The Line Up (16 page)

Like an orange medallion, the sun hung behind him in the afternoon sky. Its light caught the surfaces of misshapen rock scattered on the hill to the north, making them glow red and silver; it shone on the creek water where a whitetail doe drank nervously; it spread the shadow, long and deep, as horse and rider moved slowly to the east.

Wes Hart rode easily, reins resting across the palm of the left hand, the thumb of the right hooked round the pommel of his saddle. The fingers of his hand were spread wide, touching the leather, never far from the pistol that sat snug in its cutaway holster. A Colt Peacemaker .45, the mother-of-pearl grip carved with the Mexican emblem of an eagle holding a snake it its mouth and between its claws.

He was an inch over six foot, wiry under his light brown wool shirt, seeming lighter than the hundred and seventy pounds that had been his weight for thirteen years. His face was lean and stubbled, the high cheekbones strong against his tanned skin. Above them, Hart’s eyes were a faded blue.

Romantic, certainly; one could see Gary Cooper in that saddle, perhaps, or Robert Taylor, Joel McCrea. But the majority of our heroes, men like Jedediah Herne in the Herne the Hunter series I wrote with Laurence James, were darker, closer to extreme violence and despair. Carved from the same unforgiving granite rock as John Wayne’s vengeful character in The Searchers and the Eastwood of the spaghetti Westerns, this hero was no longer young, a loner with a tragic and troubled past that had left him imbued with a fierce but melancholic anger and a concern for few lives other than his own. He was, perhaps above all, a man not out of place, but out of time. In some respects he was not dissimilar to the Charlie Resnick to come—you see, I have not forgotten my principal theme and subject—yet in others he was cast from quite a different metal.

I got to thinking about much of the above quite recently, sitting one Sunday afternoon in one of the few London cinemas to maintain a repertory program, watching for the umpteenth time Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—a movie about men out of time if ever there was one.

There’s a moment early on when Billy turns to Garrett, his former running mate, now the lawman who has told him to move on, and says, “We had some times, didn’t we?” And this made me think of all the pleasure, the sheer fun the bunch of us hacks had during our years spent churning out cowboy yarns, and also of how important films like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch were in forming the vision of the West we had.

Sometimes this was present in the detail—in Cherokee Outlet, for instance, Wes Hart recalls his first meeting with Billy the Kid, at which the Kid shot the heads off several chickens, which is a direct reference to the opening of the Peckinpah movie—but more often in the tone and the predicament of the protagonists, who time and again find themselves shut out of a society they know and recognize but that increasingly fails to recognize and accept them.

Inside and yet outside.

Belonging and yet not belonging.

When I began thinking of a central character for the book that was to become the first of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, there were only two things fairly clear in my mind: he would be a policeman rather than a private detective, and—somehow—he would belong to the community he was policing and yet be outside it. What I needed, and finally found in the groups of shiny-suited men of an indeterminate age who spent their days hanging around the entrance to Nottingham’s Victoria Centre market, was a way of signifying this “difference.” (Yes, sorry, I’d been dabbling in structuralist theory while working for my master’s degree in American Studies and it had rubbed off.)

The men were Polish, part of a large community that had settled in the area around the time of the Second World War; in Nottingham there were two flourishing Polish clubs and a large and well-attended Polish Catholic church. If, I thought, that was the close-knit community to which my character’s family belonged, then it was not too fanciful to imagine him being brought up in a home where Polish was still spoken, but going to local schools where English with a pronounced Notts accent was the common currency, and with one set of customs and expectations vying with the other.

And his name? What about his name?

A friend in New York of Polish origin had the name Resnick; foreign and yet not too difficult for the average insular Brit to pronounce and understand. And then, suddenly, “Charlie” leaped out at me and seemed perfect. Quintessentially English, friendly, unthreatening, approachable, almost—as far as it is possible in England— untainted by class.

Charlie Resnick.

Insider and outsider both.

I remember several long sessions talking about him with the late Dulan Barber, who wrote crime fiction as David Fletcher and supernatural thrillers as Owen Brookes, and was both a generous and an unyielding mentor.

Pretty much following the stereotype, I’d decided early on that Resnick would be living alone and that in his past there would be a failed marriage that would be the source, from time to time, of a certain amount of anguish and regret. Anger too.

“What else,” Dulan asked, “do we know about this man?”

His age, his weight, his taste in music, food, clothes?

In a glib moment, I once described Resnick as being akin to Jim Rockford but dressed like Columbo. As shorthand perhaps it works, though the visual equivalent I had most clearly in mind was Sergeant Valnikov, the police detective in Harold Becker’s fine film of Joseph Wambaugh’s The Black Marble. As played by Robert Foxworth, Valnikov is a fairly hopeless alcoholic of Russian origin, prone to nostalgia and self-pity and more often than not dressed in a shabby raincoat, tie askew, hair akimbo. Skip the alcohol, switch Russian to Polish, and the picture that remains is close to the one that was forming at the back of my mind.

I don’t know if it was Dulan or myself who first came up with the idea of the sandwiches. But, we thought, a man living on his own and who leads a busy professional life would not have a great deal of time to set aside for serious cooking—though there are instances when he performs near-miracles with a few eggs and whatever leftovers the fridge provides. Sandwiches, though, seemed perfect, especially if the ingredients were mostly bought at one or another of the Polish delicatessen stalls to be found in the market, and at which he could conveniently stop on his way back from the coffee stall where he enjoyed his morning espresso.

