Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

Crack!

George Bone has always suffered from a psychiatric condition that leaves him with a split personality. He lurches from one to another unexpectedly with a terrifying physical crack that leaves him disorientated and unable immediately to remember what he is doing. He is not just an unreliable narrator, he is a pair of them, contradicting himself, backtracking on his intentions, sometimes almost free of the curse his condition has created. If Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time, then Bone has come unstuck in himself.

In his ‘dead moods’ Bone wants to kill Netta, a spoilt chancer, third-rate English film actress and alcoholic, who has strung him along and ruined him. However, once back into his normal mind, he loves her like a little puppy. Both men are Bone, and Netta is brazen, amoral and easily dislikeable. She even uses Bone to get to his old school friend, Johnny Littlejohn, who now works for a big film producer that Netta wants to exploit.

This is an odd book because Bone in either personality is hardly a hero and there is a stagey tension as to whether he will kill Netta or marry her and take her to Maidenhead, a town that has a peculiar significance in the narrative which is never explained. There is a hint of a lost, possibly dead sister, connected to a land of lost contentment, based in Maidenhead.

Hamilton divides the work into many books, each prefaced with quotes, mainly from John Milton’s verse play Samson Agonistes. Samson lost his strength to Delilah through love and strong drink and is left ‘Eyeless in Gaza/ At the mill with slaves’. He can only redeem himself, like Samson, by pulling the temple down on himself.

Hamilton was a successful playwright and novelist from the 1920s to the 1950s. His play Rope was produced on BBC television in 1939 filmed by Hitchcock in 1948 with James Stewart. Gas Light played successfully in the US and was made into a film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman.

So while Hamilton was long established as a writer of creepy narratives, Hangover Square brings to life the demi-monde of Earl’s Court, contriving a trail of perpetual drink around London in the spring and summer of 1939 in the few weeks before the War. The watering holes of that area and the small array of tube stations, the burnt-out ends of smoky days, sad cafés and cheap hotels that bind it together.

The novel is made stranger because we know what George often doesn’t, as his ability to understand the world around him fluctuates each time he switches his state of consciousness. Meanwhile we know what he doesn’t, that the bohemian life he leads is neither desirable nor durable, and the novel’s setting in the months before the start of World War Two in September 1939 reinforces the idea of Bone symbolising all that was wrong with Britain in the 1930s: weak, vacillating and schizophrenic. TS Eliot called the people of that time The Hollow Men, and you can see why.

Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina

This is a book about families. Happy families are all alike, but in Mina’s world, all unhappy ones are really screwed up.

The title, as we later find out, is a quote from Aristotle (Politics 1 l.1235), that those who live outside the city walls are either gods or beasts. The problem is not what is outside the walls, but what is within them.

The problem is that the family can no longer protect; an older man, buying stamps, is caught up in a Post Office armed robbery and brutally murdered in front of his small grandson moments before the narrative opens. Two PCs open a car’s boot and are later sent a compromising photograph. A Labour MP is offered evidence of his corrupt behaviour, never seen nor properly acknowledged and hides behind his wife. A young American, covered in tattoos, has immense wealth but has to evade the vultures he has for parents by living in Glasgow. And DS Alex Morrow craves the shelter of her home, husband and small children, the same home she couldn’t bear to enter in Still Midnight, but never gets there, sailing like a blonde Ulysses around the city, getting nowhere.

Denise Mina runs these stories in parallel and you are fully two thirds of the way through the book before they appear to converge. Like Greek plays, the violence occurs offstage, and before the police arrive the culprits are long gone. Some crime fiction reviews offer a gore rating, but while this is a book about violence, the misframing of the action puts the consequences centre stage, but leaves the causes ambiguous. The one act of on-stage violence is intense and violating as a result.

A running theme is the corrupting power of drug money. This has entered the arteries of the city like a poison and infected those who should be gods – politicians, the police, parents – transforming them into beasts. The slimy Glasgow Hillhead MP Kenny Gallagher bears no resemblance to George Galloway, as the seat no longer exists.

