the late 1950s Macdonald adopted a radically different form of crime writing. His earlier work merely imitated the successful formula created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But Macdonald went on to write detective fiction focusing on social realism and serious psychological analysis of family secrets and their impact over generations, inspired in large part by Macdonald’s personal experiences. The Wycherly Woman (1961) stands as one of the best novels produced during this period. Despite his huge contribution to the crime genre, Macdonald has received very little publication in the UK–but with the power of the internet, and the weak dollar, now might be the perfect time to start your Lew Archer collection.

The Wycherly Woman begins with Archer visiting the mansion of the Californian millionaire, Homer Wycherly. Wycherly wants Archer to locate his missing daughter Phoebe, although he is reluctant to accept that Phoebe’s mother, his ex-wife Catherine, could help with the case. Character names are traditionally important in American literature, and crime fiction is no exception. Mike Hammer is blunt and violent; Sam Spade revels in digging up dirt and sleaze; and Lew Archer is analytical and precise. Interestingly, in two film adaptations of Macdonald’s novels both starring Paul Newman, Archer was renamed Lew Harper. The wealthy Wycherly family evoke images of a pack of witches–at times alluring and powerful, but always dangerous. Phoebe and Catherine Wycherly parallel each other as the good and bad witch of the family. Phoebe is a good looking, promising student with many friends. Catherine is an alcoholic gold digger, with a habit of humiliating herself in public. But when a crooked real estate agent who links the two Wycherlys ends up dead, one has to ask: is Phoebe really so good and Catherine really so bad? Only Lew Archer can find out.

Doubling is an important feature of the crime novel, and within the family context Macdonald exploits it to the full. Behind their wealth and privilege the Wycherlys’ fall from grace is viewed with a mixture of sympathy and defeatism by Archer. Here is a private eye who has witnessed every form of corruption imaginable, has lost any sense of idealism from the experience, and seems doomed to endure it. The only hope is that others will not have to. Archer philosophises on whether Phoebe can be saved with a mixture of cynicism and humour and sometimes in an hilariously overwritten PI style:
She looked like one of those sensitive girls who could grow up into beauty or hard-faced spinsterhood. If she grew up at all.

As the crime fiction novel has evolved into the gritty violent tales of James Ellroy or Eddie Bunker, Macdonald’s work has fallen out of fashion. But an historical re-evaluation is long overdue. Lew Archer is a private eye who wears his cynicism on his sleeve. Long after the central mystery of the story is solved, Archer remains lost as to the other mysteries of life: the distance that grows between people who love each other, the soul-destroying power of money, and whether a person ever stops paying for past crimes. The Wycherly Woman is a moving novel that will haunt you long after reading.

____

Steven Powell is writing a PhD at Liverpool University on James Ellroy.

The Dahlia mythology has spawned numerous conspiracy theories as to the identity of her killer. Yet, while Ellroy’s gripping take on the case did not bring anyone closer to uncovering the murderer, it did help forge Ellroy’s greatest strengths as a writer. His depiction of post-war L.A. is unmatched amongst American crime writers, a utopian spectacle masking a cauldron of corruption, organised crime, and ethnic tension: ‘It’s a boomtown populated by psychically maimed misfits running from World War II. It’s a fiend habitat.’ This is the Los Angeles setting Ellroy grew up in, but the plot also parallels his life. The unsolved murder of his mother Geneva Hilliker Ellroy has striking similarities to the Dahlia case.

The story of The Black Dahlia is told through the first person narrative of Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert, a warrant squad cop with the L.A.P.D. who strikes up an unlikely friendship with fellow officer Lee Blanchard, and his beautiful girlfriend Kay Lake. Bleichert and Blanchard find themselves on the Dahlia case seventy-five pages into the novel. Before then, Ellroy weaves a complex back-story involving the zoot suit riots of 1943, a politically staged boxing bout, and Blanchard’s impressive list of ‘collars’. As is typical of Ellroy, the violence is graphic and to the point: ‘the breasts were dotted with cigarette burns, the right one hanging loose, attached to the torso only by shreds of skin’. His portrayal of Elizabeth Short’s fate is explicit but never exploitative, her cadaver is described scientifically, ‘dotted’, ‘hanging’, and ‘attached’.

