Too Near The Dead by Helen Grant

For much of the 2000s and 2010s I read pretty much exclusively American literature, that being my PhD subject. Since then, I’ve been returning to our own British literature and at the moment I’m in a particularly Scottish phase. Therefore, when I discovered it’s set in Crieff, my home town, I couldn’t not read Helen Grant’s Too Near The Dead.

Helen describes the book as Perthshire Gothic, which sounds just fine to me. I read a lot of gothic/horror at one time, people like Joe Donnelly and Peter James before he started his crime series, and I always admired the skill involved in being able to manage the tension of describing a series of uncanny events. How do you keep it feeling real?

I suspect that’s something Helen has thought about, too. In a recent interview, she said:

All my books have a lot of gothic elements in them. Folklore, abandoned places, stuff like that. They do have ghostly stuff too but, up until I wrote Too Near The Dead, most of my books had what one reader called a ‘Scooby Doo ending’ – it would turn out that whatever apparently supernatural stuff was going on was actually being carried out by a serial killer.

It’s not a spoiler to say that this is not the case in Too Near The Dead.

Fen Munro and her fiance James have bought a house on the outskirts of an unnamed town – based on Crieff – and are planning their wedding. The house is new, but it is built on the site of an old, now demolished building. Gradually – and this really is where the skill of gothic writers comes to the fore – things begin to happen which are at first odd, then mildly frightening, then utterly terrifying. Helen Grant paces this brilliantly. She weaves into the present-day narrative memories of Fen’s past and her troubled relationship with her ultra-strict parents and this will come to have a significance at the end. She has terrifying dreams, dreams which seem utterly real, to the extent she wakes up in a downstairs room. Was she sleepwalking? Or something else?

The tension is ratcheted up throughout. There is a malevolence about the setting in which the story takes place – the house, the countryside in which it sits, the dead who may still be lurking there – which forces you to see things through Fen’s fearful eyes. Helen is right about those ‘Scooby Doo’ moments in many books of this genre. So often, a brilliant set-up is spoiled by its ending, by an attempt to rationalise what the author has spent the entire book trying to persuade us is irrational, or uncanny, or perhaps evil. It feels like a cheat.

The ending of Too Near The Dead does not seek to explain. And it is all the better for that.

This is a tremendous book, exciting and gripping. It pulls you in from page one and doesn’t let go.

And it even describes my two favourite libraries, the AK Bell in Perth and the Strathearn Campus in Crieff. I’ve spent plenty time myself in those libraries doing research. Not, I’m glad to say for the desperate reasons that Fen has to in this novel. Too Near The Dead is definitely worth reading.

The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell

The Other Side of Stone is a wonderful book – novella, short story collection? – which is suffused with Scottish atmosphere. If I compare it to Alan Garner I mean that as the highest compliment, because Garner is one of the finest wordsmiths in the English language and his poetic meditations on our folk traditions and our uncanny relationship with the landscapes around us are works of genius. In one respect, even, you might say it surpasses Garner, whose works are rooted in the myths and traditions of our country folk but, Boneland apart, tend not to connect with our industrial or technological history. The Other Side of Stone seamlessly melds a meditation on industry with our ancient Scots’ folklore and a radical history of modern society.

In a series of short, almost standalone stories, the book relates the history of a Perthshire mill built in 1831 and cursed by the carving of a glaistig, or green woman into its lintel. From the story of the build we shift to 1913 and a moving strand featuring a fierce young woman, a Suffragette determined to build for herself a career but let down by patriarchy, and then towards the present day, as the mill gradually falls from its earlier grandeur into decline and decay.

Although the story is rooted in this beautifully rendered place, the breadth of Cracknell’s vision is remarkably broad. She takes in the slave trade, votes for women and the way women are serially betrayed, the bombings of the Clyde in World War Two, the Iraq war and the financial crash-induced travails of our modern day. The story pulses with the echo of time, a gradual palimpsest of human history in this single place and everywhere, one misfortune laid on another, one hope after another lost until all that is left is the cursed lintel with which everything began. That and hope, in the shape of a young woman and a young man.

