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The Joy of Entering Literary Worlds

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One of the joys of reading is to escape. Not just escape, but to have the chance to explore new worlds. I don’t often consider this aspect of reading. More often I point to my love for language or my interest in human psychology and behaviour. I also love story, which means I love the thrills of the plot racing forward, and the cliff-hangers that make us say “Just one more chapter!”

I always associated escape and the building of ‘literary worlds’ with science fiction and fantasy. In the corner of Oxford where I live there are no shortage of famous homes and landmarks with links to such authors. I regularly walk past J.R.R. Tolkein’s old house on my way to work. I used to walk past the grave of C.S. Lewis every time I took my daughter to pre-school, cutting through the grave yard of Quarry Church. When I go for a walk I often find myself walking past the entrance to the house of the late sci-fi author Brian Aldiss.

(I will add here a detail which will be shocking to Terry Pratchett fans. As a teenager I joined a huge queue at WH Smiths in Nottingham to get a book signed by Terry Pratchett. I was fascinated by all things bookish, and knew I wanted to write. To meet an actual writer was thrilling. I loved the illustrations on the covers of Pratchett’s books. However, I just couldn’t get into the books. They weren’t my thing. To this day I have a signed copy of Good Omens, which is inscribed with the words: “To Russell, We made the Devil do it! Terry Pratchett”. I’ve had it for over twenty years and have never read it.)

Fantasy and sci-fi were never my kinds of genres. Yes, I dip into Tolkein and dabble with John Wyndham, but I’m never at home with the genre. For me it is always crime fiction, thrillers, and sweeping Victorian novels. These are the books I immerse myself in. They are just as escapist and immersive as any other created world. When I read Georges Simenon, I am in Paris, joining Maigret for his lunchtime sandwich and beer. When I read Agatha Christie, I’m in the world of picturesque villages with dark secrets, or I’m entering Poirot’s world of glamourous holidays and seemingly endless leisure time (not to mention income).

The word ‘escape’ can have unhealthy connotations. To escape reality can be harmful, hence ‘fantasy’ being on Anna Freud’s list of psychological defence mechanisms. However, there is a difference between the reader knowingly entering a fantasy world and the person who is detached from reality in response to the threat of psychic pain. We must remember Coleridge’s phrase on reading: the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. The reader knows the difference between fantasy and reality, and fully understands the tacit agreement with the author: “You tell me something as if it’s true, and I’ll believe it as if it’s true, even though we both know it is untrue.” I will add to this that poetic truth exists outside of literal truth anyway.

Which other worlds do I love to be immersed in? I read crime fiction set in various parts of Europe: Martin Walker’s books set in the Dordogne, Donna Leon’s Venice books, the Sicilian Montalbano books, Ragnar Jónasson’s Iceland books, Tom Benjamin’s Bologna books, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh books, and the list could go on. These books give us a literary version of a real place, which is, I suppose, quite different from being in the place itself. We may get a strong cultural and geographic flavour of the setting, but where the line between fantasy and reality is, I don’t know. My own books, set in Portugal, offer an authentic sense of the city of Coimbra, but it will always be through my eyes and with my observations. I will people the city with characters I want to include, and will leave out the parts I have no interest in.

Since childhood I have been interested in Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, which are historical adventure stories, but which take place in an alternative 19th century history that never existed. Oh, and England is overrun by wolves. This is a world to escape into. I’ve recently been reading Louise Hare’s Miss Aldridge Regrets and Tom Hindle’s A Fatal Crossing, both of which are historical crime novels set on luxury ocean liners. Both books offer a whole world to enter into – glamour, luxury, and a sense of being away from the humdrum details of everyday life (such as having to call someone to fix your boiler).

While I was at university I read Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. This brick of a book, brimming with characters, and encompassing the filthy backstreets of London as well as the smart dining halls, also offered me a world to explore. Yes, it was London; yes, it was nineteenth century; but it was also the world of Dickens. I came to believe in those characters. I sometimes go back into that world when I’m in the mood. My bookshelf is packed with so many possibilities for exploration and escape that I see no reason why my passion for books, stories, words and worlds will ever be satisfied.

Advice to Writers From Two Great Names of Portuguese Literature

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These two books about the writing process and the experience of being a writer are must-have guides for writers in Portugal (and any other writers who have access to them). Aspiring writers in the Lusofone world are lucky to have these books, as two big literary names share years of wonderful – and sometimes painful – creative work.

Both João Tordo and Mário de Carvalho are literary novelists. However, their guidebooks for aspiring writers aren’t pretentious or ‘highbrow’. João Tordo is the younger of the two, born in 1975, de Carvalho the older, born in 1944. Both have won multiple prizes in their native Portugal, and also internationally, achieving great critical success (if not always commercial success).

As you can see, the front covers are wonderful. Initially, as I browsed Bertrand bookshop on Rua Ferreira Borges in Coimbra, I absolutely judged both of these books by their covers. I think the covers are classy and creative, communicating the tone and theme of the book. These books are for booklovers, and lovers of words. The typewriter on the de Carvalho book and the ink spill on the Tordo book are lovely details, as is the use of subtle, toned-down colours.

I thought twice about writing this post, because it may have limited appeal – the books in question are not translated into English. I wondered whether the ideal reader for this blog post is a Portuguese speaker who reads reviews in English. I’m hardly aiming at a wide audience. And yet…

And yet I believe that the highs and lows of creative writing are universal experiences, which any writer can connect to. João Tordo and Mário de Carvalho aren’t known in the anglophone world, but their knowledge and advice is valuable in any language.

First, a comment on the titles. Joao Tordo’s book translates as Writer’s Survival Manual or The Little I know About That Which I Do. It’s a great title for a book of its kind. It communicates the uncertainty of the writer: always using your skills, yet wondering how you are doing it, and whether you can do it again. All writers have imposter syndrome to some degree. As for the book by de Carvalho, I have to ask myself the question whether a book title has sounded so good in Portuguese and so awkward in English. Whoever Says the Opposite is Right: Letters Without Bullshit.

Tordo’s book is far more personal that de Carvalho’s. He shares the pain of failure, the struggle not just to write the book but to navigate the world of publishing. In parts it’s negative (Tordo describes the ardent aspiring writer as being “condemned to literature”). He tells stories of skirmishes with unscrupulous publishers, of the various writers’ retreats he has been to in France and America; about his journey to Brazil, and in all this how he found a way of bringing his imaginative ideas to the page.

While de Carvalho casts his net wide to incorporate reflections on Socrates, Shakespeare, Rabelais or Homer, Tordo often uses examples from his own body of work. He shows the genesis of an idea, and how it finally ended up as a book, after taking several twists and turns along the way. I mentioned that both writers have achieved critical success. Tordo especially writes about living without the luxury of the high income which great commercial success can bring. His attitude is very pragmatic: if a well-known writer needs to earn extra money by teaching creative writing, then so be it. He points out that there will always be someone who is a better writer than you, always someone who sells more, often someone who starts much later than you and quickly overtakes you in terms of sales, celebrity or prestige.

There is advice from Tordo on editing (“The process is of humility, not of humiliation”) and on the relation between reading and writing: the writer needs to “read like a writer” and consequently “write like a reader”. His advice seems more grounded than that of de Carvalho.

De Carvalho’s scope is impressive, bringing in the whole history of literature, especially through the Greeks, then the great names of European letters. Some advice is very direct. He tells the aspiring writer that reading half a dozen stories by Chekhov is more valuable than countless writers’ workshops. He extols the literary value of ripping up conventions, while acknowledging that as readers we all like convention. He says that there are no dogmas or impositions in what he advises. Both de Carvalho and Tordo emphasize the freedom of the artist to create. Tordo links it to childhood play – the novelist is like a child still at play with toys.

It’s long established that for writers in the English language there are some key books on writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and several others depending on who you ask. For the aspiring Portuguese writer, these books by Tordo and de Carvalho will become classics. I doubt whether the average English reader will ever have the chance to read them. I’ve never seen a Tordo novel in English, despite his success in Portugal and France. An Amazon search shows one Mário de Carvalho book in translation, available second hand, but currently out of print.

Acknowledging the literary landscape of another culture gives us the knowledge that there is so much going on ‘out there’. Writers are writing, readers are reading. The passion we have for books, for stories, and for exploring the human heart is universal, despite language or borders.

The First Portuguese Detective Novel

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During my last trip to Portugal I told myself that I wouldn’t buy any books. Like many booklovers, I’m a compulsive buyer of books. In the past I’ve skipped buying certain food items to have the money to buy books (a habit that my family challenged me over years ago when they saw how thin I was getting. I tried to argue my intellect and inner world were growing even as I was getting physically thinner, but I eventually saw their point of view).

This time my resolve not to buy books was practical. I had travelled with only a small rucksack and there was no space to bring anything home. However, when I saw a copy of O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra (The Mystery of Sintra Street), I couldn’t resist. This is thought to be the first Portuguese detective story. It was published in 1870 in serial form in the newspaper Journal de Notícias. Its co-author, Eça de Queiroz, is one of the great figures of Portuguese letters, a nineteenth-century novelist who wrote prolifically and spent many years outside of Portugal in his role as a diplomat (including in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where there is a plaque on the house where he lived).

In the preface to the book, which Queiroz co-wrote with literary friend Ramalho Ortigão, the authors say that each of them began the book with “a ream of paper, joy and audacity.” As I write my own Portuguese-set detective novels, I can’t help but take inspiration from their motives. I can’t think of many better things for a writer to have: blank paper, joy, and audacity.

Queiroz was well aware of contemporary literary trends across Europe, especially in England and France. He would have known the impact that writers like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Braddon were having in England with The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret. Dickens’ books were becoming more sensational, relying on twists and turns of plot. The Mystery of Sintra Street would have fitted well alongside these books.

One mystery that I’ve been trying to solve myself is why this book, the first Portuguese detective story, wasn’t the start of a wave of popular crime fiction in Portugal. In Britain we had the Golden Age of crime fiction in the twentieth century, with popular writers like Christie, Allingham and Sayers becoming household names.

While Penguin books were publishing affordable books for ordinary people during the interwar years, I suspect Salazar’s fascist Estado Novo would have discouraged the democratization of reading. The culture of ‘Fátima, Fado and Football’ meant that ordinary people were given Catholicism, music and football, which the state hoped would keep them compliant and quiet. In this context a popular reading movement wouldn’t have been welcome. I’m speculating a little on this point, so would happily defer to the views of experts in Portuguese literature and culture.

Perhaps the most intriguing mystery of Sintra Street is why it wasn’t the start of a movement in Portuguese detective fiction…

Salmon in October and Dahlias in June

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Victorian novelists often spoke with a narrator’s voice that was very much the voice of the author. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that the relationship is between a reader and a writer, that although the action will play out between the characters, the hand of the author is not entirely invisible. Dickens opens Our Mutual Friend with the words, “In these times of ours, although concerning the date there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance…” and then sets the scene. A writer now would simply begin “A boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames…”

When Anthony Trollope asks the question ‘Can you forgive her?’ in the famous novel of the same name, he asks it not just of his characters, but directly to the reader.

I came across this wonderful paragraph in Trollope’s political novel Phineas Finn, where he begins the chapter with a parliamentary scene, then breaks off and almost sets the story aside to share his reflections on the work of a writer:

The poor fictionist very frequently finds himself to have been wrong in his description of things in general, and is told so, roughly by the critics, and tenderly by the friends of his bosom. He is moved to tell of things of which he omits to learn the nature before he tells of them–as should be done by a strictly honest fictionist. He catches salmon in October; or shoots his partridges in March. His dahlias bloom in June, and his birds sing in the autumn. He opens the opera-houses before Easter, and makes Parliament sit on a Wednesday evening. And then those terrible meshes of the Law! How is a fictionist, in these excited days, to create the needed biting interest without legal difficulties; and how again is he to steer his little bark clear of so many rocks,–when the rocks and the shoals have been purposely arranged to make the taking of a pilot on board a necessity? As to those law meshes, a benevolent pilot will, indeed, now and again give a poor fictionist a helping hand,–not used, however, generally, with much discretion. But from whom is any assistance to come in the august matter of a Cabinet assembly? There can be no such assistance. No man can tell aught but they who will tell nothing. But then, again, there is this safety, that let the story be ever so mistold,–let the fiction be ever so far removed from the truth, no critic short of a Cabinet Minister himself can convict the narrator of error.

Phineas Finn, Chapter 29.

What I like about this is that even a great novelist like Trollope knows there are limitations to a writer’s knowledge and experience, which must be overcome through imagination. We can do all the research possible, but sometimes we simply have to make it up and hope for the best. Both critics and friends will tell us which parts were wrong, and we must take it on the chin.

This passage comes just before Trollope writes the scene of a Cabinet assembly. He seems almost to be saying, ‘Look, I don’t really know how to describe this scene, but the only people who can tell me it’s false are the few people involved in a very particular job role, so I’m going to make it up and I’d like you to go along with it.’

This is, of course, in the context of a book full of authentic, thoughtful and well-researched detail. Trollope knows a lot about his subject matter. But it’s a reminder that part of the job of a writer of fiction is to simply make things up!

Donna Leon: Crime, Canals and Contralto

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As the 31st Brunetti novel is published, Donna Leon remains as urbane and unaffected as ever. She is the crime writer who spends her time reading Dickens, Trollope and classic Greek literature. Leon presents herself as the cheerful book lover who stumbled into a career as an internationally bestselling author. Dividing her time between Switzerland and Venice, she gives the impression of thoroughly enjoying the life that success has allowed her.

As an illustration of how successful the series has become, it has spawned a Venice guidebook of walks and a cook book inspired by the Venetian food mentioned in the novels. It is also a mark of success that she has the luxury of choosing not to allow her books to be translated into Italian. She doesn’t want the bother of being famous in her own city. An American by birth, she has said in the past that she could never live in America now because she considers it, “cheap and vulgar.” Leon is not afraid to give a frank opinion.

In 1992 Leon was living in Venice. She was an English teacher with a passion for travelling, and had fallen in love with the city. She said in an interview with The Independent in 2010 that she wrote her first book “on a whim”. Similarly, in an interview with the Irish Times she said she wrote it as “a bit of a joke”. As a writer myself, I don’t believe a person writes 75,000 words on a whim. I do know that writers invent their public image to some extent and construct their own life stories in a way which is punchy and easy to communicate. This is part of the charm. (Roald Dahl claimed to have started writing after receiving a head injury in a plane crash; Agatha Christie apparently wrote her first book as a dare after her sister challenged her to write a detective story.)

Leon claims to be without ambition, which may be a key to her success. The story that she simply strolled into a new career as a crime writer may have some truth to it after all. It was the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl who said of success: “you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

Aged 79, Donna Leon shows no sign of slowing down. There are precedents for writers who carry on with their profession for their whole lives – John le Carré was writing up to his death aged 89; P.D. James published her crime sequel to Pride and Prejudice aged 90; Andrea Camilleri was still writing his Inspector Montalbano books into his ninety-fourth year. Brunetti’s criminal investigations could continue for years to come, which is a welcome prospect to fans of the novels.

With success comes the freedom to do what less successful crime writers couldn’t dream of doing: sometimes Leon makes the crime a peripheral element as she brings human drama and the examination of human nature to the centre. Take her novel Earthly Remains, which is just as much about the environment and the effect of pesticides on the bee population as it is about murder. Unto Us a Son is Given is really about reflections on ageing and mortality, and the unusual decision an old man takes to ensure his inheritance goes to the right person. Even the title of one of her later novels, Falling in Love, is a title few crime writers could get away with. Most crime writers heavily indicate the genre with their choice of title, like Peter James who puts the word ‘dead’ in every title.

It is in Falling in Love that we see another passion of Leon’s, one which was there from the first book, Death at La Fenice. Opera and music are often present, appearing regularly in the setting or just in passing references in the prose. Baroque music is not just a passion of the author, but becomes part of the character of the landscape of Venice.

As well as the understated and thoughtful Brunetti, there is no doubt that the city of Venice is almost a character in itself. When the reader opens a Donna Leon book, they are taking a trip to Venice. The readers can walk through the campi and cobbled streets with Brunnetti, they can enjoy a glass of white wine and a plate of tramezzini with him in a local café.

For Leon, like many other crime writers, her books follow a pattern. It’s a pattern her readers like: a crime, the scents and sounds of Venice, a taste of the local food, and an insight into the comfortable and intellectual domesticity of Brunetti and his wife Paola. I call it a pattern rather than a formula, because a literary formula suggests something lazy or tired. Leon’s books are alive with insights into human nature, reflections on politics and society, and comments on the corrupting nature of power and money.

For me as a reader (and I’m sure I’m not alone), her least successful novel was The Jewels of Paradise. It isn’t just that the story doesn’t really take off, it’s also the lack of Brunetti. It’s her only non-Brunetti novel. As readers, we read series of books as a way of visiting old friends. The cast of regular characters in a detective story become more than literary devices for the working out of the plot. We want to spend time in their company, we want the reassurance of their presence when a crime is committed because we know from the first chapter that they will solve it. From Sherlock Holmes, through Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and all the other detectives that would make up a long list of literary heroes, we know that their presence in this fictional world will give us a taste of the order and justice we hunger for in our own.

As for successors in the genre, there are English-language writers who are continuing the tradition. Tom Benjamin’s ‘Daniel Leicester’ series of crime novels set in Bologna have the same cultural authenticity, the same desire to see past the beautiful façade of urban Italy. Philip Gwynne-Jones offers us Venice in his crime novels, but in a series which has a different tone to Leon’s. I think as readers we want someone to give us an insider’s view, allowing us to see past the ice creams and the Cyprus trees (although I do happen to like both ice creams and Cyprus trees).

To emulate Donna Leon’s success would be hard. Leon said in a 2020 interview with the Boston Globe that she no longer reads crime fiction. This is a luxury few genre writers could get away with. A writer who no longer reads their genre is not going to stay at the forefront of it. Unless, of course, you have the reputation and literary ability of Donna Leon. Her writing is so good that she can almost forget about plotting. The genre is little more than a vehicle for exploring Venice, for creating a cast of characters who engage with the forces of good and bad in the world.

I hope the series continues for years to come. It’s nice to have ‘friends’ in Venice we can visit from time to time.

The Refugee Narrative of Françoise Frenkel

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Before you even read the first chapter of this memoir, the book has a curious story to tell. No Place to Lay One’s Head was published in 1945 in Geneva, and is Françoise Frenkel’s own account of her wartime experience. Neither the book nor the author made a mark in 1945. The publisher eventually went out of business and the book fell out of print. It was entirely forgotten, not even a footnote in the history of narratives and personal stories to come out of the Second World War.

Then, in 2010, a copy of it was found at a flea market in Nice. This discovery of such a remarkable and erudite account of wartime survival prompted its republication and translation into languages outside the original French. The fact that Françoise Frenkel passed her post-war life in obscurity means that some detective work was required to trace her steps. There can be no author photograph because none exist. At the end of the book is a dossier of information, including a photograph of Frenkel’s last known address in Nice, the city where she lived until her death in 1975.

Even without the book’s lost-and-found publishing circumstances, the narrative is so terse, the writing so evocative, and the story so relevant that it deserves to be read by the widest readership. (It is available as No Place to Lay One’s Head, and also under the title A Bookshop in Berlin).

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel opened a French language bookshop in Berlin. During her childhood in Poland she dreamed of owning her own bookshop. She also fell in love with French language and culture during years of living in Paris as a young woman. Her bookshop at 39a Passauer Strasse was the culmination of years of dreaming. The realisation of this dream was subject to the horrors of its time and place: a Polish Jew in Berlin had a bleak future during those inter-war years.

Frenkel describes the feeling of frustration and dread as her shop becomes the subject of scrutiny: some books in her stock are on the list of banned publications, other neighbouring Jewish businesses start suffering boycotts and attacks. Frenkel laments the destruction to lives and property caused by zealous young men who have fully embraced the National Socialist ideology.

One of the key themes of the book is escape. The first escape is from Germany itself, as it becomes increasingly clear what the future holds for Frenkel. This is one of many encounters with the indifferent or hostile face of bureaucracy. Leaving behind her possessions, Frankel gets a train to Paris, where she can live a normal life for a time. By 1940 the threat comes to Paris, and Frenkel moves south.

It was in Nice that Frenkel encountered two friends whose constant help saved her life. Monsieur and Madame Marius owned a hairdressers, and had a reputation for helping refugees. Again and again, Frenkel comes back to them in desperation as accommodation falls through and authorities round up Jewish residents to be sent to camps.

One of the saddest elements of Frenkel’s book is the sense of belonging she was searching for. Leaving her native Poland, she believes that she has found a new home in Germany, then in France, but in both places she is an outsider, forced to silently bear the insults of people who are less educated, less intelligent, and less compassionate than herself.

We don’t have to look far to find contemporary stories of refugees, even in Europe. Compare the pictures on our television news to the observations in this book, and the similarities are striking: people carried all they could, including beloved pets, cars queued to leave the city, train stations were crowded with desperate passengers wanting to escape, crushing to board the train. People ran out of fuel for their cars and food for their families.

Frenkel has an eye for detail, whether profound or absurd. At one point she finds a room to rent in a “sweet little cottage” which is made unpleasant by the fact that a municipal abattoir has been built opposite and the smell wafts over on the wind. A young man trying to sleep on a train stretches his bent leg and rests it on hers, but she doesn’t move it because he is sleeping and she could tell he had been in physical pain. In Nice she would spend hours queuing for food at the shops, making sure to wear a straw hat to protect herself from the heat of the sun.

Frenkel’s first attempt to escape to the safety of Switzerland ended in heartbreak. The local man who is paid to take them across the border is unpleasant, and Frenkel’s fellow travellers are impatient with her and often leave her well behind on the road. They are all arrested, apart from the local guide, who runs away. After a night in prison she is transferred to Annecy. It is on this bus ride that she sees a hole in a barbed wire fence which she walked past the night before. In the darkness she hadn’t spotted it, but now she sees how close she was to escaping to Geneva.

Having experienced the best and worst of human nature, Frenkel reflects on how humans behave, without allowing these reflections to slow the narrative. After witnessing extreme and unnecessary cruelty against refugees she concludes that “some deep sadistic urge must lie hidden in every man, waiting to be exposed when the opportunity arises.” The shock of the events unfolding is communicated well, with one woman exclaiming “God in heaven, and these things are happening in France!” A society which was advanced and sophisticated is crumbling under everyday, casual brutality. This is contrasted by unexpected kindness, such as the way an Italian soldier from Napoli catches her at the border and should hand her over to the police, but instead protects her from discovery and lets her go unharmed. An elderly lady who helps her in the street and takes her to a café before walking off turns out to have secretly paid for her meal.

The book is not just a heart-wrenching story of survival, but it also reads like a thriller. Hiding in one city then another, in one house then another, always questioning who to trust, always plotting her escape to Switzerland, the narrative has a momentum that makes it very easy to read. Frenkel is a sympathetic, unsentimental narrator.

One of the most poignant details comes in the Dossier section at the end of the book, where there is a photograph of an original inscription by the author after the book’s 1945 publication. It is inscribed to Reverend Father Pierre Noir. After expressing gratitude, Frenkel writes, “I would be so grateful for your prayers – I seek inner peace…How great is my suffering.”

It speaks not just of the suffering refugees have to endure in their ordeal, but the ripples of grief which continue into peace time.

A New Year for Reading

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Mid-January is traditionally the time when we break all the resolutions we made at the start of the month. The new exercise regime is a pain, drinking less coffee was ditched when you discovered it was one of the few things pushing you through a busy morning, and going dry means you’ve denied yourself one of life’s small pleasures: a glass of Rioja on a dark, winter’s evening.

And how many people have decided they will read more books this year? Probably quite a few. Read more books, watch less Netflix. I’ve heard that a couple of times in the past few weeks.

The deluge of hardbacks published in time for Christmas now have 50% off stickers on them, and as we see these books lined up on the Sale shelf of the bookshop, or paraded beneath a flashing red banner on Amazon, we begin to wonder whether anyone wants to read a celebrity autobiography, or another television tie-in, or whether we all just assume other people might want to read them as we buy them as Christmas presents.

Now that the flurry of marketing is over, and the brightly-coloured headline books are taken out of the shop windows, we can look across the literary landscape and see its richness. I can see the obscure farming memoir from the 1940s that I’ve always wanted to read (The Worm Forgives the Plough by John Stewart Collis), the almost-forgotten coming-of-age novel by the author of Black Narcissus, which is set during a summer in France, and has a title that appealed to me the moment I saw it (The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden). I can see, lined up like a range of mountains, the complete Barsetshire chronicles, which I’ve always meant to read. Down on the shoreline, I can see all the Booker prize winners I’ve never got round to. Some of them are being swept away by a tide, never to be remembered again, some of them will remain and still be read. I will read that fascinating book on child psychology coming out in Penguin classics (Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia M Axline), I will buy Georges Simenon’s The Venice Train when it comes out in its new edition.

I want quality and quantity. I want to catch up on all the wonderful books that are waiting to be discovered. I want to get through them like you would all the items on the menu at your favourite restaurant. I want to uncork them like wine bottles, eager to find out whether the taste matches the description.

I will be surprised, I will be enthused, I will be disappointed. I will pick up some amazing books for almost nothing in charity shops; I will pay full price for books which turn out to be duds. By the end of the year I will know the names of writers I’ve not heard of yet, writers I’ll wonder how I ever lived without. I will read books on sandy beaches in Portugal, I will read them in the early hours of the morning when I cannot sleep, I will listen to them through my earphones while I weed the rhubarb patch at the allotment, I will read them with large cups of tea and small glasses of brandy. I will read them when I’m bored, I will read them when I’m interested.

Whatever else you give up on this month, don’t let it be books.

Why I Continue to Read Agatha Christie

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Like many fans, I discovered Agatha Christie’s books as a teenager, when I was finding engaging novels to read independently. They contained mystery, suspense, and big characters. There were also around seventy novels to read, which mirrored the patterns of the collections I’d just grown out of, such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton, who wrote more books than any child could read.

To begin with I read tattered paperbacks from my parents’ bookshelves, such as The Listerdale Mystery and Crooked House, then I borrowed or bought the famous ones: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None. None of her books were too long, all of them were easy to read. They took place in the world of steam train engines, remote islands, luxury cruise ships, and picturesque villages. In this respect, they weren’t unlike the adventure stories I had not long grown out of.

One Sunday, I remember overhearing a family friend over the meal table remark that Agatha Christie books were “okay for teenagers, but you grow out of them”. It was probably an expression of the common snobbery towards genre fiction, and the belief that any formative reading was just a stepping stone towards reading and understanding Ulysses or The Brothers Karamazov.

And yet, years later, I still haven’t grown out of reading Agatha Christie.

My reading is wide and varied, from classic fiction to epic poems, from spirituality to psychology. However, I always go back to the crime genre and to Agatha Christie. I still love those classic elements of drama, suspense, and mystery. In Agatha Christie’s books we get them in concentrated doses, alongside the quality of the great illusion, as we wait for the big reveal and find out how we’ve been tricked by misdirection and red herrings.

Drama

The drama element of Agatha Christie’s books sometimes gets lost in her reputation for crime and mystery. Take, for example, Sad Cypress, in which an engagement is threatened by a woman’s past, and there isn’t a murder, or an appearance from Poirot, until halfway through the book. Similarly, Towards Zero offers an intriguing personal problem: should Nevile Strange and his new wife take a holiday at the house of a family friend, knowing that his estranged ex-wife is there. And once it seems clear that the holiday will go ahead, the other guests are trying to work out whose idea it was and who will gain from such an awkward house party. Again, there is no crime until halfway through the book, but Christie handles emotional, human drama very well.

In Anita Brookner’s classic Booker-winning novel Hotel du Lac, a woman stays at a hotel by a Swiss lake after a personal crisis. In this picturesque setting, the protagonist observes the daily habits of her fellow guests, getting clues as to who they are and why they’re there. It struck me as I read it that it’s almost an Agatha Christie set-up. Personal crises, foreign hotels, strangers thrown together, all of these are classic Christie ingredients. The difference is that Brookner channelled this into a literary novel, and Christie used such details as part of the physical and emotional landscape for crime stories.

As well as crime novels, Agatha Christie wrote a series of novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. Those that I’ve read are probably best described as family dramas. I found Absent in the Spring to be intriguing, with its middle-eastern setting and its tangled family relationships. It was, in many ways, a classic Christie novel, just without the murder. The denouement was focused on a woman’s relationships with her children and husband. Or, to put it another way, the book’s final revelation was emotional, not criminal.

Languages

When I decided to learn Portuguese, I chose an Agatha Christie book to be the first Portuguese language book I read. Why? Because it was the perfect mix of the unfamiliar – the Portuguese language – and the familiar: the settings, plots and characters of the Poirot short stories. The book was The Labours of Hércules (Os Trabalhos de Hércules), and I still remember the little bookshop in Porto where I bought it.

In my (off and on) attempts to learn French I’ve read some of the Agatha Christie bande dessinee adaptations. Many of these aren’t available in English, but reflect the popularity of BD books in France and Belgium, as well as the universal and enduring appeal of Agatha Christie. I would actually recommend Agatha Christie fans use their enthusiasm and knowledge of the books if they are trying to learn a new language.

Literary Value

Agatha Christie’s books are uneven, without a doubt. You can read one of the best ones, then move in to one of the weaker ones and wonder why a writer capable of writing one has written such a poor book as the other. Perhaps this is what comes of writing so many books.

I remember reading The Secret of Chimneys and laughing out loud at the Wodhousian dialogue and characterizations. It was sharp, funny, and the plot was tight. In contrast, other books (such as Murder is Easy, or The Clocks) come across as wooden and humourless. Sometimes her books are sparkling and well-observed, while others are clumsy and lifeless.

No doubt there are literary critics and authors (published or unpublished) who resent the inexplicable success of Agatha Christie, just as there was an inevitable backlash against J.K. Rowling. I say ‘inexplicable’ because there are wonderful writers out there who are overlooked or forgotten, like Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham or John Dickson Carr. Allingham is a better prose writer than Christie, and many of Christie’s contemporaries are more consistent in quality. But Christie has an X factor, as many successful writers do.

I recently read Towards Zero for the first time, and I thought it was very good. There are still a handful of Christie books I’ve not read, but not many. I’ll ration them, because at some point I’ll run out. I’ve tried reading some of her contemporaries, like Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, but the books didn’t have the appeal. There is still something of an enigma to Christie’s appeal and success, that even her most famous detectives would struggle to solve.

What’s My Motivation?

/ Russell / Leave a comment

Unless writing is a part of your life, for creative or academic reasons, you probably don’t have much of a relationship with the Word Count function of your word processing software. But for some of us, that glance at the word count is a reflex, and the number it displays can make your heart sink, or provoke a little bubble of pleasure in your stomach.

I’m currently writing a crime novel which will total 80,000 words.

Doubts creep in: What do I really know about Portuguese police procedure?

Isn’t that clunky sentence in chapter 4 evidence that I actually can’t write and I’ve chosen the wrong vocation?

I’ve just spelt the word ‘February’ wrong. Further evidence that I chose the wrong vocation.

Is anyone except my parents going to bother reading this book?

Hadn’t Graham Greene or Stella Gibbons published several bestsellers by my age?

What could my income have been if instead of studying English and spending my student days reading Caribbean Poetry, sprawling Victorian novels, and obscure works of Gothic Romance, I’d studied Law, Medicine or Finance?

Having written 60,000 words of an 80,000 word novel, have I just realised that I don’t think it’s working?

These and many other doubts rise up and make me ask: What’s my motivation? Sometimes motivation comes from the sheer energy you get from a good idea. That energy rarely lasts for the writing of the whole novel. I remember Terry Pratchett saying that to motivate himself to finish his current novel he would think about the excitement of starting the next.

For writers with works in progress, these will be familiar thoughts.

Money and contractual obligations could be motivation, but if you’re a writer without an agent or publishing contract, these factors don’t really feature. Maybe you will get money for the novel at some point, but surely that’s too far away to motivate you. I remember when I was writing radio comedy for BBC radio I was motivated not just by contractual obligation, but the fact that the producer believed in me and I didn’t want to let him down. With a novel no one has asked you to write, these motives are absent. (Although I’ve heard stories that Douglas Adams was notoriously late when it came to deadlines, and William Golding was plagued by doubts with almost every novel. If big names like this still found it hard, maybe this is a constant struggle?)

Something that has struck me in reading widely and reading about writers is this: some very average writers have had great commercial success through sheer determination and luck. Conversely, some astonishingly talented people have got nowhere because of lack of discipline and lack of endurance (and perhaps bad luck too). It’s not just about your talent. It’s also about how hard you work at writing. Have you ever picked a book to read at random, been underwhelmed by it, and thought ‘I could do better.’ Perhaps you could do better. But the person who wrote that book finished it, then edited it, then rewrote parts of it, then worked hard to find an agent. You might be more talented than them, but do you have as much determination to work hard and finish that manuscript?

If you’re an aspiring writer with a work in progress, you must push all your doubts to the side. They will undermine every chapter you try to write, every story you try to construct, and will make you push the snooze button when your alarm goes off at six o’clock in the morning because you planned to get a few hundred words in before the school run.

It’s not going to be easy. As Carlos Ruiz Zafon put it, sometimes you have to ‘squeeze your brain’. Writing a novel is sometimes a romantic idea. We picture Colin Firth in Love, Actually, writing a novel by a picturesque lake with seemingly no commitments around him. Oh, and he found a marriage partner at the same time. How easy was that?

There is room for self-criticism and questions over specific aspects of your book later on. There is time for an editorial process. But for now you need a first draft to work with. You need to hit your word count. So block out the questions that undermine you, block out the ‘Nothing will ever come of it’ voice that pops into your head, and WRITE, WRITE, WRITE!

The Novelist as Illusionist

/ Russell / Leave a comment

I’m currently reading John le Carré’s book Our Game. It has all the classic le Carré elements: spies, questions of loyalty, isolated figures with murky pasts and a constant sense of moral ambiguity. Reading the book has reminded me of how good a novelist le Carré was. His attention to detail when it comes to characterization and setting are wonderful. His portraits of human behaviour, in all its absurdity and contradictions, are sharp and powerful.

However, one thing I wasn’t expecting was a sudden plot twist. I hadn’t associated le Carré with plot twists.

A plot twist is often used as a cheap gimmick. I’ve lost count of the number of books I see online, which are advertised as having a “killer twist”. I enjoy the crime novels of Sophie Hannah, who is sometimes described as being a master of plot, and someone whose narratives feature twists and turns. If I’m honest about this, sometimes I find these convincing, sometimes not. The same could be said for Harlen Coban. Both great thriller writers, but are we always convinced by the plot twists? There have been times when I could barely suspend any more disbelief.

When I say “convinced”, I mean does the twist seem right. Does it illuminate what’s gone before or undermine it? I’ve come across plot twists which simply undermined the story up to that point. An example would be this: A character seems really nice, a perfectly friendly and normal person. The twist: They are a killer who is not nice at all.

The problem I have with this kind of plot twist is that when we reach the twist, everything we know about that person so far is undermined. In other words, it is dishonest. (I will point out here that this is the cheapest kind of twist, and that the two writers I’ve just mentioned are both above it.) The clues must always be there for the reader to pick up on; the game must always be fair.

This brings me back to le Carré. The reason I was so taken by this plot twist was that the author had pulled off an illusion. I was carefully watching the whole time, and the truth was there for me to work out if I only could, and yet I was taken in. When I learned how I had been tricked I said, ‘Of course! I should have known that the whole time!’ And in the example of Our Game, the twist undermined nothing, but illuminated a lot.