Violence alone cannot make a great crime novel, and whilst this dark tale may not be for those of sensitive tastes, Ellroy’s writing style and interweaving of storylines is subtle and assured. The zoot suit riots are an explosion of underlying urban tension, the boxing bout is motivated by political corruption and self-interest and Blanchard’s past collars become his undoing when Bleichert uncovers his dark nature. Ellroy is less interested in the buddy-buddy relationship of Bleichert and Blanchard, than he is in the unusual trinity of Bleichert, Blanchard, and Kay. For a character who grapples so much with the nature of evil, Bleichert finds himself acting as a kind of alternative husband in an unholy marriage. The three friends do everything together: work, play, and fight. Ellroy complicates matters even further when Bleichert becomes romantically involved with Madeleine Cathcart Sprague, a Black Dahlia look-alike whose family may be involved in the murder. The Dahlia becomes the epicentre for these characters soul, forging unlikely alliances, uncovering evil and offering redemption in equal measure.

James Ellroy was ten years old at the time of his mother’s murder. He first came across the Black Dahlia case a year later in Jack Webb’s sensationalist true crime book The Badge. The Black Dahlia is not autobiography and it is not history, though Ellroy leaves many of the factual details of the case unchanged. It is not even entirely original as fiction: John Gregory Dunne’s, True Confessions (1977) is a fine fictional rendering of the case, and an influence on Ellroy. Whatever category The Black Dahlia falls into, autobiography, history, fiction, the final and most unusual alliance to appear is that of Elizabeth Ann Short, Geneva Hilliker, and James Ellroy. From it Ellroy has produced one of the finest American crime novels of the last fifty years.

By Steven Powell

The Secrets of Harry Bright

Joseph Wambaugh was a Los Angeles policeman and detective for fifteen years before turning full-time to writing about crime (real and fictional) in the early 70’s. Now he’s regarded as one of the finest crime writers of the age. There are few contemporary American writers in the mystery genre who do not revere his mixture of cold realism, mordant black humour and sharp dialogue. To be fair, these are characteristics that he abandoned in his later novels. The characters became more caricatured, the humour more smutty, and the plotting so thin it is as though Wambaugh was so desperate not to repeat himself that he forgot to make the story interesting.

So for many, his stellar reputation rests on his brutal but funny depiction of L.A. Cops, The Choirboys (1975), his non-fiction classic, The Onion Field (1973), and a few others, including this 80’s gem, The Secrets of Harry Bright. The plot seems Chandleresque at first: struggling alcoholic homicide detective Sidney Blackpool is hired by a Palm Springs millionaire to investigate the murder of his son in nearby Mineral Springs. The case is over a year old and considered by the local P.D. to be unsolvable. But, as his employer is offering an all- expense- paid holiday with just a little bit of police work in between, Blackpool cannot resist. Yet, he soon finds himself lulled away from the luxury golf clubs to being obsessed about the case. He has lost a son himself, and regards it as a personal crusade to find the killer amidst the strangeness of Palm Springs life—a bizarre triangle of desert cops, biker gangs, and bored housewives. All of which Wambaugh gives quirky character introductions to in the opening pages before the first chapter: Blackpool’s reads:

SGT. SIDNEY “BLACK SID” BLACKPOOL – an L.A.P.D. homicide detective with a staggering Johnny Walker habit. Involved in a dead-end murder investigation that strikes closer to home than he can bear.

The title character, Harry Bright, is a once-revered cop, not unlike Blackpool, now in a coma and holding the key to the mystery. However, Wambaugh is interested less in the plot than he is paralleling the two policemen. The novel is rich with details of cop life, from the funny— guys impersonating Magnum P.I. on the beat— to the sad— the high divorce rate, and the almost equally high suicide rate. Wambaugh has been writing about these men for more than thirty years, but what makes Harry Bright’s secrets so fascinating is that as they are unravelled, they become less about crime, until finally not about crime at all. The more Blackpool discovers about Bright, the more it serves to deepen the mystery of himself. Why is being a cop as alien to mainstream American society as being a criminal? Wambaugh’s depiction of this despairing life is both thrilling and moving. The flashbacks of Harry Bright before his coma-induced stroke are pitiable. He cannot sing, but he records songs for his love when they are obviously not wanted. He is the most respected cop in the department, but he patrols an area where crime is almost non-existent. Yet, in a strange way, Blackpool envies him: ‘He stared into Harry Bright’s beautiful blue eyes. Looking for what.’ Blackpool is the hedonistic homicide detective to Harry’s Bright’s shadow of a policeman. But Bright finds a kind of emotional rest in his hospital bed which eludes Blackpool. Ultimately, Sidney Blackpool is serving a life sentence. Harry Bright is set free. Wambaugh has never been better than he is here, and he could do a lot worse than returning to this territory.

