Suspense and The Innocents

During the first term of my A Level English Literature course at school, my two English teachers decided to try out a very enlightened experiment. Rather than teaching to the syllabus for the examination, they would introduce the class to a wide range of other books, almost all of them written in the 20th century. To this day, I am grateful that this caused me to read some books that otherwise I might have missed. It really benefited my appreciation of literature.

Amongst many other things, we read Henry James’ novella, The Turn of the Screw. This was the earliest of the books on our list, first published in 1898. I was greatly impressed, as I was with the film version – which was also screened for us in the classroom . This was The Innocents, a film made in 1961 and starring Deborah Kerr as the governess. The script had input from Truman Capote and John Mortimer, and music by Georges Auric – no wonder it’s widely regarded as a classic.

On New Year’s Eve, we watched The Innocents – the first time I’ve seen it since I was 16. Half a century after it was made, it remains a very striking piece of work, genuinely memorable. What impresses me most is the way the suspense is created. It’s a marvellous example of how tension can be built with subtlety. The film captures the ambiguity of James’ text brilliantly, even though he isn’t the easiest writer to adapt for film or TV by a long chalk.

Seeing the film again has prompted me to think about ambiguity in fiction, and how it can be used to enhance a story, rather than irritating the reader, if carefully handled. The film also suggests a number of techniques (such as foreshadowing) for developing suspense without resort to crude effects (lots of dead bodies, in a nutshell!) There is, for instance, a sexual sub-text to the story, but James handles it sensitively, and indirectly, and although I gather the film originally attracted an ‘X’ certificate, it is all the more powerful because the sexual elements are under-stated.

Of course, we live in an age when many readers and moviegoers demand action. And I’m one of the first to complain if a supposed thriller is “too slow”. But The Innocents is a powerful reminder of the fact that it is possible to make a lasting impact through nuanced film-making, and of course the same principle can be applied to writing fiction. Even in an unashamedly commercial genre such as crime, it isn’t always necessary to resort to lots of gore and explicit violence.

Lethal Witness

I’ve been enjoying Lethal Witness, Andrew Rose’s excellent account of the life of Bernard Spilsbury, whose career as a forensic witness, usually called to give evidence by the Crown, was kick-started by the Crippen case.

Spilsbury has interested me for a long time, although he plays only a relatively minor part in Dancing for the Hangman.

On the back cover of Lethal Witness is a great quote from Sir John Mortimer, who died the other day: ‘Bernard Spilsbury was a greatly revered forensic witness who was generally believed even when he was wrong. This book has a fascinating account of his lethal effect on the great murder trials of the last century.’

It’s a good summary of Andrew Rose’s achievement. He documents, for instance, a case previously unknown to me, ‘The Button and Badge Murder’, that of 16 year old Nellie Trew, which Rose regards as one of the great miscarriage of justice cases. A man called David Greenwood was convicted, but there are reasons to believe that athe true culprit was a man by the name of Albert Lytton. Greenwood escaped the death penalty (just) but served fifteen years for a crime he did not commit, and Spilsbury’s evidence probably sealed his fate..

This shocking story is but one of the notable elements in Andrew Rose’s sober, but powerful book. It’s a very readable piece of work, which I can recommend to anyone interested n true crime, or in the portrayal of a man whose great abilities masked a flawed character.

Sir John Mortimer R.I.P.

The death of Sir John Mortimer reminded me of the pleasures I have had from his writing over the years. As a law student, my first encounter with his work was watching a double bill of his plays – one of which was the highly successful ‘Dock Brief’. At around the same time, he created Horace Rumpole, the barrister brilliantly brought to life by Leo McKern in the deservedly popular tv series. I watched pretty much all the Rumpole shows, and enjoyed them enormously.

In his professional life, Mortimer conducted many criminal cases, and although his writing covered a wide range of forms and themes, he often dealt with crime. I haven’t read so much of his non-Rumpole work, but I do like, and can warmly recommend as a nice dip-in compendium, The Oxford Book of Villains.

This is a compilation which dates back to 1992. It contains an assortment of extracts from literature; Crippen, naturally, makes an appearance in the book, and Mortimer comments in his introduction that the doctor was ‘kindly, modest and hospitable’.

Here is a flavour of Mortimer’s light, urbane style from that introduction: ‘Murderers form a long section in this book and I would recommend you not to read it all at once, but to vary it, perhaps with an occasional con man or a few seducers and cads…villains are those who have been cursed with an unreasonably high degree of optimism. Deterrent sentences have little effect, because the true villain never thinks he’s going to be caught. In the days when you could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, handkerchiefs were hardly safe in anyone’s pocket.’