This, then, is the basic plot and it is no murder mystery — a last minute letter saves Whickham’s neck and there is no real detection. Rather, this is an excuse to wind forward the clock and place Jane Austen’s characters in world destabilized by murder.

But there are real limits to this sort of project. Darcy and Elizabeth are, above all, fictional creations and no matter how sophisticated Jane Austen is in giving them appearance of reality, they are never truly human. As such, P. D. James’ is severely limited in what she can do. In Death Comes To Pemberly it is made out that Mr. Darcy’s life hinged on two moments: Whickham’s attempted seduction of his sister and his marriage to Elizabeth. Everything else is secondary to this. It is as if his self is entirely shaped by these episodes. This does not feel right and James’ Darcy, though older and wiser and more introspective, seems duller than Austen’s ever could because, whereas these incidents made Darcy gave him depth in Pride and Prejudice, the rigidity with which Death Comes To Pemberly sticks to these defining moments makes him feel shallow and flat.

This is a shame because Death Comes To Pemberly should have been a lot of fun. No doubt it was to write and P. D. James’ approximation of Austen’s sentences is pretty good. But it fails in the end because it falls short of the qualities that make P. D. James’ other work so appealing: the characters just don’t feel real.

Why was I so struck? Because of it’s grandeur and ambition I think. The books are about war and fantasy but they are also about politics and ambition. Modern literary fiction and crime fiction don’t really deal with the scope of politics and leadership very well and, all to often, they pay lip service to matters of state so that they fall short and feel false. In part because they are necessarily short these days: big books are harder to sell. George R. R. Martin doesn’t do this. A Game of Thrones is a fascinating examination of why men and women in positions of power act as they do and it shows the consequences of these actions in vivid detail. I can’t wait to keep reading the series and it’s great to be proven wrong too.

Lucius Books. Rare Books, First Editions, Signed copies in York, UK.

Rory Clements, then, is John Murray‘s answer to C. J. Samson. His sleuth is John Shakespeare, older brother to William, and an intelligencer in Sir Francis Walsingham’s underground network of spies and informers. Or rather he was in the first novel, Martyr. By the time Revenger opens in 1592 Walsingham is dead and there is a political struggle at the very heart of government between the Queen’s favourite, the Earl of Essex, and Sir Robert Cecil, one of the Queen’s key advisors. Shakespeare, now a school master, is dragged out of his exile by Essex who asks him to find a woman that everyone had thought dead. Shakespeare is pretty much forced into accepting this mission and has many doubts about whether or not the woman is alive. Still, he finds himself dragged deeper into the machinations of government when Cecil asks him to spy on Essex for him because he fears the Earl’s intentions to the Queen. Shakespeare, who is now worried for his and his family’s lives if he does not accept this double mission, sets about hunting down the missing woman and spying at the same time.

This plot becomes an excuse for a tour of late Elizabethan England and it’s major characters: Essex, Cecil and several others are portrayed in particular details and there is even a character list with potted biographies of some of the more obscure characters in the novel. There is also a glossary to help you with many of the terms that bard the narrative – some of them are particularly obscure, so this does come in handy. But it is this sort of historical detail that undoes the novel. I cannot comment on the accuracy of Rory Clements’ history but I can say that it is layered through the narrative very thickly. For example, Sir Francis Bacon makes one or two very brief appearances, this is one:

In one dark corner he [John Shakespeare] stumbled upon another guest whom he instantly recognised as Francis Bacon, his breeches dropped low, with another guest, whom he  vaguely thought to be the celebrated scholar Henry Cuffe, standing boldly in front of him.

This scene adds nothing to the plot at all. It is simply an excuse to drop the detail of Bacon and his homosexuality into the narrative in what seems to me to be a display of historical peacockery.  Similarly, the littering of obscure words throughout the book, strikes of showing off a bit too much because it, again, adds very little and feels typically heavy handed.

This said, the most problematic element of this novel is the central character, John Shakespeare, who just isn’t very likeable. He is cold to his wife and his failure to grapple with her religion – she is a Catholic, he a Protestant – means that he treats her coldly and with little feeling or empathy. Though the author tries to make him seem like a wholesome sort – and certainly he has a deep moral code that is good and true – his relationship with his wife leaves a sour taste. The inevitable reconciliation between these two distant people at the end of the novel feels false and, no doubt, in the subsequent novels will lead to further fractures in their relationship.

