Psycho by the Sea
Page 27
In researching and planning these books, the greatest pleasure has been in choosing Twitten’s latest intellectual obsession. For Psycho by the Sea the publication in 1957 of The Hidden Persuaders was a bit of a gift. It suits Twitten so well that he should be excited (and shocked) by the new science of ‘motivation research’ – and that he would want to apply it to the case before him. Digging a bit deeper, I was slightly startled to find how precisely topical this subject was. On Monday September 16th 1957 (i.e. at the start of the very week covered in this book) The Times ran a story from its New York correspondent, ‘Split Second Advertising Aiming at the Subconscious’, detailing an experiment in subliminal advertising that had recently taken place in a cinema in New Jersey. (The practice was banned soon after, in 1958.)
I do recommend the 1950s sociology Twitten latches on to in this book. It is fascinating in the light of the modern world. The idea of the average person’s inner gyroscope giving way to an inner radar, which Twitten says is “such an elegant idea that I can’t bally well stop thinking about it” (page 109), comes from David Reisman’s classic The Lonely Crowd. As it happens, there was an American sociologist in Brighton researching crowd behaviour in September 1957: this fact was what got me thinking about the whole subject. You will be pleased to hear that the real man came to no harm, although a trip to the races with a reporter from the Argus was evidently extremely unpleasant.
I am indebted to Mrs Gwen Barden who wrote to me about working in a tube room in 1945, when she was 14 years old. A brief mention of a job in a tube room in Virginia Nicholson’s brilliant oral history of the 1950s, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes, prompted me to research the Lamson pneumatic system, which I then wrote about in a column in a newspaper. Mrs Barden kindly got in touch with me as a result of that piece. Gosling’s I named after a long-ago department store in Richmond, Surrey (for many years now, the site of Dickins & Jones). The lively twins Joan and Dorothy are so named as a tribute to my mum. I would like to point out that I know Broadmoor did not have a ‘governor’ at this period (or any break-outs). In 1957, in fact, the father of the novelist Patrick McGrath became the tenth and last medical superintendent. The Puffins cigarette brand is a knowing reference to Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers. Barrow-Boy Cecil’s ‘See the bunny run’ may remind alert cinephile readers of the excellent 1956 British crime film The Long Arm, which I watch at least twice a year. Lastly, the joke about the French baguette being sucked up the tube is an overt homage to the film Paddington, in my opinion the best film thus far of the 21st century.
Thanks are due to The Keep, Brighton’s local history research facility, where the staff are unfailingly patient with people who are unable even to wrench a roll of microfilm from a spindle without expert help. As ever, I would like to thank everyone at Raven Books in London and Bloomsbury in New York, and also my wonderful agent Anthony Goff, who has provided much-appreciated moral support while I’ve been writing all four of these Twitten books. Thanks also to the Detection Club for electing me a member. Crime writing is a venerable profession and I feel honoured to have joined it, in however minor or short-lived a way.
A Note on the Author
Lynne Truss is a columnist, writer and broadcaster whose book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves was an international bestseller. She has written extensively for radio, and is the author of seven previous novels, as well as a non-fiction account (Get Her Off the Pitch!) of her four years as a novice sportswriter for The Times. Her columns have appeared in the Listener, The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and Saga. She lives in Sussex with three dogs.
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First published in Great Britain 2021
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