Plain Jane: Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), by PD James

"But this light-heartedness was not to last."

--Death Comes to Pemberley 

In the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice (1813) author Jane Austen takes time to tell us, like a tantalizing gypsy reader of tea leaves, something of the futures of her novel's many characters.  The neurotic--as we might say now--mother of Elizabeth Bennet (now Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy) "still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly," which surely comes to us as no great surprise about this exasperating lady.  In accord with Mrs. Bennet, most of the characters seem to go on much as before, like Lizzy's would-be profound but in reality entirely commonplace and dull sister Mary, now "obliged to mix more with the world but [moralizing] over every morning visit."  

Fittingly the ones for whom things definitely get worse are that distressing married couple George and Lydia Wickham.  George, a charming rogue who briefly enchanted even sensible Lizzy Bennett herself, and flighty Lydia, Lizzy's youngest sister, clearly were not souls destined for settled lives, whether spent together or apart.  "They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought," Austen tells us chidingly.  "His affection for her soon sank into indifference; her's lasted a little longer...."

Naturally Austen's extremely devoted fans--the Janeites as they became known--wanted to know yet more, Pride and Prejudice being Austen's most beloved novel; and Austen continuations since have abounded, including in the mystery field.  Jane Austen herself never wrote a murder mystery, of course.  She died sadly prematurely at the age of forty-one in 1817, when Edgar Allan Poe was but an eight-year-old lad--though she did mock Gothic mysteries in her amusing posthumously published novel Northanger Abbey, which she had actually completed amidst the Gothic novel craze back in 1803, when it seemed as if every other English novel was set in a crumbling European castle inhabited by a beautiful, imperiled ingenue and her scheming guardian or wicked uncle.  

The author of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma and Mansfield Park probably would have deemed Poe's ghastly ghouls and ghosties a pack of fanciful nonsense.  I can't imagine she would have admired Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  A nice cozy manners mystery, however, might just have done for a nice read by the fireside....

Despite not having written an actual detective novel, Austen became a major influence on Golden Age detective fiction, when the English Crime Queens--most prominently Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh--began publishing what became known as manners mysteries, detective tales clearly written in the style of Austen's witty Regency Era novels of manners.  Like Austen, these Crime Queens boldly placed love interest at the center of their books, having their debonair gentleman detectives over the course of their chronicled investigations fall in love with and marry brilliant bluestocking ladies.  Mystery fans ate up every dainty murderous morsel, especially women.  

One of these contemporary women fans was PD James, born in 1920 and arguably the modern crime writer most influenced by the Golden Age Crime Queens.  The late author, who died a little over a decade ago at the venerable age of ninety-four, was also a fervent admirer of Miss Austen, though she made her own name as a novelist with her rather grim Adam Dalgliesh police series, which ran for nearly a half-century, from 1962 until 2008.  

James nearly died from heart failure in 2007 and might never have completed The Private Patient, what proved her final Adam Dalgliesh novel.  But she did live to complete it and in 2009, with publicity for the book over, she was looking ahead, as successful novelists will do, to her next novel, "increasingly aware," as she put it, "that neither years nor creative energy last forever."  She decided with what might be her last book (and it was) to be "self-indulgent" and "combine my two lifelong enthusiasms, namely for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen," into a single mystery novel set in the world of Jane Austen.  This novel, published in 2011, she called Death Comes to Pemberley (Pemberley being Mr. Darcy's great country estate).    

Chatsworth House, though to have been the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice
just ignore the line of horseless carriages

James completed the novel at the age of ninety, an impressive achievement. A realist, she herself felt her age keenly, worrying that reviews of the novel might run along the lines of this is an extraordinary book for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage PD James.  (She seemed not to allow the possibility that critics might not think it was very good for a nonagenarian either.)  

James needn't have worried about the critics, however; by 2011 she, like Jane Austen, actress Judi Dench and the Queen of England, was a veritable institution and certainly no one in the press was going to accuse their reigning  Mistress of Murder of possessing no crown and wearing no clothes.  Pemberley netted the usual praise, rest assured.  Having finally read the novel now myself, however, I have to say I pretty much concur with James' feared imaginary reviewers: I think it's a remarkable novel for a nonagenarian, but it's not vintage James.  

Actually I think the book is better James than Jane, but that is the problem with the novel: it is fundamentally at odds with itself.  James obviously greatly admired Austen, but she herself is a much heavier, gloomier writer than Austen, who is beloved for her wry humor, sprightliness and brightness.  James, it's apparent to me, had a fine sense of humor, but she rarely gave it much play in her novels.  Even in James' Pemberley, wit is only in limited evidence; and once the dead body rolls into the tale, out goes humor for the most part.  

in some (blood) spots James' novel 
owes more to Edgar Allan Poe
than it does to Jane Austen

James herself was aware of the problem, writing amusingly in her author's note: "I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation....No doubt she would have replied to my apology by saying that, had she wished to dwell on such odious subjects, she would have written the story itself, and done it better."  This disarming nature of this candid apologia is somewhat lessened by the fact that it is so clearly true.  Austen and the word "trauma" do not belong in the same sentence, it seems to me.  

On page 54, several pages before Lizzy's sister Lydia Wickham comes shrieking of murder to the very  doors of Pemberley, PD James has Elizabeth morosely thinking, as the wind shrieks too in the trembling trees (our old friend, the pathetic fallacy): 

outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as in the animal world.  Perhaps even the most fortunate of us will not be able to ignore it and keep it at bay forever.

This is the world of the contemporary French Revolution or Edgar Allan Poe ("The Masque of the Red Death") or James' own crime novels, but is it the world of Jane Austen?  I suppose in Austenland implicitly there is always a fear of "marrying poor" and sliding down the social scale into outright privation, but do you ever see it so gloomily expressed?  This is a James sentiment, not an Austen one, or so it strikes me.  

