Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (98 page)

Edgar Wallace had died in 1933 and the creator of Simon Templar succeeded him as ‘King of the Thrillers’. The Saint was further popularised by a radio series (starring Vincent Price – like Sanders, another career smoothie), which ran from 1945 to 1951 in America. There was also a Saint comic strip,
The Saint Mystery Magazine
and, most long-runningly, a TV series launched in 1961, starring Roger Moore. The fiftieth
Saint
book came out in 1983. A big budget Hollywood film, starring Val Kilmer (no Sanders, he), came out in 1997. The formula was simple and repetitive. A crime is committed requiring redress from a modern Robin Hood. Templar steps in to do what the flat-footed police cannot. Templar’s vigilantism, for all its suavity, is fuelled by right-wing political sentiment and snobbery – the persistent failing of British thrillers. Villains (sinners?) are typically lower-class or foreign.

Charteris married the beautiful film star, Audrey Long, fifteen years his junior, in 1952. He was now wealthy – enriched by multi-media subsidiary rights. The couple returned to England, where Charteris lived the good life (he enjoyed five-star restaurants and the sport of kings), and died leaving a fortune. Extraordinarily intelligent (he was a founder member of Mensa) and intellectually curious, Charteris also invented a pictorial sign language called Paleneo.

I am a damned good writer.

Although he did not begin writing until he was forty, Michener made a literary form distinctively his own. The ‘epic’ deals, typically, with the evolution of some great entity – an American state, such as Texas, the birth of a nation, or one of mankind’s ‘great steps’, such as the conquest of space. His choice of subject was always astute.
Centennial
(1974), his biggest bestseller, for example, was timed so that its millions-selling paperback form would appear in the bicentennial year, 1976. The hallmark
of the Michener novel is girth. If not the Great American Novel, he certainly wrote the bulkiest. ‘I have two pieces of advice,’ one critic wrote of Michener’s latest effort: ‘first, don’t buy it. Second, if you do, don’t drop it on your foot.’ Latterly his books would be prefaced with the names of armies of researchers. Generations of American journalism students must have worked their way through college, subsidised by the Michener hourly rate for leg-work.

James Albert Michener was born (the exact day is unrecorded), probably in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, possibly in New York. His mother, Mabel Michener, was a widow of Quaker descent. When he was nineteen, and a freshman in college, James learned that his ‘father’ had in fact died some five years before his birth. Michener never knew who his father was or, if he knew, never told. He told many lies on the subject. It was, the novelist recalled, a hard childhood: ‘we were evicted six times because my mother couldn’t pay the rent.’ An industrious schoolboy, Michener won a scholarship to Swarthmore College in 1925. In later life it pleased him to pretend it had been an athletic scholarship. He also liked to claim, with as little plausibility, that he was a ‘troublemaker’ and had been expelled – ‘even though they knew I was probably the brightest kid on the block’. In point of fact, he was a dutiful, weedy undergraduate of middling academic attainment, regarded as wholly inoffensive, if ‘moody’, by his fellow students. He graduated in the ominous year of 1929, and took up teaching work in Pennsylvania schools. In 1935 he made the first of his three marriages. The couple had little in common, apparently, beyond tennis.

In 1941 Michener accepted a post as editor in Macmillan’s textbook division, a post which brought him to New York just as war broke out. Aged thrity-five, he was among the oldest American males to be drafted. He was commissioned into the US Navy in 1943. His country required no great sacrifice from Lieutenant Michener. His duties, as a supplies officer, were those of a ‘superclerk’, but his service, momentously, took him to the South Pacific. Out of this experience would emerge his first book,
Tales of the South Pacific
(1947). The tales were picked up by the
Saturday Evening Post
and by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical,
South Pacific
. The book, to the amazement of intellectual New York, won a Pulitzer.

Michener had drifted apart from his wife (she was, he drily put it, ‘a war casualty’), and divorced and remarried in 1948. In 1952, he formed a long connection with
Reader’s Digest
, giving him a direct line to middle America.
Sayonara
(1954) dealt,
Madame Butterfly
style, with the interracial love of an American officer and a Japanese woman and was filmed, starring Marlon Brando. A better book, which produced a better film, was
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(1953), a sensitive study of the stressful last mission of an American fighter-bomber pilot in the Korean War. Out of his association with
Reader’s Digest
Michener developed a crossover genre later
known as ‘faction’. It was to be the foundation of his first ‘epic’, the massive ‘soul of a nation’ narrative,
Hawaii
(1959). The story starts with geology and ends with American statehood.

The book’s ‘melting pot’ optimism was to the taste of the American reading public. Politically Michener had been Republican but in the 1960s he campaigned for Kennedy and himself stood unsuccessfully for Congress. His failure to win a seat was, he claimed, one of three great disappointments in his life. The others were never winning the Nobel Prize (like Proust, he would modestly point out) and the childlessness of his marriages. The last was not for want of trying. Michener divorced again in 1955 and again promptly remarried, remaining with his third wife, Mari Toriko Sabusawa until her death in 1994.

He had at last found his groove as a novelist. Blockbuster (literally, in his case, the size of building blocks) followed blockbuster:
The Source
(1965) – Israel,
Chesapeake
(1978) – from first migrating goose to Watergate,
The Covenant
(1980) – South Africa),
Space
(1982). A man of frugal habit, Michener would, it was said, haggle over the price of a newspaper. None the less he made major donations to good causes – including $2 million to his alma mater, Swarthmore. His one recorded vice was overwork. He produced a book (typically a
big
book) every year between 1947 and 1977. After a massive heart attack in 1965, he took better care of himself physically. Well into his sixties he would jog every day. Although he was convinced that malnourishment in his Depression childhood had damaged his constitution, he lived to a great and honoured, if un-Nobelised, age. Courageously, he resolved to end his life by refusing dialysis.

When he founded the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953, he [Creasey] and his noms de plume outnumbered the total membership.
Keith Miles

The most fecund of British crime fiction writers, Creasey has some 560 known titles to his credit, written under scores of pseudonyms. The truth is, no one has ever precisely been able to count his
oeuvre
. He was ruefully proud of his 743 rejection slips – authors tend to be precise about those sad scraps of paper. Creasey was born
in Southfields, London, one of nine children of a working-class coach-builder. His family circumstances were straitened and as a child he was afflicted by polio, having to relearn how to walk at the age of six. His school education ended at fourteen and he tried, it is recorded, some twenty-eight different lines of work: none of them turned out well. He was already writing by night and submitting pieces to the two-penny thriller-papers which were popular between the wars. Some were published (the first in 1925), but most were not. Other hopefuls would have conceded defeat in the face of such repeated rejection, but his tenth novel,
Seven Times Seven
(a
Four Just Men
knock-off), was finally accepted, published and well received in 1932. Thereafter, Creasey stepped up his writing to factory pace, averaging 6,000 words a day, a full-length novel in six days, fifteen novels a year. He had found his groove.

His series heroes, especially the ‘Toff’ series (Charteris knock-offs) were two-penny cornershop library favourites. Creasey had an uncanny knack for framing his thrillers to the sociopolitical nervousness of the day – whether it was the Nazis in the 1930s or the Reds in the 1950s. By the 1940s he was one of the wealthiest writers in England – now a ‘toff’ himself, living in a country house and chauffeur-driven in a Rolls-Royce with its hallmark ‘Toff’ insignia proudly emblazoned on its doors. His coach-builder dad would have been proud of young John. He was clearly proud of himself.

Creasey was awarded an MBE in 1946 for contributions to philanthropic causes during the Second World War. He stood for Parliament on a number of occasions, founding his ‘All-Party Alliance’ to do so. No allies joined up. Had he succeeded, PM Creasey would, he fondly believed, have solved the nation’s financial crises with no trouble whatsoever. He labelled his philosophy ‘selfism’. No luckier in love than politics, and just as selfish, he made four marriages. With Creasey, everything crystallises into numbers: he was published in twenty-eight languages, sold 80 million copies of his work, and – an inveterate traveller – circumnavigated the world twice. Whether in eighty days, like Phileas Fogg, is not recorded.

He founded the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953;
John Creasey Mystery Magazine
, which ran from 1956 to 1965; and his own publishing house, Jays Suspense Books. In their day, the most popular of Creasey’s series heroes were the ‘Baron’ (John Mannering, an art dealer), the ‘Toff’ (the Hon. Richard Rollison, to all appearances a wealthy playboy, in fact a modern Robin Hood), Patrick Dawlish (a Private Investigator), and George Gideon (a Scotland Yard detective). The twenty-one-title-strong Gideon series of Scotland Yard ‘Police Procedurals’, which opened with
Gideon’s Day
(1955) and finished posthumously with
Gideon’s Drive
(1976), was issued under Creasey’s pen name ‘J. J. Marric’. The pseudonym was derived from his then wife Jean, and their sons Martin and Richard. Gideon is the most deeply
characterised and least sentimentalised or glamorised of Creasey’s heroes: a hardworking London cop, with a wife and six children, doing a difficult job against the odds. He was based on the author’s friend, Commander George Hatherill, the officer who brought the mass-murdering John Christie and John (‘acid bath’) Haigh to justice, and who led the successful hunt for the Great Train Robbers in the 1960s. ‘Show us as we are,’ Hatherill had implored his writing friend. Creasey obliged.

Gideon inspired a line of policemen with human faces (e.g. Taggart, Inspector Morse). The series was televised and span off a gritty, but still watchable British film,
Gideon’s Day
(1958), starring Jack Hawkins and directed by John Ford. The ‘Department Z’ series (i.e. a fantasised MI6), particularly
The Enemy Within
(1950), were an acknowledged source for Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which began in 1953 with
Casino Royale
. It is a mark of generational difference that Creasey’s counterpart of ‘M’, Gordon Craigie, keeps a barrel of beer on a trestle, and a row of pewter tankards in his HQ. No stirred not shaken martinis or damn Balkan Sobranies for him.

We are the only two writers who write about what people are really interested in: cards, money, gold and things like that.
Ian Fleming to Somerset Maugham

Ian Fleming was born in Mayfair, aptly enough, the second of four sons of Valentine Fleming. ‘Val’ was a banker, a Conservative MP (much liked by Winston Churchill) and during the First World War a dashing and decorated hero. He died in the trenches in 1917. The surviving Flemings were left comfortably off, but the sons, by a clause in their father’s will, could not inherit unless their mother remarried (which she never did) or died – which she did not do until a few days before the death of Ian. As a result, the men in the family were always hard up and, in a condition of ‘Great Expectations’, predisposed to live beyond their means.

Ian’s mother, Evelyn, was a dominant influence on his early career. So, too, by being so much more successful than him, was his brilliant older brother, Peter, who – after an effortless first at Oxford – made his name early as an intrepid explorer and travel writer: a man of action. Ian recoiled into a
je m’en fous
playboyism – elegant inaction – aided by charm, aquiline good looks (which he projected onto
James Bond) and winning manners, although, as Cyril Connolly cattily remarked, he routinely made the mistake of going home for breakfast after sleeping with a woman. At Eton he acquired little other than a broken nose in the wall game, as a result of a collision with Henry Douglas-Home, brother of the future PM. Nothing undistinguished, even a bash on the conk, for Ian Fleming. He lost his virginity in the local Windsor Kinema (the film is not recorded). It was a matter of lifelong pride that he was, two years running, Victor Ludorum on the school sports day.