Ruth Rendell, “A Demon in My View” (1976)

Rendell wrote a lot of books, and I’ve read a fair few before, and so I thought I knew what I would get here. And you know what, I was right. This is the essence of Rendell. What’s that essence? “Nasty”, my mother says (she and my grandfather are the original sources of my crime fiction habit). My mother is laconic, but perhaps I can say a bit more.

This book is about a psychopathic killer of women who has learnt to control his urges by instead strangling a mannequin in a basement every now and then. Through a series of unfortunate but not far-fetched coincidences, he’s denied this outlet, and so goes back to killing women. Meanwhile, the same series of coincidences brings minor love-life tragedy for his near-namesake and fellow inhabitant of a grotty London rooming house. The latter happens also to be writing a PhD thesis on psychopaths.

Now, that setup promises nastiness in a lurid sense: grime and gore and excavation of the psychopathic psyche. But I think what makes Rendell really nasty is that she does none of that. At her best, she is an incredibly controlled, restrained, exact writer. The image that always comes to mind is of an entomologist dispassionately and precisely skewering specimens.

This restraint and precision are manifest in several respects in the first half of this book. Plot: it’s obvious from the start that something awful is going to happen, but it’s a quiet inevitability, not a runway train. Perspective: she is meticulous in only every evaluating or editorialising from the viewpoint of a given character. There’s plenty of description of dingy lower-class London, but with no judgement except when someone in the book is judging (all the racism, and there is plenty, is from such a perspective). Moreover, there is no hint that any one of these perspectives is favoured or disfavoured. They are all simply reported. Psychology: she hints at explanation of psychopathy without ever tipping over into unfounded speculation. Draw your own confusions.

All this adds up to a horrible sense of creeping dread as the book progresses. The lazy reader wants the author to let things rip, and wants an easy explanation of why they’re ripping, and a steer on what they should think about it all. This author refuses to give any of this, just keeps labelling the insects, and so the tension mounts. This, not luridness, is the essence of nastiness.

I did say “the first half of the book”, and in truth I did find that the tension slackened in the second half—the awful thing happens halfway through and the consequences are less suspenseful. All the same, this is a very good novel. I can’t say I enjoyed it, because Rendell at her best is not enjoyable, but I certainly appreciated it. Which is lucky, because she won this thing three more times, so I’ve plenty more to come.

Nicholas Meyer, “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1975)

Less to say than usual about this case. It’s a Holmes pastiche, written by an American screenwriter looking for something to do during the 1973 strike (Meyer later moved to directing; some Star Trek films are apparently his best-regarded work in that field).

Stylistically, the pastiche is more than competent, and that’s no small thing: good pastiche is hard to do. In that familiar, slightly awkward, slightly pompous Watson style, the first half of the book details the narrator’s successful scheme to get Holmes to Vienna so that Sigmund Freud can cure him of his cocaine addiction, and the second half recounts how the restored Holmes foils a vaguely improbable international conspiracy kind of thing.

The first half is, I suppose, something of a departure from the usual Conan Doyle fare, but also something of a missed opportunity. Holmes, deep in cocaine psychosis, being chased around the labyrinth of his subconscious by Freud? Yes please. A couple of overwrought hypnosis scenes and some jiggery-pokery with hidden syringes? Oh. Sigh.

The second half is straightforwardly like one of the middling Holmes stories, consisting of various stagey opportunities for him to do the whole deduction performance and a bit of derring-do in pursuit of the bad guy. Along the way, there’s plenty of reference and allusion to the canonical stories and the critical apparatus around them. I say “critical”, I think a lot of what Meyer is referring to is really closer to fan fiction avant le lettre. Anyway, some of this stuff is pedantically brought to the surface in “editorial” footnotes, more is no doubt left to be truffled out by people with their snouts deep in the Holmes humus (how’s that for stretching a metaphor just beyond breaking point). Right at the end, we do get a bit of Freud rummaging around in the recesses of Holmes’ mind, but this actually just reinforces the fanfic feeling: what emerges is mostly the sort of extra-textual biographical information over which obsessives like to obsess.

So, yeah, to the extent that you like Holmes, you’ll probably like this to more or less the same extent. Not much more to say of it than that.

Anthony Price, “Other Paths to Glory” (1974)

I wasn’t sure whether trepidation or anticipation was the right attitude to approaching this one. On the one hand: one of just seven nominees for the “Dagger of Daggers” in 2005. Must be good, right? On the other hand, from the cover blurb: “all [Price’s] novels reflect his intense interest in history and archaeology, particularly military history”. And this one presents a present-day intrigue interwoven with a mystery from the First World War, specifically the Somme. Uh oh.

See, here’s three prejudices I have about people with an “intense interest” in First World War military history. One: their interest will manifest in obsession with detail. Two: they will go heavy with the poppies and the mud and the horror and and the senseless sacrifice. Three: they will do that in an unsuccessful effort to disguise the fact that actually they find it all rather thrilling. It all makes me rather uneasy.