Despite all this, I did enjoy Revenger. The story and the period is very interesting and the author manages to weave real events through the narrative. To my mind, it makes a good summer read, particularly if you are interested in the Elizabethan era. It might not be in the same league as C. J. Samson but that doesn’t mean Rory Clements will never get there. The early Ian Rankin novels were nowhere near as good as his later efforts – his book Black and Blue was a real breakthrough, as the writer has suggested himself – but they got better. Writing is something that takes time and practice and there is enough good stuff in Martyr and Revenger to leave me hopeful.

Revenger is available on Amazon here

The Big Sleep in LA Noire

I’ve been having a lot of fun with LA Noire recently, particularly stumbling across the Chandler references that the game makes. And, as in my earlier post, I wanted to share a few more.

Interestingly, the allusions the game makes tend to be to movies rather than books so it is fitting that The Big Sleep be playing somewhere in the city. In my last post, one commenter made the point that where there is A Geiger’s Book Store – and there are a few – there is an ACME Books opposite. This come from the 1946 film  made by Howard Hawkes, starring a grizzled Humphery Bogart opposite the very throaty voiced Lauren Bacall, who was also sharing Bogey’s  bed. It’s a great movie and if you want to follow up LA Noire you should watch it. Here is the location if you’ve not yet passed it.

But the game doesn’t just allude to adaptations of Chandler’s novels. In the final few missions of the game you stop playing Cole Phelps and play Jack Kelso instead. He works at the insurance firm California Fire and Theft as an investigator. In 1943 Ray was invited into Paramount Studios and asked if he was interested in writing a screenplay for James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. He would work with Billy Wilder and though the two would not get on very well, they wrote a blistering screenplay that was much better than the original novel. It stared Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as the central couple and the sexual charge between them – developed in the pacey writing and swapping of some hot lines – was brilliant. MacMurray’s character, Walter Neff, is an investigator like Kelso and he works in a galleried office that Kelso’s is modelled on. I didn’t get a picture but in this still from the movie you will recognize the frosted glass doors and the art deco railing. Chandler himself is also in the shot.

There are many more references I am sure that I have yet to spot. The last one I have noticed though is the trophy you win when you complete the Homicide desk cases. It is called The Simple Are of Murder  which was the title of an essay written by Chandler and published in The Atlantic Magazine. You can read a bit more about it here. It’s an important essay and worth checking out. It’s a great introduction to what Chandler was trying to do with his writing.

This sort of thing is rather fun, in a nerdy way, but it also shows how important Chandler and noir are today. His influence is still being felt in all sorts of ways and LA Noire is just one example albeit a rather good one. And I have not doubt that the more I play this game, the more I’ll find.

The Hypnotist opens after a murder, a particularly brutal and bloody one, that leaves a family in bits – literally – the only survivor being a horrifically injured teenage boy, Joseph, and his missing sister.  Joona Lina, a Stockholm detective – who happens, by the way, to always be right – calls up Erik Maria Bark, a doctor who once did something with hypnotism until a very Bad Thing happened and he foreswore never to hypnotize anyone ever again. Lina quickly convinces him to forget the oath and hypnotize the surviving boy so that they can find the sister. But the boy, it turns out under hypnosis, is a pretty bad apple – he is the killer.

When Erik’s son, Benjamin, gets kidnapped, and Joseph gets away, it’s assumed it’s a revenge attack. That’s what Simone, Erik’s wife  thinks anyway and she’s soon tramping across Stockholm with her father in law – a retired detective – looking for Benjamin, who also has a life threatening illness that means his blood won’t clot. Erik however works out that his sons disappearance and Joseph’s escape are a coincidence and that the real cause is the Bad Thing that happened in his past: what was the sub plot is now the main plot. Everyone ends up on a frozen lake in Northern Sweden where Bark has to cope with  cracking ice, very cold water and a gun totting former patient and this makes for a rather wonderful and very bleak denouement.

As summer reads go, The Hypnotist is pretty good. It is certainly a degree or two better than most holiday thrillers and a light years better than Jeffrey Archer. But there are a couple of nagging flaws. Firstly, before the action the Bark’s marriage is on the rocks and when Benjamin is taken, it splinters immediately. This seems pretty unrealistic – traumas tend to unite families, masking cracks and fissures, while they focus on solving the problem. It is only later, if the problem remains, that any real breaking down of the family occurs. Secondly, unlike Henning Mankell and Steig Larsson, this novel doesn’t really engage with Sweden at all. Wallander and Salander are uniquely Swedish and they deal with Swedish problem – racism and isolationism in the former; sexism in the latter (the original Swedish title to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women which tells you something about the book). The bright Swedish dream, in Larsson and Mankell’s, view is tarnishing rapidly and they need to expose this dark side in their fiction. The Hypnotist, however, could be set anywhere. But perhaps that is the point. Finally, there was only the briefest of attempts to play with the genre – Lina’s continual but slightly jokingly insistence that he is always right, for example, is just like Poirot’s only much more self aware – and I wanted more of this. Lars Kepler are a literary couple apparently but this didn’t seem very literary to me.

If you’re a publisher, you are going to want to hop on the Swedish crime bandwagon and that’s fair enough – this is a perfectly decent example of a good thriller. It’s just a shame it isn’t more than that. And we have, after all, come to expect much more from Scandinavia now.

You can buy The Hypnotist here.

For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to collect some shots of Chandler locations in Los Angeles, London and Paris. I am not the best photographer so you will have to bear with me.

Some are more famous than others – Ray’s office at the Bank of Italy building is less well known that the Deitrichson house from Double Indemnity – but I hope you find them interesting all the same. I don’t think anyone lese has taken a picture of Ray’s pension in Paris where he lived in 1905.

Via Flickr:
These are the pictures related to my research in Raymond Chandler

In 1958 Raymond Chandler was in Britain. By and large he spent most of this time drunk and had to be looked after by a group of friends under the guidance of Natasha Spender. Ray was troubled, depressed and difficult- his wife Cissy had died in 1954 and this devastated him. This is an interview with Ian Fleming that has appeared in several places in the last 12 months (here and here for example). For a long time it was thought lost but the BBC managed to excavate it from somewhere. Fleming and Ray were friends, exchanging letters occasionally about writing. Chandler’s dunkeness is self-evident but that does stop Ian Fleming getting a good deal of fascinating information out of the writer.

You can read the text of the interview here,  a PDF of Five Dials, a literary magazine from Hamish Hamilton, Chandler’s first UK publisher. You can see the original posting here on the BBC website.

No one doubts that a writer’s personal life – people, places, events – enters the work. But the process is not reversible. For Bowker to say that “passages in Stephen Hero and A Portrait faithfully capture [Joyce] the tireless monologist in action” is meaningless. How would he know if they didn’t? There’s a persistent slide here between characters and their conjectured models, perhaps the crassest example being the description of Joyce as “the self-proclaimed forger of the conscience of his race”. It was actually Stephen Dedalus who said something roughly similar to that.

He is entirely right in this. As an undergraduate I was warned again again about conflating writers’ lives with their work – first person narration does not denote accuracy nor that it is the writer ‘talking’, even in a memoir . With Joyce this problem becomes slightly stickier because he explicitly draws a parallel between his life and his work in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Yong Man but it does not make it so sticky. Joyce was creating a work of art – a portrait – and so biographical accuracy plays little part when compared to artistic intent.

But this sort of review does raise a question: how far can the biographer go when looking for elements of a writer’s life in his work? As Mars-Jones says, ‘Seeking to extract personal testimony from any novel whatever is like trying to tell the time from a clock in a painting…’ but then again, seeking ‘personal testimony’ is a step too far. What is interesting is the way that an artists’ work reflects and re-figures experience. For example, it is interesting that the only mother to appear in Chandler’s novels is Mrs Murdock in The High Window, a vile domineering woman who is repulses Marlowe. Does this mean than that Ray was repulsed by his mother? Of course not but it may point to some complicated feelings about her, particularly if Chandler had a troubled relationship with his mother.

