by Clive James
Featuring prominently in this department is Andrea Camilleri, inventor of the Inspector Montalbano mysteries, which in Italy are put out in an elegant series of paperbacks that any sophisticated family likes to have a couple of neatly displayed on the glass-topped coffee table. Montalbano’s bailiwick is Sicily. If mainland Italy is corrupt, Sicily is corrupter, and Montalbano has some plenty-mean streets to walk down. He does so at a brisk pace, and it is because Camilleri knows his background too well to be impressed. He speaks the language. Camilleri’s regular translator Stephen Sartarelli has made a well-deserved career out of rendering Montalbano’s Sicilian dialect first into Italian, then into English, and then into your living room, where you can back it up, if you like, with subtitled DVDs, because Montalbano is an all-media phenomenon in his land of origin.
A typical Montalbano novel, and one which I recommend heavily for when you can spare a couple of sunlit afternoons from The Wings of the Dove, is the impeccably grimy The Shape of Water. Hookers, junkies, scary crime, inspired sleuthing, great sexual tension between the happily fixed-up Montalbano and the vampy young female cop Corporal Anna Ferrara. Notable is the way Camilleri can do a character’s whole back-story in half a paragraph, and only rarely do you get that giveaway trade trick by which one character tells another what he already knows, so that you can find out. ‘You know what he’s like,’ says A to B about C, and then proceeds to tell B what C is like, as if B didn’t know after all. But at least Camilleri is aware that these technical requirements exist, and that it really is a lot easier all round to depict the character outright, rather that plant him in front of a mirror and give him Rembrandt’s ability to depict himself.
That last habit is one of the sure signs of the beginner in genre writing. Italy’s most recent home-grown crime-fiction wonder boy, Massimo Carlotto, hasn’t got even that far yet. But unlike most crime writers, Carlotto has a criminal record, which gives him a flying start with the street cred. In the days of the Red Brigades, he was rounded up in an anti-terror sweep and did time in gaol before being sprung into a life of writing. If only he wrote better. Another dozen novels and he might, but it could be a case of congenital ineptitude that no amount of experience will cure.
Carlotto’s latest hit, The Master of Knots, is a story of torture, snuff movies and arbitrary death that once again features his freelance fighter for justice, nicknamed the Alligator. The Alligator drinks Calvados the way the Scots and Irish boys drink whisky, but unlike them, and like most of the other Italian sleuths, he lines his stomach with decent food, evoked in some detail. His friend Max is a cook. ‘Max had prepared linguini with a cream sauce containing prawns and aubergines.’ Philip Marlowe never ate anything like that. On the other hand, Philip Marlowe never had to listen to anything like the following, which might just possibly sound better in the original Italian, although I wouldn’t count on it. ‘“We’ve absolutely got to find a way of stopping the Master of Knots and his gang,” Max said angrily.’ Those are the moments that make real writers wonder if they shouldn’t get into the crime-fiction business and run up a score.
The temptation is as old as the discovery that any real writer can use a cash cow. The British poet C. Day Lewis was once the crime novelist Nicholas Blake, and for a while Julian Barnes was Dan Kavanagh, whose bi-sexual private eye Duffy patrolled Soho in search of loose change. All over Europe and all through modern history, there have been real writers sending out a sleuth on the same mission. John Banville is the latest to fall for the lure. Banville has adopted the pseudonym Benjamin Black in order to produce a crime novel called Christine Falls, starring a pathologist called Quirke.
The action is set mainly in Dublin and Galway of fifty years ago, so that Quirke can smoke and drink all he wants, which is a lot. There can also be poverty, secrecy, fear of pregnancy, bungled abortion and all manner of Catholic scandals of the fine old type. In today’s Ireland, as prosperous as Monaco, you practically have to be a Russian au pair girl to get killed, but in Quirke’s days of yore there are bodies everywhere. There are also some fine incidental phrases. Banville is a real writer who can really write, and that’s the trouble, because the high quality of the incidental prose makes you wonder if his heart is in the main action. Raymond Chandler proved that a gifted writer could occupy himself with genre fiction, but Chandler didn’t have all that much gift left over – a serious theme would have left him short of analytical tools. Christine Falls actually does face you with the question of whether you really want your crime writer to have that much literary talent – the very question you started off with when you got tired of wondering whether Kate Croy’s elaborate description of a house she already knew inside out could not have been juiced up a bit with the presence of a dead body, preferably hers.
In that regard – the question of literary talent – my pick of the current avalanche would have to be Gene Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir, starring Inspector Synott. The book is set in today’s Dublin, but Synott manages to find a few mysterious bodies in among the parked BMWs. Synott is divorced, drinks whiskey, and eats particularly badly: three scrambled eggs and a couple of slightly off tomatoes when cooking for himself, a cardboard box of Kung-Po-beef takeout when he’s in a hurry. But Kerrigan’s prose (always supposing that there really is a Kerrigan, and that this isn’t Seamus Heaney hustling for a buck) is luxury stuff: brief, funny descriptions, phrases that give you the speaker’s age (‘Every move totally ace’), and a complete financial analysis of a city whose property prices are going up like a flock of flamingos off a lake of money.
I would gladly believe it all, except that Kerrigan doesn’t. Synott, his man of integrity, spends the first half of the book being incorruptible, and then the second half trying to frame the perps. Serpico turns into the Prince of the City, and finally we have no hero. Down these mean streets a man must go who is as mean as the streets are? Genre fiction that gets too far into the ambiguous tends to remind us that if we had a hankering for the quasi-meaningless we could have stuck with le nouvel roman. It would be nice to think that Kerrigan had got himself lost in a genuine search for complexity, but I fear that he just became impatient with the form.
He was right to. As a form for real writers, the detective novel is bound to be a dry well in the end, because a detective novel, no matter how memorable in the detail, is written to be forgotten. Not even a sure-touch writer like Donna Leon would stay in business if you remembered every bit of every book. You need another meal because you digested the last one: if it had stayed intact in your stomach, you would stop eating. And no matter how carefully depicted, whether by the omniscient author or by themselves looking at length into their own shaving mirrors, the maverick detectives are too consistent to be true characters. As for the action, there is only a finite number of angles at which the hooker’s headless corpse can hang from the chandelier. So finally there is nothing left of the books in the memory except the place they are set in.
Essentially they are guidebooks. That’s why a maverick detective from Edinburgh outranks a maverick detective from Glasgow, and why we can’t get enough of the detective from Venice, and why even Elmore Leonard, who can get so much out of a small American city whose main drag consists almost entirely of franchises – some of which, admittedly, come equipped with a dead body in the dumper out in back – still gravitates towards Los Angeles as the natural stamping ground of Chili Palmer, a criminal with a hankering to bulk large in the film industry, thereby reversing the cliche´ of the cop with criminal tendencies. Chili Palmer is a criminal with cop tendencies, but even then, his deep-down urge is to have a studio parking space with his name on it in the town they call This Town. Ideally, any author of crime fiction should turn out a sequence of detective novels that will generate a bus tour in the city where they are set.
As a demonstration of that principle, the biggest detective-fiction sensation in Britain in recent years has always been the rather tedious Inspector Morse, because the novels about him and his even more tedious
assistant Sergeant Lewis are set in Oxford, and when the Morse mysteries are transferred to television the colleges look wonderful already, even before the enthralled viewer finds out that there is a dead body nailed to an oak door in almost every one of them.
