The Line Up (15 page)

I well recall a film critic giving his judgment on the latest blockbusting biblical epic from Hollywood in four words: “God at his best.”

art

Let me add one final sentence. I never allowed anyone, not even my wife, Dorothy, to read my novels before they were dispatched to my publisher. It was only then that I was ready for any criticism. All writers of course will sometimes wince silently at some of their earlier offerings and wish to amend them. I remember, for example, once having Morse enjoying “a pint of the amber fluid” instead of “a pint of bitter.” The only changes I always made, when checking copy for omnibuses, etc., involved crossing out Lancia and substituting Jaguar, because ITV were unable to come up with an ancient Lancia and instead purchased, for some ridiculously giveaway price, a maroon-colored Jaguar Mark II, 1962, which, fully and luxuriously refurbished, recently changed hands for £150,000.

What really makes Morse tick?

Earlier I gave my own three greatest joys in life as crosswords, Wagner, and the poets, and vicariously I tried to exemplify these interests/hobbies/passions, both in the novels and in the TV programs.

Crosswords? Well, Morse could almost invariably finish The Times crossword at breakneck speed (he was considerably quicker than I am), and in his vainer moments he would claim that solving that newspaper’s puzzle was the veritable benchmark of mental acumen and flexibility. Sometimes, however, he could cheat just a little. In The Wench Is Dead, for example, we read that Morse “bought The Times at the bookstall, got a seat at the rear of the train and had solved the puzzle in ten minutes before reaching Didcot. Except for one clue… He quickly wrote in a couple of bogus letters in case any fellow passengers were waiting to be impressed.” He did try once to interest Lewis in the delights of the cryptic crossword, but in vain.

Wagner? I attempted perhaps rather laboriously to explain Morse's passion for music. It would have been very difficult for him to explain such a passion to Lewis, just as it is for me here to put these things into words. Much better, surely, for both of us to feel them? Once, in a car, Morse betrayed an impatient arrogance when Lewis mistook an aria from Tosca sung by Maria Callas for a lively tune from Cats. But, then, Morse was a musical snob who would have had no sympathy whatsoever with a woman I knew who had seen The Sound of Music on fifteen occasions. Such contempt was not Morse’s most attractive trait, was it? But perhaps we should forgive him.

The poets? Certainly Morse spent much time reading poetry with deep and abiding love, both the English and the classical poets. Occasionally read them aloud, too, as in The Remorseful Day, when, seated one summer evening in the Victoria Arms with a pint of beer on the table in front of him, he gazed westward toward a miraculous sunset and recited part of a poem by Housman—a poet who, like Morse, failed to get a degree from St. John’s College, Oxford.

Ensanguining the skies

How heavily it dies

Into the west away;

Past touch and sight and sound,

Not further to be found,

How hopeless under ground

Falls the remorseful day.

(More Poems, XVI)

Unusually for the melancholy Housman, this poem has an almost playful touch. The remorse here is for unfulfilled intention, an emotion experienced by most of us every day. But not by John Thaw, perhaps, whose life afforded a fulfillment of his ambitions and a manifestation of his extraordinary talents.

Did John Thaw ever say anything to you that you particularly remember?

Let me be honest. No one has ever asked me that question, but I would like to answer it. He told me that he enjoyed playing Inspector Morse more than any other role, and for me that was an unforgettable compliment. I can just about understand why that great actor thought so. For me John Thaw was Inspector Morse. And in my will I have specifically stated that for as long as the copyright on the character remains with me, I shall permit no other actor to follow him. No other actor could follow him.

JOHN HARVEY

John Harvey was born in London in 1938. After studying at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at Hatfield Polytechnic, he took his master’s degree in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he taught film and literature as a part-time lecturer between 1980 and 1986.

Harvey taught English and drama in secondary schools for twelve years. Since then, he has lived primarily by his writing, and has more than one hundred published books to his credit. After what he calls his apprentice years, writing paperback fiction for both adults and teenagers, he is now principally known as a writer of crime fiction, with the first of the Charlie Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, being named by The Times (London) as one of the 100 most notable crime novels of the last century. Flesh and Blood, the first of three novels featuring Frank Elder, was awarded both the British Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger and the US Barry Award in 2004. His books have won two major prizes in France, the Grand Prix du Roman Noir Etranger for Cold Light in 2000 and the Prix du Polar Européen for Ash & Bone in 2007. In 2007, he was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing.

Harvey has written many scripts for television and radio, specializing in adapting his and others’ work. His radio work includes dramatizations of two Graham Greene novels, The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, as well as The Frederica Quartet by A. S. Byatt and (with Shelly Silas) The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott.

After living in Nottingham for many years, Harvey now lives in north London with his partner and their young daughter.

CHARLIE RESNICK

BY JOHN HARVEY

To the memory of two fine professionals, Laurence James and Dulan Barber, without whom it is doubtful Charlie Resnick would ever have existed—and for Marian Wood, who, as my US editor at Henry Holt, was responsible for keeping Charlie, and me, more or less in line for a good—a very good—ten years. Thanks, Marian.

That I became a writer at all—and that Charlie Resnick, therefore, was brought into existence—was largely due to a series of convenient accidents. You see, I had never harbored any ambitions to be a writer, at least not a fiction writer, and until the time that my first book (Avenging Angel, New English Library, 1975, under the pen name Thom Ryder) was published, I had made no attempts in that direction: no early masterpieces stored beneath the bed or in an adoring parent’s drawer, no prize-winning contributions to some children’s short-story competition. I had, it’s true, both at secondary school and then again at college, edited a couple of student newspapers, gracing them with the occasional review or what I saw as a scathing muckraking exposé, but this was journalism, nothing more or less, and although, looking back, I’m somewhat bemused to understand why, it never occurred to me that it might be my profession. No. I was destined to be a teacher, an inspirational—well, I was still young—teacher of English and drama to whatever hapless eleven through eighteen year olds found themselves seated before me.

The twelfth year of this career found me in Stevenage, a “new town” an hour’s drive north of London, and I was beginning to feel more than a tad restless. And here, as chance would have it, I resumed close acquaintance with a former college friend, Laurence James, who, sadly, was to die all too early, in the year 2000, when not yet sixty. Laurence had been assiduously working his way up in the book trade—first as a bookseller, then as an editor, and finally as an author. He was living not far from Stevenage, close enough for me to make frequent visits, during which I complained about the nature of my present lot and observed with no little envy the comparatively pleasant life of a fulltime writer. Laurence, it seemed—I later learned the truth to be both more arduous and demanding—would rise in his own good time and, after a leisurely breakfast, make his way into his office, where he would sit behind his desk for an hour or so before pausing for the first of several coffee breaks that would occur throughout the day. And at the end of each of those days, two or three thousand words of manuscript would have been created with apparent ease. No bells sounding at forty-minute intervals to announce a new class and a change of lesson, no recalcitrant or obstreperous youths to chivvy along or bully into submission: just your own quiet room with a stereo and coffee machine close to hand and, in Laurence’s case, an intelligent and lovely wife, who, having shipped the kids off to school, was most likely working on a novel in a room of her own.

My envy must have been evident for all to see, and now, providentially, more good fortune came to my aid. Laurence had been writing a series of rollicking biker books under the name of Mick Norman, and his publishers wanted another; Laurence, however, was committed elsewhere. “You want to write something,” he said. “Here’s your chance.” Except, of course, I hadn’t really wanted to write anything at all: what I wanted was what I saw as the writer’s life—the cottage in the country, the Volvo, the ability to organize one’s own days. Faced with actually producing anything somebody else might want to read, never mind publish, I gibbered and blanched.

But Laurence was persuasive: he gave me the Mick Norman books to read, helped me to assemble a story line and then a synopsis, and sat patiently—well, mostly patiently—alongside me while I rewrote my sample first chapter more than a dozen times. The whole package went to his editor with a strong letter of recommendation, and a month or so later (things moved speedily in those far-off days), I was in possession of a contract. All I had to do was provide a manuscript of fifty thousand words, and the grand sum of two hundred fifty pounds would be mine in return.

Back in Stevenage, still teaching, I worked at the kitchen table of my small flat—holidays, evenings, weekends—and somehow my deadline was met and the finished manuscript shipped off.

Glancing back, it was a strange book, as much about the iniquities of the education system as the roar of marauding Harley-Davidsons, but, to my delight and no little surprise, it was accepted and, graced with the near-obligatory jacket photograph of a young blond woman in an unbuttoned denim jacket astride a motorcycle, Avenging Angel was duly published—and I was offered a contract for a second book at fifty pounds more. I was on my way.

One thing that aided my swift elevation to the ranks of published writers was the happy fact that the mid-’70s were a boom time for British publishing, new paperback imprints springing up seemingly overnight and all greedy for product. And because I had entered the world of writing in the way I had—because to me it was first and foremost an alternative way of earning a living rather than a sign of any higher literary ambition—I was only too happy to oblige. War books, movie tie-ins, apocalyptic adventure stories, teen romances—during the years of my apprenticeship, all was grist for my mill.

Then there was the day an editor from Transworld phoned me and said, “We’re looking for someone to write a Western series. I wondered if you’d be interested?”

One of the publishing phenomena of the period was the success of a Western series called Edge, written by Terry Harknett under the pen name George G. Gilman. In his role as commissioning editor at New English Library, Laurence James—yes, him again—had suggested that Harknett, up to that point the author of middlingly successful thrillers, try his hand at a new kind of pulp Western, violent and sexy, based to a large degree on the Sergio Leone–Clint Eastwood spaghetti shoot-’em-ups such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and For a Few Dollars More. A brilliant idea, which Harknett fleshed out in spades. After a cautious start, sales of each new book in the series were nudging the 100,000 mark, and, not surprisingly, other publishers wanted a piece of that pie.

Soon there was a small group of British writers—hacks, as we delighted in calling ourselves—Laurence, of course, Terry Harknett, Ken Bulmer, Fred Nolan, Angus Wells, and me—laboring away at the Western cliff face, more often than not sharing pen names. Between us, while the boom lasted, our titles must have gone well into the hundreds; before shifting tastes and the changing economic climate caused me to hang up my spurs, I had myself written between forty and fifty books in different series.

That I was suited to this was to no small extent due to my father, who had been a great Western fan (Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was one of the three books forever at his bedside), and while I was growing up, he had taken me to see every Western movie that played in our part of north London. Under his influence, in my early teens I read and reread many of the Hopalong Cassidy novels of Clarence E. Mulford—what is it about Western authors and that middle initial?—and the Buffalo Bill Annual was virtually my bible. With considerable regularity—how did I get away with it so often?—I would skip school and take the Tube into the center of London, the lunch money I had saved bulking out my pockets, and alight at Marble Arch, where, immediately outside the station, a news vendor sold imported American comics: Superman, of course, and Captain Marvel; but also, more interesting for me, the adventures of minor Western movie stars: Rod Cameron, Allan “Rocky” Lane, and Lash La Rue.

So when it came to it, the frontier background—mythic and heavily romantic rather than realistic—was well in place for me. As an example, look at the opening chapter of Cherokee Outlet (Pan, 1980), the first of ten Hart the Regulator books, the only Westerns to have my own name, plus the near-obligatory middle initial, on the cover—John B. Harvey, no less.

He was a tall, dark shape coming out of the sun. Shrouded in his own shadow. A man who rode alone.