Crime books

Richard Usborne on whatever happened to the likely lads

After the publication of Clubland Heroes in 1953, I gave away, or lost, most of my copies of the books about which I had written. For some reason I had never owned many Sappers.

Last year I started to do a second edition of Clubland Heroes, and I went to the London Library to isee what they'd got there of my three authors. I remember vividly that first day of my research there. I saw three of my princesses lointaines, glamour-girls of the arts,, on separate literary quests: Fenella Fielding, Edna O'Brien and Eleanor Bron. I felt that my twenty pounds annual subscription (plus two pounds VAT) to the London Library had been well spent. And imagine my extra' agoggery when La Bron sat at a desk near my.' armchair in the Reading Room and started studying, with notebook and pencil, three of the Library's Dornford Yates thrillers. What' was she cooking up? A TV parody? What would a girl so young, so beautiful, so pure in heart, want with the pre-second world war Mansel, Bagot and Chandos, or the Grand Duchesses and childlike Andromedas whose chains those gallant Englishmen broke and whose hearts they won? I obeyed the Reading Room rule of SILENCE, and I still don't know.

Meanwhile, since the Library's stock of Yates was clearly depleted, I searched for Sapper and came back to the Reading Room with eight or nine of the canon. And, curses! some nameless cad had polluted five of them with pencilled graffiti in the margins. Exclamation marks, 'ooh!' marks, underlinings of clichds, underlinings of those heroic men's names that Sapper repeated so: Maitland (there were three separate Maitlands), Strickland (3), Drayton, Draycott, Carruthers and Standish (haven't counted). I then realised, with hot flushes, that the polluting pencil had been mine, the notes were in my handwriting. I had forgotten to rub them out after committing them to my notebooks. For twenty years now they must have infuriated the nostalgic Sapper-browser at the Library. That afternoon, and for a week's study thereafter, I rubbed out the old graffiti as I went along.

They were very useful, though. They flagged many juicy passages I had not wholly forgotten. In Tiny Carteret, for instance, Standish of the Secret Service gets a message that they've got to go to the Lake of Geneva. And Tiny, the enormous England rugby football hero, thinks:

The Lake of Geneva! Could it be something to do with the League of Nations? And Bolshevism? He rather hoped not. Unwashed international Jews, plentifully covered with hair and masquerading as Russians, failed to arouse his enthusiasm.

Could anybody but Sapper have written that? And the eternal lighting of cigarettes, ,"the most dangerous blackmailer in Europe." ' Bessonia, the open powder keg of Europe," the eyes like slits, Standish's cosh, "little

Willie" (see Nick Carter passim), "You halfbaked Sheeny! I said to Mr Pearl Studs, 'the love of country — that nameless love which is the greatest driving force the world has ever known— (nameless? greatest? ever?), "very much alone did he strike me as being" (if he got that syntax from Wodehouse, didn't he realise that Wodehouse was being tunny?) rhe pulse hammering in the throat, the veins on the forehead like whipcord. "And then it happened," maniacal fury, the character who broke into "fluent Brazilian" (? Portuguese), "literally they were never out of one another's pockets." "I'm Eton, you know — and Balliol: though for the Lord's sake don't think I'm begging,' his mouth twisted into one of his lazy smiles," "his mouth twisted into an ugly snarl," "Merciful heaven, what am I doing in this galaxy?" (? gallery, galere?). Noel Annan told me that he had found, in some historical Sapper story which I can't locate, a remark about the "outbreak of intoleration in England under Cardinal Wolsey" (did Sapper's publishers never query his dream-like English usages?).

But two things in Sapper came new to me after twenty years. First, his great debt to — after Kipling, Conan Doyle and Robert Service — Baroness Orczy. I missed that in 1953, the Hugh Drummond/Sir Percy Blakeney echoes: the lazy smile, the wealth, the great size, the affected imbecility, the circle of otherwise unemployed rich male bachelor friends who were prepared to live,

fight and die for their unquestioned leader.

Second, the significant point in that tense story where the heroic Strickland, for heroic reasons which I have already forgotten again, puts the topping girl into his bed at a country house, so that he can stand behind the curtains with a poker and await the villainous foreigner who's climbing up the ladder to shoot at him through the window. The foreigner climbs and shoots and is immediately smashed to death by Strickland's poker. Alas, the bullet has landed in the girl's thigh and Strickland must Do The Right Things and in the right order and examine the wound (" 'Expanding bullet,' he muttered. 'Curse the swine!' "), pour a bottle of iodine into it, tell the awakened house party that he and the girl are engaged (she didn't know that!), send for a doctor. And so on. What I hadn't remembered was that the girl, when shot, fainted. So, when she came to after Strickland had doctored her in such intimate detail, she could only blush, stammer and adore.

