by Colin Watson
It is interesting that one of the busiest leg-pullers ever to emerge from the fun-house of the Secret Service, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, was a great admirer of Buchan. His books, he said, were ‘like athletes racing: so clean-lined, speedy, breathless. For our age they mean nothing; they are sport only; but will a century hence disinter them and proclaim him the great romancer of our blind and undeserving generation?’ Even from another romancer, this was pitched a bit strong; the explanation could be that Lawrence had sensed behind the derring-do of books such as Greenmantle and Huntingtower a fellow-sufferer from that uncertainty and desire for self-proof that had motivated his own seeking after adventure.
Long after E. Phillips Oppenheim had made a fortune writing about mansions in Mayfair where seven hundred pounds in cash would be left around on furniture to meet day-to-day expenses, and about gentlemen stopping their limousines on impulse to buy gold and platinum wrist-watches for supper companions, he continued to enter every shilling and every cent of his earnings in a meticulously accurate account book. Sydney Horler’s chronic self-doubts were evidenced by an altogether remarkable mendacity: Compton Mackenzie awarded him third place in his selection of the world’s champion liars, after Ford Madox Ford and his close runner-up, Axel Münthe, Swedish author of The Story of San Michele, the famous but substantially spurious bestseller of 1929. So vehement and repetitive were Sax Rohmer’s references to Asiatic plotting against ‘white’ civilization that they cannot be explained simply as the frills of melodramatic narration. The man clearly was possessed by some sort of private dread. Peter Cheyney, prolific author of ‘tough’ thrillers in an embarrassingly pseudo-American style, was himself a notably diffident personality. And A. E. W. Mason’s boyishness embraced not only secret service work and a propensity to appear for morning dictation in bath towel and monocle, but close friendship with J. M. Barrie.
Mason, the boy-at-heart, produced heroes of a rugged, mannish kind. His detective, Hanaud, is a big middle-aged man who is dedicatedly professional and whose very clowning intimidates. By paradox of an opposite order, E. W. Hornung created a character who was the antithesis of the ‘formidable Edwardian gentleman who didn’t like teenagers very much’ remembered by Nigel Morland. This is how Hornung, brother-in-law of Conan Doyle, conceived the exciting life:
His own hands were firm and cool as he adjusted my mask for me, and then his own. ‘By jove, old boy,’ he whispered cheerily, ‘you look about the greatest ruffian I ever saw! These masks alone will down a nigger, if we meet one. But I’m glad I remembered to tell you not to shave. You’ll pass for Whitechapel if the worst comes to the worst and you don’t forget to talk the lingo. Better sulk like a mule if you’re not sure of it, and leave the dialogue to me; but please our stars, there will be no need. Now, are you ready?’
‘Quite.’
‘Got your gag?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shooter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then follow me.’
(A Costume Piece)
Although Ernest William Hornung died in 1921, the popularity of the books featuring his hero, A. J. Raffles, the ‘gentleman burglar’, long outlasted him. The name of Raffles is still familiar to most people, if only vaguely. Forty years ago it was being used as part of the language. Any especially ingenious or lucky thief was likely to earn the epithet ‘a real-life Raffles’. It was by no means a derogatory expression: the character was generally conceived to be admirable. The few lines of typical Hornung dialogue above are enough to indicate why this was so.
The instructions and advice that Raffles is giving his friend and confederate, Bunny, refer to a robbery on which the pair are about to embark. But they are delivered in a spirit which would be equally appropriate on the eve of a critical school sporting event. Raffles’s coolness as he fits the masks is the coolness of a cricketer adjusting his pads. His ‘By jove!’ is not the expletive one would expect from a criminal. Rather does it betoken a decent upbringing and a sportsmanlike disposition. Adventurous he obviously is, but excitement evokes from him a cheery whisper, not the snarl that unquestionably would have escaped the lips of a criminal under similar stress. The reference to Bunny as ‘the greatest ruffian I ever saw’ is good-humoured chaff and therefore an indication that ruffianism is something alien to them both. The masks they wear would normally strike us as sinister equipment, but their purpose in this case is legitimate – to ‘down a nigger’ should so undesirable a creature be encountered in the course of their enterprise. The injunction to Bunny to remain unshaven tells us that good grooming is habitual to them, while the standard impeccability of their accent is implied by the necessity of the reminder by Raffles that they should adopt, in extremis, the ‘lingo’ of Whitechapel. The expression ‘please our stars’ also is significant. Although falling short of being a declaration of Christian orthodoxy, it does suggest an element of spirituality. This is no less reassuring to the reader than Raffles’s application to a gun of the jocularly sporting term ‘shooter’.
In 1928, there was published a collection of what the editor of the series, Dorothy L. Sayers, considered the finest examples to date of crime and mystery stories in the English language. She chose Hornung’s The Wrong House to represent the work of the creator of Raffles.
