Readers of this blog will recall my posting last year about how I was fired by Otto Penzler (OP) from writing intros for Mysterious Press' classic crime fiction reissues because he saw a comment I made on a Lee Goldberg Facebook post about Otto's history of egregious sexist comments. My grave crime was that I had commented that retrograde attitudes like the ones Otto expressed on women mystery writers back in the 1990s helped explain how a hideously homophobic book like Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich biography was published. (Mysterious Press was the publisher.)
As a result I was informed that Otto had decided I was accusing him of homophobia, which I really wasn't. I was simply suggesting that he suffered from imperception, like, frankly, a lot of straight people back then. (And the rise of MAGA over the last decade should dispel the notion that things have gotten all that much better since.)
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the dreadful ravages of AIDS, even the best-willed, liberal straight people didn't necessarily pick up on what seems to me the blatant and rampant homophobia in Nevins' book. The Mystery Writers of America awarded even it the Edgar for best critical work in 1989. So why would someone like OP have been any different, really, in his lack of perception?
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| Like protagonist Tim Cornish, this cover swings two ways |
I bring this up not to pound on OP again, but because I finally read Ruth Rendell's 1994 Barbara Vine novel No Night is Too Long, which was much heralded, three decades ago when I was the age of the gay characters in the novel, as a "daring" take on the subject of homosexualty. The review excerpts in my Penguin pb copy are ecstatic, even downright swoony, in their assessments of the book.
While Joan Smith panned the novel as contrived and false melodrama in the Independent, we otherwise have in the opposite corner Harriet Waugh in the Spectator (a remarkable psychological thriller); Joan Bakewell in the Sunday Express (a dazzling structure of intrigue and suspense); Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail (Vine is writing at the peak of her powers); and John Mortimer in the Sunday Times (Vine writing at her marvelous best).
The late John Mortimer, creator of the beloved Rumpole of the Bailey book series and television program and--rather surprisingly to me judging by his looks later in life--a notorious ladies' man, selected No Night is Too Long as one of his 1994 books of the year. The author in his review noted that in Night, which he lavishly lauded as a "dark, watery masterpiece...suffused with sexuality," Rendell had adventurously "written in the person of a young homosexual man." Around a decade later the Daily Mail revealed that the subject of young homosexual men was hardly an unfamiliar one to Mortimer.
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| John Mortimer in college around the time he conceived a pash for Quentin Edwards |
It seems that back in 1942 Mortimer, then a nineteen-year-old student at Oxford going through what then was euphemistically termed an aesthetic phase, had "conceived a violent passion" for a rather attractive schoolboy two years younger than himself. To this dreamy young object of his ardor and affection, with his liquid eyes, pert nose and beestung lip, the bespectacled and bookish Mortimer sent numerous randy "pash" letters and even took him for a romantic ride in a cosy punt for two on the River Cherwell. (Crime writer Hugh Wheeler of Patrick Quentin fame did the same thing back in the day--romantic punt rides seem to have been quite the thing for courting lads, gay or straight.) The two boys also went to the ballet together and Mortimer gifted his beloved with a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, the significance of which will immediately be clear to any queer literary lad. As MAGA would say: "Gay!"
Mortimer's young inamorato was Quentin Edwards, later a renowned English QC. Like so many gay romances back in those days, the affair took a somewhat tragic turn. When Mortimer's racy, suggestive letters to Edwards were discovered at Edwards' school, the boy was expelled and Mortimer, who was accused of having "corrupted" the boy (or groomed him as would be said today), was sent down from Oxford, though he was ultimately allowed to take his degree. All in all, things could have gone worse for them and both went on to live long, fulfilled lives, enjoy distinguished careers, take wives (and mistresses in Mortimer's case) and beget children.
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| Quentin Edwards |
When all these details came out a few years before Mortimer's death at age 85 in 2009, both Mortimer and Edwards admitted that they had a mutual "crush" on each other but denied that they had actually had any sort of carnal relations together. Mortimer freely allowed that he had enjoyed "perfectly pleasant homosexual experiences" as a schoolboy at Harrow, declaring colorfully that homosexuality simply had run rife at the school: "You could have any boy for a box of Cadbury's milk chocolate." He himself preferred boyish women, to be sure, but women of any sort had been sadly unavailable in Harrow's same-sex environment.
Diamonds and pearls, as rock star Prince once lilted, for a pretty boy or a girl. If you don't have the pretty girl you settle for the pretty boy. Just make sure you can offer them some nylons or bars of Cadbury's chocolate.
