BOOKS AT CHRISTMAS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Not Christmas books. Those are books about Christmas…or they are not about Christmas – just set then. Great Christmas movies? Bah, humbug! That was a hint about a great Christmas movie. I’ll leave you to discover it on your own.
   Christmas movies?
   Batman Returns.
   Lethal Weapon.
   STAR WARS.
   A James Bond film. You’ll have to guess which one, as many of them are shown at Christmas – which makes practically all of them Christmas movies. Do you know how Christmas trees are grown? I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Christmas movies. Okay. But Christmas books? Do I read Christmas-themed books at this time of year? What would I consider a book with a Christmas theme? There’s an obvious candidate by Charles Dickens.
   The Chronicles of Narnia feature…koff, koff, spoiler alert…okay, eternal winter, and no Christmas as a major theme. So maybe, just maybe, if you do believe in fairies, talking lions, and Turkish Delight…Christmas might return to Narnia. Don’t accept sweets from strangers.
   It’s easier for C.S. Lewis to add Santa Claus to The Lord of the Rings than for J.R.R. Tolkien to add Galadriel to The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien couldn’t stand the thought of Santa Claus ripping down fictional barriers and being a guest star in a fantasy land. Mainly as he’d been busy as fuck impersonating Santa in letters to his children.
   Narnia is all the better for having Santa Claus in it. If, indeed, Santa puts in an appearance at all. I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Do I consider Christmas books to be those with snowy settings? Is there more to it than that? Vitally, is there less to it than that? For reasons of the plot, C.S. Lewis gave us a Christmassy story. And there is snow. The snow also melts away, in the end.
   What about a story with a Christmas connection, angle, or timeline? The Midnight Folk, by John Masefield, leads to a very festive sequel called The Box of Delights. Perhaps the setting becomes more Christmassy for being written in the mid-1930s. But what sort of festivities feature in Masefield’s tale? I’ll leave you…etc.
   Scrooge inhabits Christmas. He is haunted by it. That was a spooky spoiler. In the land of Narnia, it’s always winter. Christmas was frozen out. Until…ah, but that’s a spoiler. I suppose there are stories you forget are set in December…
   But there are fantastical tales that don’t have the month of December in them, or any other month of the year. Those stories develop their own calendars. And may yet be Christmassy as fuck.
   There’s a rule about much-loved classics. Beware those who tout the phrase around. Particularly if they insert the word holiday into proceedings. A much-loved holiday classic. One we’ve never heard of.
   To return to the movies for a moment…animated movies…there’s a cartoonish cartoon based on the much-loved classic book I’d never heard of. The Polar Express. What the fuck is that, and why the fuck does everyone in the cartoon look like melted rubber?
   You may vomit at the very concept of Narnia, and that’s your business.
   Perhaps you’ll barely make it through more than five minutes of The Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing and discovered that I’d never need to read one of Tolkien’s stories ever again. C.S. Lewis, being eminently more readable, and with a sense of humour, is an author I return to. But not specifically at Christmas.
   So what of books at Christmas? Not Christmas books. Books I find myself reading at Christmas. Oh. Gifts. Christmas presents. If I think of those books, they aren’t Christmassy in scope, theme, and use of language…
   The best gift of a book at Christmas is always one you are going to buy for yourself, as you know roughly what your own taste in books is like…though even you might unpleasantly surprise yourself with an ill-thought-out choice. So buyer beware – never surprise yourself with an off-kilter purchase.
   But always delight in an off-kilter purchase that proved true.
   You are not buying yourself a Christmas present. No. It’s a festive excuse to buy a book. As if you fucking needed an excuse. You aren’t going to wrap it and leave it under the tree for a stunned you to pick up in wonderment.
   For years, I’d just buy myself music I’d heard somewhere. That was my festive treat. Always have a back-up – music to listen to. I still buy music in, around this time of year. But the point of this blog is to consider books, and not festive discounts on music purchases.
   Books are great gifts if you like the books given. And if the books aren’t for you, they are for someone. Have I ever given away books I received as gifts? People have always chosen well, when furnishing the gift of a book.
   So…that’s never come up. It would be awkward to receive a duplicate of a book. But there are checks and balances in place. What would you like? Do you already have BLAH DE BLAH? I find that saves a lot of bother.
   It would be nice to receive an entire bookcase as a gift for more books that’ll turn up sooner rather than later. But I’d have to be asked if I have space for yet another bookcase. The answer is always NO, and then I conjure up more space anyway.
   How many books sneaked into the house this year? I never care to hear the answer. Why not? I always think the answer is around five. And it never fucking is. How many books leave the house? That’s the tricky part.
   I haven’t had a charity clearout in some time. And I didn’t dump much on the charity shops, even then. If I really need to, I’ll cast a cold eye over one or two volumes. Then I’ll take them to that nice farm in the country, and I’ll point out the rabbits.
   How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know.
   It’s true. I count my books by tonnage and not by volumes. The only thing stopping the floors collapsing is the lack of floorspace for more bookcases. It’s a complex mathematical calculation, to be sure. And it goes like this…
   Floorspace is represented by the symbol F.
   U, or Utility, covers the usefulness of the assembled volumes.
   From Einstein’s formula, we have C – in this case, standing for CASE. That’s the type of unit which absorbs floorspace and holds books.
   K gives us F.U.C.K. That’s what I think when I have to think of the number of books already here. The K might as well stand for KETAMINE at this point. I’m going to be on horse tranquilisers just thinking about moving another bookcase to make room.
   But I need not add five books to the library this festive-tide. I suspect five. There are 30 days left. If I want to be picky, I wouldn’t place bets on books arriving after Christmas itself. And we have to knock off a few days for lack of postal activity.
   Then there’s a week in which I will be recovering from the annual food coma. Last year I decided to cut back, and foolishly added parsnips to the Christmas dinner. I should have added lumps of concrete. Less filling.
   I suppose the most Christmassy book of all is a Christmas cookery book. That’s a gift once, just in time to be no use that year. But forever available for study, thereafter. I don’t believe I have any cookery books in the library. It’s better just to get on with the cooking.
   But that flies in the face of an entire industry, based around festive meals! So? Do any of these cookery books implore you not to add fucking parsnips to a meal that you are already trying to cut back on?
   Didn’t think so.
   I am reminded of Christmas annuals. Hardback anthologies of comic book characters. They year would always be the next one. So a 2024 Christmas annual is dated 2025. The format is for the next year. You are getting to buy the book early for Christmas, even though it’s technically a book for the New Year. Just a publishing quirk, designed to flog as many copies as possible. It’s like a sell-by date for a much-loved classic.
   A quick online check of Christmas annuals shows this chicanery is still going on.
   This blog post is now host to a question. Will there be more than five new books in the house, by month’s end? It’ll be a very short blog in January.

KARLA’S CHOICE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Fact, in a world of fiction. Clear reflection, for once, in a wilderness of mirrors. George Smiley left the Circus with unfinished business. His chronicler, John le Carré, is no more. The family firm, concerned with the writing of stories, passed to his son. And so, I picked up KARLA’S CHOICE – written by Nick Harkaway.
   The premise is that intelligence officer George Smiley left the secret world of espionage behind, that he’s happy away from managing shady activity, and there’s a decade or so of a gap to fill in the chronology. And now the story can be told.
   What happens between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY…well, that’s the topic of this continuation/fill-in book. To get into that, just a little, first I must bring an old file from Cold War storage… 

*

George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A LEGACY OF SPIES are overlooked. 

*

Why mention this observation from yesteryear? Nick Harkaway, in his introduction to KARLA’S CHOICE, tells much the same tale. He thinks of all the Smiley portrayals. Various actors from television, the movie, and audio adaptations. I think of Smiley once…
   This particular once. Only SMILEY’S PEOPLE puts that character’s name in a book’s title. Harkaway had one eye on that, I’m sure, when he took Smiley’s Cold War adversary, Karla, and bumped him up to star status on the cover.
   Co-star status. The cover tells us this is A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL. Not a George Smiley one. It is a George Smiley one, but it is from le Carré’s universe. Graham Greene has Greeneland, a country of everywheres. No matter where you are in the world, in Greeneland you are always in the same place – five minutes from betrayal if you are on the ball. That’s five minutes after betrayal, if you aren’t.
   But le Carré only occasionally flirted with Greeneland. If anything, he subscribed to Tolkien’s draughty character-building England, and took over management of a small misty corner of it when the resident wizard left for the dreaming spires of Oxford the Far West and a community of weed-smoking elves.
   Not for le Carré the excessive usage of a literary crutch holding Cold War novels upright: flashy expensive science fiction gadgetry of the Yankee variety, which he considered akin to the use of magic in a non-magical world when writing espionage fiction – stripping away the label of espionage fiction in the process of employing said wonders. With one mighty gadget, our hero clichéd free. No.
   Instead, he relied on muddy tea, clanking lifts, Victorian brickwork, and rattling radiators of a between-the-wars vintage. Oh, and Russian interference with same.
   Karla is the bogeyman. He’s mostly an off-screen villain: Sauron, with hints of Lenin’s face. An all-powerful ring in a le Carré story is going to be a spy-ring. And that’ll be an all-powerful spy-ring…with many flaws.
   In the television adaptations, Karla is an almost unknown force of nature. He provides the Russian wind which blows through the Cold War. In portraying him, Patrick Stewart says not one word. But he brings the adversary to life.
   The non-speaking role in the flashback is important as a driver of many plot-threads. Smiley meets Karla and tries to recruit him, early. This encounter plants seeds of doubt in the boss, Control, looking for a traitor. Control considers the possibility that Smiley was recruited by Karla at that meeting, instead. Or that Smiley was already a traitor before then, and used the meeting to catch up with his Russian master.
   Control was strong on paranoia. He took three lumps of it in his toffee – a strange mix of tea and coffee served in Victorian institutions that exceeded their original century by some time.
   TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY has a list of suspects, including Smiley for several reasons, but it is the flashback meeting which furnishes a prominent mark against Smiley’s name. Why mention Karla and his non-speaking role?
   I’ve gone over it several times. When reading this John le Carré novel, written by le Carré’s son, the question of voice comes up. Once Alec Guinness played Smiley on television, le Carré found it difficult to shake the performance from his head. And so, he wrote fewer stories about the character. Guinness, ever the imp, stole more than a few le Carré mannerisms for the role.
   Reading KARLA’S CHOICE, I can hear Beryl Reid when Connie Sachs enters the tale. No one says actually quite like Hungarian Toby Esterhase. He seems to speak that way by bringing remnants of at least two other languages into English and hiring the word actually as the face-paint on the foreign words, to whore its way around a sentence or two.
   There’s a Hungarian connection in this novel, so Toby is brought into the narrative – and a welcome addition he is. Connie Sachs is always great fun, if alcoholically tinged with great sadness. And that’s her point.
   So, yes, characters are preserved. The timeline is a moveable feast, but at least a feast is had. And Harkaway confesses this in his introduction. He’s damned right to do so. Expectation is high. We’ve been down this road before…
    When A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, le Carré went back and filled in a few gaps so that THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD would make sense in light of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. And there, date-of-birth and character age were on the moveable menu.
   In terms of age Smiley may very well pass for 63 in the dusk with the light behind him. He hovers in the perpetual Twilight Zone of fifty-something years old under your average pub lights on a bitter mid-week November night, and sixty-something to any doctor evaluating him for signs of heart trouble.
   With that loose age in mind, Harkaway visited the well his father had returned to. KARLA’S CHOICE gives us more about that time between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR…
   In dropping his bucket into the well, Harkaway had to give us another layer between those books that didn’t ruin the extra layer of icing his dad had already added to the cake with A LEGACY OF SPIES. Difficult terrain. Many mines on that field. The best approach was to say…
   Well, dad shifted the dates around a little and where’s the harm…do you want this book or not?
   I am strongly reminded of the oft-mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders. Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, consumer of Chateau Thames Embankment, and husband to the formidable Hilda, would trot out this running joke on an hourly basis. But Sir John Mortimer left the gag dangling. It was better to travel than to arrive.
   Until, in the end, he wrote Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. Inconsistent? Rumpole isn’t a reliable narrator. If you believe that, I have Tower Bridge to sell you. And the book? A triumph, meeting impossible levels of expectation? It’s not about the murders. No, it’s about Rumpole’s meeting Hilda. A triumph.
   On a side-note about voice, and image, Leo McKern is Rumpole. His caricature adorns the book covers. Turning back to le Carré, you’ll find all sorts of editions of his books have very vague people on the covers.
   Except for one of the covers of KARLA’S CHOICE. One man, Karla, is inside the head of another – bespectacled Smiley. Smiley could be a vague nod in the direction of Sir Alec Guinness, though reminds me of Alan Arkin in profile. Karla seems to have been conjured up from publicity stills of East German Stasi man Markus Wolf.
   Le Carré almost used Wolf as a character, taken from his lawnmower. Then he learned Wolf was a real spymaster over in the East. If you believe the bit about the lawnmower, let it be on the basis that you’ve checked that brand exists. It does. We’ll leave off there, unless you, like control, also take three lumps of paranoia in your tea. And coffee. It’s toffee.
   What do we get in this book? Karla, scheming. He has a walk-on part. Many cogwheels click around. Do we have le Carré’s voice, and is Harkaway his own man? Yes and yes. He writes in the terrain of his dad, but not in his dad’s shadow.
   Harkaway respects the landscape of lamplighters and scalphunters. He wheels Connie Sachs on for a turn. But Harkaway gives us more. Connie is one of the Norns, weaving a thread and telling the tale of a man’s fate. She can’t do this alone, and has two other Norns in attendance, as is the custom. Harkaway uses another name for them. But they are Norns, just the same.
   This extra level of detail contradicts nothing in the original novel cycle. Even if there were contradictions, remember this is an espionage novel featuring Russian agents. The future is certain. It is only the past that is unpredictable.
   There’s a bit of a blip, but it is easy to overlook. Yes, there’s another book in the series. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR features Smiley. But it doesn’t matter. He’s hardly in it. That story takes the Special Operations Executive from World War Two and imagines the organisation’s floundering and flapping along well beyond its use-by date.
   In that sense, it’s a bit of a curio that le Carré himself rejected and accepted and rejected by turn. Ultimately, he appeared to have settled on the idea that the bruises died down with the passage of time.
   Voice. Character voice. The voice of the setting. Voice of the argument, theme, being put forward. Those voices of TV and movie and radio/audio book actors. Smiley’s voice as a character and as Alec Guinness.
   Yes, le Carré’s voice and influences on him. His influence on Harkaway’s voice. (Harkaway sneaks in a spot of blurry family background that le Carré used extensively for THE PERFECT SPY. It’s his family history, though. So, fair game.)
   Then there’s the spectre of Kim Philby.
   Graham Greene and le Carré each had to deal with betrayal by Kim Philby. In le Carré’s case, he gave us TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Philby, in commenting on le Carré, set about a casual almost disinterested scathing dismantling of le Carré’s voice and purpose. By contrast, Graham Greene turned up to see Philby in Moscow, and sloshed vodka as they spoke of old times and a changing world.
   Greene provided a plug for THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and Harkaway seems to have returned the favour somewhat with a not-so-sly reference to Greene’s work in this continuation/fill-in novel.
   It’s difficult to evade the very long shadow of Greene in writing espionage fiction. Yes, le Carré fell foul of this with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. That book has everything to do with Greene’s work OUR MAN IN HAVANA. For those embarking on the task of writing spy books, read Eric Ambler first. Then you’ll have a different shadow to leapfrog away from.
   I have to avoid the plot of this book. That means I must skirt around plotting in other books in the series. Where would I place it in the running? Same advice as ever. Read the Smiley books in order of publication…
   Start with the two murder mysteries. CALL FOR THE DEAD. A MURDER OF QUALITY. Then Smiley takes a back seat to proceedings in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. But events in that book come to haunt him.
   Smiley has a token role in THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. After that, he’s back in THE KARLA TRILOGY – TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, and SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
   He turns up almost reluctantly in THE SECRET PILGRIM. Then we have the fix-it novel that connects THE SPY WHO CAME IN WITH THE COLD to THE KARLA TRILOGY. A LEGACY OF SPIES fills in some crucial gaps.
   Okay, but to read this book, KARLA’S CHOICE, I’d say – bare minimum – read CALL FOR THE DEAD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, THE KARLA TRILOGY, and A LEGACY OF SPIES before even thinking about tackling Harkaway’s continuation.
   I have my suspicions about certain aspects of the plotting that could lead to another continuation book or two. More unfinished business. But I can’t really give you the plot here. Except to say…a man goes on the run, and everyone would like to find him.
   Smiley, called back to the job, goes after this man. Karla, Moriarty to Smiley’s Holmes, lurks in the deep background but haunts many a page. Characters collide, some old, some new, and Harkaway does justice to his dad’s legacy. Of spies.

READING A BOOK THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY LIVE UP TO EXPECTATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Blast from the past.

…standing in the shadow of the Stevenson house, I hadn’t read Weir of Hermiston. The book has an awesome reputation. From the man who gave us Treasure Island, came this – his greatest novel. He dropped dead after writing chapter nine.
   How can that be his greatest book? It’s unfinished. Hell, with nine chapters – it’s barely started. I refused to read it until recently. When I did, I had to agree with the view that it was his most accomplished work. I was saddened that he didn’t live to write the best jail-break scene in literature. All in the name of character, and in the service of the story.

Have I altered my view? Here is a book. It is the author’s finest work. An unfinished tale. There are enough notes from posterity to indicate how the book would’ve gone. How can such a non-book be the greatest effort from the author’s output?
   No, I haven’t altered my view. That is still his finest tale.
   I began thinking about other stories.
   No. I am always thinking about stories. Science fiction stories, for example. Stories in which crowds of people go into supermarkets to purchase food. Well, tales like that seem like science fiction, now, but one day those ideas will shift from fiction to fact.
   Robert B. Parker took a fragment of a Raymond Chandler story and bolted his own tale onto proceedings. The original proceedings were rather slim. If you are presented with the first few chapters of a mystery story, how much of the mystery is bolted on to the scene-setting?
   Chandler reached every writer’s ultimate deadline and died. He left behind a few pages of a story that’s out there under his label, with a big old Robert B. Parker rubber stamp across it. Poodle Springs was never going to be a proper Raymond Chandler detective story featuring Philip Marlowe.

It couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation. I’d never heard of Robert B. Parker, so I’d never read Robert B. Parker. Could he approach that world of Chandler’s with anything like a decent level of similarity?

*

I don’t mean a photocopy of Chandler’s style. Or a smudged photocopy of Chandler’s world-view. If you are looking for the continuation of a series based on a deceased author’s scribbled/typewritten notes, I think you are looking for an impressionist watercolour painting. At best. Yes, at very best. Not a digital scan.
   A crisp photocopy of a writer’s work comes across as dry and airless in tone. Use better toner. But who is Philip Marlowe, and where does he begin and end? There are many false starts and finishes to the character.
   Chandler created his detective with one eye on Arthurian literature. You don’t have to look far to see that. One of the books is called The Lady in the Lake, after all. Marlowe started off as characters in short stories. Detectives with different names.

When it came time to write full novels, Chandler strip-mined his short stories and stitched them together into books. Three books in, Chandler wrote a novel that didn’t depend on previously-published tales.
   So…
   Detective Philip Marlowe had a few false starts before he started. At the other end of the line, he had a few false trails leading to the end. You are better off reading the novels before tackling the short stories.

The books open with The Big Sleep and end with The Long Good-Bye. We must gloss over Playback, which came out after The Long Good-Bye. Philip Marlowe rises fully-formed from the sea in The Big Sleep and he walks off into the sunset, or along Sunset, in The Long Good-Bye. That’s all you need to know.
   Rather, it’s all we need concern ourselves with. No short story talk, and nothing about the fiction after a very lengthy farewell.
   The Big Sleep is a great opener for Chandler’s detective, and The Long Good-Bye is the ideal finish. Playback is from an unfilmed script dating to a decade before, and sits – quite rightly – off to the side when you are reading it.

Chandler’s first novel leads to more stitching of short stories and further adventures for the weary detective character of Marlowe in the second book. And The Long Good-Bye closes the series with its hyphenated title. Chandler was a writer who hyphenated to-morrow, and I suspect the title layout was at his snippy insistence.
   After The Long Good-Bye, does Playback live up to expectation? Not really. Playback is the diving board from which Poodle Springs springs. There’s even less chance of Poodle Springs living up to expectation, given that jumping-off point.
   I read the springy book anyway.
   Why? I wanted to see where Raymond Chandler ended and where Robert B. Parker began. But I am not writing this post to talk about Raymond Chandler. I am here to rake over the idea of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation.
   An author scribbles away. The author dies. Another book is torn from the deceased scribe’s iron fingers. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash. Was that a crime? The court of public opinion determines the verdict.
   Suppose there’s another criminal act? The author, in the library, with the fountain pen. What happens when an author writes a story in a series and…that story couldn’t possibly live up to expectation?
   The reader has to read this book. It is part of the series. That is the law. Expectation be damned.
   Sir John Mortimer’s comedic/dramatic creation of a lawyer in search of justice, Rumpole of the Bailey, provides an example of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation. Everyone in Rumpole’s life is long-suffering. Especially Rumpole himself.
   He moves over the hallowed ground of the Old Bailey, and attempts to gain a not guilty verdict on behalf of an entire family of long-suffering villains. Insufferable long-suffering judges settle like dust into long-suffering courts and put up with Rumpole’s caustic long-suffered comments.
   Rumpole never enters a plea of guilty. (Well, that’s not strictly true.) And Rumpole always appears for the defence – never for the prosecution. (Well, that’s not strictly true, either.) As sure as night follows day, the Rumpole stories hand us many constants in the Old Bailey Hack’s life.
   He drinks cheap wine charitably referred to as plonk. Uncharitably, in unveiled references, the wine is akin to sewage. Rumpole quotes a lot. He bluffs, he blusters, and he takes to court as others take to the stage.
   Rumpole’s long-suffering wife Hilda is referred to in long-suffered style as She Who Must Be Obeyed, a descriptor only half-jokingly lifted from H. Rider Haggard. Mortimer gives us Rumpole’s world and gives us that world repeatedly. Familiarity breeds contempt of court, and there’s much fun in establishing the familiar only to pull the rug from under it.
   There’s one familiar item in Rumpole’s bag of tricks that never went anywhere. This was the story of an early case, The Penge Bungalow Murders. Often referenced and used as an in-joke, the Penge case offered little to go on beyond the title.
   Rumpole was a young legal beagle, and concluded the case alone and without a leader. He won a spectacular success. After many stories, and after the long-running television series ended, the author went to the library with the fountain pen, intent on committing a crime.
   The crime of giving us a book about The Penge Bungalow Murders. This is the literary felony of potentially killing your own franchise. The disaster of writing a prequel at odds with everything that followed on.

Scene. The time is now. Whenever now is. Rumpole raises the topic of The Penge Bungalow Murders one more time. But this time, Rumpole tells the tale. It is the story of a young lawyer who is thrown in at the deep end of a murder case when his boss drops out of proceedings.
   And, given the setting, it is a murder case with incredibly high stakes. The death penalty is still in place. What do we know, as readers? Rumpole can’t start the story in charge of the legal brief. But he must take over. And he is going to win. Where is the suspense, then? What is the point of this tale, except, perhaps, to give us a view of Young Rumpole in action?
   The added complication is that Rumpole meets Hilda in this story. Yes, we know how that ends. He must marry She Who Must Be Obeyed. This isn’t wildly speculative internet fiction or an alternative comic book universe, after all.
   Basic story building blocks are already carved into the landscape of the past and do not have to be shunted in place. Rather, they need merely be unveiled with a degree of ceremony. A degree of certainty.
   So why the hell write this? Why the hell read it?
   For the inevitable journey around familiar landmarks. The hype around the case counts against it. This story cannot live up to expectation. There is a sense of inevitability about the plotting. We need a murder. And a victim. The suspect. A sense of injustice. High stakes. And the wooing of Hilda. Or is it the wooing of Rumpole by Hilda? You decide.
   Yes, this is a prequel. It is a very bad place to start reading about Horace Rumpole. The effect, the joke, only works after repeated exposure to mentions of the case in all the other stories. You shouldn’t read The Long Good-Bye first if you want to hear about Philip Marlowe, private detective/knight-at-arms.
   How heavily does continuity feature in a story of this type? Long-delayed prequel. A book people frothed to read, yet were afraid the writer would publish. Continuity in Mortimer’s stories wasn’t a very strong point to begin with.
   Characters are frozen in amber in the Rumpole tales. They are born, they live, and they keep on going as the years pass by. With stories set now, now is a very loose term. Rumpole’s date of birth is a matter for major miscalculation. When did he buy his first legally-required white wig? Did he marry Hilda during the Second World War or after? When did the murders occur in that bungalow in Penge? Is Rumpole a vampire, given that he seems to be there in the same offices and same courts, decade in, decade out?
   There’s another character who qualifies for this semi-eternal blurriness over the timeline, and that’s John le Carré’s Cold War operator, George Smiley. We’ll return to him in short order.
   Details flutter out of Mortimer’s legal stories, giving glimpses of those murders in the bungalow and Rumpole’s involvement in the trial. When Mortimer finally hands us a murder case Rumpole HAS TO SOLVE, and solve ALONE, can the story possibly live up to the expectation?
   Rumpole’s world itself is a world packed with inconsistencies, told over many years, and would tax all but a godly editor when trying to keep the timeline straight. It is no surprise that the story about the Penge murders is also dogged by inconsistencies.
   We gloss over that. It’s something we gloss over when reading the regular stories about an eternal Old Bailey Hack.
   Reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation is a pursuit with very few avenues of escape. Let’s wander the avenues.
   The story can’t live up to expectation, can it? So we agree that you know this, going in. You are reading just to confirm this. In the case of Robert B. Parker, he was no Raymond Chandler and you knew that. Parker’s friends continued his stories after he died. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash.
   Alternatively, down another avenue, the story goes beyond expectation. Exceeding your wildest dreams, you praise the story for not being internet fan-fiction. Fan-fic’s always bad, coming from the original writer. We should not dwell on that point.
   How was the story, then? Which avenue did the author take?
   I always hoped we’d see a tale about the murders in that bungalow down in exotic Penge. (A hasty scan of the interwebs tells me people are dedicated to the view that Penge is where planning decisions go to die.)
   Batting the continuity glitches aside, I thought the story lived up to its impossible expectation and went a little further. Above all else, it’s an atmospheric piece about a familiar character’s younger days. It works on its own terms, and that’s all we need ask of a story. My opinion that the book was great fun…is irrelevant, naturally.
   We could ask the story for coffee and a triple chocolate muffin, but that’s an expectation too far.
   I once considered the Stevenson story a tale too far for me. What was the point of reading nine chapters? I was surprised by the enjoyment I gained from an unfinished story.
   In the case of the Chandler piece, that’s four chapters of Raymond Chandler and the rest is very clearly Robert B. Parker. I’d looked at an unfinished tale by Stevenson and another one barely even started by Chandler. Big differences there.
   With Mortimer, I was given the story oft-times mentioned yet never seen. Finally, the author ran the Questing Beast to its thorny lair. Here you had the original author completing a story and handing it in. The expectation being that he wouldn’t mess it up.
   He didn’t mess it up. There’s great enjoyment in hearing of Rumpole’s significant case, and even greater fun in then reading it.
   At this point, I should return to le Carré. With A Legacy of Spies, le Carré was an author still alive, handing in his homework. Not a prequel. And not a sequel. Awkwardly…both. A return to an earlier time, with a story that filled in the blanks.
   Expectation was high.
   For reasons of the plot, I can’t really discuss the plot.
   Our tale starts with Call for the Dead. It continues later in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I always wondered about a character in the series. There was an obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   We move on through le Carré’s novels to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s a major bit of plotting here that sets you thinking about previous books in the series. An obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   Years later, the author turns in his not-prequel, filling in those two obvious gaps with explanations that more or less hold up. You’d think I’d be delighted to have two great puzzle pieces handed to me by the original scribe…
   I was two pieces shy of the whole jigsaw, after all.
   And yet…
   The author’s one crime was to set the story now, whenever now is. George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A Legacy of Spies came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A Legacy of Spies are overlooked. The one thing that let it down for me was the updated setting. If le Carré could’ve done anything to remove the absurdity of an elderly character getting ready to mix it up in a raging fistfight, he should have set the story in 1985 instead of the 2016-ish territory we are saddled with.
   No, not Smiley himself. Though Smiley appears in the story, I can’t quite take in the notion that he’d still be living by his wits and on his memory at the age of post-100. A Legacy of Spies was a prequel and a sequel rolled into one. And it almost worked. But the millstone around its neck was the improbable age of several characters in the early 2000s. Characters who belong, firmly entrenched, in the late 1900s.
   This is something Philip Marlowe suffers from. We’d like to think of Marlowe stuck in the late 1930s, leading up to the Second World War. Yet there he is, still walking those mean streets in the early 1950s. Rumpole swerved retirement age every time he took up later cases. I suspect he swerved retirement in more than a few of the earlier ones.
   Stevenson’s story exceeded my expectation by leaps and bounds.
   Robert B. Parker’s book is the only Robert B. Parker book on my shelves. I resisted the non-temptation to read his unnecessary sequel to The Big Sleep.
   Mortimer’s easy target, finally giving us the big case, was no easy target after all, and more than lived up to the expectation.
   And le Carré almost came away with a classic, explaining behind-the-scenes scenes that lay behind the scenes of other scenes. To set the story in 1985 or 1989 would have guaranteed classic status. Almost there, but not quite. Oh, I liked the jigsaw pieces le Carré finally handed out. Begrudgingly, he gave us those.
   Expectation is inevitable. Inevitably, set expectation aside and just read the damned stories. See what you think, yourself. If you go further than that, you go further by writing as well as reading.

My copy of A Legacy of Spies has defected to the other side…of a bookshelf, somewhere in the Berlin area. I could engage in a spy hunt to photograph the suspect. Or just let an old Cold Warrior enjoy retirement…

 

WRITING FICTION. THE WOMAN TEST.

I wrote this piece after I'd had more than enough of a tired format - quite a specific one. Plugging James Bond movies. Actress dazzles with smile on interview sofa. Talks about how strong her Bond character is.
   And I'm left wondering how much she can physically lift. Will she raise the movie up off the tired format of plugging itself in that one way?
   A few years after I wrote this entry, we were treated to the notion that the movie SPECTRE was a feminist film...as Bond went knocking around with a woman of roughly his own age.
   This is a woman whose husband Bond kills before sliding casually into her arms while what's left of the husband's corpse is still warm. Well, technically that isn't adultery.
   Monica Bellucci's character is spared the death Bond's sexual contact normally brings...presumably the movie-makers had one eye on a sequel that would bring her back for a spot of exposition.
   I'd believe SPECTRE was a feminist film if La Bellucci'd been paid the same rate as Daniel Craig trousered for appearing in that flick. Anyway...
   (This entry predated the release of SKYFALL by a few weeks, and the topic was on my mind.)

After blogging WRITING FICTION. THE KNIFE TEST, I decided to do a post on similar lines. (For more in that line, see WRITING FICTION. THE CHAPTER TEST. And for a piece on conduct, rather than typing, there's WRITING FICTION. THE CREEPY SEXIST DICK AUTHOR TEST.)
   This is a test of the fiction you write - though there is no straight pass/fail result. The test allows for a neutral outcome. You scribble a story. Ask yourself a question of the piece you wrote.
   In your story, does a woman (or female entity) say or do something meaningful?
   If the answer is yes, your story passes the woman test. And if the answer is no, chances are your story has failed the woman test.
   But bear in mind the following points...
   If you write a story with an all-male cast and you have no desire to shoehorn a female element into that story by the most awkward means at your literary disposal, then your story neither passes nor fails the woman test.
   Example. A World War Two submarine story. All-male cast. You wish to avoid the cliché of the submariner reading a letter from his wife - because that guy dies in his next scene if you take that path. IT'S THE LAW.
   Given that you don't shoehorn the female character into the story by that means, your story doesn't pass the test. But your set-up isn't an outright failure, given the stricture of the setting.
   Another example. You write some weird sci-fi stuff about asexual characters. Story doesn't pass, but technically that's not a failure either.
   And there you have the woman test. Keep it in mind when scribbling fiction. Try to avoid writing female characters who are there to make echo-sounds.

MAN: We must stop the atomic explosion!

WOMAN: Atomic explosion?

   Ever-questioning characters, who only exist to blunder through who, what, where, when, how, why, huh, are cardboard at the best of times. There's no need to up the cardboard quotient by dressing those characters in skirts, dumping all the meaningless lines on the ladies.
   And while I'm here, musing, do we really need boob-shaped armour on women? If that trend persists, we should see a little equality there by forcing armoured men to have cock-shaped padding downstairs.
   Next they'll be putting nipples on Batman.