The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  In Briarpatch (1984), a man is described, by another character, as having to choose between his friend and his government, and choosing his friend. The speaker intends this description as a slightly stunned moral tribute, an American version of E. M. Forster’s notorious and appealing hope (‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’). The recipient of the tribute says, ‘That’s not a very big choice. That’s hardly any choice at all.’ He means that it’s easy to get some things right but also that the moral complications of his decision, and the chances of real damage, are just beginning.

  II

  Eric Ambler says of Thomas that he ‘is that rare phenomenon, a writer of suspense novels whose books can be read with pleasure more than once’. This amiable compliment is in this case perhaps more than merely amiable, since it acknowledges a response many readers may share: an appetite rather than a judgement. But then Ambler also seems to be making the familiar suggestion that one can’t reread – or reread with pleasure – novels that are all plot, or all mystery and solution. One rereads Chandler, say, for the writing, even when one knows the story by heart. I don’t find either of these claims convincing. I can happily reread novels that are all plot, if they are any good. And I reread Chandler, I hate to say, in spite of the writing. The point about Thomas, and what Ambler’s comment catches for me, is that the considerable suspense in his novels is always linked to subtle and intelligent notations of human contact. His characters have histories, you hear it at once in their language. Sometimes they have histories with each other, going back to old criminal escapades or even childhood. And if they’ve just met, then a genuine history begins at once. A large part of the pleasure of reading Thomas is keeping company with these people, even though the company of their equivalents in real life might be too much for us. Take the following exchange, again from Briarpatch, between an ancient, usually drunk white journalist and a black waiter at a Press Club in the Southwest of the United States.

  ‘Go away,’ Laffter said. ‘Go back in the kitchen and spit in the soup or whatever you do.’

  ‘Spit in the soup?’ Harry the Waiter said. ‘Goodgawdalmighty, I never thought of that! Lemme go and tell the other niggers.’

  We know straight away that these men have known each other for a long time, and we know Harry the Waiter is joking. What we don’t know is how to read the tone of the joke and its provocation. It is possible for genuine affection to work through such language; possible too for hostility to become a habit, even a comfort, and have its traditions of wit. When Laffter has a heart attack – more of this later, it is part of the story of ruthlessness the novel has to tell – Harry is the person who performs artificial respiration, cursing the while. And finally we learn that Laffter has left all his money to Harry. Does this settle the question of affection or hostility? Not really. But it considerably deepens our sense of this relationship, of how far back and how far down it goes, and it tells us something about race relations in a place resembling Thomas’s native city.

  III

  I have mentioned Briarpatch twice, and I want to devote the rest of my essay to this novel; to try to suggest how good it is in itself, and how strongly it represents, in its loyalty to certain long and old preoccupations, both the genre novel and the novel as a genre.

  There is much to be said about this book – Thomas won an Edgar award for it, and for The Cold War Swap (1966), his first novel – but one particular sequence lingers in the mind, promising far more than it overtly displays, crying out for comment. To put it a little cryptically for the moment, this sequence, like many moments in Balzac or Dickens, is about reading the material world, scanning a human habitat for the meanings it will deliver. I’m not associating Thomas with Balzac and Dickens in writerly stature, only saying that he is a skillful member of a large and inquisitive writing family. Not all novelists are inquisitive, and certainly not all of them devote so much conscientious attention to the litter of human signs.

  We need a sense of the novel’s story line before we go much further. Benjamin Dill is a thirty-eight-year old consultant for a United States Senate subcommittee. In the first chapter – after a brief prelude – he learns that his sister Felicity, ten years younger than he is, and a police detective in the Southwestern city where they both grew up, has been killed by a car bomb. She was plainly the target, not an incidental victim. Dill hears the news in Washington – the local police chief phones him – around 11.30 a.m. and by 4 p.m. he is back in his home town, and his tracing of an intricate tale of murder, politics and power begins.

  Dill’s question, of course, and ours, is, Who killed Felicity? But he has other questions too. Was she, as all the immediate evidence suggests, an accomplice in local crime, on the take? It says a lot about our expectations of the novel’s genre that we are so sure she was not. This is what we want to believe, and genre fiction is usually quite eager to satisfy our plot desires. It says something about Thomas’s use of the genre that Dill himself is not sure of his sister’s virtue, although of course he wants to believe in it as much as we do. He has still other questions, which bring us to our sequence of readings of the material world. How did Felicity live? Where did she live? Dill’s contact with her since he left the city has been regular and warm, but mainly by telephone and letter. He needs to know what he can of the traces of her life as a way of coming to terms with her death.

  He is given the key to her apartment, the upper floor of the duplex she owns, and outside which the car explosion took place. Thomas, through Dill’s eyes, takes us on a tour of the interior of this dwelling, developing a meticulous portrait of absence, detailing the markers and furnishings of a property where no one really lives. At one point Dill notices there are no scales in the bathroom and thinks that ‘that might be significant; that it might even be a clue’. The possible clue is the detectable absence of a clue, and the discreet allusion, evoked explicitly elsewhere in Thomas’s fiction, is to the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Silver Blaze’. Dill’s conclusion actually precedes his exploration. He turns on the air conditioning and then, we learn,

  stepped to the center of the living room, glanced around, and found there was nothing to indicate his sister had ever lived there. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else with a shred of personality.

  The description of his continuing scrutiny, however, takes three and a half pages. It begins:

  There was furniture in the living room, of course: a dark-green boxy couch, a matching chair, and a chrome-and-glass coffee table with nothing on it except last week’s copy of TV Guide. On the floor, because there seemed no place else for it, was a small black-and-white Sony portable television set. There were no books, not one, which Dill found strange … There was a rug of a neutral sand shade on the floor, a few pictures on the wall that appeared to be cheap mail-order prints of Dufy, Cezanne, and Monet, and in one corner an inexpensive-looking Korean stereo so new it looked unused … The living room blended into a dining area where four chairs surrounded a drop-leaf maple table that looked as if it had been ordered by catalogue from Sears. A fake Tiffany lamp hung by a heavy golden chain over the table.

  The visit continues through the kitchen, the main bedroom, another bedroom (‘which turned out to be the den of someone who had run out of money’) and into the bathroom with the missing scales. The dutiful dreariness of the description matches the intensely synthetic, low-budget feel of the place. We don’t actually require more than a fraction of this account to get the point: someone wants to persuade Dill that his sister lived here, when it’s obvious that she didn’t. But then, as with the mechanics of the memoir in Twilight in Mac’s Place, we are shown that absence not only can do the work of presence but also has its own ways of presenting itself to our eyes. The dog barks and does not bark: the Korean stereo is as good a clue as the books that aren’t there.

  And the point we get so quickly turns out to be the wrong one
anyway, a false inference. Felicity herself created the impression that she didn’t live here – by not really living here. The duplex was a front for an investigation she was conducting; a place where she sometimes slept but which she chose not to mark with any sort of record of her personality. Of course you would have to know her as well as her brother does to register the tale of her absence; and you would have to have Dill’s feeling for what actual human litter looks like to suspect the larger absence of any personal note.

  Much later in the novel we find out ‘where Felicity really lived’, in Dill’s words, and this apartment is described in great detail too, reversing the earlier effect.

  Dill … pushed the door open, went in, found the light switch, flicked it on, and knew immediately that Felicity Dill had indeed lived there.

  For one thing, there were the books: two solid walls of them, plus neat piles on the floor and in the deep sills of the four dormer windows that looked out over the alley …

  A couch stood against a wall. A coffee table was in front of it. There were also some chairs, a magazine rack (full), and a whatnot stand in one corner. None of the furniture matched, yet none of it seemed out of place.