The whole thing often strikes Americans as bizarre (and many would say immoral), but that's the English public school system, or at least so it was at one time, when righteous England simply shut its eyes to what was going on among its elite schoolboys and, worse yet, its masters and boys.
I go into this more below, but there is a section of No Night is Too Long, where protagonist Tim Cornish reflects on his schoolboy homosexual experiences, which must have struck very close to home for Mortimer when he was reading the book. Indeed, I have to wonder whether Mortimer--who was a friend of Rendell's, anthologized her work and praised her tremendously in print (She is one of our most important novelists)--told her something of his schoolboy sexual experiences and she then drew on this in writing Night.
Rendell herself told a newspaper interviewer in the 1990s that her novel was "about selfishness, about vanity, about a very, very good-looking man who thinks his handsomeness gives him the right to do anything."
Rendell could have placed this ever so vain character, Tim Cornish, strictly in a heterosexual context, of course, but she chose to make him, at least initially, queer--whether asexual, homosexual or bisexual, it's not quite clear, though he ends up, apparently, heterosexual. So you could say, riffing on Dorothy Parker, that the book runs the gamut of emotions from AC to DC.
Rendell included queer characters in her books from her very first published one in 1964 up through at least her last Barbara Vine, The Child's Child, published in 2012, less than three years before her death. Lesbians feature importantly in at least two of her novels (I won't say which), but she seems more to have favored with her attentions gay men. They feature significantly in The Lake of Darkness (1980), No Night is Too Long and The Child's Child and some others. Additionally other books, like A Fatal Inversion, have decidedly homoerotic elements, even if they never break into full flame.
"I had a cousin who was gay and eventually died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989," Rendeel divulged a few years before her death in 2015. "He was put though aversion-therapy, which was pretty grim--this must have been in the 1970s, I think--and it was so horrible he ran away. Of course I knew he was gay--we were great friends as well as cousins. He was very unhappy and often very unpleasant. It sours the character, that sort of thing."
Likely this too impacted her later writing about male homosexuality. Of course both the Rendells and Vines are filled with scores upon scores of unhappy, damaged people and the queer ones are no exceptions--indeed, far from it. Problematically in No Night is Too Long, at least for a gay reader, is the way the author seems to go out of her way to prevent the queer characters from being happy together. Did Rendell believe such a thing as happiness was even possible for gay men in 1994, or was she influenced by the experiences of men like her cousin and John Mortimer to think otherwise?
Here in 2025 one would have had to have been born, I would say, by the early 1980s to have much recollection of the world for queer people--or anyone else--in 1994. No social media to speak of, no emails and texting and you still got your culture filtered though print books and magazines and cable television programs. In the US Friends premiered on TV only that year, while gay-friendly Will & Grace was still four years away, but a glimmer in a scripter's eye. Its gay kiss came in 1999 (see below).
There was independent gay film, but those films never played in most of the country. The most recent actual hit gay film was a tragic AIDS drama, Philadelphia (1993), which, while meant, just continued the association between gay men and AIDS. (Ruth Rendell's 1992 Wexford detective novel Kissing the Gunner's Daughter has an AIDS plot strand.)
The next year Australia daringly gave us the trans dramedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but most of the world never knew of it, I suppose, until America remade it in 1995 as To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. (The original is better.) A year later American did the same with The Birdcage, a hit belated remake of the French gay drag farce La Cage aux Folles (1978) which made Nathan Lane a star. I don't recall there being a lot of social blowback to these films from conservatives, but then we didn't have social media to amplify that. With social media still in its infancy by the end of the decade, television and films were the major ways a lot of people, both queer and straight, learned about queer people.
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| Just three fun-loving guys (?) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert |
Same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the country until in 1999 the progressive state of Vermont ruled that the state's gay marriage ban was illegal. In 2003 the US Supreme Court ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional. The United Kingdom enacted civil partnerships for same-sex couples in 2004 and legalized gay marriage a decade later, not long after The Child's Child was published. In the US the Supreme Court struck down gay marriage bans the next year. In interviews about this book Rendell had called for the legalization of same-sex marriage, opining that gay men were still very much feared by much of the public. "[N]obody really cares about lesbians, do they?" she remarked to her interviewer. "It's [the] penetration [of one male by another male] that bothers them."