Raffles and Bunny (Bunny is always the narrator of these tales) set out on bicycles to burgle the house of a rich stockbroker at Teddington. Raffles cuts a hole in the kitchen door and thrusts his hand through. His hand is seized on the other side by boys: the burglars have broken into the wrong house, one occupied by a ‘crammer’ and his pupils. Bunny urges the trapped Raffles to ‘blaze through the door’ with his gun, but Raffles refuses. ‘You get out, Bunny, while you can; never mind me; it’s my turn, old chap.’ His free hand tightens in affectionate farewell.
Bunny breaks in through a window and succeeds in setting most of the boys off on a false chase. Only ‘Beefy’ – a ‘red-faced barrel of a boy’ – remains, still hanging on to Raffles’s hand. Bunny seizes this boy round the neck ‘with such a will that not a gurgle passed my fingers, for they were almost buried in his hot smooth flesh’. Raffles, freed at last, gives ‘Beefy’ the coup de grâce with a bottle of chloroform.
The master appears. Raffles and Bunny pretend to be innocent passers-by until they get a chance to make off on their bicycles (that ridden by Raffles is a Beeston Humber, smeared with vaseline against the night air). The escape route is steeply up-hill and the boys give chase. ‘All my fault!’ wails Bunny, but Raffles protests that he would not have missed it for the world. ‘Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a moment, he who from his boyhood had done everything of the kind so much better than anybody else.’
Raffles finally manages to beat back the pursuit by smashing the glass of his heavy electric torch in the face of the nearest boy.
Back safely at home, Raffles declares that he thinks it is an occasion for Sullivans (his own special brand of cigarettes). ‘By all my gods, Bunny, it’s been the most sporting night we ever had in our lives!’
‘And he held out his dear old hand.’
While that dear old hand reaches forth from 1928, we have to remind ourselves firmly that stories at this level excited not ribaldry but wrapt devotion. They were written for adults – and for educated and relatively discriminating adults, at that. Their popularity was enormous and even those readers who smiled at their unlikeliest excesses were far from being persuaded of their general worthlessness. We may mock the archaisms of style, be repelled by the sickly sentimentality of Bunny’s hero-worship and the sadistic overtones of the narrative, and wonder at the author’s betrayal of a way of thinking at once ingenuous and vicious, but the fact will remain that these books were bestsellers for years. They must have reflected or confirmed some pattern of thought common to a great number of people. What were the ‘notions … most acceptable to the present taste’ (to employ again Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s useful phrase) that were to be found in the writings
of E. W. Hornung?
There are certain elements of attraction that the Raffles books have in common with most other successful works of fiction. Flamboyant character and preposterous situation have in themselves an appeal that persists against the grain of logic and even of taste, if that is the best word for what might be otherwise described as literary conscience. Heroes do best for themselves when they are cheeky and daring. The memorable ones nearly always have an imbecilic streak that in the real world would render them liable to be shunned and perhaps locked up. Exaggeration is an expected feature of escapist literature – the ‘larger than life’ requirement. That it reads sometimes like parody means only that time has shifted our sympathies away from those of the readers for whom a book was originally written. Much of our own fiction will seem to be burlesque in twenty or thirty years.
Hornung’s writing has pace. The stories, however ridiculous, carry the readers along briskly. Superfluous description has been avoided and account of action is to the point.
There remain certain peculiar characteristics to be considered.
The atmosphere, the dialogue and many of the events described in the Raffles books are schoolboyish. The excitement is at the level of a dormitory rag or a midnight feast. Even the mutual loyalty of the confederates is expressed in terms more appropriate to the Lower Sixth than to an association of armed criminals. ‘Old chaps’ in the sense of men mature enough to shave and sufficiently worldly-wise to have a smattering of thieves’ argot, if that is what is implied by ‘Whitechapel lingo’, are not normally in the habit of clasping one another’s hands. Nor do we expect a pair of foiled burglars to celebrate their escape from arrest by treating themselves to a cigarette apiece, however choice the brand. But Raffles and Bunny are not subject to the likelihoods of human development. Eternally callow, they mirror from the pages of fiction the reader’s inmost desire for happy immutability.
‘Sport’ is a key word in the Hornung vocabulary, as it is in that of a whole group of popular authors at the time. Its emotive significance cannot be overestimated. Epitomizing a philosophy that over the years had been built into every stratum of rulership, instruction and administration by the public school system, this one little word served for a great number of people the combined purposes of civic code and religious regulator. It does still, to some extent, despite the educational reforms and social realignments of the intervening years and the discrediting by events of so many of the narrow and specious ethical concepts that held sway in the first third of the century. Then, the difference between a ‘good sport’ and a ‘bad sport’ was a clear distinction between the acceptable and the intolerable. When the novelist Sydney Horler wanted to pay a compliment to the Prince of Wales that would not seem impertinent in so awesome a context, he simply called him ‘the world’s greatest sportsman’.
The ascribing of ‘unsportsmanlike’ motives to enemies of all kinds and in all circumstances – particularly those in which they achieve success – is too familiar a propensity of the English to need stressing, but the converse attitude, as evidenced in Hornung, is worth examination. Raffles describes as ‘sporting’ an expedition which has involved the carrying of firearms, attempted robbery, the near-strangulation and chloroforming of one perfectly innocent boy and the felling of another with a vicious blow to the face. The readers, it may seem, thus are being invited to enjoy vicarious sadism on the assurance that such things are quite acceptable in circles of society able to appreciate the licence of ‘sportsmanship’. Raffles, of course, belongs to those circles. He went to a decent school and moves, when he is not a-burgling somewhere, among people whose knowledge of what is ‘done’ and ‘not done’ he shares. The attractive implication is that the reader who admires, or even condones, the behaviour of A. J. Raffles, thereby shows himself qualified for membership of that same privileged group.