And through them, we trust – we hope – the story will continue, as stories must.

What You Call Free by Flora Johnston

I suspect if What You Call Free was written twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, it would be a very different novel. Instead of the two women – both real historical characters – around whom the novel revolves, the central character would have been James Renwick, the charismatic and driven Covenanter who was ultimately martyred for his beliefs. Helen Alexander, a principled, fiercely independent and intelligent woman, would have been relegated to a supporting role emphasising the charisma of Renwick. And Jonet Gothskirk, a young woman from a poor family, would not have appeared at all. She simply wouldn’t have existed. 

Flora Johnston’s brilliant historical novel tells the story of a dark period in Scotland’s history – the conflict between the Covenanters and the Crown – through the prism of these two women and in so doing casts a wholly different light on the times. To be a Covenanter in the 1680s was brutally dangerous and the story of James Renwick and his righteous – if foolhardy – attempt to take his fight directly to the agents of the Crown is a tale of jeopardy and despair. 

But overlaid on this story of religious conflict are plotlines which reveal how difficult it was to be a woman in those times. Helen, every bit as principled as James Renwick, suffers terribly for her faith, both physically and mentally. She holds her family together despite constant threats of reprisals and punishment. She is the beating heart of decency in a truly frightful world. 

And Jonet Gothskirk, a young woman taken advantage of and left pregnant, is the most luminous creation of all. Until now, Jonet was literally only a name recorded in history: in the minutes of the West Calder Kirk Session from 1687, an eighteen-year-old woman called Jonet Gothskirk was sentenced to wear a sackcloth gown in front of the congregation for weeks on end as punishment for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The inspiration for Flora Johnston to write Jonet’s story came when she saw that sackcloth gown in the National Museum of Scotland. In What You Call Free, Flora gives the unfortunate Jonet a voice she never had in reality and brings her alive, enabling a woman who died over 300 years ago to force us confront some uncomfortable truths in our contemporary world. 

Much has changed, and we can be grateful for that. But is it enough? In the conflict between state and subject, are dissenting voices sufficiently listened to? Is tolerance real or illusory? And what is the position of women in society? We may not force people to wear sackcloth any longer, but the title of this novel, What You Call Free, is still a rallying call for faithfulness – in both religious and secular terms – and for the strength of people to live their lives according to their own convictions. It speaks of hope, yes, but it is a hope whose origin is in the societal double standards which exist still and which mean that in 2021, like 1687, the world is still an uncomfortable place in which to be a woman.

1930s Crime - Fact and Fiction

 Last night I did a talk with Tom Wood, former Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders on crime in 1935.

Tom is the author of Ruxton: The First Modern Murder and that case came to trial the same week as the trial of John McGuigan for the Cuddies Strip crimes, which were the basis for my novel Cuddies Strip.

Some of the police officers involved in the Ruxton case also offered assistance to the Perthshire force and the two crimes were heavily reported side-by-side in the newspapers.

The criminal investigations are fascinating: in the Ruxton case, as Tom expertly explains, we saw the beginnings of a scientific, professional approach to policing. The Cuddies Strip investigation, by contrast, was undertaken by a police force that was under-resourced and not set up to manage a complex and detailed investigation.

You can view the talk here.

Barossa Street

 I finished the final draft of Barossa Street, the follow-up to Cuddies Strip tonight.

Bob Kelty, having recently resigned his commission with the Perth City Police force, immediately becomes embroiled in another murder investigation when he discovers the brutality murdered body of Hugh Smithson in a house in Barossa Street, Perth.

Once more, Bob finds himself operating alone, with the police seemingly content to pin the blame on Richard Hamill, an early suspect in the Cuddies Strip murders the previous years.

Set against the backdrop of the death of King George V and the ensuing abdication crisis, plus the looming threat of war and despotism in Europe, Barossa Street follows Bob's attempts to prove that Richard is innocent and to bring the culprit to justice.

