Crime compendium
I had to endure two rebukes arising from my last column,
The first was for dealing with Northcote Parkinson's naval adventure Devil to Pay in a
crime compendium; the second for failing to mention Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey novels among the rival-successors to
Forester's Hornblower. The first rebuke I reject: the detective or
crime novel is a branch of adventure entertainment (though a very special and independent branch), and if crime reviewers don't mention adventure novels many of them never get reviewed at all. To the second I murmur mea culpa and turn to the latest Jack Aubrey, H.M.S. Surprise (Collins E2.50).
And I don't see that I have any reason to change my view that Forester and Hornblower are peerless. O'Brian has a number of attractive characters, especially the spy friend of the hero, Dr Stephen Maturin; and his knowledge of naval techniques and history is fully equal to that of Forester. In this story, which weaves together the complicated strands of politics and family relations on shore with Aubrey's adventures in the East Indies, all his virtues as a scholar and story-teller are displayed to considerable advantage. But I cannot see the force of Mark Kahn's judgement (of an earlier book, Post Captain) that "This is not second hand Forester." The loneliness of the captain, the specific working out of problems of command, the deliberate distance the hero creates between himself and others — all the psychological features of the Hornblower novels, which re-create in the reader's stomach the same knot as there is in that of the hero as ships sail to battle, are here at a lesser level of tension. When Aubrey tells his men they are not to try to rescue him from a Land operation in Port Mahon his words, " The idea of these brave, but essentially unenterprising and unimaginative men plunging about an unknown countryside made him repeat these words" (of negative command), almost exactly recall Hornblower's instructions to Brown when he is preparing to land to face El Supremo in The Happy Return, and there are many such echoes,
So I cannot agree with the, praise lavished on O'Brian by Julian Symons and Mary Renault. However, I think that O'Brian, who is a good story teller, simply labours under the ineradicable handicap of dealing with exactly the same number of limited facts that Forester 'milked dry over his long career.
'There are, after all, a limited number of changes to be rung on the available factual picture we have of naval warfare in the Napoleonic era, A similar problem confronts the successor writers to Ian Fleming and John le Carre. I agree with Kingsley Amis that James Bond just about slips into the tradition of British heroes descending from Newbold through Buchan. hut one of the most powerful attractions about Bond was his modernity — the fact that he was a professional agent, with a massive expertise, worn lightly; and that his expertise was very up to date. (Expertise was a vital part of the Buchan books too; and it was also worn lightly by his heroes.) Nowadays the successors, including Frederick Forsyth, bury the reader in in formation, none more so than Adam Hall, creator of Quiller, whose latest, The Tango Briefing, comes from Collins at £2.00.
In this story Quitter, his field director, and an inadequate female radio operator, are sent to North Africa, where the hero has to fight two rival intelligence cells to get at a mysterious 'plane crashed in the desert. There is a great deal of what I can only call secret service guff (" This is the moment, in the last phase of pre-mission activity when we wonder why we do the things we do; psychologically the brakes are coming off and we are gathering speed and soon we shall be pitching headlong into the dark and its unnerving ..." etc — Hall is the greatest user of the conjunctive since
Hemingway), pseudoinformation and tsoterica which advances the action not at all, but seems designed to gull the reader into thinking he really is in a mysterious half world of derring do and ruthless agents.
Expertise — I repeat it — must be worn lightly, and it must not conceal the characters. I welcome, therefore, a first novel The Boheme Combination by Robin Close (Michael Joseph £2.50), in which an attractive and civilised Treasury Intelligence man, Richard Brandon, is pursued by mysterious enemies as he takes a holiday in Rome from his work investigating a ring organising industrial subversion in England. He is brutally, brilliantly and expeditiously framed for a murder and,goes on the run with every man's hand against him. There is a large, but not at all bewildering, cast of characters; an extremely attractive heroine; and a great deal of clean cut action — altogether an excellent debut.
Quitter has increasingly become a faceless man, a
functioning psychotic automaton; Brandon is human but skilled. An author must very carefully balance character and background so as not to let one kill off the other. Colin Forbes succeeds not at all badly in Target Five (Collins £2.00). The Anglo-Canadian agent, Keith Beaumont, is sent to the Arctic by American Intelligence to bring home a defecting Russian scientist, whose information is vital to US summitry. There is an intricate game of chess between Washington and Leningrad (the headquarters of the Russian service who are Beaumont's enemies) and utterly realistic and gripping action on the ice fields as Beaumont and his friends struggle against time, the weather, and a vastly more powerful enemy.
Another Amis dictum is "that the deductive solving of crimes cannot in itself throw much light on the character doing the solving, and therefore . . . that character must be loaded up with quirks, hobbies, eccentricities." (What Became of Jane Austen, Cape £2.40). He applied that dictum to Michael Innes, three of whose Appleby books I have recently read in Penguin, at 35p each — Appleby Talking, The Open House, and Lament for a Maker. Appleby is a gentlemanly don of a detective, and the mysteries he is involved in are unbelievably complex and literary. But, much though I love the books, I have to admit that Appleby never really comes alive: "Appleby is the man to whom it all happens," says Amis, "most of it could happen to anybody, or nobody."
The extraordinary thing about this is that Innes is a past master of creating gripping, horrifying situations, and marvellous and outstandingly memorable characters. Appleby Talking is one of the boring Innes collections of short stories; and The Open House, in which the hero, seeking help on a dark and lonely night; finds adventure and mystery in a Palladian mansion, is a late Innes, and in the late period he has become steadily more trivial. Lament for a Maker (the title is drawn from Dunbar, whose great poem plays an important part in creating the sinew of the mystery) is, however, a classic mystery story. It tells of the mysterious death of a mad Scottish laird, who lives with his niece daughter? or mistress?) in a ruined castle. The story is told from different points of view, and each revelation of evidence piles up a new mystery. The attention is held, literally until the last couple of pages, and every character — except, alas, Appleby — is brilliantly etched.
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