Gwendoline Butler R.I.P.

Gwendoline Butler, a crime novelist of distinction, whose writing career spanned half a century, has, I have been told, died at the age of 90. She was a member of that generation of novelists who did not seek personal publicity or engage in self-promotion, and it may be for that reason that her work is much less discussed than one might expect. I never met her, nor corresponded with her, but over a period of thirty years I occasionally dipped in to her work and found it interestingly different. Just possibly this may explain why her books seem never to have been televised.

By a very strange coincidence, I've just downloaded one of the new books on Bello's list of re-discovered classics.This is The Odd Flamingo, by Nina Bawden, which I've discussed before on this blog. And it has an introduction by - Gwendoline Butler. The edition of the book that I'd read previously had an introduction by Julian Symons, who is rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all crime fiction critics. Yet I think it's fair to say that Gwendoline Butler's appraisal of Bawden's book is at least as insightful as Symons'. It's very clear that she was a highly intelligent and also very thoughtful woman.

Marcel Berlins, another of the finest crime fiction critics, once said in a review: "Gwendoline Butler writes detective novels that, both in method and atmosphere are things apart, not only from the main body of crime writing, but even from the mass of general fiction." And there is certainly a strangeness, bordering at times on the quirky and fantastic, about some of the stories of hers that I've read.

That said, although I have perhaps ten of her books on my shelves, plus one or two short stories (one called "Ladies who Lunch" sticks in my  mind even now, though it's getting on for 20 years since I read it), that represents only a fraction of her output. Apart from a long series under her own name, featuring a cop called Coffin who rose through the ranks to become, in Coffin on Murder Street, "Chief Commander of the Police Force in the newly created Second City of London", she also wrote books as Jennie Melville and created a female cop, Charmian Daniels. Coffin is intellectual, but "never judged arrogant or uncaring". I had the feeling he was very much the sort of man she herself admired, and no doubt that explains why she wrote books about him from 1956 to 2002. Despite her preference for a low profile, she and her books definitely deserve to be remembered.

How Jessica Mann's crime writing career began

I was really pleased when Jessica Mann responded to my suggestion that she write something about how she got started as a writer. It's the sort of topic I find really interesting, and I'm especially keen that we hear more about writers past and present who - like me - are by no means household names.

'When Martin emailed saying he had acquired a pristine first edition of my first novel, A Charitable End, I read it again myself and found a story I’d forgotten in a tone of voice I hardly recognize. Then Martin asked me to write something about how I got started as a crime novelist.

In my head, I’d been a writer ever since I could read and was determined to be the youngest published novelist ever. I was broken-hearted at seventeen to discover that Pamela Brown had been only sixteen when The Swish of the Curtain was published. All the same, to write a novel and get it published was still my ambition though deferred and deferred again as I went to Cambridge, got married, moved to Edinburgh where my archaeologist husband was a university lecturer and had children.

Many writer friends have told me that they always felt, exactly as I did, that holding a hardback volume with one’s own name on the spine was more than a simple ambition or life-plan, it was something without which life would have been meaningless. But I had still produced little more than random scribbles when Charles was appointed to a chair at Leicester. I suddenly realised that it was now or never: write that novel before we moved south or accept that it wasn’t ever going to happen. So, at last, I got down to work, half-an-hour here and half-an-hour there, whenever I could get away from our three (at the time) small children. I have had an irregular working timetable ever since.

A Charitable End was finished shortly before we left Scotland. I sent the manuscript to Collins and got it back almost by return of post. Then a friend introduced me to an agent who took me on and sent the book back to Collins who bought it, not quite by return of post, and published it in 1973, to encouraging reviews. On republication in 1992 Gwendoline Butler wrote that the book is “a story of the secrets that can lie hidden behind a respectable façade.” (She also kindly called it “a wickedly funny picture of manners and morals in the Scottish capital, a fascinating mystery and also an understanding and sensitive novel about the position of women.”)

Why crime fiction? Partly because that was what I liked reading; partly because I was interested in what happens when the thin ice of civilised society cracks or breaks; and partly because it was a genre that was by definition not autobiographical. I had no wish for my writing to be any kind of emotional strip-tease. As I was to realise when I wrote a book about women crime writers (Deadlier Than The Male, 1981) the grandes dames of crime fiction all used it as a kind of barrier between themselves and self-revelation.

A Charitable End came out in 1973. In various ways it’s become a period piece. First of all, at 60,000 words it’s less than half the length of most 21st century crime novels. It’s written in a less colloquial style than is usual now. And it’s about middle class people.

It has become fashionable to suggest that crime fiction can only be regarded as realistic if it concerns gritty low-lifes, and investigation is only worth following if it’s performed by cops. The Edinburgh that Ian Rankin and Quentin Jardine describe or the Edinburgh of the current new wave of Scottish noir, is a very different place from the city in which A Charitable End is set, in the beautiful Georgian New Town where we lived ourselves amidst middle class respectability. Our friends were lawyers, doctors, journalists, academics (all men) and their wives who, in those pre-liberation days, didn’t have jobs, but probably did voluntary work – do-gooders, as they would later be derisively termed (would a do-badder be preferable?). I was writing about a society and a setting familiar from my own experience. But I’ve always insisted that everyone and everything else in the book was pure invention.

Or was it? With several decades of hindsight, I can see that I did borrow (probably unconsciously) aspects of people, places and predicaments that really existed; and I can recognize the naïve thought processes of the person I once was, a young woman who had been bounced into a kind of premature maturity by marriage and motherhood. A Charitable End reminds me of a happy period and lovely place, but there is much more I could and should have said about them. Perhaps, forty years on, my first book should have a sequel.'

Now, wouldn't it be great if a bit of blogging could inspire a sequel to a book dating back four decades?!