Barossa Street will be published later this year.

CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Longlist

I'm delighted to have been nominated for this year's Crime Writers' Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for the best first novel published in the year for my novel Cuddies Strip.

The Cuddies Strip website is here.

Copies of Cuddies Strip can be purchased here.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

 

The Grapes of Wrath divided opinion when it was first published. Some declared it a masterpiece, others dismissed it as crude propoganda. Charles Angoff, in his contemporaneous review, noted: 

There should be rejoicing in that part of Hell where the souls of great American imaginative writers while away their time, for at long last a worthy successor to them has appeared in their former terrestrial abode. With his latest novel Mr. Steinbeck at once joins the company of Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Norris, and easily leaps to the forefront of all his contemporaries. [The Grapes of Wrath] has all the earmarks of something momentous, monumental, and memorable: universal compassion, a sensuousness so honestly and recklessly tender that even the Fathers of the Church would probably have called it spiritual; and a moral anger against the entire scheme of things that only the highest art possesses. 

High praise indeed, but it wasn’t all uncritical acclaim: the novel was banned in Kansas and in Kern County, California (location of the Weedpatch camp in which the Joads stayed in the novel). In St Louis not only was it banned but the librarian was ordered to burn copies that had already been purchased. H. Kelly Crockett, a student in Oklahoma at the time of the novel’s publication, recalled in an article twenty years later that a common criticism of the novel at the time was that it was propogandist and, once the situation that had called into being the events it portrayed had been overcome, it would be read merely as a historical curiosity. 

Crockett’s conclusion, after twenty years, was that this had proved not to be the case and the novel retained its literary power. Seventy-plus years on, is that still the case? The fortunes of any novel wax and wane, and such is the case for The Grapes of Wrath. A largely positive review by Edward Galligan of the 1989 fiftieth anniversary reprint still balked at “purple prose, melodramatic plotting, and sentimental thinking” and enough “hamminess” to make us “gag at the prospect of rereading it.” Today, then, while Steinbeck is still read, it is mostly Of Mice and Men, while The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps out of favour. I would suggest that, for all the novel’s faults, this is a pity. 

Frank Eugene Cruz suggests that most criticism of the novel categorises it in one of four ways – as a story of migration, a recasting of Christian themes and motifs, a work of social protest or a powerful, sentimental epic. And the latter three representations are, in part, responsible for some of the ambivalence with which we tend to confront the book today. The Christian moralising and socialist rhetoric which some discern in it are too didactic: and it is true that, at times, Steinbeck batters us with his message where some subtlety would have been more effective. The unfairness, for example, of the way the farm owners used the surplus of men to drive down pay does not become any more unfair because we read of it three or four or five or six times: it was unfair the first time and the reader could have been trusted to intuit that. And the sentimentality that gives rise to Edward Galligan’s gagging at the prospect of re-reading it is certainly an issue. But, nonetheless, I would argue that The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel. 

What makes it so, for me, is the interconnectedness of those different categories that people ascribe to it. It is all of the things that people have described it as, but it is all of them in combination. If it can be read as a Christian narrative, then it is a highly political Christian narrative, as Stephen Bullivant demonstrates when he points to the novel’s connection of being a “red” with Jesus Christ, in the form of Jim Casy. Similarly, Stephen Railton suggests that Steinbeck’s use of Christianity, in the form of Casy, is a way of insinuating a revolutionary vision of militant socialism. Railton appears to posit this as a criticism, but for me the way the novel gives religious ideas political resonances is one of its great strengths. In any case, politics and religion are backdrops in the novel – essential, unavoidable, but backdrops nonetheless – and the central message is neither purely political nor religious, but rather about the nature of humanity and the need for community. And that transcends everything. 

While there is a strongly religious element to The Grapes of Wrath, it is not straightforward. Stephen Bullivant notes a letter from Steinbeck to his editor in which he states that he wants “all all all” the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to be printed at the start of the novel. The repeated alls demonstrate that he is adamant on the point and Bullivant therefore makes a study of the complete song in order to understand why. He notes particularly the final verse: 

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make me free,

While God is marching on. 

