Black Beech and Honeydew (38 page)

After a deathly silence broken by the chairman saying, ‘All right, men. Come on, now. Ask somebody something. Yes?’ he added hopefully, having noted the reluctant warrior who now rose and turned scarlet in the face.

‘Why,’ he asked, staring at me, ‘do people like reading about crime?’

The chairman turned to me and smilingly suggested this seemed to be in my department.

I should here explain that some provision had been made beforehand to guard against non-cooperation. Questions had been suggested to the troops. This, I have reason to believe, was one of them.

My mouth was dry and my stomach unruly. I remembered hearing a friend accustomed to public speaking say that the great thing was to start with a joke. The only military jokes I could recollect were about sergeants major.

I opened, in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else, by saying people might enjoy reading about crime as an alternative to committing it.

I then said, ‘Suppose, for instance, one of you wanted to murder the sergeant major.’

I got no further. As one man the assembled strength broke into herculean laughter. They roared, they stamped, they hit each other on the back. They clapped and whistled.

This was extraordinary. Greatly taken aback but encouraged by my inexplicable success I held up my hands. There was immediate silence.

‘Well,’ I said, and hoped to sound breezily at ease, ‘all right, suppose you
did
want – ’ I got no further.

It broke out again, more boisterous and more puzzling than before. I noticed that the officers in the front row looked quite uneasy. At last, I again raised my hands and said, ‘What is all this in aid of? Where
is
the sergeant major?’

At the back of the hall three enormous soldiers amid cheers from their comrades hoisted up into view a struggling figure on whose uniform the insignia of a sergeant major was clearly visible. He was pulled down again in a continued uproar.

I really don’t remember how I got on after that except that they calmed down and the rest of the Brains Trust passed off without incident.

When it was over we were entertained in the Officers’ Mess. One after another our hosts came up to me and asked me in the oddest manner, how ‘I knew’. (’Wink, wink. Nudge nudge’, almost.)

‘Knew
what?’

Then, furtively, they explained. We had drawn a full house because there was nowhere else for the men to go. And there was nowhere else for them to go because they were confined to barracks. And the reason they were confined to barracks was because that morning a stick of gelignite had been found underneath the sergeant major’s bed.

I grew accustomed, after this dubious success, to speaking to very varied audiences. Seamen, for instance, of all sorts, from the New Zealand Royal Navy to the crews of large and small trading vessels at anchorage in Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch. They were always polite and seemed to be attentive. I remember one occasion when after I had sat down and the chairman had asked for questions and the usual silence had set in, a sailor rose and, in an expressionless voice, asked me what my name was and on being told gave a curt nod and sat down again. Disconcerting.

One does get asked very strange questions by strangers. During a long voyage I had found a quiet place on deck and had settled myself to write when an old lady, who looked and behaved like the late
Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marples, sat down nearby, edged her deck chair alongside mine and began to whisper.

‘I have read all your tales,’ she hissed and having waited for my emotion to subside, confided that there was a question she had always wanted to put to me.

She reached out a little paw and patted my manuscript. ‘When you are writing your tales,’ she breathed, ‘do you know who committed the crime?’

A stock question is: how do you begin to write a book? I imagine that my way of beginning is unorthodox and silly. I try to behave sensibly and prepare myself by setting out the anatomy of the plot and the order of events and then inventing a cast of characters that this structure will accommodate. But that never lasts and the truth is that I most often start with characters alone and then have to find a milieu and circumstances and a plot that suits them. It becomes a matter of which of these people is capable of a crime of violence and under what turn of events would he or she actually commit one? I write very slowly, make a lot of alterations and lay myself open to the danger of repetition and self-contradictions which, when there has been a lot of rewriting, I fail to spot. If the publisher’s readers also miss the boob it will ultimately be seized upon with glee by some babu in Pondicherry or a cock-a-hoop maths mistress in an establishment for middle-class maidens.

The stupidest brick I have ever dropped was to do with a play which I knew almost by heart. I mixed up two battles – Harfleur and Agincourt – in
Henry V.
In less than no time I did indeed get a letter of reproof from a babu in India.

A large number of the reading public for crime fiction are professional men and women; the very people, of course, who are best equipped to catch you out if you make a blunder – doctors, lawyers, soldiers, sailors, academics, all read these books and strangely enough, or so I am credibly informed, so do policemen – these latter perhaps because they enjoy a complete change from reality.

You might say the writer of a detective story is in much the same situation as a barrister whose practice is largely in crimes of violence. One gets up the case and in the process often has to do a lot of research in a number of fields: medical jurisprudence, police law, poisons, the drug racket, the arts, ballistics, the Judge’s Rules or the laws of evidence. I have amassed a large collection of reference
books and often am obliged to fag through one or another of them in search of some technical detail to which I will refer in a single sentence. No matter how plain sailing and simplistic you may consider the plot you’ve chosen, sooner or later you’ll find yourself involved with technical concerns.

Suppose you decide that the crime is simply this: one man hits another man on the head with a half-brick in a dirty sock and leaves the body in a dark alley. Plain sailing you think? In no time your detective, and therefore you, are involved with the component parts of brick-dust, the various types of wool from which socks are woven or knitted and the places of origin of such microscopic traces of dirt as cling to the sock in question. Once the book is concluded you forget all this stuff and I’m told barristers who so confidently expound their expert knowledge to juries do exactly the same thing. The information has served its purpose: away with it.

Sometimes, however, things turn out oddly. One of the rare occasions when I began with a plot rather than with people was in writing
Scales of Justice.
A friend who was a member of the Royal Society and an authority on trout, told me that the scales of trout are unique in as much as those of one trout never have corresponded and never can correspond exactly with those of another. In this they resemble human fingerprints.

This, of course, immediately suggested a title and pleasing subject matter for a book. So I wrote
Scales of Justice
and in due course typescripts were sent off to my English and American publishers. To my astonishment the American script-reader wrote crisply in the margin ‘Trout do not have scales.’ I can only suppose she was thinking of eels.

It really is best to stick to backgrounds with which one is familiar. That is why Troy and I are concerned with painting and so many of my stories take place in theatres among those larger-than-life persons, actors.

Actors, indeed, make splendid copy. They tend to express every emotion up to the hilt. If they are pleased to see you they are enraptured to see you. If they are bored or depressed they turn the mask of comedy upside down and are desolate. If they are ironical or sarcastic they make jolly sure they let you know it with the well-timed sneer. It is not that they are insincere in their extravagances, it is their business and habit to give every reaction its due and then
some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually truthful. This makes them good material for detective fiction.

I’ve said already that it never does to talk about a book while it is merely a fragile idea. I now break this rule by confessing that I have often dallied with the notion of writing a book about a company rehearsing
Macbeth,
which, as every actor knows, is thought to be an unlucky play. I have not found it so and do not subscribe to the superstition. It would be satisfactory to bring the two major interests of my life together for, as it were, a final fling and the actor’s response to the situation as it develops could be an intriguing ingredient.

I hope I have one more book in me and I hope too I’ll have the sense to call it a day if it turns out to be below standard. But my memory! As I have already confessed it has always been erratic, treacherous to a degree when the thing to be recalled is not particularly interesting but uncannily sharp when for some reason it was something that had attracted me. My father was a great singer-about-the-house and his choice in songs was Gilbertian. Patter songs, production numbers, romantic ballads, wandering minstrels, Lord High Executioners, jesters, judges, peers and policemen; he warbled away, taking his own time with them and it was often a very slow time. The other day I wondered how much of the interminable ‘Nightmare Song’ from
Iolanthe
might have lodged itself, unknown to me, in my wayward recollection. I had never attempted to memorize it. I started off and got, I think faultlessly, as far as words were concerned, to the end. But if you asked me to name all the characters in my latest book,
Photo-Finish,
as likely as not I’d be flummoxed. I suppose Freud would find something rather disgusting to dredge up about all this but I don’t particularly want to hear it, though not for the reason advanced by my schoolboy cousin who, on being asked if he was interested in psychology, replied ‘I’m a-Freud I’m too Jung.’

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion

Ulysses in his elderly wisdom, is saying, and how marvellously he says it, that no one who has achieved recognition for his work can
afford to rest on his laurels. It’s no good, he says, for achievement to ‘seek remuneration for the thing it was’. Keep it up. Go one better or sooner or later, out
you’ll
go. Cold comfort for the lightweight novelist.

In contemplating the affairs of men, Shakespeare is a determined realist, perhaps the most unsentimental in our literature. In nothing does this attitude of mind declare itself more absolutely than in the passages about death. True, one must always recognize that in plays the situation and the characters stand like a veil between author and audience, but surely there are many instances when the veil is almost transparent, when the character does in fact speak for the creator. Can anyone read or listen to Claudio’s speech about death in
Measure for Measure
and not believe Shakespeare’s personal horror of it is there, before our eyes and in our own hearing?

Claudio is condemned to death. The price of his reprieve is that his sister buy it by yielding to the lust of the unspeakable Angelo. In the subsequent scene with her brother she takes it for granted that he will be prepared to sacrifice himself. He pleads with her.

Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot…

The speech is a horrifying and horrified confrontation with the physical ignominy that follows death and a terrifying speculation as to what may happen to the released spirit. One cannot escape the feeling that the poet himself had experienced these fears.

At the time when his small son Hamnet died, Shakespeare was writing
King John.
In this play another little boy dies. His mother says ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child.’ Here, in these desolate words, the veil between the author’s sorrow and his audience, it seems to me, is very thin indeed.

The Emperor Julius Caesar teeters between heroics and geriatric posturing. We are given one or two momentary back-flashes of the man in his heyday, particularly in his celebrated reply to the threat of assassination. He says of death,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

The same acceptance of inevitability is echoed by Hamlet:

If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if ‘it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

In
King Lear,
the most pessimistic of all the plays, it is not only the longing for extinction of the dying themselves that is expressed but also that of the living, the onlookers, for release from the unendurable spectacle of death. Kent cries out,

O let him pass!

He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.

And as Kent speaks, the old King dies.

I cannot find that anywhere, except in the obligatory, conventional or ceremonial speeches of one or another of the characters, does Shakespeare promise, through them, some happy continuation after death, unless it be found in Cleopatra’s proud boast that in the Elysian fields she and Mark Antony, holding hands, will walk together.

In
Cymbeline
the little dirge for the supposed Fidele says consolation is to be found in oblivion. The dead boy has nothing to fear. He knows nothing. To him ‘the reed is as the oak’. ‘Quiet consummation have’ is the poet’s final wish for him and, one feels almost as an afterthought, a kind of politeness, he adds ‘and renowned be thy grave.’

A very short time before his death the actor, Robert Donat, recorded some of the poems that he liked very much and this was the one he chose from Shakespeare. He introduces it by quoting an old Lancashire woman who had once said to him that Shakespeare was ‘sootch a coomfort’. She was right. The solace this dirge offers is not of the conventional kind but nevertheless there
is
comfort as well as fear in the thought of oblivion.