  In the kitchen there is ‘a six-tier spice rack’ and ‘a four-foot shelf crammed with cookbooks’; the silver is polished and the bathroom comfortable and bereft of prescription drugs. Dill doesn’t need to think as hard about this place as about the other one, or to query his own impression. ‘She lived here’, he says. ‘And she seemed to like it. That’s all I was after really.’

  He wanted to know not just where she lived but that she really lived somewhere – in a setting where she wasn’t camping or pretending. But the satisfaction is brief since all the questions return. Why couldn’t Felicity live only in the apartment she seemed to like, what was she doing in the duplex she had bought ‘by dint of some rather dubious creative financing’? The novel itself seems to invest in the disappointment since just before Dill arrives ‘where Felicity really lived’, the place is described as ‘the two-story carriage house where the dead detective was said to have lived’, and on its last appearance in the book is described as ‘the garage apartment or carriage house where Dill’s dead sister had sometimes lived’. These are fine distinctions. Felicity is said to have lived in two places, and in a modest, restricted sense, did actually live in both of them. The difficult declension is in the other phrases: she only sometimes lived where she really lived, and she died leaving the other apartment.

  The great set-piece of the novel occurs between these two inspections, when Dill knows only about the first place. He asks the police detective Felicity was engaged to – this engagement is itself a surprise and a source of bafflement to him – where she lived. The detective names the address of the duplex. Dill shakes his head and says, ‘I guess I didn’t phrase it right.’

  What I’m asking, I guess, is where did Felicity really live? Your place? Is that where she spattered the stove with her rémoulade sauce, and read nine books at once and left most of them open on the floor, and smoked her two packs of Luckies a day, and weighed herself at least twice, and kept her kitchen stocked with enough food to last two months even if she knew she’d throw a lot of it out? That was my sister, Captain. That’s how she lived. She wasn’t obsessively neat. She didn’t hang mail-order Impressionist prints on her wall. Give Felicity five minutes in a room, any room, and she made it look like she’d lived there forever.

  Dill takes a deep breath and asks his question once again: ‘So where did she live, Captain?’ The detective tells him, and gives him the key. But the detective doesn’t know why Felicity had two places, even though he was her fiancé. Dill glimpses something that is ‘perhaps pain’ in the detective’s eyes. The reflection of a genuine sense of loss, surely; but also a feeling of exclusion from Felicity’s secrets; and other worries too, no doubt, since this man, like almost everyone in this city, is playing for at least two sides at once.

  But of course what matters here, and what distinguishes this scene from the visits to the two apartments, is the irrepressible life of the dead Felicity. She is her habits and tastes; she is what she liked to do. We hear Dill’s affection in the very detail of his evocation of her style, and if his visit to the carriage house is a disappointment, even an anticlimax, it’s because we know the real question is not where she lived, even if that’s the one Dill insists on, but how she lived – and he has himself just given us the answer to that. There is a kind of resurrection in this memory – in this memory transformed into a troubled question – and it is because Felicity returns so vividly in this form that her death is more than a mystery to us. It is a loss.

  Dill catches this sense perfectly when he returns to the phrase ‘in vain’, spoken by a well-meaning but shallow speaker at Felicity’s funeral. ‘When the young minister uttered the inevitable words “in vain”, Dill quit listening as he always did when anyone spoke those words. They always came right after “sacrifice”, another word that sent Dill’s attention wandering.’ ‘If Felicity didn’t die in vain,’ he thinks, ‘I don’t know who did’. And yet at the end of the novel, when he has discovered how deep the many duplicities of the local characters go, and how difficult the investigative task was that Felicity had set herself, he finds a new use for the phrase:

  They all killed her in a way, he thought, and now all will pay just a little something on account. Otherwise, the preacher was wrong and she will have died in vain, although dying in vain isn’t really all that bad since nearly everyone does it. It’s the living in vain you really have to watch out for, and Felicity never wasted a day doing that.