It was my decision to make him a lover of jazz. (Dulan’s tastes leaned toward high opera and the songs of Richard Strauss, with a strange but understandable penchant for Dusty Springfield.) A long-term listener to jazz myself—and, for a short period, a less than moderate practitioner—I wanted the opportunity to write about the music I knew, to try and give the reader, as far as it can be achieved in words, a sense of what Resnick is hearing when he listens, be it to Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker or whoever, and to describe as accurately as possible the actual sounds. More than that, I hoped I could make Resnick’s sympathy and enthusiasm for the music say something about the man himself; it might suggest—as, in another way, I suppose, do his culinary appetites—an imaginative richness not otherwise apparent. I also wanted, if I could, to draw a connection between Resnick’s appreciation of that listening experience and his understanding of people and their emotions, the things they feel and do.

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times some years ago, the critic Lloyd Sachs was kind enough to state, “One of the things Resnick draws from the music is the ability to sense deeper possibilities in people, criminals as well as victims of crime. Just as he is aware of Lester Young’s hard life producing this beautiful music, he sees people leading difficult lives being able to produce something of worth too. Maybe even something beautiful.”

I fear I was less successful with the cats. I had, it’s true, owned cats at different times in my life, but I also harbored, since childhood, a recurring fear of them—see the opening of the first Frank Elder novel, Flesh & Blood (2004). But it was Dulan who was the real cat lover, and it was probably at his instigation that Resnick’s caring nature is revealed through his treatment of no less than four cats, named after jazz musicians, who function as substitutes for the children his marriage failed to provide. In retrospect, I think they are in danger of being cute and little more and too frequently get under the writer’s feet in their need for attention. From correspondence, however, I know there are readers—mostly female and mostly, it appears, living in the United States—who will vehemently disagree.

All of the above, however, means that Resnick’s basic characteristics were pretty much in place before I sat down to write Lonely Hearts, as I think is clear from the beginning of chapter four.

The sandwich was tuna fish and egg mayonnaise with some small slices of pickled gherkin and a crumbling of blue cheese; the mayonnaise kept dripping over the edges of the bread and down onto his fingers so that Dizzy twisted and stretched from his lap in order to lick it off. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were doing it through the headphones, making love to music without ever holding hands. Resnick could not stop thinking about the fact that he had lied to Skelton, wondering why.

His marriage had neither been so bad that he had stricken it from the record of his memory, nor so lacking in incident that he would have truly forgotten. Something over five years and she had walked in while he was painting the woodwork in the spare room and announced that she wanted a divorce. Each year of their marriage he had redecorated that small room at the back of their own bedroom in the hope that one day she might walk in with a glow in her eyes and announce that she was pregnant. Why else did he use alphabet wallpaper in primary colours? Why else the paintwork in bright reds and greens?

Or, as one of the characters observes of him earlier on,

He was an overweight man in his early forties, whose narrow eyes were bagged and tired, and who couldn’t find the time to drop his tie off at the cleaners.

This last observation was made by the social worker Rachel Chaplin, with whom Resnick becomes involved professionally and personally. It was my intention, I think, that there would be some kind of romantic interest for Resnick in most of the books, each more or less doomed to end badly. Meantime, a relationship of a different kind was slowly building up between Resnick and the junior member of his team, Lynn Kellogg. Cold Light (1994), the sixth in the series, ends (as, in my head, it began) with Resnick thinking of her as “the daughter he had never had, the lover she would never be.”

Shows how little I knew.

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Hand in hand with my decision that my hero would be a serving policeman was the assumption that, as such, he would be one—the central one—of a group of fellow officers, a team. In this I was influenced both by police procedurals I had read—Ed McBain, Joseph Wambaugh, et al.—and those I had seen on TV, early British series like Z Cars and later American ones like Hill Street Blues. In respect to the latter, Resnick would be the middle-management figure holding it all together—Frank Furillo but with a different tailor.

One great advantage, it seemed, of this kind of structure was that it would enable me to employ a multistrand narrative and shift the focus of the story away from Resnick to other members of the team. In so doing, not only could I introduce characters of differing age and gender and sexual orientation, I could also vary the pace and cover more narrative ground. For every chapter showing Resnick listening thoughtfully to, say, Thelonious Monk at home, I could have another in which one of his young DCs chases an armed villain across the rooftops.

The move from writing Westerns to crime fiction was not an instant one; in between I wrote quite a bit of television drama—from BBC Classic serials such as the dramatization of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns to episodes of popular crime series like Spender. Indeed, the last project I worked on before turning to Lonely Hearts was a six-part series I had originated about the probation service, called Hard Cases. This was written about and largely filmed on location in Nottingham, where I was then living, and followed, as far as we were able, the Hill Street Blues pattern to a T. (I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the sequences of that program exactly before planning my first scene-by-scene outline.)

Scriptwriting not only sharpened my use of dialogue and ability to cut between incidents and characters, it made clear both the importance of place and the possibility—I’m tempted to say necessity—of presenting people and their actions within a social context.

I’ve already mentioned Z Cars, a groundbreaking police series that locked into the strong documentary tradition of British cinema with its use of believable working-class characters, regional accents, and location filming. No wonder this was where such filmmakers and writers as Ken Loach, Alan Plater, and Troy Kennedy Martin did a lot of their early work.

I have always remembered an especially harrowing episode of Softly, Softly, the series that grew out of Z Cars, in which the police are investigating serious instances of child abuse instigated within the family. In one of the final scenes, after the abusers have been arrested and taken away, a detective is talking to one of the abused children, making sure the child is all right, and in gratitude the child offers to perform a sexual act—it is the only way that child knows to show thanks and gain approval.

The look on the detective’s face—expressing in a moment revulsion, understanding, compassion, and deep, deep sorrow—has lived with me and, I’m sure, informed some of Resnick’s responses in those parts of Lonely Hearts that deal with a similar theme. Beyond that, it convinced me that the crime story, whether in fiction or on film, at its best can—and should—deal with the same themes and situations that provide the subject matter for more supposedly serious work.