And that’s why the undisputedly least fascinating item in the current landfill delivery of detective novels is The Return, by the Swedish writer Håkan Nesser. It’s set in an unnamed country in Northern Europe, so we don’t get to see even the clinically shining pavements of Stockholm. (Down these clean streets . . .) It’s just set somewhere out in the countryside, where Inspector Van Veeteren is investigating the mystery of the headless corpse wrapped in a carpet and dumped in a ditch. A transcription of Van Veeteren’s thought processes is the main narrative technique. ‘Here I am, he thought.’ Van Veeteren is profound. ‘The world, he thought. Life.’ But so is the author. ‘What strange worlds there were in existence.’ Perhaps so, but not in this part of Scandinavia. There is scarcely a building of any kind to remember. Some spur road into the woods off the highway is the closest the book gets to having any mean streets. As for a man to go down them, Van Veeteren doesn’t even remind you of Van Der Valk, the Dutch detective who made a Euro-hit thirty years ago because he was co-starring with Amsterdam. Van Veeteren is playing opposite a ditch. Rarely have I laughed so much at a dead body without a head, hands and feet. It was a male dead body, however, so it couldn’t have been Kate Croy. But Van Veeteren himself, though flat as a tack, is not far enough below his many international rivals to stand out, as it were.
No matter how carefully depicted, whether by the omniscient author or by themselves looking into some arbitrarily selected reflecting surface, these purportedly maverick detectives are too much on the one note to be true characters. Given all the other constraints, including the finite number of points in the ceiling from which the hooker’s headless corpse can hang, there is by now a looming danger that even the travelogue aspect is fated soon to wear out. In some respects, Henry James had it easier after all. It may be tempting for the reader faced for page after page with one of those placid Jamesian sitting rooms to imagine it being sizzled up with some extra action. ‘As the butler entered with her father’s head in one hand and a blood-stained Horikawa Kunihiro samurai sword in the other, Kate Croy’s nickel-plated automatic coughed once, twice.’ But that’s just an adventure holiday. The real adventure, less gripping but far more memorable, is waiting to begin again on page fourteen. Real literature is written in the light of the inexorable fact that the mysterious dead body that really matters will one day be ours.
New Yorker, March 17, 2003
Postscript
As Edmund Wilson discovered when he dared to ask the question ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’, people with a deep commitment to genre fiction are reluctant to concede that their passion might put a question mark over their sensitivity to fiction practised as an art. After I published this piece, I was the target of many letters accusing me of snobbery, when I should have thought it was obvious that I was wide open to the possibility of a genre piece making it on the artistic level: a development always to be welcomed, as long as it actually happens. When Michael Dibdin died, people told me I had been unfair to him, as if there has been a connection between my limiting judgment and his demise. I managed to brush that off, but I am still trying to get over the fact that the excellent Will Self, when he wrote an article about the number of times Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe gets hit on the head, seemed never to have seen my article, collected in my book As of this Writing, which touched on the same sensitive subject. When one lavishes time and effort on the analysis of the evanescent, one hopes that the cognoscenti will get with the programme. But wait a second: why should they? One of the definitions of genre fiction is that it entertains without benefit of explication. One explicates in the hope of proving that the subject is a bit more serious than that. But if it really were, the point would need no proving. There is a conundrum in there somewhere, and it is permanent.
DENIS HEALEY’S CLASSIC MEMOIR
The unexpectedly high quality of Alistair Campbell’s published diary The Blair Years, which I came to late and have just finished reading, leads me to wonder if we spend enough time being grateful for living in a post-imperial culture whose politicians and political operatives manage, in a gratifying number of cases, to write their memoirs on a human level. We don’t necessarily have to like the person doing the talking. Alan Clarke, for example, would have been reprehensible for his opinions if he had not been so patently unhinged. But his Diaries have been compulsory reading ever since they came out. There are so many good books on this particular shelf, in fact, that some of the best ones, after their early fame, forfeit the continuous respect that they deserve.