So when going back and looking at Rendell's handling of queer matter in No Night is Too Long, one has to allow that the past is another country and the customs of the country may seem rather strange to us today. Or perhaps not--I think one really has to question whether a majority of the United States actually is genuinely committed to equal rights for queer people, not to mention women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities. But I'm not really concerned here with conservatives, or traditionalists, or whatever you want to call them, but rather with liberals of good will, like Ruth Rendell. And here I have to admit that I find Rendell's handling of queer characters in Night somewhat problematic.
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| a sort of poison pen novel Is the pen wielded by a dead man? |
No Night is Too Long is about a beautiful young man in his mid-twenties, Tim Cornish, who narrates the novel. When the story opens Tim is living in near seclusion at his parent's house in coastal Suffolk and suffering "fearful remorse" about someone he says he killed. It doesn't help that he's been receiving a steady stream of subtly menacing letters postmarked from America.
It's soon made clear that Tim's victim was Ivo Steadman, a distinguished and handsome paleontologist (he even had a black forelock that fell over his forehead) in his early thirties who taught at the university where Tim was a graduate student in creative writing and was Tim's lover for over a year. It seems that on a cruise in Alaska that Tim and Ivo took, something quite terrible happened between the the two, but what exactly?
The Nineties being the peak of Rendell's wordy novel phase, it takes the reader rather a long time indeed to find out what exactly happened, unless the reader impatiently starts skipping pages. You may well be tempted to skip. I was.
The first part of the novel, depicting Tim's wretched present, is very atmospheric, drawing on one of Rendell's favorite authors (and mine too), M. R. James, the great English ghost story writer, in depicting how Ivo is always appearing to Tim in his dreams and in his house (!) and on the streets and the beach (!), constantly, everywhere. It reminded of the great horror film It Follows (2014). It's also interesting reading about the beginning of Tim's affair with Ivo at university.
There is some welcome humor in the depiction of a presumably gay or asexual creative writing teacher (he wears his black cat draped around his shoulder like a stole, we are told) who is a maddening pedant with a a fierce hatred of contractions. Rendell herself could get rather pedantic about grammar--she hated internet speak--so I suspect there's a bit of self-satire here.
You might call this the actual "gay" part of this long novel (about 135,000 words by mu count), the part which gives the book whatever claim it has to being a gay mystery novel. This is where we get Tim's thoughts on sex at his boys' public school, Leythe:
No one could have passed through Leythe without regularly taking part in sexual activity, and taking part in it as a matter of course. You did it, and that was that....
Love existed, of course, or rather a lustful or sentimental obsession. James Gilman, five years my senior, was in love with me, and wrote bad poetry to me. Prefects were always in love with some first- or second-year, and in a few cases this idol was kept on his pedestal, the recipient of love-letters or even sonnets, his photograph on a study desk. Mostly, though, he too was used in the way of all flesh.
Rendell was still interested in, and capable of, clever plotting at this point in her career and you can be sure that if a character's name keeps cropping they will feature in the plot in some form or fashion. Late in the novel James indeed pops up again when by letter reveals to his wife:
When I was eighteen and Tim was thirteen I was in love with him, I was deeply in love and it consumed my whole existence. He wasn't in love with me, that goes without saying, but he was nice to me and compliant, he did what I wanted. You understand me, I'm sure, I don't want to use the words. He was nice to me for the favors I could do him....
Later on the letter James recalls, referencing Tim, "things he once said to me, injuries he did me, his callousness and kindness, his opportunism and gratitude." The "love" which James had for this thirteen-year-old boy, he assures his wife, who I would think would be getting pretty worried by this point, "is long gone." Well, okay, then, nothing to worry about!
Frankly, I found this more twisted than anything in the book. When John Mortimer had his pash with Edwards (which may not have even been sexual), he was 19 and Edwards 17, but in Rendell's novel the two males are 18 and 13. That's a rather alarming, I would say, but the participants take it as a matter of nature's rutting course and talk about it as if Tim could have been a fully consenting partner to everything that went on. Tim at 13 is seen as the same perky "coquette" as he was a decade later. Can this be real? I don't imagine most parents would take such a sanguine view of their 13-year-old being buggered at school by an 18-year-old (legally an adult). Or would they have said, well, at least it wasn't the headmaster!
