Forgotten Book - Betrayals

Charles Palliser, an American long resident in Britain, is an interesting writer with a gift for pastiche. But that description doesn't do him full justice, because he has a considerable literary range as well as talent. This is well illustrated by Betrayals, a book published twenty-five years ago with more than a touch of Borges about it. It's much less well-known than his debut, Quincunx (which I'm hoping to read soon) but I found it very interesting.

The book is divided into ten sections. The first and last are extracts from a newspaper, the Daily Scot, an obituary and a review respectively. The former is a malicious piece of work, about a late Glaswegian professor called William Henry Dugdale. It refers to a number of mysterious incidents, and these allusive touches set a pattern for the book.

The next section, 'The Wrong Tracks', is particularly enjoyable. It's a collection of three stories, each told by passengers from a stranded train. It soon becomes clear that there are connecting themes, in particular about types of betrayal, and these connections continue throughout the narratives that follow. These are highly varied, and even include a parody of the then hugely popular Scottish TV series Taggart. I enjoyed Palliser's wit very much, even though I felt that particular section of the story was expanded beyond its natural length.

That said, the book doesn't, in the end, hang together quite as well as I'd hoped. There are various deliberate infelicities in the texts, and I'd anticipated a satisfying explanation for them; if one was provided, I missed it. I certainly got the impression that Palliser was paying off a few personal scores, and the book does not ultimately prove to be quite as tightly structured as it might have been, all the connections and repeated themes in the different sections of the story notwithstanding. So I can't claim that Betrayals is entirely successful, because to some extent I felt it fizzled out. But there's plenty of entertainment along the way. And plenty of ingenuity too.

Pushkin Vertigo

Recently, I was contacted by the publishers Pushkin Vertigo, who asked if I would be willing to supply a quote in relation to their reissue of Margaret Millar's novel of suspense Vanish in an Instant. I was happy to do so for two reasons. First, I'm a big Millar fan and I'm always delighted whenever her books return to the shelves. Second, I've been impressed by the Pushkin Vertigo imprint, and some of you may recall that I've previously reviewed a couple of their books, by Frederic Dard and Augusto de Angelis, on this blog.

I've taken a further look at their list, and found it really interesting. One of the titles is Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I hope that more books by that brilliant duo resurface - including, dare I say, some of those which have never been translated into English in the past. I would love to read more of their work; alas, my schoolboy French is not up to it!

I note also that PV have reissued several books by Friedrich Durrenmatt. I first came across this fascinating Swiss writer when I was studying German at A Level. One of the set texts was Durrenmatt's sardonic play The Visit. I loved it, and was prompted to read much of his other work, including his detective stories, some of which are now, happily, available again. The Judge and His Hangman is a good place to start.

I recently read Maria Angelica Bosco's Death Going Down and Leo Perutz's Saint Peter's Snow, both of which I enjoyed. Of the two, Perutz's is perhaps the more striking, because the storyline is quite remarkable. No wonder the Nazis hated it. But both novels are well worth reading,and when time permits I'll talk about them in more detail. Bosco, incidentally, was someone to whom Jorge Luis Borges gave encouragement, and if, like me, you are a Borges fan, that in itself is an endorsement. 

Forgotten Book - The Unfortunate Murderer

Richard Hull was the name under which R.H. Sampson, one of Britain's few crime-writing accountants, wrote rather unorthodox fiction for roughly twenty years. To some extent, he was influenced by Anthony Berkeley/Francis Iles, but his work was often rather original and unpredictable, and as I mention in The Golden Age of Murder, it even attracted the attention of Jorge Luis Borges.

My Forgotten Book for today is a Hull novel written and set during the Second World War. The Unfortunate Murderer (1941). It begins very well, with the scene set by a government auditor who has been sent to a munitions factory, only to stumble across a murder. Hull's wit, displayed as early as the Acknowledgements page at the start of the book, is in evidence at times, but he does not indulge his taste for irony as extensively as in some of his other novels.

The murder is quite cleverly contrived, but the story does, I regret to say, become rather bogged down, and a thin and frankly uninteresting espionage sub-plot doesn't help. On the whole, I was more taken with the portrayal of business life - something Hull knew rather more about than some of his fellow Golden Age writers - and the wartime background. The factory is based somewhere in north Wales, unspecified but possibly in the vicinity of Wrexham, which is definitely an under-used location in the genre. But the solution to the killing was,for me, a let-down.

This isn't a book that has ever been much discussed, but a contemporary review in The Spectator said it was "nearly very good"and praised the freshness of the writing. Despite my enthusiasm for Hull, I think this errs a little on the side of generosity, but even his minor and less successful mysteries usually offer something of interest, and I found it a quick and agreeable read. But the book he wrote just before this one, My Own Murderer, is definitely superior.