The supra-legal status of Raffles is possibly a further contribution to the character’s popularity. He does not just break the law; he commits crime so frequently and successfully that the impression is created of his being above the law. Now the English, who so seldom do it themselves, love a man who cocks a snook at authority. No myth has been more cherished and expanded than that of Robin Hood. Our national heroes include only one saint (and him dubiously) but a score of pirates and highwaymen. Is Raffles in this company? Certainly he is a lone wolf, or one of a pair anyway. He spends part of his time fleeing from the police. He robs the rich (whom else could he rob?). Perhaps Hornung calculated that these attributes would be enough to make Raffles a satisfactory embodiment of the Robin Hood tradition. Undiscerning readers certainly have accepted him as such. But what he really personifies is something quite different, something inimical to the principles of justice, of the righting of wrongs, with which the rebel heroes of England have always been associated. Raffles is himself a product of privilege; he is unconcerned with justice; his crimes are mean, his commission of them purely selfish and arrogant. There can scarcely be excluded from any theory of why narration of his exploits sold so well the presumption that it reached some part of the reader’s mind that was ready to applaud the success of even a bully and a thug, provided he had estimable credentials.
In 1944, George Orwell analysed in an essay in Horizon what he conceived to be the moral differences between the Raffles books and a work of fiction that had won comparable fame twenty years later. This was No Orchids for Miss Blandish by the Englishman James Hadley Chase, a semi-pornographic novel written in imitation of the American ‘tough’ school of William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett and purporting to depict the crimes and rivalries of a gang of kidnappers. Orwell decided that although Hornung’s hero lacked any real ethical code, he was sensitive to the distinction between ‘done’ and ‘not done’ and therefore a ‘gentleman’. He baulked at murder, regarded friendship as sacred and, above all, was intensely patriotic. ‘The Raffles stories,’ wrote Orwell, ‘belong to a time when people had standards, though they happened to be foolish standards.’ No Orchids, on the other hand, took for granted complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour. Placid acceptance by the public of the book’s multiple murders, floggings, violations, tortures and so on demonstrated to Orwell’s satisfaction that by 1939 there existed ‘great numbers of English people who are partly Americanized in language and, one ought to add, in moral outlook’.
Orwell, his prophet’s eye fixed steadfastly upon political and cultural Armageddons, was eager to interpret the face-bursting, belly-plugging literature of Chase and his fellows as a sign of general decadence. He was therefore the more inclined to be tolerant of the relatively naïve and inhibited criminality described by the earlier author. ‘Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book,’ he concluded, ‘with the cruelty and corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.’
This is a curious suggestion indeed to have come from a man who once considered himself an uncompromising revolutionary. What Orwell perhaps insufficiently appreciated was that although readers may be fascinated by accounts of extreme human perversion their consequent emulation of it is a very doubtful possibility. During long and lively discussion of the influence of ‘undesirable’ literature upon behaviour, there has come to light not a single case in which a formerly normal person has been induced by his reading to commit a violent crime. Whether abnormal tendencies can be exacerbated by fictional example is another question; there is plenty of evidence – including that provided by the trial in 1965 of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley for the ‘Moors Murders’ – that psychopaths tend to read about perversion, just as gardeners tend to read about horticulture. But no one can justifiably assert that Brady would never have murdered if he had not read the Marquis de Sade.
The influence of books is of a more subtle and involved nature. The most lasting, and therefore the most serious, harm they can do is to confirm – to lend authority to, as it were –
an existing prejudice or misconception. Lies fully grown have been sent as strangers into the world of books, but these have seldom survived for long. The prospect is much better for the lies already present in embryo in the mind – the ‘feeling’ that this or that is so – the ‘fact’ that ‘everybody knows to be right’ – the mistrust or dislike that cannot quite be explained, ‘but you know …’ Any book performing a placenta function for the nourishment of such ideas is likely to prove more effective than one of blatantly corruptive intention.
One of the gangster characters in No Orchids is of so pronounced a masochistic disposition that when he is knifed he has an orgasm. We may be confident that Raffles and Bunny would have considered both the knifing and the orgasm ‘not done’. They would have described the one as ‘foreign’, the other as ‘unspeakably filthy’. Bestselling authors have to be adept at finding such brief, emotive epithets that awaken response immediately. ‘Foreign’, for instance, makes quick appeal to nationalistic snobbery; ‘filthy’ short-circuits thought and gives prudes and hypocrites a pleasurable shock of virtuous indignation. Neither has anything to do with reason; neither is relevant to the real issues of violence and sexual deviation.
Yet Orwell suggested that the snobbishness and hypocrisy to which popular literature of the Raffles type pandered might have value as a check upon social behaviour.