In 1982, back around the time Tim and James would have been having it off with each other at Lethe, Elton John cut a video for his tune Elton's Song, a plaintive song about an awkward young schoolboy with a desperate crush on a devastatingly handsome and debonair older one (see immediately above). They actually look about the ages that Tim and James would have been, but the relationship is reversed, it's the youngest boy in love with the older one. And of course nothing ever actually happens between the two. To me it seems much more believable than Rendell's scenario. Even this video was deemed too controversial for television, however, back in 1982. You'll find a terrific analysis of the video here.
Anyway, as an adult Tim gets bored with his affair with Ivo and desires to dump him as he dumped Janes, but problematically Ivo now is madly in love with him. Then in Alaska Tim falls in love with a woman, Isabel, and decides he's probably not actually gay, after all. Fickle, fickle boy!
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| the 2002 film version |
The resolution of this triangle, which comes rather quickly and perfunctorily at the end of the novel with a rather maddening twist of sorts, did strike me, like it struck Joan Smith, as contrived and passing implausible. I would think modern gay readers would be intensely disappointed at the way Rendell vigorously swabs the deck clean of gayness to make room for herterosexual romance with Isabel, who herself comes off as a plot contrivance: the hetero ex machina, if you will.
Indeed, when reading this novel I kept thinking how I would have "improved" it, which is always a bad sign, no doubt. I guess you could say it's a queer curate' egg, gay only in spots.
There's a 2002 film version of the novel, I would be interested in seeing what they did with the plot. I notice they made Ivo blond and and Tim brunette, which is precisely the opposite of the novel. The actor playing Ivo was 34, the actor playing Tim was 31, so they did get the ages right, more or less.
What interests me most now about this novel is whether John Mortimer might actually have helped inspire it. I suppose that we shall never know now. To be sure, there are many such tales about schoolboy same-sex affairs in England, so many that sometimes it does come off as a rite of passage before you move on to higher--i,e, heterosexual--love. I left the novel feeling like this was Rendell's own view, that gay love is something lesser--more sexual, less spiritual, if you will--than straight love. Gay sex in the book is frequently portrayed as near-rape--anal penetration, recalling what Rendell said, bothers people, don't you know--though not her, of course!
Or was this what she, or her publishers, thought her reading public wanted from her, just to dabble in gauness? To write a real gay novel in that day was to go "niche," after all, to ghettoize oneself to the "gay mystery" section of the bookstore, if the bookstore even had one.
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| Sex or rape? The gay characters go roughly at it in No Night is Too Long |
In any case, I regret to say found No Night is Too Long a profoundly unsatisfying novel, despite its good features. I much preferred Asta's Book (1993) and The Brimstone Wedding (1996), the Vines which covered No Night is Too Long on both sides. Not only are they more complex novels, dexterously skipping back and forth decades in time, but they are told through the perspectives of middle class straight women. I think Rendell was simply more comfortable on this territory. That's not something the author had to write about vicariously. She was quite capable of writing from the perspective of straight men, I will allow, but gay men I'm not so sure. What I have read of her last Vine novel, The Child's Child, hasn't persuaded me otherwise.
To be fair, here's another perspective on the subject, really quite fascinating, from a man who grew up queer in Waco, Texas and found reading Barbara Vine a revelatory, transformative experience. Of course it was Waco, Texas. But how proud I think Ruth Rendell would have been to have known that she positively impacted someone's life in such a way.
Interestingly before his Rumpole of the Bailey days John Mortimer wrote a one-act play called Bermondsey about a pub keeper who has had a male lover over the eighteen years of his marriage. It was performed on stage in 1970 and then televised two years later with the actors Dinsdale Landen and Edward Fox in the roles of the male lovers. In the play Landen and Fox (who rather was one in those days) shared an intimate full-on-the-lips kiss, the sort of thing that was still deemed too scandalous on American television in the Nineties. It seems to have been a more positive depiction of a gay male couple than anything I have yet encountered in the work of Ruth Rendell or her alter ego Barbara Vine (see immediately below).
For those keeping count, I think this is now the fourth Vine I have reviewed here at the blog. There are fourteen Vines. My favorites, ranked, are:
1. Asta's Book (1993)
2. A Fatal Inversion (1987)
3. A Dark Adapted Eye (1986)
4. The Brimstone Wedding (1996)
5. The House of Stairs (1988)
6. The Blood Doctor (2002)
The others I am not so hot on, though I still need to read The Chimney Sweeper's Boy and The Child's Child, the latter of which I have started twice now but never actually finished. Someday need to reread Gallowglass, which seemed more of a "rendell" than a "Vine" (as did King Solomon's Carpet). More food for thought in all, no doubt.
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