I now guess that, had she been conscious during the operation, the story would have been over-exciting for the twenties, and would have probably come back with a tut-tut from the Editor of the Strand. But what a filthy mind I must have had, these twenty years or more, to think that she knew Strickland was being efficient somewhere between her waist and her knees as she lay in his bed, and that she was licensing his roving hands to go their ways. Ooh! No, no, you beast! She had fainted. Otherwise the Done Thing would have been for her to insist on the wound, going septic till the doctor, or another female, came along. I got out the Library's Do. rnford—Y-ateses when Eleanor Bron had returned hers. Also, the Williamsons. I had logged, and Yates hae acknowledged, his debt to fellow ()Id Harrovian Anthony Hope (Dolly Dialogues' the Berry books, Prisoner of Zenda, the Chandos books). But, as in the case of SaPPer and the Baroness, I had, in the intervening decades, found a strong and strange other pairing for Yates — the Williamsons, C. 14; and A. M., husband-and-wife motorists, travel writers and romantic novelists who were in their full spate in the years before the first world war. Here the gay rich, often

Americans, bought motors and hired uniformed 'engineers' for travel through

Europe. Often an amusing English clubman, for a dare, disguised himself as an engineer and signed on and, sure enough, the rich

American lady's beautiful daughter had fallen

in love with him before they got to the Riviera. One, late, Williamsons' novel' ,published in 1921, was positively titled BerrY Goes to Monte Carlo. The hero's name was Sir Berrian Borrodale, Bart. Yates's Berry Pleydell got his name into the title of a book, Bad and Co, the same year. Surely someone most have horsewhipped someone about this clash of -hero's names in titles of books? No? When I wrote Clubland Heroes in 1953' Dornford Yates (Major William Mercer) w,a5

still alive, writing away in Southern Rhodesia'

And, in absentia, he disliked me. I'd written a long, scholarly article about his books in a now deceased magazine, Windmill, in a series their editor, Kay Dick, was running on 'best sellers.' And when my publisher wrote 1, Ward Lock, Yates's publisher, saying that

was at work on Yates again, for a book, wuru came back that this intelligence gave Yates

no joy at all. I had traduced him in the Windmill piece. "Never was the whip so laid to my back . . . " This made me sad, because I had revelled Yates's books since boyhood. Of course his, multitude of mannerisms amused me, but had not meant to pillory him, and didn't thin" I had, anyway. I later found that the thing he

had hated worst was not my smiles about hiS

snobberies, his names, his favourites' servants, wealth and idleness, his Rolls Royces, his dogs,

and his odd verbiage, but my use of the WO,

'cad.' I used 'it then, and still do, loosely, tu mean a baddie. To Yates the word had a class

consciousness, and he thought I was accusing,

him of hating the lower class grammar schon opportunist or nouveau riche who tried t° move in on the upper class Harrovian gentrY. There would have been some truth in such OA accusation, but I wasn't making it, ant,', wouldn't have. Yates thought I was anv would have, a Socialist jeering at the Tory. He regarded me as an enemy. Once, in preparation of my book, I askeds' through Ward Lock, for permission to use s few snippets of autobiographical Yatet material that was appearing on the d,,,tits5e jackets of a new edition of the works. Ti answer came back, by cable, I think, to Lock, "Usborne uses such material at PI" peril." I remembered that the young Merced pre-first world war, had been a barrister, ano that his father had been a solicitor with e widecriminal practice. I didn't use

material.

And Buchan. Several critics and some d

my friends disliked my attitude to Buchan 0:4 thought I'd under-rated him by a mile. 110 late M. R. Ridley (Roy, the Balliol priest WP„ had married me in the College chapel) has: first chapter in his Second Thoughts (19051 entitled'ik misrated author,' and I have alsvli assumed that I was the chief misrater he sv,„ shaking his handsome head about. And ow

late John Connell, biographer of Auchinleck and Wave11 and others, a Scotsman of

Indefatigable literary output . . he, a very old friend of mine, almost, I think, regretted the friendship for what I had written about his admired fellow-Scot, fellow workhorse, fellow imperialist, fellow missionary for the decencies.

Buchan, I agree, had a far better brain, and was a far better prose-writer, than Sapper or Yates. But his shockers (his own word for the segment of his writings I was examining) Were surely only exercises — to give his riotous imagination healthy canters, to cover With industry periods, such as train journeys, Which might otherwise be counted as dangerously idle by his Calvinistic conscience, to show (himself chiefly) that he could emulate his "master," Phillips Oppenheim, the best Jewish writer since Isaiah," to make Money to send his sons to Eton, to put his love of Scott and Stevenson to useful tributary purpose. Buchan, as an undergraduate at BNC, went for all the prizes that Oxford offered the brilliant and the industrious. For the First in Mods, First in Greats, proxime for All Souls Scotsman, verse (he won the Newdigate), politics and speech (he was President of the Union) came as exercises in spare time from LLatin, Greek, history and philosophy. The tItsY, sleepless, honed mind could tackle any,!Itng, and the shockers were one of his side'Ines.

I still find them dull and puritan, though most expertly written. And the ethic of success, half Glasgow, half Jowett's Oxford, wholly puritan, grates on me even more today than it did in the early fifties. I've just been reading Kenneth Rose's excellent Superior Person. Curzon's blood was blue, Eton was IS school, Jowett was his Master and he did get his All Souler. But what miseries he earned for himself, and gave to others, after

wards in his drive for supremacy!

I am glad Buchan went out in the proconsular purple (or wartime hodden gray) in Canada. I admire his shockers, and I admire Buchan. But for me he had never provided the magic that Sapper and Yates, lesser men, did. If, in Clubland Heroes Mark 2, I still do Buchan less than justice, it will not be through want of trying. I read all the books again, and again could not find the magic I sought.

Richard Usborne has recently revised his classic study of Edwardian heroes, Clubland Heroes, and it is to be published by Barrie and Jenkins later this year.