As you are doubtless aware, there are two kinds of novel: the kind you read with a frown of concentration, and the kind you read while sitting in a deckchair, eating chocs. You may also be aware that this column does not feature too many of the second kind.
Well, here is one. But do not presume that because I say it is a lighter read it is also a more stupid one. There is an art to the good popular book: or should I say there was once an art to it, and that time, in this country at least, was the 1930s. This is not a rare or controversial view. Think of Agatha Christie getting into her stride, or PG Wodehouse in his pomp. Their books, 80 years on, still provide decent mental chewing gum for readers who feel like laying off the heavy stuff for whatever reason, but do not want their intelligences insulted.
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel is a very deliberate and calculated nod to the popular fiction of the 1930s. Set in 1936, against a backdrop of Blackshirts, tea shops, seedy boarding houses and the smoke of a thousand Woodbines, it tells the story of an actor, Nina, an escort, Madeleine, and an artist, Stephen, who get involved in a murder mystery, in which a killer is strangling prostitutes and leaving, as a calling card, a tiepin skewered through their tongues. Also very prominent, but not directly involved in the gruesomeness, is Jimmy Erskine, a long-serving theatre critic based not too loosely on James Agate, with an enormous appetite for alcohol, fine meals, taxi rides and rough trade, and an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep in the first act of some of the plays he reviews (Quinn is also a film critic, and I suspect there is personal feeling on his part behind some of Erskine’s thoughts). I’m not quite sure why Erskine is in the book, as he is only tangentially involved with the plot: but you will be glad that he is, this Falstaffian monster, as he bestrides it unforgettably. He’s not only the sort of person who would take over any social gathering in real life, but who takes over the very pages he appears in.
One of the pleasures of reading pastiche is to see how well the writer manages it. There are boxes to be ticked and traps to avoid. But there can be fun in these exercises. There is the simple pleasure of people saying “Here’s how” when they raise their glasses, as opposed to “cheers”; or of having a chapter end with the arrival of a character’s wife, so that you suddenly realise, as if to the accompaniment of three crashing, dissonant orchestral chords, that the character concerned has just been doing something that no married person should be doing. Then there is the more complex pleasure of shifting literary etiquette: here, seeing a guardsman do something with a tankard of scotch that would certainly not have been even hinted at in a novel that was genuinely of the 1930s (unless it was published in France, or something).
Quinn does not put a foot wrong, barring a slip when he says that it is less than a mile from Hampstead Tube station to Highgate High Street. There might be something a little baggy about the overall structure, and I’d have liked a bit more on the murders, which are mostly off screen, as it were, but the book has depth and resonance, both from its own awareness of its place in the scheme of things (it is haunted by Kipling, Trollope and Shakespeare, as well as by its own precedents), and from the pervasive atmosphere of seediness and anxiety, hypocrisy and moral queasiness, the smell of Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”. It does its job very well (I’d compare it with Sophie Hannah’s recent Christie tribute, The Monogram Murders, also faultlessly executed), with the sleaze of Soho being particularly well captured. After you with the Milk Tray.
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