On Goodreads Pemberley received many poor reviews from Austen fans--Janessaries shall we call them--and I can see why.  James had too pronounced an authorial personality and writing style to be a really successful pastichist, which requires an author to subordinate herself to the subject of the pastiche.  If you can't do that don't do it would be my advice.

Where Pemberley succeeds best is as a PD James mystery.  Some critics of the novel have dismissed it as a mystery as well as an Austen pastiche, but I actually thought the mystery plot was pretty good.  Though one point as I far as I can recall is not clued at all--and some inkling should have been given--the construction of the plot is rather admirable, I think.  I particularly like the mystification around the death instrument.  

The problem, however, is that the pace lags.  There's the night of the murder and a brief investigation, followed by mostly tedious recapitulations at an inquest and a trial.  Then there's a letter of confession, followed by a coda of sixty-five pages!  Critics called this a more streamlined James novel, but by my count it's still around 100,000 words.  James hadn't really written a genuinely streamlined mystery novel in over four decades, if that word carries any actual meaning at all to critics.  

Still, I'm glad James lived to write Pemberley.  Like the curate's egg, it's genuinely good in spots and the basic mystery plot would have made a first-rate crime short story.  Now pray allow me to go, like James, into more detail.

*******

Death Comes to Pemberley, like other later James novels, is divided into books, plus a prologue and epilogue.  The prologue, in which James updates us on just what the P&P gang has been up to these last few years, is the most Janeian portion of the book.   As James explains in an afterword, Austen wrote the original draft of the novel in 1796-97 and revised it fifteen years later in 1811-12.  James sets her own novel in 1803, six years after the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy.  

My favorite part of the prologue is when James explains how envious neighbors from Meryton, the market town near the Bennetts home in P&P, deemed that "Miss Elizabeth's triumph was on much too grand a scale," so they conjured in their minds a sinister alternative history, wherein "Miss Lizzy," like a classic scheming adventuress, "had been determined to capture Mr. Darcy from the moment of their first meeting."  James then goes through all the events of the P&P to show how Elizabeth might deliberately have plotted step-by-step to achieve this mercenary objective.  It's all tongue-in-cheek, rest assured, but I can see it appealing to James' skeptical view of human nature.  Austen herself took a sardonic view of the foibles of man and woman kind, but James did her several times better (or worse) in this ill regard.

Oh! Charlotte, you schemer
Charlotte and Mr. Collins in the 2005
big screen version of P&P

Later on James even suggests, seriously this time, that Elizabeth's best youthful friend Charlotte Lucas, who married that sublimely odious vicar, Mr. Collins, deliberately attempted to sabotage Lizzy's marriage to Mr. Darcy by tipping the news of their infatuation to his formidable aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  This seems to me too dark a view of Charlotte and Lizzy's relationship (I always put the blame on spiteful Miss Bingley), as does James' pronouncement that Elizabeth's sister Lydia always "disliked" Lizzy.  Really?  I don't sense that all.  Did butterfly Lydia ever trouble herself seriously to dislike anyone?

Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, James always seems to be looking for fiendish mysteries.  Of course James' own tragic life--both her mother and husband were institutionalized, the latter for most of their two-decade married life, and he ultimately committed suicide--understandably may have soured her view of human nature.  James emphasizes that Lizzy never would have married Darcy had he not been a rich man.  

Certainly we don't see much interaction between the Darcys in Pemberley and what there is of it is not very romantic.  In truth the Darcys come off rather as a dull old married couple.  Particularly disappointing is Elizabeth, who really is never given much of interest actually to do in the novel.  Her only noteworthy scene, as far as the mystery plot goes, is a charity visit she makes upon the denizens of the woodlands cottage in the company of her sister Jane Bingley.  

To be sure, women then were excluded from such unpleasant aspects of the real world as murder investigations, but I have a notion that, had Jane Austen actually written a detective novel, she would have found some way of effectively feminizing it.  Perhaps she would have invented the cozy mystery!  

An old married couple: The Darcys in the 2013 film version of Death Comes to Pemberley

Darcy's younger sister, Georgiana, provides what there is of love interest--both Darcy's cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a character invented by PD James, a brilliant, handsome lawyer and baronet named Henry Aveling, are courting her--but none of this is really compelling either.  

The plot picks up when the Wickhams arrive on the scene--you can always count on the Wickhams for mayhem!--but the problem there is we don't get to see much at all of them.  They rarely even speak in the novel, even though it's Wickham who is arrested and charged when a murdered body is discovered in the woodland on the grounds of Pemberley.  

It's James' own characters whom the author endows with more life, but because these characters have to share the stage with the pale Austen people, they never get the attention which they merit.  It's the dark and mysterious woodland, though it be on the hallowed grounds of Pemberley, which really belongs in the heart of Jamesland.  We learn that Darcy's eccentric great-grandfather built a cottage there, where he lived as a recluse, ultimately shooting himself!  This seems not at all like Jane Austen, but it is very James.  Indeed, it is very similar to the dark Victorian backstory of the folly in The Black Tower (1975), which I reviewed here on my blog thirteen years ago.  

Living at this very cottage in 1803 is the family of the superannuated Pemberley coachman, now an assiduous polisher of the family silver, Thomas Bidwell: his wife, daughter Louisa, dying son Will and grandson Georgie, by his other daughter Sarah.  There's also, if we believe in the supernatural, a ghost of a woman periodically wandering the woods, whose appearance portends--What else?--death.

All this is interesting, but it sounds nothing like Austen.  Louisa Bidwell in particular sounds like a nod to PD James herself, an intellectually precocious girl in whom the scholarly local minister, Percy Oliphant, has taken a charitable interest, lending her books and including her with a few boys in his small private Latin class.  

Before PD James there 
was ME Braddon

This sinister setting, with its forbidding woods, phantom lady and violent suicide, sounds rather more like one of Austen's mocked Gothic novels, or, as it develops, a Victorian sensation novel by Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.  I suspect James could have written quite a good Victorian detective novel, something rather better than this neither fish nor fowl affair she gave us in Pemberley.  

