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White hell
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Islay McLeod
Rebus and Sherlock Holmes
Exiting Gare du Nord during a recent Paris jaunt, the first thing that hit me was an advertising sign declaiming – en francais – the arrival of Ian Rankin’s hot new Rebus adventure. Wow, I thought, the Scots boy done good – even the French flock to read him.
Worldwide, one in three novels published in English is in the crime fiction genre. Presumably, a similar figure pertains in French. Crime fiction is an odd sort of escapism: your job sucks…your love life’s rubbish…your mother-in-law’s so nice you can’t even rant about her…so you turn to a book where the bodies pile up, gore drips off the pages and the constabulary are clueless. Yet Raymond Chandler once said: ‘The detective story is a tragedy with a happy ending’. So hang in there for a little deferred gratification.
Chandler is one of a selection of celebrities championed in the cutely named ‘Murder in the Library’, an exhibition of the A-Z of crime writing at the British Library in London. Illuminated with several first editions, drawings and photographs, the show – free and on until 12 May – is a fascinating record of the various sub genres making up the big picture.
Firstly, the Clever Dick. None more so than Sherlock Holmes, created and extant still after 126 years, the famous detective never having been out of print since he appeared in Beeton’s Christmas annual. Created by Arthur Conan Doyle, the dazzling sleuth was modelled on Dr Joseph Bell, the author’s tutor in the medical school at Edinburgh University.
A rather thrilling example here is the 1927 manuscript of ‘The Adventure of the Retired Colour Man’, one of the late stories following Holmes’ resurrection, due to popular demand, after the author had attempted to kill him off at the Reichenberg Falls. Doyle’s handwritten script, almost pathologically neat and slightly slant, would, I’m sure, provide no shortage of clues for Holmes as to the writer’s impetus.
As well as never being off the bookshelves, Holmes is seldom far from our screens: the modern hi-tech version with Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous detective gained a good audience share for BBC1, and Robert Downey Jr picked up several plaudits for two recent movies. And Jeremy Brett’s rather loopy Holmes still regales viewers of ITV3 despite the last episode being made in 1994. Conan Doyle himself popped up on the ITV drama series ‘Mr Selfridge’ recently, promoting his interest in spiritualism, the Largs-born actor John Sessions providing the great man with some fetching Morningside vowels.
ITV3 has provided, too, a durable platform for many a detective series, none better in my book than ‘Inspector Morse’, created by Colin Dexter yet much improved and given global status on TV – thanks to a talented Glaswegian. Producer Kenny McBain, a gifted musician who attended Hutcheson’s Grammar and Harvard University, saw great potential in the Oxford-set novels and, despite succumbing aged just 42 to Hodgkin’s Disease, produced the first two TV series, developing Morse’s love of Mozart and Wagner and turning the Sergeant Lewis character into a young, computer-savvy foil for his often irascible boss. To accompany this section is an early edition of ‘Last Bus to Woodstock’, the first Morse novel published in 1975.
Along the corridor are nods to the ‘locked room’ riddles where it appears impossible for the killer to have escaped, and the ‘country house’ mysteries embraced by Agatha Christie, examples of which still do a brisk trade in holiday reading. Illustrating this is a still of John Gielgud from the 1974 movie ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ alongside a copy of his script, his scribbled notes accentuating some point or other. Christie, by the way, described her creation Hercule Poirot as an ‘egotistical creep’, having introduced the Belgian detective in ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ which she wrote in all of two weeks in 1920.
Nearby stands a beautiful first edition of ‘The Leavenworth Case’ of 1878 by Anna Katharine Green, one of the first writers of American crime fiction. Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom she had earlier submitted some verse, advised that poetry might not be her best choice of profession. Her change of tack made her rich and famous, her novel concerning the female sleuth, Violet Strange, remaining a bestseller for 40 years.
Near this is a case devoted to Edgar Alan Poe, whose 1841 cracker ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ – along with an excitingly illustrated example – is widely considered to be the first in the mystery-writing canon. The word ‘detective’ was not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary until two years later.
Farther along, however, is a paean to what is mostly agreed as the first full-length detective novel, ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins, published first by his chum Charles Dickens in the latter’s magazine ‘All the Year Round’ in 1868. Wedged between these are other interesting exhibits, such as the ‘hard-boiled’ American private dicks, initially Sam Spade created by Dashiell Hammett in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, serialised in the sensationally illustrated ‘Black Mask’ magazine in 1927, an edition of which appears here.
Raymond Chandler developed the idea in his inimitable Philip Marlowe series. You know Marlowe…he was ‘an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard’. Chandler liked a scoop or two himself. He went to school not far from where I live in Brixton. People ask me: ‘Whereabout’s Brixton?’. I tell them: ‘On the No 3 bus, it’s…24 minutes from Tulse Hill’.
Back to Ian Rankin, that other likely suspect. Despite his Parisian renown, the Fifer gets no mention in this display, which some might say is a glaring omission, and Val McDermid, despite promoting the exhibition on BBC2’s ‘Culture Show’, manages only a passing reference. At least neither penned ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Not crime fiction? Certainly a crime it got published.