Steven Powell

Although it was remodeled in 1899 by Edinburgh architect James M. Henry, and its interior was modernized in the mid-20th century, Rutherford’s elegant historic façade remains, as do “the terrazzo floor and marble walls of the lavatory and boxed-in sawdust spittoon channel,” according to Edinburgh’s Evening News. However, that newspaper adds, the pub’s original purpose may now be in peril …

Here’s the link.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Megan Abbott. Die A Little Simon and Schuster, 2005.

Nineteen-fifties Hollywood has a seedy glamour that, half a century later, has acquired the status of myth. Like Dickens’s London, Joyce’s Dublin, and the Paris of Marcel Proust, the cultural landscape of Southern California is inscribed on the psyche of anyone who ever watched Humphrey Bogart cracking wise with Lauren Bacall, or read a novel by Raymond Chandler, or James M. Cain. The books, after all, fed off an atmosphere of ambition, ruthless greed, extravagant wealth and desperation. Grifters, aspiring actors, moguls and movie stars: myth making rarely comes with a backdrop as gaudy as this.

Whether they are set in Hollywood or not, hard-boiled novels and the shadowy films they inspired are rarely sympathetic to women, or even allow them a voice. Men control the narrative and the action, for the most part. When they don’t it is usually because they have been deceived by a woman, tempted by a flash of thigh, encouraged with sexual promises never fulfilled. This was the aftermath of World War Two. Men back from battle found women in their jobs and other men in their beds. In Fritz Lang’s movie The Big Heat, the all-American gingham-frocked wife of detective Dave Bannion is blown up in a car. That kind of woman was history.

Megan Abbott’s 2005 debut novel Die A Little takes a different view of the femme fatale. She is not a spider at the centre of a web but just a woman trying to make a living, like everyone else. In this novel ambitious women compete and conspire. They use what they have to get what they want and mean nothing by it but looking after themselves. When Lora King’s brother hooks up with Alice Steele, a glamorous studio wardrobe assistant, Lora’s ordinary life as a school teacher is transformed by her association with powerful press agent Mike Standish and a whirl of restaurants, nightclubs and parties. In an effort to protect her brother she is soon drawn into a world of drug deals, double lives, prostitution and murder.

The novel reads in many ways as if it might have been written in 1954, but for the fact that its point of view is very modern and very female. Here is Lora describing an acquaintance, Lois, whose chaotic behaviour fascinates her:

Alice’s friend Lois Slattery has a kind of crooked face, one perpetually bloodshot eye just higher than the other, and that Pan-Cake makeup you often see on what Alice calls “girls on the make.” She begins periodically appearing at Bill and Alice’s, each time without warning. Somehow, I end up, over and over again, having conversations with her. Each time thinking, Poor Lois, in a few years, she’ll have a slattern look to match her name. (p. 50)

This is a woman’s-eye-view of another woman and a world away from the usual dismissive masculine tone. Much of the detail in the novel is of the domestic sort. Baking ingredients, housekeeping and household objects are as central to this book as hats, coats, and guns in more traditional hard-boiled fiction.

In contrast with the 1940s and 1950s originals Abbott’s female characters are fully developed. They have hopes and fears, they are jealous, angry, but also concerned and loving. Lora sees Alice as a threat to her brother’s career in the district attorney’s office and to her relationship with him. But she also wants at some level to make the new family work, at least until she knows the truth. What she doesn’t bargain for is the extent of Alice’s corruption, or the lengths to which she must go to root it out.

Abbott’s novel is a compelling story of one woman’s quest to save her brother, but it is also striking for the way its authentic noir style is combined with a modern, archly knowing approach. This is a stylish book that eases its perfectly made-up face right in close and whispers “Read me: I’m good.”

_____

By Chris Routledge

Hammett’s vision is more complex than that of his near-contemporary Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be – gallant and with a lively satirist’s wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be – tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue. He stayed on the job. The job defined him. His job description was in some part "Oppression". That made him in large part a fascist tool. He knew it. He later embraced Marxist thought as a rightwing toady and used leftist dialectic for ironic definition. Detective work both fuelled and countermanded his chaotic moral state and gave him something consistently engaging to do.

Here’s the link to the article again.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana