wot i red on my hols by alan robson (supera lectio)

Binge

Some people binge watch the telly. I binge read books instead. It amounts to much the same sort of thing. I’ve read fourteen books this month but only two authors were involved in the writing of them…

Marion Todd is Scottish. She writes detective novels set in Scotland and, being thus perfectly qualified for it, she gets every detail exactly right which gives her novels a strong feeling of authenticity. And because she’s Scottish she can’t help being funny every so often despite the seriousness of the subjects with which she deals.

Deborah Crombie, on the other hand, is American. She writes detective novels set in England and, despite the handicap of her nationality and her upbringing, she gets every detail exactly right which gives her novels a strong feeling of authenticity. (Where have I heard that before?). I must confess, I would never have known that Deborah Crombie was American if I hadn’t looked her up. On the strength of her books alone I would have sworn on a stack of Agatha Christie novels that she was English through and through with ancestors dressed in tweed going back for hundreds of generations. She understands the subtleties of the British class system from go to whoa (something I would never have believed possible for a non-British person) and she perfectly captures the nuances of vocabulary and attitude that set a person so exactly in their place. It’s really most impressive. Apparently she lived in England for a few years before returning to America and clearly she fell in love with the place and the people, soaking up the culture like blotting paper soaks up ink.

You really can’t go wrong if you choose to read all the books that these two authors write.

* * * *

When I started to read See Them Run, Marion Todd’s first novel about Detective Inspector Clare Mackay, I thought I wasn’t going to like it. On the surface it was yet one more novel about a serial killer who always leaves a distinct "signature" at the scene of the crime, thus guaranteeing that the police would have no doubt whatsoever that this was yet another crime perpetrated by the same person. Cue lots of angst.

Furthermore, the Detective Inspector investigating the crime had a troubled, and traumatic background. Doubtless she would have nightmares and crumble at vital moments under the weight of her PTSD.

Both these things have become such a cliché of the genre that, for me at least, it’s an automatic turn off. However, for some reason, I persevered with the story and I’m very glad I did because by the end of the book Marion Todd had completely subverted the clichés in a very satisfying way. Clearly she was perfectly well aware of the nature of the beast and she knew exactly what she had to do to tame it.

On the night of a wedding celebration, a guest is killed in a hit-and-run. A card bearing the number "5" has been left on the victim’s chest. The following night another victim is struck down and a card with the number "4" written on it is left at the scene. The trend is obvious. Clearly three more murders will soon be taking place.

Detective Inspector Clare Mackay is handling the investigation into the killings. She herself enters the story under a little bit of a cloud, at least in her own mind, though her colleagues don’t feel  that way about her. Once she had been a highly respected member of the Scottish Armed Response Unit, the branch of the police that dealt with situations that might involve firearms (just like the English police, the Scottish police are not routinely armed). However Clare’s final operation had seen her shoot and kill a teenager who was brandishing a pistol. After the fact, it turned out that the pistol was a harmless replica, but of course in the heat of the moment there had been no way of telling that. Clare is devastated by the teenager’s death even though the official enquiry into the incident completely exonerated her. Nevertheless she felt obliged to resign from the Armed Response Unit and return to more usual police duties. She has just transferred from Glasgow to the small town of St. Andrews when she is faced with the serial killer who is counting down his victims.

It turns out that there are very good (and very convincing) reasons for the killings. However their justification is far from obvious at the beginning and it takes quite a long time for Clare to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

In some ways this first novel is the most melodramatic of Marion Todd’s books. The later stories are not without their cliff-hanging perils but the emphasis is far more on the minutiae of dedicated, daily police work than it is on the (sometimes terrible) nature of the crimes themselves. Clare herself never becomes hardened to the tragic ramifications of the crimes she investigates – they are all very "ordinary" crimes, the kind of things you hear about almost daily in the real world. But as with real life, so too in the novels, it isn’t just the victim who suffers. The ripples spread outwards and a lot of people are involved. Clare recognises this and is very sympathetic towards it. This attitude adds a pleasing warmth and humanity to a genre that is often far more concerned with solving convoluted mysteries than it is with dealing with the human tragedies that underlie them.

Clare’s own tragic past and the trauma induced by her killing of the teenage thug soon largely fade from view. Time heals all wounds (and wounds all heels) and though the memory never fades away, there is no permanent scarring left behind. Eventually it is seldom, if ever mentioned. Clare is just...Clare, an ordinary Detective Inspector doing a Detective Inspector’s job.

Marion Todd has filled her novels with unforgettable characters and she follows the events of their lives with glee, gusto, and a sometimes mischievous streak of humour. Will the mystery of where her detective sergeant hides his never ending supply of Wagon Wheels ever be solved? Towards the end of my marathon reading session I was devouring the books more because I wanted to know about the lives of the people I was reading about than because I wanted to know about the crimes they were investigating (though I did want to know about those as well because the means, motives and opportunities were all handled brilliantly and very convincingly).

Everybody has a life outside work, though given the monomaniacal dedication to the job shown by a lot of fictional detectives you could be forgiven for thinking that they don’t. Marion Todd’s novels spend just as much time dealing with ordinary day to day living as they do with the time spent in the office and I can’t count how many times Clare sends her team home at the end of the day with instructions to get a good nights sleep so that they will be refreshed and ready to take up the strain again in the morning. I can’t imagine John Rebus or Harry Bosch ever doing that…

* * * *

I quite enjoyed A Share In Death, Deborah Crombie’s first novel, but I didn’t think it was anything special. It’s just a very well written, perfectly competent Agatha Christie type of mystery set in an isolated country location. Superintendent Duncan Kincaid is spending a week on holiday in a luxurious Yorkshire time-share miles from anywhere. A body is discovered floating in the whirlpool bath. Clearly someone at Followdale House is a killer. The local constabulary are less than thrilled to have a Scotland Yard detective on the premises and are not very cooperative. But Kincaid's keen sense of duty keeps him investigating and he sends for his sidekick, Sergeant Gemma James to come and help him out. Then a second body turns up…

It’s clear from later novels that in this one Deborah Crombie was just dipping her toes in the water to see if she just wanted to paddle or whether she should take things a bit further and go for a swim. Her second novel, All Shall Be Well sees her striking out strongly for deeper and murkier waters. It opens with the death of Jasmine Dent, Duncan Kincaid’s upstairs neighbour in the block of flats where they both live. Jasmine has been terminally ill with cancer for some time and as she has become steadily more frail, so have the neighbours rallied round to help her.

Kincaid soon learns that Jasmine, knowing her illness is terminal, has been considering assisted suicide, but shortly before the end she seems to have changed her mind, nobody is quite sure why. The post mortem reveals that she died from an overdose of morphine and so the general assumption is that she went ahead and killed herself anyway. But Kincaid is not so sure.

Kincaid has a lot of suspects. Jasmine's weak and useless brother Theo has tried and failed in several businesses, always depending on Jasmine to bail him out when things go pear shaped. Lately Jasmine has expressed considerable reluctance to help him any more. Major Keith, once a soldier in the army in India lives downstairs from Kincaid and is more than a little bit curmudgeonly. And of course Jasmine’s home nurse, Felicity would find it easy to lay her hands on sufficient morphine to do the job. Jasmine's close friend Meg and her thuggish con-artist boyfriend are also well in the frame.

Kincaid is also worried about Jasmine's cat Sidhi (Sid for short). She doted on Sid so surely she would have made arrangements to have him looked after if she intended to kill herself? She would never have left him alone, potentially to starve.

Guess who Sid eventually moves in with?

By the end of this long, rambling and utterly addictive novel I was completely hooked and very eager for more. There’s not a lot of action in any of Deborah Crombie’s novels, but that doesn’t make them dull. They are character driven rather than event driven, but the lack of physical action doesn’t mean they are inactive. The action is mostly cerebral as (in this case at least) Kincaid and Gemma James immerse themselves in Jasmine’s life and death through her journals and interviews with her friends.

This sets the pattern for the later novels. All the characters, heroes and villains, friends and enemies alike, are analysed and closely examined. Motives are prodded to see if anything breaks under the strain, relationships are investigated. Many passages are narrated from different points of view and so the reader often knows more about the interior lives of the people involved than Kincaid and James do. This also applies to the relationship between Kincaid and James themselves – it is a deep and progressively more intimate one and yet each of them is often puzzled by the actions of the other. It is particularly satisfying for the reader to see that intimacy developing along with insights from both sides.

The crimes that Kincaid and James investigate are often complex, sometimes proving to be the very tip of a massive iceberg of motivation with roots buried in the past. Multi-generational feuds and fancies can be the seeds of later tragedies. In the words of a not very famous Yorkshire philosopher, there’s nowt so queer as folk and that queerness is what drives all of Deborah Crombie’s novels. As a result, they are some of the most fascinating and involving stories I have ever read.

* * * *

As I read further into the novels of both Marion Todd and Deborah Crombie I found myself reading them more and more in order to understand and appreciate the nature of the lives being led by the protagonists and concerning myself less and less with the intricacies of the mysteries being investigated, fascinating, interesting and ingenious though those mysteries were. Don’t get me wrong - both aspects continued to hold my close attention and therefore I started to feel that I really was getting the best of all possible literary treats from these books. People I really cared about were involved in doing interesting things and taking part in interesting events. I wanted to know how all of it worked out for them.

That’s an amazing achievement in its own right and the only way I can explain how the authors managed to carry it off so well it is to get a bit pretentious. Sorry. Not Sorry..

Andrew Butler once accused Terry Pratchett of being guilty of literature. He wrote a whole book devoted to proving his thesis that Terry Pratchett, one of the most entertaining novelists ever to have put finger to keyboard, was doing a lot more than just writing stories. I’d like to lay the same charge against Marion Todd and Deborah Crombie. I contend that both of them are doing rather more than just writing detective novels, though it’s very hard to pin down exactly what the phrase "rather more" actually means because it wriggles too much when you poke it. Nevertheless I’m willing to give it a try.

It’s not easy to define that nebulous thing that separates literature from a simple story. Indeed it’s not even clear whether there is actually always a relationship between the two things in the first place. Does Finnegan’s Wake have a story? If it does, Joyce managed to hide the story very well indeed. But there’s no doubt that it really is fiction of some kind so there must be a story in there somewhere. If there wasn’t, it wouldn’t be classified as fiction. Everything always starts with a story. My entire argument depends on that relationship being true (though I’m willing to admit, under pressure, that there may be exceptional edge cases). So to that end I’m going to define literature as that aspect of storytelling which gives some insight into the human condition. In itself that’s nothing but a cop-out, of course, a bit of gobbledygook that just raises another question, thus postponing any meaningful definition. And so because of that, I’m now faced with trying to define the human condition. Oh dear. Time to take a deep breath…

OK! Onward!

The human condition is what we learn from our interactions with the world and with the people and the things that are part of it. And, of course, it tries to come to grips with what the world (and the people and things in it) may learn, if anything, from all these interactions with us. Of course that assumes that we can always divide our environment into "us" and "them" – mostly I think we can, though the boundaries are blurred and dynamic, with many members of each set sometimes swapping places and sometimes finding themselves to be members of both sets simultaneously – a good trick if you can pull it off successfully!

On the one hand such a world view encompasses the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology and their various subsets (and overlaps) all of which define and describe the nature of the place where we live. On the other hand it gives us some insight into how and why living creatures behave in the way that they do: psychology, psychiatry, sociology, economics and (to an extent) politics – these are studies that are perhaps less rigorous than the physical sciences but which are no less valuable in that they all give us some understanding (flawed though it may be) of what is going on inside our heads when we try to come to grips with what is going on outside our heads. And on the gripping hand it all adds up to a definition of our place in the world and, most importantly, the place of the world in us. It works out the same whichever way you look at it. I find the symmetry pleasing.

Nietzsche’s famous philosophical joke tells us that when we look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at us. Presumably it’s a better and a wiser abyss for that experience.  Certainly it’s a different one because the experience will have changed it. And of course the same can be said for us. We learn something from the abyss as well, even if it’s only how to control the vertigo that the very act of looking so far down and so deeply induces. In other words, living is a two way street. Everything we say and do has an effect and nothing remains the same afterwards. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that things change. It is the business of literature to put all that into some kind of perspective and to try to explain both the how and the why of it.

Controversially, I would contend that much of what is claimed to be great literature fails miserably at that task.

Consider, for example, the novels of D. H. Lawrence. I have a sort of proprietary interest in Lawrence’s novels because I lived for many years in the village where Lawrence himself was born and brought up. I met several people who had known Lawrence in their youth. My landlady had been at school with him. She would not allow his name to be spoken in her house. From hints dropped by her and various other people I suspect that Lawrence had been quite a bit of a bully at school.

I was completely familiar with the landscape that Lawrence described – I drove and walked through it every single day. I was familiar with the dialect he used when his characters conversed. I heard it all around me all of the time and, being something of a linguistic chameleon, I used it myself when I spoke. ("Ey up, me duck!"). So I was ideally placed to judge how well Lawrence invoked all of those things, how well he set up the time and the geography and the people. There is no doubt that he did it brilliantly. If nothing else, his novels are extremely solid reportage. Nevertheless I have never, ever managed to finish any novel by D. H. Lawrence. I’ve started reading several of them and I always found them very easy to put down and correspondingly difficult to pick up again. The plain fact of the matter is that Lawrence’s novels are very, very, very boring. Even Lady Chatterley’s Lover is boring despite it’s semi-pornographic reputation. How do you make erotica dull?Lawrence knew how. He was the master of tedium.

It seems to me that the genre fictions are actually much better suited to the writing of literature than are the (often mistakenly lauded) novels of the mainstream. Science fiction, fantasy, detective, horror, historical, romance, whatever – by definition all of these are primarily concerned with the telling of a story. That has to comes first. You simply can’t categorise any of the genre fictions in any meaningful way if you don’t have a story to start from. The mainstream, on the other hand, tends to think of the story as something unimportant that is grafted rather grudgingly on top of whatever it is that they are trying to say. It’s merely a mechanism that is used to express their insights, but it obviously isn’t their main interest, and it shows. Lawrence is a perfect case in point. Quite clearly the telling of a story was the very last thing on his mind. He had much loftier purposes.

That doesn’t mean that all literature is necessarily dull (Charles Dickens, for example, was a bloody good storyteller) but neither does it mean that all genre fictions are guilty of literature. That would be a very silly thing to say. But it does suggest that the genre fictions start with a distinct advantage over their siblings and niblings because their main purpose in life is simply to entertain. Everything else is a bonus – after all, if you give the people bread and circuses, their hearts and minds will follow. With luck, they might not even notice.

Pure entertainment, of course, is all icing and no cake and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We all enjoy the taste of sweetness, we all like a good bit of fun. But if you try to bite more deeply into those kinds of stories the best you will ever find beneath the icing is just candy floss, which quickly dissolves away into nothing at all.

More substantial stories, stories with pretensions to literature, will always start with a very thick layer of icing on the top because that’s what stories do, that’s what stories are, but underneath it, should you care to take a really big bite, you will find the most wonderful cakes of many colours: birthday cakes and wedding cakes, chocolate cakes, fruit cakes, banana cakes, carrot cakes and Christmas cakes steeped in well aged brandy.

Pure literary (mainstream) fictions on the other hand, as exemplified by writers like Lawrence, all too often turn out to be made of cake as well, but generally speaking it only has a very thin coat of icing on the top, sometimes none at all. Such cakes are invariably stodgy and hard to digest.

Everybody loves a story and everybody loves a well baked cake. Marion Todd and Deborah Crombie bake wonderfully tasty literary cakes complete with very thick icing indeed. Go ahead and nibble away at it. What could possibly go wrong?