Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (96 page)

With America’s entry into the Second World War, Carr returned to America to volunteer his services after enduring the Blitz in England. He was reassigned to return to wartime Britain by his new employer, CBS, and assisted with news propaganda. After the war he again briefly resettled in England, only to leave in disgust at the welfare-state reforms brought in by the Labour government in 1948. With the Tory victory of 1951 Carr returned to Britain once more and thereafter shuttled between the two countries, eventually (having always been a heavy drinker and smoker) dying of lung cancer in South Carolina, where he had lived since 1967.

Among the many styles of detective and historical fiction Carr practised himself in his eighty or so books, he was renowned particularly for his mastery of the ‘locked room mystery’. Much of what he wrote, from his first book on, can be traced back to the Poevian room in the Rue Morgue. In addition to Bencolin, who was dropped after three appearances, Carr – as ‘Carter Dickson’ – concentrated on two series heroes: Dr Gideon Fell, introduced in
Hag’s Nook
(1933); and Sir Henry Merrivale, introduced in
The Plague Court Murders
(1934). Fell is hugely fat, a historian and works as the unofficial aide of Chief Inspector Hadley of Scotland Yard. He is modelled on G. K. Chesterton (creator of ‘Father Brown’). Merrivale is a patrician barrister and a physician: his liaison figure at the Yard is Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters.

Carr constructs his narratives as puzzles – challenges to the reader’s ingenuity and acuity. There should be, he believed, not one but a whole ‘ladder of clues’. He believed firmly in the ‘fair play’ principle – no Roger Ackroydian tricks are to be sprung on the reader. Admirers, even passionate admirers such as Kingsley Amis, concede a price is paid in Carr’s surrender to formula, pattern and narrative principles. ‘At every emotional turn,’ says Amis, ‘he is likely to plunge into the style of the novelette.’ On the plus side, to quote Amis again, Carr can ‘grip’ like no other crime writer:

The hero of
The Burning Court
comes across, in the most prosaic way possible, a photograph of a Frenchwoman who according to the caption was guillotined for murder in 1861. ‘He was looking at a photograph of his own wife.’ End of
Chapter One
. There must be those who, on reaching that point for the first time, would be able to lay the book aside and go out to a Mahler concert, say, without turning a hair. Not I; I had a hard enough time just now getting my copy back on to its shelf after checking that reference.

As ‘Roger Fairbairn’, a pseudonym first used for
Devil Kinsmere
(1934), Carr developed a sideline in historical romances and ‘historical’ crime such as
The Bride of Newgate
(1950), an eighteenth-century detective story; and
The Hungry Goblin
(1972), a Victorian detective story.

Carr received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1963 and it is hard to think of any writer more deserving. Not only did he practise, he also wrote astute critical and biographical works which gave shape, historical sequence and hierarchy to the chaotic mass of crime fiction since Poe invented the genre. Carr, for example, wrote what was, for many years, the authoritative study of Arthur Conan Doyle. He was privileged by the estate, unlike his successors, to see the author’s ‘locked archive’. Locked rooms and the mysteries therein were Carr’s speciality.

Bugger them all!

Numbers stack up around her. She published over ninety novels, under her own name and under the pseudonyms Catherine Marchant and Katie McMullen (see below for the origin of this second pen name). In the 1990s she topped the Public Lending Right list, which records borrowings from public libraries, year in, year out – beating even Dick Francis. Her combined sales, at the time of her death, were calculated at over 100 million. She is plausibly reckoned to have been the mostread British novelist of her time. It was, given her lifespan, quite a long time – even though she did not start publishing until her mid-forties.

As remarkable as the statistical bulk of Cookson’s achievement are the obstacles she was obliged to overcome to get there. They are chronicled in her autobiography,
Our Kate
(1969) and her novel
Fifteen Streets
(1973). Catherine Cookson was born the illegitimate daughter of Catherine Fawcett and brought up in Tyne Dock, East Jarrow, a slum vividly described in Cookson’s various ‘fifteen streets’ settings. The area was dominated by the ship-building industry. Catherine’s mother was, when working, ‘in service’ and away from home. The name ‘McMullen’ was that of her grandparents, whose family background was Irish Catholic. Illegitimacy was shameful (as, to some degree, was Irish Catholicism) and as a young child Catherine was kept in ignorance of her parentage and assumed ‘Kate’ was her elder sister. Cookson romanticises this deception, wildly, in one of her most popular later novels,
The Glass Virgin
(1969). It added to the family shame that Kate ‘drank’.
Young Catherine became familiar with the pawn shop, the off-licence and the bailiff’s knock.

Catherine was unhappy at the Catholic school she attended. ‘God came into my life’, she recalled ‘and with him came the Devil, and Miss Corfield, the schoolmistress of St Peter and Paul’s, Tyne Dock, and with her came mental and physical torture’. She was, none the less, very bright and submitted her first story, ‘The Wild Irish Girl’ (a telling title) to the local South Shields paper, aged eleven. It was rejected: so, she might well have thought, was she – by the whole world. She left school at thirteen and, as soon as she was allowed, left home, which had become threateningly violent, to work first as a housemaid, at 10 shillings a week plus board, then in a workhouse laundry in South Shields. A skilled laundress and, as it was observed, an able manager, she later moved to Hastings, where she was employed at that town’s work-house in a middle-managerial capacity. Over time she scraped together enough from her wages to buy a large town house, take in lodgers and add even more income to her savings account. Her personal, more specifically her sexual, life in her twenties and early thirties is obscure. It seems likely that she had, if not a lesbian, then a long-running passionate friendship with another, older, woman, Nan Smyth, with whom she ran the boarding house for nine years until her marriage.

What is clear is that Catherine was all the while improving herself and reading widely. In 1940 she was respectable enough to marry a grammar-school teacher, Thomas Cookson, without any sense of his coming down in the world by his choice of bride. There were, to the couple’s mortification, repeated miscarriages and no surviving children from the marriage. Cookson, it emerged, suffered from a chronic vascular complaint (which would, in later life, cause her blindness). She recalls this period of her life, the war years, as profoundly depressed and sometimes dangerously so, to the point of nervous breakdown. In 1948, Cookson records losing her faith: ‘I dared to make a stand against superstition, against faith, against God … I sent tearing heavenwards words that made me tremble with fear even as I forced them out. But I was saying them aloud and defiantly. I was answering back my fears for the first time. What the hell does it matter! To blazes and bloody damnation with it all! God, dogma, the Catholic Church, the Devil, Hell, people, opinion, laws, illegitimacy – and fear.
Bugger them all
!’

Writing was then suggested to her as a therapy and she became a founder member of the Hastings Writers Group in 1947. Knowing the value of money, she put her mind to fiction aimed, primarily, at the woman reader which, as she astutely guessed, would sell. In 1950, aged forty-four, she published her first novel,
Kate Hannigan
. The heroine’s life mirrors that of Cookson’s mother Kate, sympathetically romanticised. Kate Hannigan is the prettiest and smartest girl in the Fifteen
Streets and catches the eye of Dr Rodney Prince, an unhappily married man. Love and scandal ensue.

Kate Hannigan
hit the mark and launched Cookson on her bestselling way. A fluent writer (in later life, after her sight failed, as fluent a dictator to the tape recorder), she went on to compose a string of multi-volume sagas and sequence novels. Notable is the ‘Tilly Trotter trilogy’ – another indomitable working-class girl who braves gossip and scandal – and the more Brontëan ‘Mallen trilogy’. Cookson was never afraid of themes more socially controversial than what were usually found in the ‘romance’ genre. In
Colour Blind
(published in unregenerate 1953), she has a hero, Bridget McQueen, who gets herself pregnant by a ‘coloured’ seaman. The family is ostracised, Bridget is urged to have an abortion (criminal at this period). None the less, she follows her heart, defies prejudice, and marries her daughter’s father. It’s a brave novel for the time when boarding houses and pubs all over Britain would advertise ‘no coloureds’. Her strongest settings, however, remained the north- east where she had been raised and where, as her fiction won her fame, she and her husband relocated. Cookson enjoyed climactic triumph with Tyne Tees TV’s adaptations of her novels. Between 1989 and 2001, eighteen mini-series adapted from her novels were screened, starring actors such as Sean Bean and Catherine Zeta-Jones and a team of dialogue coaches to get the accent right.

A very rich woman in her later years, Cookson was also spectacularly philanthropic. Among many other gifts, she donated £100,000 to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and £50,000 to Girton College, Cambridge (having been a thirteen-year-old school-leaver herself). One million pounds went to research into the blood disorder, telangiectasia, which had blighted her life and denied her children. Her PLR income she donated to a fund for authors less profitable than she (virtually every novelist who ever wrote, as it happened). She regained her Catholic faith in her serener later years and was awarded a DBE in 1993 – not, as it should have been, for her services to literature but for her charitable activities and acts of patronage.

I rather like Mr Howard’s stories.
J. R. R. Tolkien

Howard never put his name to anything that could be called a novel. But his narrative fantasies, dribbled out for pulp magazines, have been, and still are, radioactive in the fiction (graphic novel, print novel, film, comic book, cartoon, computer-game) they inspire. His own life was short and very ordinary: the son of an itinerant Texas physician and a mother, Hester Howard, who was chronically tubercular. A saintly woman, Hester had contracted the disease tending the sick. Robert idolised her all his life. In his nomadic childhood he picked up tales and lore in country areas and cow towns where inhabitants could still recall the frontier lawlessness which was already being mythologised in Hollywood. The reading matter available to young Robert was principally comics and the pulp fiction on sale at local drugstores or left around in bus stations. Through them he picked up a third-hand social Darwinism and racism of the Jack London,
übermenschlich
kind. Somewhere, it is speculated, he may have come across a scholarly volume on the Scottish Picts: his ‘Celtic’ blood was one of his dearest personal possessions and the cult of barbarian purity took early root in his sensibility.

When he was thirteen, the family settled in the small central Texas town, Cross Plains. In early adolescence he developed a passion for boxing – both the sport and stories about the ‘ring’. He enrolled in mail order body-building courses and did some fairground fighting. From fifteen years old Howard immersed himself even more enthusiastically in the pulp magazines which flooded the country in the 1920s. A particular favourite was
Adventure
and its lead author Talbot Mundy (1879–1940). whose ‘Tros of Samothrace’ left a clear mark. While still at school, Howard did a number of menial jobs around town: desk work, interspersed with manual work in the fields and – at one low point – garbage collection. It was a comedown for the son of a professional man – as was the fact that he had no interest in attending college. He had not shone at school and was observed to be chronically shy and melancholy by temperament. He wrote reams of poetry.

He was also writing fiction furiously, though his efforts were everywhere rejected until, aged eighteen,
Weird Tales
magazine accepted his caveman story ‘Spear and Fang’. The opening is touchingly reflective of the author’s own sense of his unrecognised genius:

A-aea crouched close to the cave mouth, watching Ga-nor with wondering eyes. Ga-nor’s occupation interested her, as well as Ga-nor himself. As for Ga-nor, he was too occupied with his work to notice her. A torch stuck in a niche in the cave
wall dimly illuminated the roomy cavern, and by its light Ga-nor was laboriously tracing figures on the wall. With a piece of flint he scratched the outline and then with a twig dipped in ocher paint completed the figure. The result was crude, but gave evidence of real artistic genius, struggling for expression.

Battle to the (species) death between
Homo sapiens
and Neanderthal ensues.