The official investigators as well are a promising cast of characters, but they never get to do much. To be sure, Darcy's fellow local magistrate, the officious Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, who once insisted on hanging a man from the Pemberley estate for poaching a deer, is set up by page 100 to serve as a great nemesis for the master of Pemberley, as he assuredly would have been in one of John Dickson Carr's historical mysteries. 

Of his grave suspicion of Wickham in the crime, Sir Selwyn menacingly informs Darcy: "I am a simple man, Darcy.  When a man confesses, one who is not under duress, I tend to believe him."  Oh, what Carr would have done with this sinister man!  Yet this never really goes much of anywhere at all, despite an effective vignette when Darcy visits Sir Selwyn's country mansion.  There is even a butler named Buckle.  

The Darcys needed to get out of their own house more in this novel.  Much of the book is a country house mystery without any mystery, with even a sideboard breakfast spread of domed dishes right out of a Golden Age detective story: "eggs, home-cured bacon, sausages and kidneys."  Then we have the trial sequences which get so repetitive and boring, then the confession and a long explanation after that.  As a whole the narrative too often is inert.  

I can understand why James did it this way though.  Despite her protestations, she loved classic country house mysteries and additionally way back in 1971 she co-wrote The Maul and the Pear Tree, a fine study of a true crime, the Ratcliffe Highway serial murders, which took place in 1811, just eight years after the events detailed in Pemberley (see my 2012 review of the book here).  But all the legal stuff fit better into a study of an actual criminal case.  

Clunkingly anachronistically, James has "radical" Henry Alveston make a speech on the need for appeals courts, concluding presciently: "I can see no reason against such a change, and we are hopeful that it may come before the end of this century."  (Indeed it was 1876.)  With unintentional sad irony near the end of the novel she also has a character predict that the United States will become "a country as powerful, if not more powerful, than [the United Kingdom], and one which will continue to set an example of freedom and liberty to the whole of the world."  Well, at least until 2025, when it became an utter shame and disgrace to the world.

James was a very formal writer by nature and in her writing and her characters' speech she was never able to capture the real inflections of modern-day speech in the 21st century, when she published no fewer than three contemporary Adam Dalgliesh detective novels.  That formality, however, helps her mimic Austen, though she mostly lacks Austen's light touch.  Yet there also are times when her characters' speech sounds too like the later 20th century to me, with such phrases as these: "age difference"; "I was a disaster"; "made a move"; "clear and concise"; "the main facts"; "point out"; "take charge"; "blurted out the news"; "inappropriate"; "got it right"; "make a move"; "out of date"; "rent-free."  

I may be errantly nitpicking here, however.  I just know that it's not James but author Stephanie Barron, who transformed Jane Austen herself her series detective in a fifteen-novel series running from 1996 through 2023, who makes me feel like I am actually in Jane Austen's world.  Naturally British television has left Barron's fine books untouched, while rushing out and filming an adaptation of Pemberley in 2013, a year before James' death.  Jane Austen + PD James: sure winner, right?   

endearing young charmer: the talented Mr. Wickham

The film version has as the Darcys Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin, good actors both but to my eye miscast here, especially AMM, who was too old for Elizabeth and rather looked it.  Rhys on the other hand strikes me as a bit too glowering and formidable, even for Darcy.  One reviewer noted amusingly that in handsome, charmingly dimpled Matthew Goode, however, filmmakers had finally cast a sufficiently attractive Wickham.  I can only assume his part was greatly expanded from that in the book, because in the book he hardly does anything except protest his innocence and make a boring explanatory speech near the end. 

But then I can't think of a single character from P&P to whom James really does justice.  Colonel Fitzwilliam plays a large part in the events in Pemberley, but he doesn't resemble the character from Austen's novel to my mind.  Mr. Bennett makes a forgettable cameo appearance (in the Pemberley library naturally), while Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh merely send letters.  To be sure Lady Catherine's short epistle is amusing. She divulges to the Darcys her certainty that had she been a man she would have made a most estimable attorney.  But all this good character material is essentially wasted for the most part.  

Had I written this novel, which I freely admit I would have had neither the wit nor ability to accomplish,  I would have set it in Longbourne and Meryton and brought in all of Elizabeth's vivid relations.  I think that is what Austen fans would have wanted and then we could have had a true village mystery--perhaps even with a nosy old village biddy who solves the case and turns out to be Miss Marple's great-great grandmother.  

HUGE SPOILER to PEMBERLEY

I also would have had a twist ending, where, after the confession, which proves to be false, Wickham admits to really being the murderer after all, then toddles nonchalantly off to America, leading us to fear that during the trip poor dim Lydia may very well get pushed into the pond, dropped into the drink.  Personally I think it would have been entirely in character for Wickham, who has all the making of a great criminal sociopath; but James in her novels generally could not bring herself actually to allow her murderers to get away with their murders entirely scot-free. 

END SPOILER

This final James novel has a very moral ending, which I suppose both our dear Aunt Janes--Marple and Austen--actually would have approved of.  James even gives us a character I don't recall from Austen: a genuinely good and admirable clergyman!  But then PD James herself remained a pious Anglican churchwoman to the end.  

Black bird scheming in the dead of night: 95 Years with The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett

"What's this bird, this falcon, that everybody's all steamed up about?"

"You're a fine lot of lollipops!"

--PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, published 95 years ago this month, is such a landmark archetype of detective fiction that it feels kind of hard to say anything original about it at this point.  If you had to compile a list of the ten most important detective novels it would have to be on there, along with what?  The Moonstone? The Mystery of Orcival?  The Hound of the Baskervilles?  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?  Those few titles come immediately to mind.  I suppose some people would include Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, but I've always felt that one was actually somewhat dreadful, the wonderful fractured stained-glass similes notwithstanding.  The Long Goodbye, now...

From the previous year, 1929, American reviewers had loved Hammett's Continental Op crime novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (the latter, to be sure, to a lesser extent) and they were primed to embrace Hammett's new tough detective, Sam Spade.  In 1930 they simply went bonkers over The Maltese Falcon.  

Everyone wants the bird....

Author and El Paso Times book review editor Eugene Cunningham raved: "I shall be surprised if it doesn't find a niche among the Best Detective Stories of All Time."  Popular newspaper columnist and satirical wit Franklin P. Adams, a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, pronounced The Maltese Falcon "the only detective tale that I have been able to read through since Sherlock Holmes."  

It was the realism of the book that appealed most strongly to American reviewers: the realism of the cops, the crooks and most of all the private detective. They felt like they had read an account of something that really might have happened on the streets of San Francisco, where the novel is set.  The precious falcon statuette which nominally drives the plot--the dingus as Sam calls it--is something out of an Edgar Wallace thriller, sure, but the desperate, dangerous characters hiding it and hunting for it make the story feel real.  The vitality of Hammett's writing makes these people live (until they die).

"Until the coming of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvest and now in The Maltese Falcon," observed Donald Douglas in the New Republic

the memorable detectives were gentlemen.  The ever-delightful M. Lecoq and his copy, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, are fair gods against the gnomes.  Their only worth successor, Father Brown, is a priest.  Scratch every other detective and you'll find an M. Lecoq.  Now comes Mr. Hammett's tough guy in Red Harvest and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and you find the Pinkerton Operative as a scoundrel without pity or remorse, taking his whiffs of drink and his casual amours between catching crooks, treating the police with a cynical contempt, always getting his crook by foul and fearless means, above the law like a satyr--and Mr. Hammett describing his deeds in a glistening and fascinating prose as "American" as [Ring] Lardner's, and every bit as original in musical rhythm and bawdy humor.  

There is nothing like these books in the whole range of detective fiction.  The plots don't matter so much.  The art does; and there is an absolute distinction of real art.  It is (in its small way) like Wagner writing about the gnomes in "Rheingold."  The gnomes have an eloquence of speech and a fascinating mystery of disclosure.  Don't get me wrong, bo.  It's not the tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine.  It is the genuine presence of the myth.  The events of The Maltese Falcon may have happened that way in real life.  No one save Mr. Hammett could have woven them to such a silver-steeley mesh.  

Alberich in Wagner's Das Rheingold

Reviewers disagreed over whether the nominal hero of the novel, Sam Spade, could even be seen as a hero at all.  Barend Beek at the Book Nook in the Miami News observed that after finishing The Maltese Falcon "one still wonders whether the hero is a hero or a deep-dyed villain."  In England in the Daily Herald reviewer Maurice Fagenck expressed no doubt that the ending of the novel would leave readers "better disposed to the murderers than towards the gloating detective."  

Reviewers in England generally seemed less enamored with the novel than besotted Americans.  I think the public school honor code ethos still held greater sway among the Brits, at least the elite tastemakers in the papers and journals.  

Sam's motivations were a mystery to a lot of people because of the way Hammett weaves his silver-steely mesh, his exterior third person narrative capturing people's words and actions but not their thoughts.  So in judging Sam we can only judge him by what he does and says.  And for most of the characters in this book their words aren't worth shit, to be blunt, and their actions are elliptical, if not downright shameful.  

The plot that so many found startlingly original at the time seems fantastically familiar a century later.  So imitated was Hammett that the plot must have seemed cliched even a decade later.  The whole thing opens at the detective offices of Sam and his partner Miles Archer.  Their secretary Effie Perine ushers in to see them a luscious young redhead, wonderfully named Miss Wonderly.  The lady explains that she wants someone to shadow a certain unsavory character named Floyd Thursby, who has run off to San Francisco with her younger sister Corinne, only seventeen, five years younger than she.  Archer, obviously very smitten with Miss Wonderly (as is Sam but he keeps a better grip on himself), volunteers for the job.  

That's the end of chapter one; chapter two opens with Sam learning from the cops that Archer has been found shot dead in the night on the job; soon afterward he learns that Thursby has been shot dead as well.  Sam himself is suspected by the cops in their murders.  Worse yet, he also finds that Miss Wonderly has been lying to him (which he already suspected) and that her name is not even Wonderley but, supposedly, Brigid O'Shaughnessy.  She's a crook of some sort, and there are other crooks in the game as well.  

What is the game?  Well, whatever it is, it involves a statuette of a black bird known as the maltese falcon.  A certain dingus as Sam Spade colloquially calls it--a gizmo or a thingummybob, say.  

Alfred Hitchcock would have called it a macguffin--the mystery object that propels the story's plot, even if we never actually see it. The thing everyone is after.  Hammett certainly didn't invent this sort of plot--you can look back to Conan Doyle's "The Six Napoleons," for example--but he certainly put a new, modern gloss on it.

Maltese Falcon is such an epochal work of mystery fiction that most of us can never capture the excitement of the novelty which 1930 readers felt when first perusing it.  But we can feel excitement at seeing so many genre tropes really come together and into scintillating life for the first time.  

And, here, I guess, I'm going to get into some major Maltese Falcon SPOILERS, so if you actually haven't read it yet or seen the '41 film and you keep on reading, I WARNED you.  

Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
It's the iconic hard-boiled detective on film, although Bogart looking nothing
like Same Spade as described in the novel  ("pleasantly like a blond satan")

First we see here the client who lies to the detective.  And, man, does Brigid lie!  Practically every word out of this woman's mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the."  She is, for all practical purposes, a malignant sociopath, the mother of all femmes fatales.  The story is largely the story of a man, Sam, overcoming his poisonous attraction to this fatal woman.  Brigid killed one man outright and is directly responsible for two other men getting killed.  And then she expects Sam to play the sap for her!  Sensibly Sam declines.  

Hammett establishes the whole PI ethos here with the line "I won't play the sap for you"--no man is going to let himself be taken advantage of by a woman--and also his honor system: "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it."  Brigid killed Archer--whom Sam didn't even like and in fact was cuckolding by having an affair with his wife--and now she has to take the rap for it.