  IV

  Detection is always a work of material memory, a reading of the remains of habits and actions, the mess left by various forms of life. But in much, perhaps most, crime and mystery fiction, the main mess belongs to the criminal, and the detective’s job is to trace it to its origin, and even clean it up. Memory disappears into motive and explanation. In Thomas, the mess is called living, and, affectionately regarded, it can, as we have just seen, prolong or bring back a life. There are writers, like Michael Dibdin and Ian Rankin, who are less interested in who committed a crime than in what to do about the consequences. Thomas is too attentive to the idea of the person to go as far as that, but he also cares about ripples and reverberations rather than reasons. When you have made the relatively easy choice of your friend over your government, what is your next choice? At the end of the novel Dill has resolved the question of responsibility for his sister’s death – although there seem to be more offenders than he or we can quite count – but he now needs to think about what to do about what he knows. He has been lucky enough to meet a wonderful woman, Felicity’s lawyer. They may even have a future together, if he has a future. In a few minutes he will be interrogated by a pair of ‘government agents’, although he doesn’t know which of several possible agencies they represent. He has time to call his new friend, and the last words of the novel are:

  As the phone rang, Dill wondered how good a lawyer she really was, and whether she would like Washington. Most of all he wondered whether she could keep him out of jail.

  Dill is in trouble because of what he knows, because of who is involved in what he knows (an old friend, the local police chief, a high-ranking CIA officer, a Washington lobbyist, a White House chief of staff, and a US senator, for starters), and because he did not inform the FBI of what he knew, as was his legal obligation, at any of the several moments when the opportunity arose. He has the goods, in other words, on people who have the goods on other people. If it doesn’t get him locked away or killed, this may help him a lot.

  The chief crooks in this story, and therefore the most intriguing figures, are Jake Spivey and Clyde Brattle, former colleagues in various forms of government-endorsed skullduggery in the East, or as Spivey himself puts it when giving official testimony, ‘duties … performed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia whose exact nature I am prevented by my oath from disclosing’. The duties
included quite a lot of killing, and Spivey doesn’t like to think about what he calls the ‘stuff’ he did, even though he likes the money he made and is still richly living on. He is a dodgy version of the poor boy who made good, Dill’s old schoolfriend who now lives in a vast mansion once owned by a famous magnate in their home town. His house, he says, is his briarpatch, prickly with armed guards, but safe, as he thinks, and certainly luxurious and a source of great pride and pleasure to him.

  The snag is that Brattle, once Spivey’s supervisor in those distant activities, is no longer in the CIA or under its protection, and is worrying, as characters in Thomas’s novels so often do, not about any possible harm to his reputation but about the probable harm his reputation can do to him. He is especially concerned about what Spivey might now choose to say, and is planning, it seems, both to have Spivey killed and to sell to the right buyer a whole lot of different secrets about other people. Dill also knows Brattle – met him no doubt on some unmarked occasion in his own nefarious past – and thinks of him as resembling ‘some long-vanished Roman consul’. He does have lots of style, and we might regard him as something like a cross between Marlon Brando and Sidney Greenstreet. When Spivey steps behind him, unseen, and sticks a gun in his back, Brattle says, ‘Well, Jake, how nice to hear from you again.’ It is Brattle who eloquently recalls ‘Mr Nixon’s rather sodden farewell’. And the deal Brattle wants to make, quite apart from his plan for Spivey’s death, is magnificent. He is the one who has the goods on the figures I mentioned, and it is Dill’s acquiring of this knowledge in turn that puts him at risk. The deal is so subtle that when Brattle proposes it to an ambitious Senator – not the one involved with the CIA but the one Dill works for – the man’s own legal counsel doesn’t get it. The lawyer thinks the idea is that Brattle will get immunity in return for allowing the Senator to play a role in the arrest and exposure of these men. But Brattle knows better, and so do Dill and the Senator. Dill’s guess is elegantly framed as a mock-recommendation: