Crime with a rhyme
Byron Rogers
JACK THE LADYKILLER by H. R. F. Keating Flambard, £7.99, pp. 158 Mr H. R. F. Keating has written what the blurb describes as one of the rarest forms known to literature. As he himself admits, this is not the first detective novel in verse (that honour goes to an Australian writer called Dorothy Porter), but even so his achievement in writing the second is matched only by his success in finding someone unworldly enough to publish it. Flambard should perhaps be thanlcful for small mercies, for Mr Keating might just as easily have chosen to write his whodunnit in mediaeval Welsh, or with a flamingo feather stuck up his backside. As it is, in a foreword he congratulates his publishers on their bravery.
The first time I read stories written in verse was in the Rupert books by Mary Tourtel, which she also illustrated. But her illustrations were so imaginative, her plots so packed with incident, that, just as I didn't notice that Rupert had hands not paws, so I didn't notice that the stories were in verse, which was as well. This is Mary Tourtel at full stretch:
Well guarded by the stern Police Straight off to gaol they went. For all their wicked deeds they had Lifelong imprisonment.
'Did you pack up your troubles in your old kit bag yourself sir? The fact that I didn't notice the medium meant she had succeeded. Had her verse been better it would have got in the way of the story, for I should have been distracted, and, at seven, intensely irritated.
Verse, it is assumed, is not poetry. Verse is workmanlike, poetry something higher: you have to approach poetry with rever- ence. This is tosh. My daughter sat GCSE English and I stared for the first time in wonder at the broken-backed rhythms and banalities of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, with the cordon sanitaire of white space around them. If that was poetry, what was it for? In our time, it is for exams. But verse had a use once. For the old poets, singing their epics without a written copy, it was as an aid to memory. They knew its limitations. The sea was always `wine-dark', the ship `the foam-necked floater', the sword 'the widow-maker'. Any- thing more elaborate and they would have been sent scampering out of the hall in a hail of broken pottery.
They were singing to an audience that had no experience of prose, or of the print- ed page. We, on the other hand, have both. We are used to the luxuries of discursive- ness and dialogue and being allowed to amble through the thoughts of the charac- ters. So it is a bit of a shock to read Mr Keating's book.
It is set in British India in 1935, which allows him to lay it on a bit thick, with the club, the moustaches, the racism and the sense of duty all mixed up. The crime is the murder of an English widow, who is also the local nymphomaniac:
But listen, lad, yet don't repeat it.
If Milly beckons, smile — and beat it.
It is cheerful stuff, and, to start with, its cheek bowls you along. The hero, a young policeman, finds himself playing his superi- or in a tennis tournament.
The semi-final And to him it's most dismaying (He'd rather hide in the urinal).
But after a while, as in a relationship going wrong, claustrophobia comes. The cheerful cheek gets irritating, particularly the inverted adjectives, the lack of definite or indefinite articles and all those run-on lines.
Any milieu snow-surrounded Meant that the suspects are all rounded Up, or corralled, for Reader-sleuth To follow clues and reach the truth.
Like Lamb being buttonholed by Coleridge, I felt I could have snipped the button off, walked away and returned hours later to find the delivery relentlessly proceeding. More to the point, I began to realise I couldn't have cared less who killed Milly, which in a detective novel is disas- trous. Pity.
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