That's it, there you have every hard-boiled detective novel for years to come.  Spillane may have made his detective an outright psychotic, which Spade emphatically is not, but he's simply imitating Hammett. It was Ross Macdonald who finally brought something new to PI detective fiction, by bringing psychology and sensitivity into it--taking the egg out of the boiling water a couple of minutes earlier, as it were, where Spillane left it in so long the yolk hardened into an unpalatable slab of sulphurous rock.  

Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon 

Hammett also introduced decadent queer villains into the hard-boiled detective story, in the form of that emphatically gay Levantine, Joel Cairo, with his chypre-scented handkerchiefs, not to mention notorious gunsel Wilmer Cook and the falsely avuncular fat man, Caspar Gutman.  

I don't know why people assume Gutman necessarily is gay--he has a daughter, Rhea, and unctuously refers to Wilmer as being like a son to him.  However, Joel Cairo undeniably is flaming.  He's your classic crime fiction queen, elegantly nasty and frequently bitchy.  It's not long before he and Brigid are literally scratching at each other like cats and slanging like a pair of dolled-up Dynasty divas.  

Bridgid resents it when Joel sneers to her that long-lashed pretty boy killer Wilmer was "the one you couldn't make" in Constantinople.  (The city's name was changed to Istanbul the year Falcon was published.)  It's Joel who cooingly caresses Wilmer when he is dealt a great blow late in the novel.  It's obviously they who have been intimate, not Wilmer and Gutman.  It's hard, actually, to imagine anyone having sex with Gutman, certainly in the present day of the novel.  Did anyone else see him, by the by, as inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe?  Actor Sydney Greenstreet, who memorably incarnated Gutman on film, also played Nero Wolfe on radio, I recall.  

Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.),
Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet),
and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), 
all perfectly cast

I always read that Hammett in referring to Wilmer slipped in the word "gunsel," meaning catamite, tricking publishers into thinking the word meant gunman.  But Cairo gets called a fairy and a pansy and there's not any doubt what those words meant in 1930!  So just why would gunsel have been such a tough sell?  Hammett also alludes to Wilmer, that nasty little tyke, telling Sam "Fuck you" without actually spelling the words.  Sam calls the whole queer gang "a fine lot of lollipops," which may be another example of Twenties gay slang.  

Amusingly The Film Experience website described The Maltese Falcon basically as "the story of a group of gay men that went on an antiquing trip that got out of hand."

I have to say Chandler ripped off a lot of this in the very derivative, vastly inferior novel The Big Sleep. When old Ray got mad about Ross Macdonald ripping off "his" signature Big Sleep PI patter in The Moving Target, he should have thought about how a decade earlier he had brazenly ripped off from The Maltese Falcon actual plot elements, like Wilmer, in The Big Sleep.  But then almost everyone in the field ripped off Hammett in one way or another.

END SPOILERS

What is it about this
damned black bird?

Hard-boiled crime fiction's debt to The Maltese Falcon is incalculable, like the value of the fabled bird itself.  It's fascinating to reflect how much the hard-boiled ethos owes to a man who himself was an op (however much he may have exaggerated what he did as one) and had terrible relations with women as a chronic adulterer and even a sexual assaulter.  Did it take a deeply flawed man like this to shape all the inchoate "tough" hard-boiled elements into a landmark novel, a book that forever changed the landscape of crime fiction?  

Often the central theme of The Maltese Falcon feels like "Women are the very devil."  Brigid, of course, is no picnic, shall we say, but then there's Iva too, Miles Archer's wife whom Sam is having an affair with and at this point just wants taken off his hands.  As portrayed in the novel she is a genuine pain.  

Spade is attracted to women, but also repelled by them.  The only woman in the book he actually likes is his loyal secretary Effie Perine, who is always being described as "boyish" and desexualized.  (Maybe Joel Cairo might have been attracted to her.)  

Mary Astor as Brigid and Humphrey Bogart as Sam in The Maltese Falcon
Both are too old for their parts by a decade are more, as described in the book,
yet both of them are great in the film.

"You're a damned good man, sister," Sam tells Effie, rubbing her cheek.  This, incidentally, is another one of the classic hard-boiled tropes, the loyal secretary in love with her boss whom he never actually has sex with.  Spillane ripped this element off as well, making sure for good measure to satisfy his and his readers' sadistic urges by having Hammer's secretary get stripped and tortured.  (Brigid is "only" forced to strip before Sam in Falcon.)

My friend of a quarter century now (!), the brilliant blogger Nick Fuller, hates this book and deems Sam Spade a sociopath.  All I can say is Nick should meet Mike Hammer.  Or maybe not, I really wouldn't wish that crazy, murderous bastard on anyone.  I can happily abide the company of Sam Spade, however, and I love The Maltese Falcon.

Rocked Out: Some Lie and Some Die (1973) by Ruth Rendell

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 an 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.

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 four 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).  

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, Jethro Tull, 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. 

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 bit about festivals 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.  

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" Grasemann, who was fifteen years younger than her sole brother, Rendell's father Arthur Grasemann.  Margot Grasemann at age 23 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 Grasemann 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 the gay schoolmaster protagonist's sisters Ethel, which was Margot's first name.  Margot had died at age 93 in 2008.  Was this Ruth's posthumous revenge on her aunt for her cousin's aversion therapy (i.e., diabolical electroshock torture)?  

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 is pertinent 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.  

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 the started.  (Talk about shutting the barn door.)  "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.  

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."  

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."  (Something like the Asian Joan Baez, I gather.)  

There's also a group called The Verb To Be, which made me laugh, this would be a rock group in a crime novel by grammar pedant Rendell, naturally.  But the big draw, of course, is Zeno with his super cool smash hit rock ballad "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 Sundays property discovers the brutally beaten body of a dead woman and goes screaming for help to Wexford who is one the scene doing concert duty.  However, it turns out that the woman--a certain London men's club 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 the correct sequence of events until Reg explained it all to me.  

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 Burden look like decided also-rans in comparison, at least on television.  (On paper I personally much prefer Rendell to Morse author 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 person on British television should give Ruth Rendell's books renewed looks, they offer good murder material indeed upon which to build a series.  

