As I commented on a previous post, Ruth Rendell when she was publicizing one of her final novels, The Child's Child (2012), divulged that she had had a gay cousin who died in 1989 from AIDS complications, to whom she had been very close. He was put through aversion therapy in the 1970s, she told interviewer, "and it was so horrible he ran away....Of course I knew he was gay. We were great friends as well as cousins."
Well, you know me, I found myself wondering, who was this person, this cousin of Ruth Rendell's who suffered so tragically from the warped attitudes of a bygone era (or perhaps not so bygone)? I think the answer lies in two book dedications. In 1970 Rendell dedicated her Wexford detective novel A Guilty Thing Surprised "for Michael Richards, my cousin, with love." Three years later Michael shared the dedication of another Wexford mystery, Some Lie and Some Die, with the author's own son Simon:
To my son, Simon Rendell, who goes to festivals, and my cousin, Michael Richards, who wrote the song, this book is dedicated with love and gratitude.
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| I presume this amorous couple is heterosexual, though it's hard to be certain. |
The festivals to which Rendell refers were "pop festivals" (or rock festivals as Americans would say), where tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans (along with occasional Maoists and Hell's Angels) would gather in fields to hear their favorite bands play live. Rendell published the novel in 1973, just five years after Woodstock in the United States and three years after the 1970 Isle of Wight Pop Festival in England, of which it is claimed that there was an even bigger attendance than Woodstock (supposedly some 600,000 people, though newspaper accounts at the time had it at more like 250,000).
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| the magical mystery tour is dying to take you away |
Singers and bands at the Isle of Wight Festival included Chicago, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Sly & the Family Stone, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Donovan, Leonard Cohen and The Moody Blues. A right nice lineup, isn't it?
They even had Tiny Tim with his ukulele singing There Will Always Be an England and Land of Hope and Glory (so much for Communism). Gentle Tim defended the hippies, telling reporters: "They're such kind people, I just love them. They have their own way of life and I see no reason why they shouldn't lead it." Ah, tolerance, it was a wonderful concept while it lasted.
Conservative locals on the Isle of Wight, who were worried about Communists, bikers, druggos and hippies, were less than enthralled with the coming of the rockers, however. The island's conservative MP Mark Woodnutt spent months futilely trying to thwart the festival from alighting on his isle's shores.
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| the Honorable Mark Woodnutt (regrettably not in his hippy outfit) |
When the dreaded thing did come off in spite of him, Woodnutt, then 51, himself attended the festival, as he put it, "incognito in my hippy outfit"; and he later declared disgustedly to parliament that "the scene...was one of indescribable squalor and filth."
Afterward McNutt was able to induce Parliament to pass an Act allowing the Isle of Wight's county council to have approval over local festivals numbering over 5000 people. They promptly gave thumbs down to a festival the next year. Not surprising with council members with names like Sinclair Glossop and William Rees-Millington! Another pop festival was not held on the island for 32 years.
Pop festivals continued in other parts of England, however, provoking more conservative consternation. At an event the next year at Weeley in Essex (closer to Rendell's home turf), several Hell's Angels instigated "displays of public savagery," resulting in arrests and parliamentary condemnations.
Ruth Rendell, being the trendy lady she was and only a smidge over forty, decided in 1972 that she would use such a festival as the backdrop for the murder in her next Wexford novel. As she said in her dedication, her college-age son, who turned nineteen in 1972, was a regular festival attendee, so she probably learned a good but from him directly and didn't have just to read about them in the newspapers. I wouldn't be surprised if Simon had been at Weeley, at the least.
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| not exactly flower power |
Then there was Ruth's cousin Michael Richards. How old was he? Michael was the son of Rendell's aunt Ethel Margaret "Margot" Grasmann, who was fifteen years younger than her father Arthur. Margot married Reginald Richards in 1938, but I don't know when Michael was born to the couple: it could have been any time from 1940 to 1950 or even a little later. In short he might have been ten or twenty years younger than his Cousin Ruth, who was born in 1930.
In the latter case he would have been a contemporary of Ruth's son (Ruth married young), rather than Ruth, which would accord with someone being subjected to aversion therapy in the 1970s at the behest of concerned parents. Of course we don't know that Michael was Rendell's beloved, gay cousin, but the book dedications and Michael's participation in the composition of the song in Some Lie and Some Die certainly are suggestive.
Rendell later dedicated Shake Hands Forever (1975) to her four Grasmann aunts, including Margot, but in 2012 in The Child's Child, which draws on her schoolmaster father's family history, she names the worst of gay schoolmaster protagonist's sisters, Ethel, which was Margot's first name. Margot had died at age 93 in 2008. Posthumous revenge for the aversion therapy?
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| the hills are alive with the sound of music |
The song which Margot's son Michael Richards wrote for the novel is called Let-Me-Believe, and the complete lyrics are given just after the dedication and just before a frontispiece map of the festival grounds. The chorus runs
So come by, come nigh,
come try and tell why
some sigh, some cry,
some lie and some die.