The book does miss the character of Bannerman, who was central to Still Midnight and The End Of The Wasp Season. He is now in charge of Police Professional Standards in the area.  Like other threatening characters – Godot, Fortinbras – he is about to arrive for the whole second half of the book.

Alex Morrow, who was pregnant throughout The End Of The Wasp Season, features relatively little in this book having only recently returned to work after the birth of her miraculous twin sons. Her Manichean half-brother, who resembles but contrasts with her, and links all evils just as Morrow is the moral centre. The interplay of the two marks the impossibility of families keeping both the gods and beasts out of the city.

Dominion by C.J. Sansom

Chris Sansom is unwell, and I hope he recovers fully and fast.

Muriel Spark had a story that when she was a secretary at Hamish Hamilton publishers, her boss announced ‘Mr Greene’s new novel has just come in. Have it typeset will you?’. Graham Greene was so famous and reliable that nobody even read his novel in MS because they knew it would be good.

Sansom so badly wants to be Graham Greene, and so badly is how he has set out his bid in this novel. Dominion re-treads the ‘Nazi Victory’ scenario of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1982) and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1998). However the Deighton book is 334 pages and Harris is 400, so Dominion is almost the length of those two combined at 717 pages. I even recall that the Daily Mirror newspaper’s ‘Garth’ cartoon strip included an alternative history graphic novel where the Nazis won the war. A multi-author book Third Reich Victorious (2008, ed. Tsouras, esp. Peter Badsey’s chapter ‘Disaster at Dunkirk’) is a more immediate source too. All ultimately look back to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Tower, published in the 1950s.

Many say that the reason why the Millennium trilogy is so poorly written is because the author died and nobody had the nerve to edit the unwieldy draft into a workable publishable book, so on a wave of sentimentality, the books were published as received, like Graham Greene, only without the honing that Greene applied to his work. The Heart of the Matter is 288 pages, The Quiet American is 208. Yet both contain far more than this book, which is triple the length.

Briefly the plot is that a scientist who may know something about a secret weapon the Americans are working on has been locked up in an asylum  near Birmingham in alternative 1952. A small cell  of the pro-Churchill underground including of the scientist’s two university friends and a mysterious Slovak woman are sent to find out what he knows and later to spring him so he can be taken to America. The great smog of 1952 is evoked. Their Nazi SS opponent is ruthless. Everything else is elaboration. One section has a trip to Birmingham and a visit to the scientist’s flat described in vast detail twice.

What really mars this book is that is is appallingly badly edited. The manuscript must have contained masses of exposition, where characters who know each other sat down and say ‘Remember when this happened?’ and recited reams of history which they both knew about. All of this should have been struck out by the desk editor, but for reasons of sentimentality were allowed to remain. Then there are historical errors, such as the reference to a ‘motorway’ in 1952, which later becomes the Great North Road, and to a man zipping his fly in 1952, when no trousers had zips until the 1970s. In one chapter we are told a character is called Meg when the viewpoint character has no idea who she is, and while there are four viewpoint characters in the book generally, Meg briefly becomes one, although she is soon written out. Two minor characters have their surname changed and changed back.

All these things can happen in a novel when the work is not edited properly and not checked. As this was a paperback edition, it has had to be reissued and there was time to make the corrections.

Much is made, at inordinate length, about the morality of David Fitzgerald, mild mannered civil servant in the Dominions Ministry. He has a sort-of moral dilemma in that he has told his wife nothing of his involvement with the underground. Nor has he told her he is half-Jewish. This is Sansom’s attempt to write a Greene character, but Fitzgerald is a very uninteresting character. While Greene’s anti-heroes are flawed and in a moral dilemma, but the reader is not led to care about Fitzgerald.

This wrist-breaker of a book is a disappointment after the strong Shardlake series, which thankfully continues with Lamentation, and I did wonder if this novel was a bureau novel, one that the author wrote years ago but consigned to the bottom of the bureau and only dug out because the publishers, Pan Macmillan (Mantle) really wanted some product to push.

Get well, Chris, we need you back to full health. 