Now, let's look back at the Isle of Wight, 1970.

Died on the Vine: The Child's Child (2012), by Barbara Vine

By the time the 21st century rolled around, Ruth Rendell, who turned seventy as its dawn, had published forty-six novels and six short story collections over thirty-six years.  That is a lot of writing, but the seemingly indefatigable author kept on going, producing another score of crime novels and another short story collection in the fourteen years left to her.  There were nine non-series Rendells (the last published posthumously in 2015), six Wexfords and five Barbara Vines.  There was also, a few years after her death, yet another short story collection.  

Rendell's books continued to garner respectful notices in the 21st century, but gradually some carping from the critics set in, usually having to do with the aging author's failure to keep abreast with the trends of modern life.  For example, her series detective inspector Inspector Wexford, who finally retired from the force in his penultimate novel in 2011, continued to grouse about computers way past the point where this was believable.  Modern slang and grammar seemed increasingly to bother Rendell and she did tend to go on about "political correctness" (now replaced by "wokeness").  

This is okay, up to a point, and perhaps to be expected from an elderly writer (I'm not quite old yet, I like to tell myself, but I can't keep up with youth culture either).  One thing a writer can do to try to sidestep the problem is to write about the past and Rendell did some of this, though largely she kept writing about modern-day England, with noticeably slackening authority.  But a larger problem, I think, for a crime writer, is when their plotting skill declines.  I don't care what some critics say, plotting matters in genre fiction.  And looking back at Rendell's later books, a decade after death, I am afraid I think it's fair to say that the author's plotting skill largely left her (or she left it) in the new century.  

I enjoyed the nonseries Rendell thriller A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), though it's a rehash of old themes, and I think Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001), though it's a rehash too and rather discursive, has its points. The Wexfords all are readable, though none of the late ones as mysteries are up to the standard of earlier efforts.  Of the five 21st century Vines I only like one of them, The Blood Doctor (2002).

The problem with the later non-Wexford Rendells, aside from a lack of temporal authenticity (this is a problem in the Wexfords too), is that the plotting is not very good and you don't have the Wexford milieu to force the author to provide some sort of actual mystery.  Things happen, but the narratives drag and the things that happen are not very exciting or suspenseful or mysterious.  The Vines lack the narrative complexity of earlier volumes, while the non-series Rendell thrillers do not thrill.  Really it seems as if Rendell largely had lost interest in even trying to thrill the reader.  

Books like Portobello (2008), Tigerlily's Orchids (2010). The St. Vita Society (2012), The Girl Next Door (2014) and Dark Corners (2015), seem more like novels of manners about quirky people (to put it mildly) trying to manage in London.  There may be a murder at some point, but it's not the author's real interest.  I first noticed this when reading her ostensible serial killer novel The Rottweiler (2003), perhaps the least exciting serial killer novel ever written.  Maybe Rendell had done murder thrillers so many times she just became bored with it.  

And if you like these mild manners novels of sorts, that's fine.  But for me they make me miss the days of The Lake of Darkness (1980) and A Demon in My View (1976) and even One Across, Two Down (1971) and Vanity Dies Hard (1966)--books that were short, to the point and, yes, suspenseful.  I think wordage often worked for the Vines, which at their best successfully imitate Victorian sensation novels, but wordage was an enemy of the Rendell thrillers, ultimately overthrowing them.  Frankly it finally overthrew the Vines as well.  

I abandoned Portobello halfway though and skipped briefly to the end.  It has a typical gallery of Rendell's obsessive-compulsives and outright wackos: the guy who sees spirits, the freeloading hooligan determined to get his girl back and, most infamously, the guy desperately addicted to sugar-free sweets.  (Yes, I'm talking about the notorious chocorange subplot.)  

I managed to finish Tigerlily's Orchids, which I thought was better, but it was still the same type of thing: the alcoholic woman determined to drink herself to death, the guy obsessed with the pretty Asian woman next door, etc.  It was like each year Rendell took a kaleidoscope and gave it a little shake, just enough for the familiar bits to settle in a slightly different pattern.  

There's a drowning in Ladbroke in the Grand Union Canal
which takes place in the main portion of The Child's Child
Was it murder???

After two previous tries I made a determined to attempt the finish The Child's Child, the final Barbara Vine novel, the penultimate book published during her lifetime.  When it was published in 2012 one book critic who dared dissent from the usual laudatory review chorus was Claire Black in the Scotsman, who boldly announced: "The Child's Child...just isn't very good.  There, I've said it."  I'm afraid Black is generally right in her assessment.  This take on Rendell is largely correct as well, I think.  

At first it seemed like this might be a real return to form after the blandness of The Minotaur (2005) and outright disappointment of The Birthday Present (2008), but, alas, this hope proved illusory.  Any return to form is but fleeting. The novel, over 100,000 words long I believe, interweaves present and past like the best Vines, but unfortunately not effectively.  In fact I should allow that there is no real interweaving, there's simply a modern-day framing story, set in 2011, placed around an ostensible unpublished 1951 novel, The Child's Child, which details events, based on real life, from 1929 to 1948 (?).  The novella gets two-thirds of the space, with a very brief modern-day coda following.  

What it all really feels like is two separate stories, although the modern-day story is rather artificially manipulated to make the three principals in it mimic the pattern set by the three principals in the novel within the novel .  Let's get to it, then, shall we?

The framing story is about the two Easton siblings, Andrew, age 30, and Grace, age 28.  Andrew is a publisher (that's how he comes across The Child's Child) and Grace is a graduate student working on a thesis about unwed mothers in literature.  After their grandmother dies the siblings inherit from her a large, lovely Victorian house in Hampstead and they go there to live together, dividing the house between them, though it only has one kitchen.  

Andrew barely exists as a character, besides that he's gay, and Grace makes a rather dull, pro forma narrator.  But along comes James Derain, a novelist published by Andrew's firm who also becomes Andrew's new boyfriend.  He moves into the house to live with Andrew, which soon becomes a problem.

You see, James is, as Grace rather clinically puts it: "One of those gay men who dislike women, all women.  I had never met one before, but I had heard of them.  I knew they existed."  Well, they certainly exist in this book, anyway.  I have never met one either, but perhaps they do exist, just like straight men who hate all women.  Grace does on to tell us that such gays "were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover."  Apparently those gays go through lovers like bunches of grapes.  

Would you trust this guy?
Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941)

Whatever James is, he's a real pill though.  He's constantly rude to Grace and loves to lecture her about his hero Oscar Wilde, though he sanctimoniously denounces George Sand, whom incredibly he thought was a man until Grace corrected him, as dishonest for using a male pen name.  

To Grace he contemptuously dismisses the cruel historical treatment of unwed mothers as of no account compared with that which was meted out to gay man through the years.  Grace rightly can't stand this self-righteous, combative prick, and I can't blame her for that.  In fact I don't see how Andrew could stand him.  

Oh, wait, he's one of those fantastically attractive gays, like Tim Cornish in No Night is Too Long.  Rendell's straight woman in that book, sounding very much like a straight woman born around 1930, compared Tim to a "young Robert Redford."  In this book, Grace, born apparently in 1983, goes four times better with the Hollywood film star references by telling us that James resembles an amalgamation of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Gregory Peck.  (Was Jimmy Stewart really that gorgeous? I thought he was more an Everyman type.)  I wish someone could AI this for me, cause I'm really wondering what such a person would look like.  Sounds like Demi Moore in The Substance.

I was born in the Sixties and certainly grew up knowing of all of these people (they were all still alive except Gable, who everyone knew anyway from Gone with the Wind and the famous film burn "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"), but did young people born in the Eighties know them?  Grace explains that Andrew has a huge DVD collection of Golden Age Hollywood films, which I suppose may be plausible, Andrew being a gay man.  (Bette Davis will never die among the tribe.)  Yet I'm pretty sure Netflix was really hitting its stride by 2011 and DVDs were well on their way to obsolescence.  (I still have a bunch of them myself, but then I was 45 when this book is suppose to take place.)

Despite his apparent hatred for women, however, James, like Tim Cornish, soon goes bi on us!  How does this happen, you may ask?  Well, it seems that he and Andrew were out clubbing early in the morning and witnessed some neo-Nazi thug types beating to death one of their friends, Bashir al Khalifa, "a handsome young man from somewhere in the Middle East."  This presumably is a reference to the Jody Dobrowski Clapham Common gay bashing murder, though Rendell changed the ethnicity f the victim.   

Anyway, James, the silly bugger, has a nervous breakdown at the very thought of testifying at the murder trial and develops writer's block so Grace kindly tries to restore his confidence by having him show her how to use the internet (!!!).  She's just pretending she doesn't know, you see, to try to restore his masculine confidence, get it? Sounds straight out of Fifties newspaper advice columnist Dear Abby, someone else Grace and Andrew probably know of, although she officially retired in 2000.  

Here I have to quote Claire Black, where in her review she wrote: "No one of Grace's generation ever wonders about the impact of mobile phones on the way we communicate, nor would she ever need to ask about how a search engine works, even as a ruse."

EM Forster with his longtime lover
Bob Buckingham
who was also a married policeman

But this brings Grace and James closer together and the next thing they know they are, after having shared a bottle of sherry (Grace happened to have a bottle in the cupboard), passionately "making love" together, a lot like Tim Cornish and Isabel in No Night is Too Long.  Soon James is ruminating: "I suppose you could say I'm bisexual."

This struck me as rather implausible, given what we had known about James, but, you see, it's all just a necessary plot contrivance.  Grace gets pregnant from her and James' afternoon of passion and decides to keep the baby.  Informed of her indiscretion with James, Andrew pettishly moves out of the house (taking James with him).  He frostily tells Grace: 

I can imagine that you, Grace, fixed up a pretty little scenario in which your baby has a daddy and an uncle and looks a lot like all of us.  It might be a kind of Design for Living,a twenty-first century one Noel Coward didn't write, but in that comedy there's no infant.  

Burn!  Sounds just like your typical Gen Xer.  Okay, maybe not.  Maybe whatever generation was born back in the Edwardian era.  Only in the worlds of Ruth Rendell and PD James novels do Gen Xers talk like this, surely.  

Poor Grace sits down to read The Child's Child and sure enough she finds that it rather resembles her own situation.  The novel is about a fifteen-year-old west country middle-class girl, Maud Goodwin, who gets pregnant in 1929, leading her stodgy, conventional Methodist chapel parents to denounce her as an immoral girl and threaten her with the workhouse (and of course her baby would be taken away).  

Thankfully to the rescue comes Maud's decade older gay schoolmaster brother, John, who says he will live with her and her child and pretend to be her husband.  He plans to devote himself to a noble life of self-sacrificing celibacy, being conscience-stricken about having a gay boyfriend in London named Bertie, with whom he is very much guiltily in love. Unfortunately sibling love in a cottage turns into mutual loathing as John finds that he can't let go of Bertie and Maud, once male homosexuality is explained to her (lesbians never come up in the course of the novel), pronounces it utterly shameful, horrid and disgusting.  

This part of the book is much more interesting than the framing story, the characters from 1929, a year before Rendell herself was born, being far more credibly conveyed and the conflicts plausible (given the outre situation of siblings pretending to be husband and wife).  For a while it sustained my interest, but then, a little over halfway through this portion of the book, something happened to one of the principals--I won't say what to whom--and after that my interest slowly deflated, like air out of a punctured tire.  The second half of the tale, which must cover a dozen or more years, feels rushed, a rare criticism one can make about late Rendell.  The ending is underplayed, a common feature of later Rendells, a dying fall without any actual death.  

And never is the framing story really made to relate to the novel within a novel.  I couldn't help feeling that Rendell would have been better off just telling the story of Maud-John-Bertie as a linear novel without a frame.  That was actually a story here that could have used more colorful strokes of the author's paintbrush.  Some pictures are good enough that they don't need a frame.    