The song, like the map, is in the book for a reason, you may be sure, meaning it has pertinence to the tale. Now, what is the tale, you may be asking, feeling the urge, Monty Python like, to say to me get on with it! Well, let me tell you.
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| American first edition of a novel reprinted many times and still in print today |
When the novel opens, a pop festival is coming to Kingsmarkham, still policed by the redoubtable team of Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden in this, their eighth detective novel. Mike Burden, now an overprotective single father and still a conservative blockhead, is frankly hostile to the festival, carping about his fifteen-year-old son John's intense devotion to rock star Zeno Vedast, the festival's superstar headliner.
"I just don't understand this craze for pop music," rages Mike long after it started. "Why can't John play classical records?" Oh dear. Reg Wexford, the voice of mainstream liberalism, "tolerant of everything but intolerance," scoffs at this, as you might well imagine.
"They're only a bunch of kids come to enjoy themselves," Reg amiably pronounces, adding "I'd like to be one of them...off to the pop festival." Wexford even strikes up a friendly acquaintance with a young Marxist African prince (!) attending the festival, though he makes clear that he himself is not in sync with Marxism.
One English reviewer of the novel carped that Wexford was becoming something of an all-knowing gasbag. There may be some truth to this, but I'd still rather spend the course of the investigation with him than the somewhat aptly-named Burden.
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| They are coming! |
The case is an interesting one, much more so than the one detailed a few years earlier in A Guilty Thing Surprised. That was a country house mystery, very traditional for 1970 and not very convincing. Some Lie and Some Die actually is a country house mystery as well, I suppose, in that the rock festival takes place on the grounds of a diminished country house estate called Sundays. Its owner, Martin Silk, is Wexford's age (sixty, we are told), but, unlike Wexford, he's not tolerant of youth, he's addicted to it--"one of those people who cannot bear to relinquish their youth."
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| bobbies versus bikers at Weeley |
Silk thinks that the young people can do no wrong. He's hosting the festival, he tells Wexford, "because I love young people. I love their music. They've been hounded out of the Isle of Wight. No wants them. I do."
Wexford speaks to the crowd, urging them to behave, and gets roundly booed off the stage as "fuzz." It all goes off pretty well, however, with the author especially approving of the environmentalist ballads (especially the one about the disappearing butterflies) of Betti Ho, "a little Chinese girl, as pretty and delicate and clean as a flower." (The Asian Joan Baez, I suppose.)
There's also a group called The Verb To Be, which made me laugh, this would be a rock group in a grammar mad Ruth Rendell novel, naturally. But the big draw, of course, is Zeno with his super cool hit Let-Me-Believe.
But this being a murder mystery novel, it's not long before a couple having sex in the abandoned quarry on the property discovers the body of a dead woman, brutally beaten to death and goes screaming to Wexford. However, it turns out that the woman--a certain London cocktail waitress named Dawn Stonor who originally hailed from Kingsmarkham--was actually killed a few days' before the festival.
Does this let the rock stars and their fans off the hook? What about the denizens of the five recently built bungalows overlooking the quarry? Wexford's investigation turns up some extraordinary facts indeed before an old photo finally allows him to pin culpability on the guilty.
In A Catalogue of Crime Jacques Barzun called Some Lie and Some Die a good illustration of the "nice balance between police procedure and psychology that marks this author's best work," concluding: "The neatly restricted locale, small number of suspects in a brutal killing, and strong ending make this a classic tale."
I agree that this is a strong detective story. The problem is an interesting one, the characterization good and colorful and the denouement--a variant on the classic drawing room lecture--effective, with the author's signature lecture on murder psychology from Wexford. Why would the police need actual psychiatrists when they have Wexford? I knew the things in the novel that were important, but I never quite pinpointed to correct sequence of events until Reg explained it all to me.
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| Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast in Some Lie and Some Die |
Ruth Rendell has always been more popular in the UK than the US (unlike her gal pal PD James, who achieved bestseller status in the States), and in the UK there was a Wexford television series (part of the larger Ruth Rendell Mysteries series) which ran for 13 seasons, from 1987 to 2000. I don't believe this series ever ran in the US and, truth be told, it looks rather dreary to me, without the panache of the Inspector Morse series which ran over the exact same time span and the compelling presences of John Thaw and Kevin Whately as Morse and Sergeant Lewis. Wexford and Bruden look like decided also-rans in comparison, at least on television. (I personally much prefer Rendell to Colin Dexter.)
Some Lie and Some Die was adapted in 1990 and features former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast. I feel sure I have seen him in a number of things, but at the moment I can't recall them. However I can say he is well-cast as Zeno. He even sings a version of Let-Me-Believe in the episode. To be honest it sounds like pale Pink Floyd, but he's a very credible performer. However, the episode looks dully filmed on the whole. Someone enterprising on British television should give Ruth Rendell's books renewed looks, they are good murder material.
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| Wexford and John Burden (?) in Some Lie and Some Die |
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