The Story of a Crime

The Story of a Crime

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Never heard of this one? Nor have most crime fiction readers. You won’t find it listed on Amazon either. But it exists.

In 1965 two Swedish partners, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo began a unique collaboration, which was planned as a series of ten books, to be published one a year for ten years. Both had been published before, and Maj is still alive and writing, although she has never attained the same success. Per died of cancer aged just 49 just as the proofs of the final book, The Terrorists, were coming from the typesetter.

You might have seen these novels they are often marketed in English as the ‘Martin Beck books’ and indeed, there is a handsome series now available from Fourth Estate in the UK. These come complete with introductions and essays from fans including Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, ‘Nicci French’. Colin Dexter and Lee Child. These help to set the books in their historical context.

Starting with Roseanna (1965) the books follow the adventures and misadventures of a number of Swedish police officers, mainly in Stockholm, but also around Sweden, across into Denmark and even (in The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, 1966) to Hungary, then only ten years on from the 1956 uprising and firmly under Moscow’s thumb.

Central to all of the books is Inspector Martin Beck, who is gradually promoted over time. He is an honest policeman, but flawed, as they all are these days, depressed, alienated, unenthused and dyspeptic; his marriage is failing (cases are sometimes embraced so he can cut short his holidays). He contrasts with his best friend Lennart Kollberg, fat, uxorious, a former soldier who can identify any gun, but who refuses to carry one. (Now I know why Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer has a pet dog called Kollberg!). Other characters include the dandy thuggish Gunvald Larsson, and two bumbling uniformed cops, Kristiansson and Kvant, one of whom meets a sticky end somewhere in the series.

The individual novels can be read individually but are best read in sequence.  None is ever less than very competent and all are pacy and often nerve racking. But what is the overarching feature, you might ask, what makes it ‘The Story of a Crime’?

The crime is the fate of Sweden, the country held out as peaceful, the model Welfare State, liberal on sex, cool on drugs, held up as the model for a good and just society. The alienation of ordinary people, the rise of drug culture, the criminalisation of society, the tearing down of cities in the interests of modernity all feed into the idea that Sweden’s Third Way has failed. The contrast between this anomie and a nice countryside is encapsulated by one policeman’s comment in Cop Killer (1974) that ‘Sweden is a shithole, but it’s a very pretty one’.

The other crime is the nationalisation and politicisation of the police into a paramilitary force, thuggish yet incompetent – when things go awry, the national police commissioner’s mantra is ‘None of this must get out!’ But Sjowall and Wahloo, through their disembodied omniscient narrator, are determined that it will.

Martin Beck is particularly aware of the void between appearance and reality. In The Locked Room (1972), a murderer is found not guilty of his crime, but guilty of another murder that he didn’t commit. Having failed to convict, Martin Beck is punished by being denied a promotion he dreaded getting in the first place. Life’s little ironies don’t escape Sjowall and Wahloo’s satirical edge.

Every book in this series has been filmed, but only one in English: The Laughing Policeman (1968) was filmed with Walter Matthau, Beck renamed Jake Martin for some reason, and there is a bizarre film version of The Man Who Went Up In Smoke with a German title, dialogue in Hungarian with Derek Jacobi as Martin Beck. The BBC has dramatised all the books on the radio in the last couple of years. You can hear echoes of Martin Beck in Wallander (indeed, Krister Henrikkson from the Swedish second version of Wallander is my mental picture of Beck).

Some features do date. There are few women on the force, and the idea of using one as a provocatrice in Roseanna would never be allowed today. There are a lot of guns and few if any computers; in fact a distrust of technology is a running theme, as technology often enables the police to go off in entirely the wrong direction. The protest of the Swedish people against the Vietnam War runs through the books, when Americans today seem barely to remember it. The reader has to accept that these books were written in the period 1965-75 when policing was different to today.

Worth a read? I may have made the series sound worthy, but the books are good fun as well as thought provoking, and a hundred times better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Be prepared to invest; read one and you’ll want to read them all.

Martin Nichols is a former magazine journalist, former charity manager, former cancer research manager and now a tutor in classics and linguistics at the UK’s Open University. He lives in Suffolk.