The second half of the framing story, which is really more of a postscript, could be said to provide a positive contrast with the central story which some people will like.  But my problem with that is since I never really cared about the characters in the framing story to begin with, I didn't have anything invested in the resolution of their story.  I did care about John somewhat and I briefly had hopes, soon cruelly dashed, for Maud and Bertie.

Come into the garden, Maud
Erm, I mean, Maurice!
(James Wilby as the title character
and Rupert Grant as Scudder
in the 1987 gay film Maurice, based on
EM Forster's novel of the same name)

John comes off as a gay saint, albeit rather a dim one.  Still, you feel desperately sorry for the poor dumb mutt.  However, Maud and especially Bertie are repellent, underdeveloped ciphers. People who think Rendell herself was a woman-hater will point to the egregiously dull Maud as case in point, but in fact there are several sympathetic women characters in the story, including Maud's grown-up daughter, Hope, and a broadminded schoolteacher named Elspeth Dean. The monstrous regiment of Mauds always seem to be termagants in fiction--perhaps a modernist backlash against Lord Tennyson?  

Another question: Was Rendell channeling some of her own bad relationship with her troubled Danish immigrant schoolteacher mother Ebba into this story?  Rendell unfavorably recalled her mother as "a very vague strange woman" who felt alienated from the people around her.  That certainly sounds like Maud as things transpire! It was Rendell's native English schoolteacher father, Arthur Grasemann, whom she loved, fondy recalling him as "sweet and caring" and a good parent.  

For much of Child Maud and John live together at a cottage in Devon, presumably not far from Plymouth, the home of Rendell's father, the son of a Plymouth dairy foreman and grandson of a cooper at a Bristol brewery.  In Child the Goodwins, elevated by the author to having their money come from a bookbinding business, live on the outskirts of Bristol.  Maud bitterly dismisses the local wealthy family, whom she believes snubbed her, as "basically brewers.  All their money comes from beer."  

John Goodwin is the lone son with three younger sisters, Maud, Ethel and Sybil.  Real life Arthur Grasemann was the lone son with four younger sisters, Dorothy Rosamund, Laura, Ethel Margaret and Phyllis.  John's mother is a Halliwell, the daughter of a draper, while Arthur's mother Ada was a Hockaday, the daughter of a drayman.  The alliteration of these real life and fictional surnames likely is not accidental.  A few years before Arthur married Ebba, he was best man at his best friend Charlie Gilbert's wedding in Cornwall, a fellow schoolmaster and London University graduate.  Charlie's bride Dorothy shared the same surname as sympathetic schoolteacher Elspeth Dean in The Child's Child.  

This was an intriguing matter to me.  I think Rendell clearly drew to an extent on some of her family's personal history.  In the book Maud's daughter Hope was born in December 1929, while Ebba Grasemann's daughter Ruth was born in February 1930.  Hope married, I think, in 1948, while Rendell married in 1950.  

Bertie--a clerk, we are informed, of the "lowest rank" (basically an Anglo chai wallah I suppose)--is yet another one of Rendell's loutish, lazy lower-class characters, though he's physically beautiful we're told. Be certain that his and John's tale is no Maurice.  Bertie may have lovely baby blue eyes, but he's no earthy angel like Maurice's lover Alec Scudder. 

Once again in her writing Rendell fetishizes proper grammar and punctuation.  One of the awful things about Bertie, apparently, is that in letters he puts circles in his "i's" rather than dots. Oh, the humanity!

In modern times, a fascist thug's girlfriend from the framing story demands of Grace about Andrew "Where's he gone to?"  This grammatical construction Grace primly refers to as "murdering the English language."  It's sure a relief to know that Grace's thesis won't have any sentences ending in prepositions.  That would bring me down--I mean, down it would bring me.  

Still there was definitely material here, I think, for a successful book.  Alas, as it stands it's a missed opportunity, though for me at least it was more interesting than The Birthday Present.  

In a 2012 interview Rendell said of her Barbara Vine novels that they "don't have any sort of mystery in them, they don't have any revelations, really.  They're just really about people."  This is true of late Barbara Vine, yes (as well as late Rendells, actually), but it's not remotely true of earlier Vines, which skillfully withheld shocking revelations and teased readers with sinister suggestions. 

It's all an old technique which mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart called "the buried story," deftly applied.  There actually is suspense for about half of the main portion of Child, but then the story is allowed to go flat and soften into a mild mainstream novel.  Ms Rendell meet Miss Reed.  

I have one poignant last note on this late Rendell novel.  I mentioned above that in it the grandmother of Grace and Andrew died, leaving them a house.  (One parallel between the two stories is that when Maud's grandmother dies, she leaves her five thousand pounds, or over half a million dollars, changing but not changing her life.)  Grace states that her grandmother died from a stroke at age 85: "A good age, as they say."  

When Rendell was publicizing this novel in late 2012 she was nearly 83 years old.  She herself would suffer a stroke a couple of years later in January 2015 and lie incapacitated for several months before passing away at age 85--a good age, as they say--in May of 2015.  In her newspaper interview she vowed to keep writing ("Octogenarian Author Has No Plans To Stop"), having just completed a new Wexford novel.  Sadly it would be the last Wexford.  

Of authors Rendell said in 2012: "I think you don't retire unless you are ill."  Her health, she declared, was "very good" and she planned to keep writing.  She managed two more novels, the last one published posthumously.  

So many of Rendell's books, I have noticed, feature elderly stroke victims.  (There are two in The Child's Child.)  Was there a family history?  Her schoolteacher mother Ebba Grasemann had multiple sclerosis and died at the age of 71 in 1963, shortly before Rendell published her first novel.  Her father Arthur, who unusually was nine years younger than her mother (they married when he was 28 and she was 37), died a decade later at the age of 73.  Did the author, in spite of her show of bravado, have a presentiment of the nature of her own death?