It is a fine line that the biographer must tread but it is an important and necessary one. A writer or an artist doesn’t create in isolation, their work is influenced by their time, their place, their method of production and their life. But, still, we must be careful not to go too far.

The Cover From The Second Edition of The Simple Art of Murder, a collection of Chandler stories published by Houghton Mufflin in 1950 and prefaced by the essay.

Raymond Chandler’s essay The Simple Art of Murder is pretty much  required reading for any Chandler fan and any aspiring crime writer. It is one of those essays that has earned a place in literary history for its title as much as its thesis. Appearing in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, it’s a serious examination of the genre and it reveals plenty about Ray and about how he approached writing so to my mind it is interesting in both a biographical sense and a literary one. It’s worth pointing out though that it was written after he produced The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady in the Lake and so, to a certain extent Ray was following the advice of Sherlock Holmes, suiting his theory to facts rather than his facts to theories.

There are three elements that stand out to me. Firstly, the opening section. Reading it now – you can so here – the introductory passages are exceptionally choleric in their attack on the literary institutions that dismissed crime fiction. Here is an excerpt:

There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make bestsellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will find out how idealistic they are.

And this sort of stuff makes me want to connect some biographical dots. This essay was written in early to mid 1944. The year before Ray had worked on Double Indemnity and there is little doubt that during this point he was drinking heavily (Billy Wilder, his writing partner on the movie, certainly thought so) and so I wonder if there is parallel or a resemblance in the essay with Ray’s outburst a Billy Wilder (he complained bitterly, in a note)? Was this essay then – probably written late at night, after Cissy had retired – an example of Ray writing in his cups? Maybe this is a stretch to far, maybe it isn’t. Ray’s anger in the early part could be simple rhetoric but it seems to be a degree beyond that. It is just too bitter.

Of course the essay has more to tell us than Ray’s state of mind and this is where it gets interesting in a literary sense. Ray works very hard to position Dashiell Hammett and himself in the American literary tradition. In passages like this, he is claiming hardboiled fiction for America:

How original a writer Hammett really was, it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group, the only one who achieved critical recognition, but not the only one who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway. Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been going on for some time. It probably started in poetry; almost everything does. You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like.

It’s pretty fierce stuff especially when it is combined with the dismissal of the English tradition as weak, useless and unliterary. American crime literature, when it is of the best, hardboiled sort, is about language: it is, in other words, truly literary:

He [Hammett] was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

This is exactly what Modernists like Ezra Pound were calling for when they shouted Make It New and Hammett, according to Raymond Chandler, had answered  that call and made something truly new using the American language.

Lastly though, this essay will be remembered for it’s brief flickering illumination of Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe in it’s closing paragraphs. Though he does not make it explicit that Marlowe is his subject, it is pretty clear that he is talking about his central character:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor…

Reading the entire passage you can’t help but pick up on the reiteration of the word honest (or, in it’s other form, dishonest): it’s like the bass drum beat to the conclusion. Philip Marlowe though, isn’t always honest: he is more the happy to lie as long as that lie is in someway serving a higher truth, as long as that lie somehow serves Marlowe’s moral code. Read the end to The High Window for a good example of Marlowe’s working in this way.

But, Chandler’s hero’s honesty is of a different quality because it keeps in line with his moral code and, thinking carefully about this moral code it becomes clear that Marlowe isn’t that American: this moral code may not exactly be British either, but it is certainly the code of the Public School boy and it is certainly the code of Dulwich College. Dulwich instilled in Chandler – as it instilled in countless other boys – the need for self-sacrifice, putting the needs of the community above those of yourself; the need to be honorable in all things (according to Evelyn Waugh, who was at Lancing, ‘”Honour” was a word often on our lips. Dishonesty, impurity, cruelty would have been inconceivable to us…’); the need to be faithful to your school and country. And all this was wrapped up in a loose veneer of chivalry that was part of the Victorian ethos.

This is exactly what Chandler internalized as a child, wrote about as a man and which he came to express vividly in The Simple Art of Murder. The essay offers much more than literary criticism though and it is more than biographical insight. It is Ray struggling to align a series of different ideas: the American language with his Public School upbringing; Modernism with commercialism; being English or being American. And simply because it is so fascinating and enthralling, it deserves a much wider audience.