One of the happy results of publishing The Golden Age of Murder has been that I've received many fascinating messages from people with interesting stories to tell about Golden Age books and writers. Among these have been emails from Prue Mercer in New Zealand, who contacted me about Norman Berrow. I'm delighted that she has agreed to contribute a guest post telling us more about this long-neglected author:
"I
have been exploring my step grandfather Norman Berrow's writing life. Norman Berrow was a writer of the Golden Age
of detective fiction. Between 1934 and
1957 he published 20 books. (There was a
rewrite of The Ghost House in 1978, a
retirement project.) It is remarkable that he established himself in the
English crime fiction market from Christchurch, New Zealand, at a time when
authorship was not a vocation widely followed in New Zealand. He achieved this through his books, his agent,
the well-known Leonard Moore, and his publisher. All but his first novel were published by
Ward, Lock in London.
Berrow was born in Eastbourne, Sussex,
1 September 1902, into a British military family. His father was Garrison
Adjutant in Gibraltar and the family lived there from 1920 to 1922 when his
father retired and they moved to Christchurch.
He lived in Sydney from 1949 to 1975, when he retired to
Christchurch. He died there in 1986.
Berrow started writing short stories in
his 20s, probably about 1924 or 1925. In
them he is experimenting - murders in rooms locked on the inside, and crooks
disappearing in not so clever disguises.
His first novel The Smokers of
Hashish (published by Eldon Press) was advertised in the Sunday Times (14 October 1934:12) as
being about "Tangier! City
of Thrills, Danger and even Death. Meet here Hafiz 'The Purveyor of Delights,' leader of an immense dope organisation,
and Chiller, who smashed the power of the dope runners."
The book introduces plot devices and
techniques Berrow repeated: locked rooms, secret passages, disguises,
vanishings and vanishers, a love interest, secret agents, and a reflective
narrator keen to play amateur detective with a professional. Its atmosphere drew on Gibraltar and
autobiographical elements become part of his style and inspiration. Setting is always significant for Berrow and
the influence of Gibraltar is strong in his first novels, as is Christchurch
and Sydney in the later ones.
In Don't
Jump Mr Boland (1954) the character Montague Belmore captures the impact of
Sydney's beguiling harbour.
The blanket of fog that always lay on the harbour these
mornings had cleared away, the water was as calm and clean and blue as the
sky. The oppressive humidity of summer
had gone and the clear warm autumn sun was a caress. Behind him now, on the other side of the
harbour, the city basked in sunshine.
He loved the city. It
had it's faults, too many of them; it was cramped, dirty, overcrowded; it was
avaricious, discourteous, rough and tough and graft-ridden; but he loved
it. He loved the world. He loved life.
Ramble
House has been publishing Berrow's work for over ten years. In 2007 The Footprints of Satan (originally
published 1950) was number one on the Honkaku Mystery Best 10, an annual
mystery fiction guide to books published in Japan in the previous year."
My thanks go to Prue, and I hope to have more to say about Norman Berrow in the future.