And hey, here are my prejudices confirmed. One: especially in its earlier parts, the book is weighed down with information about Royal Berkshires and West Mercians and Tyneside Irish and this ridge and that valley and the other redoubt and which of the former stormed or defended or encamped in which of the latter. Two: all the invocations are there, lions and donkeys and doomed poets and respectful contemplation of war memorials in English villages. Three: well, if you make a thriller out of the material, I guess you must find it thrilling.

Points one and two are problems with the book; point three is part of what it does well. Quick plot summary: our protagonist, Mitchell, is a Somme expert who’s approached by some shadowy government types with some anodyne questions about a map of part of the battlefield. Soon after, he’s nearly killed by assailants unknown, and then recruited by those same government types. They want to know what’s interesting about the map, because people who find it interesting keep getting killed, which suggests that whatever is interesting about it historically is pertinent presently. But to what they don’t know. Adopting a ridiculous disguise, Mitchell and his new friends set about solving both a mystery about events in 1916 and a puzzle about what’s going on in France today—the mystery and the puzzle being inextricably intertwined.

So all that weight of information is presented as part of the mystery, and because it’s mysterious you don’t know how much of the numbing detail is actually germane and how much you can just let wash over you. A friend of mine voraciously reads the O’Brian nautical adventure novels while admitting that paragraphs and pages might just as well just say “shippy ship ship” so far as he’s concerned. The effect is a pleasing haze. But there’s no chance of a similar retreat from attention here. Eventually, through repetition, it’s clear enough what you need to register properly, but for a while it’s heavy going.

The going is heavier for the fact that nobody is allowed to look at a French field without solemnly imagining it covered in barbed wire and trenches and foxholes, and paying due obeisance to the dead of whichever precisely identified units fought there, and reflecting sadly on the passage of time and the transition from live experience to mere memory. Of course this stuff is significant, and of course remembering it matters, but perhaps we don’t need to remember it every other page or so.

As I said, I suspect the reason that the appropriate attitude is so extravagantly demonstrated is that an inappropriate attitude is being suppressed. And when Price actually lets himself gets excited things can get pretty exciting. The past and present mysteries turn out to be skilfully, satisfyingly linked. The past mystery is convincingly concrete, the kind of thing a military historian would genuinely care about. The present day one unspools nicely, the good guys chasing leads and clues and their own tails until they stumble upon the solution. It’s perhaps under-explained—the identity and motivations of the bad guys are rather fuzzy, and the cogency of their plot is debatable—but a little under-explanation is a welcome counterpoint to the over-explanation elsewhere. The climactic 40 pages or so are taut, tense, tight (shame about the fantastical Boy’s Own coda). There are some stock characters—some Yorkshire-accented light relief and a Mademoiselle Sexy Sex—but the main ones aren’t bad.

Although this is Price’s most award-laden book, I do wonder if I might enjoy him more writing in a different period, away from the World War stuff that makes me itch. But I can also see why the thing won an award, and why some people would love it. Caveat Lector, I suppose.

Robert Littell, “The Defection of A.J. Lewinter” (1973)

Robert Littell was a journalist before he was an author, reporting on Soviet stuff during the Cold War, mainly for Newsweek. And guess what? This novel, his debut, is about Cold War spy type stuff. One can only assume that the many others he subsequently produced plough similar furrows.

The plot centres on the defection to the USSR of an American scientist named A.J. Lewinter. He may have some very secret secrets to do with American missiles stored in his brain, ready to spill. He may not. The Americans and Russians both try to work out whether or not he does, and whether or not the other lot think he does, and what they ought to think given what they think the other lot think, and what they ought to gull the other lot into thinking given what they themselves think.

That’s a pretty neat setup, and the sense of intelligence as a grand guessing game premised on ego as much as espionage comes through strongly. You might well wonder whether the book is really an account of what the author strongly suspects happens behind the locked doors of Washington and the Iron Curtain: the story he wishes he could publish in Newsweek, given the sources and the editorial nerve.

I found the book engaging enough without being entirely taken with it. It has some obvious problems, not least an astonishing superfluity of named characters, several of whom introduce themselves or each other with laboured (auto)biographical paragraphs of dialogue. I counted 12 characters at least in the first 30 pages, and then gave up counting, or paying attention to who all these people were, as more and more proliferated. The alternation of action between the USA and USSR works well structurally. But the Russian chapters seem speculative, while the American ones are more obviously realistic, written from knowledge rather than guesswork. This makes for an uneven tone, which is further unbalanced by a slight air of whimsy that makes the rather grim ending hard to land. Le Carré is mining the same seam of cynicism about spying, its methods and its ends, in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But he starts, continues, and ends in the same tough, bleak register. That makes the cynicism compelling. Here, it seems more like a posture taken by someone who actually, at bottom, finds it all pretty exciting: someone who, above all, wants to know what happens in the rooms where it happens.

Overall, I would pick up another Littell book if it fell into my hands, but I’m not going to seek them out.