High on that list, in my opinion, should be placed Denis Healey’s The Time of My Life. The book is a delight to read, and would be significant even if it were dull, because Healey was such a substantial representative of that generation of British left-wing idealists in the late 1930s who favoured Communism as an answer to fascism, until they found out the hard way that the two brands of totalitarianism were effectively identical. To put it bluntly, they learned that grand plans kill. Idealists of today, though they are less likely to pledge allegiance to a foreign power, are just as likely to be impatient with the imperfections of liberal democracy and its ordinary politics. A reminder that ordinary politics are the only kind that count is always useful. Healey’s memoir embodies that truth, as well as providing a model of prose. Since Healey, it seems fair to say, is of an age when we should not hang about if we want to praise him while he is still with us, perhaps it is time for someone to give an account of just how good the book is.
Before discussing its enduring merits, however, we should face the possibility that younger auditors might need reminding of just how big a wheel Healey once was. Let the following few sentences stand as the brief biography that the reader needs in order to appreciate the fact that Healey’s autobiography, published in 1989, would have been an event even it had been bad. Healey was born near London in 1917 and raised mainly in Yorkshire, as the Scholarship Boy of a hard-working family. After grammar school he gained a double first at Oxford, spent a brief period as a starry-eyed young Communist, and went on to serve in the British army during World War II. At Anzio, a graduate course for those who survived it, he was Military Landing Officer for the British assault brigade. His experiences in the frustrating Italian campaign, a grim education in the art of the possible, translated readily to post-war British politics. After six years as the Labour Party’s International Secretary, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Leeds in 1952, and served for thirty-five years on Labour’s Front Bench both in power and out. In Government he was both Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in Opposition he was Shadow Foreign Secretary. Whatever the post, he showed such conspicuous ability that many still wonder why he was never Prime Minister, but the best answer is probably the most obvious: though he had the common touch, his superiorities were too striking. Among them was a wide range of learning, worn without pretension but not easily emulated. Delightful from start to finish, his autobiography is an education in itself, disheartening only in its implicit suggestion that it takes the near-breakdown of civilization to produce a generation of politicians who can appreciate the value of what was almost lost. But perhaps we should try to demonstrate its quality with an initial quotation. Try this:
I was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell’s nature: he tended to believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk’s advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision. Thus he would keep a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet going, long after he had obtained its consent to his proposals, because he wanted to be certain that everyone understood precisely why he was right.
That comes from page 154 of my paperback edition, and there is something to equal it on almost e
very other page of the book. One doesn’t say that cultivation ensures political acumen. If it did, Neville Chamberlain would have been the most effective Prime Minister in British history. But an empty mind is rarely reassuring. A cultivated man across the whole range of the arts, Healey was a gift from war to peace. If there had been no war, the dazzling double first in Greats might have gone on to be an academic, a scholar, a critic, a writer, a star broadcaster, or any combination of those five things. But the war sent him into politics: real politics, Labour politics, not the Communism he had briefly embraced when too young to know the difference. (Isaiah Berlin said that most of those bright young people who enrolled in the Communist Party in pre-war Britain didn’t really want a revolution: they were just liberals who wanted to feel serious.) In parliament, Healey’s mere presence on the Labour front bench was enough to make the Conservatives look like philistines. Not all of them were, but few of those who weren’t had a mind as well furnished as his. Their culture was part of their inheritance. He had to acquire his, and went on acquiring it throughout his career, out of a passion that was never stilled even by the crushing, necessary boredom of political committee rooms. So it was unsurprising, if gratifying, that he marked his retirement with one of those rare books of political memoirs that connect politics to culture. A book like Noel Annan’s Our Age, while of comparable quality, is really coming from the other direction, in which the going is far easier. At the end of the war, Annan, as a leading light in the Allied Control Commission, played a key role in fostering the reconstruction of Germany’s civilized institutions. It was a difficult task requiring much tact and ingenuity; but that was as far as he went with politics. Post-war, Annan was a cultural grandee, which for a man with his qualifications was easy street. Healey, once he had made his choice, never saw the ivory tower again.