Bullivant is drawn to the third line, noting that, in religious terms, the concept of dying “to make men free” is novel. Martyrdom, in the Gospels, is a transcendent event rewarded by personal salvation; “making men free” suggests more of an immanent event. Such notions, of course, would have appalled social conservatives such as Eric Voegelin or Leo Strauss, suggesting, for them, the hubris of mankind, but there is nothing hubristic about The Grapes of Wrath. Far from it, there is a deep note of pessimism sounding throughout it. It may be replete with Christ figures – Casy, Tom, even Rose of Sharon – but the freedom granted by Jesus’s death is still, in Steinbeck’s vision, a highly qualified one. 

Tamara Rombold gives a persuasive account of inversions of the Bible story throughout The Grapes of Wrath, from the superb depiction of drought in the first chapter (an inversion, she argues, of the Creation story) to Exodus (unlike the Israelites who were spared the plagues, the Oklahoma drought blights everyone), to Moses in the bullrushes (Rose of Sharon’s baby cast dead into the water) to the final scene, after the apocalypse of the flood, with Rose of Sharon in the barn with the starving man, reminiscent of Isiaiah, and the New Heavens and the New Earth. 

Rombold then draws on Jim Casy’s soujourn in the wilderness “like Jesus”, in which he realises the call of a new spirit, which he calls love. She makes persuasive allusions to Casy’s Christ-like behaviour in his arrest and death scenes. Curiously, though, she makes no mention of probably Casy’s most important speech, just prior to his death. In this, Casy himself makes an inversion of Jesus’s walk into the wilderness. The truth isn’t in the wilderness, says Casy, it is here, in the community, among the people. This is where he finds his soul. An this resonates clearly with Tom, of course, because it forms the basis of much of his later conversation with Ma Joad (and this exchange is related by Rombold), in which he reveals his intention to leave and follow Casy’s example, leading the community against the travails forced on them by the system. Thus, we have in Casy and Tom, two representation of Jesus. Casy, the pure-of-heart lover of humanity, a man who dies for his beliefs, is an earthly Jesus figure, preaching virtue and honesty and decency. Tom is at once his disciple and a symbol of the risen Christ, the one who is “with you always, even unto the end of the world” as it is written in Matthew. Or, as Tom says to Ma: 

“Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be aroun’ in the dark. I'll be ever’where - wherever you look. Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build - why I’ll be there.” 

Casy, then, can be seen as Jesus, while Tom is Christ. And the gospel they preach is a radical one. As Casy says to Tom: 

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things people do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say . . . What is this thing called sperit? ... It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust sometimes - an’ I want to make them happy - maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.” 

For all that, though, I don’t believe The Grapes of Wrath should be read as a Christian novel. It is, if anything, a humanist novel. There are clear Christian resonances, and central characters may be comparable with Christ-figures, but that is because the fundamental tenets of Christian religion such as fairness, sense of community and so on, borrowed as they are from pre-Christian Platonic thought, are equally relevant to modern humanist belief. And so you might consider the novel christian, in the sense of evoking an ideal of human decency, but not Christian, as in following the doctrinal beliefs of any Church of Christ. As Casy says, “Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” Thus, the titular grapes of wrath are not those of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the spirit inside man which will rise against oppression and exploitation. Casy is no longer a Preacher of God but remains, throughout, a preacher of men for men. 

Similarly, despite its sometimes overwhelming didacticism, in the end The Grapes of Wrath is not a political novel either. Politics is simply a by-product of Steinbeck’s true interest, which is human nature and human beings, the human community. In the 1930s, the prevailing difficulties which beset humanity were political, and that is therefore what he wrote about. It is Ma Joad who makes one of the novel’s most telling points: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody.” And earlier, she says: “I’m learnin’ one thing good. Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.” 

Warren Motley, writing in 1982, complains that much of the novel’s critisism until then had focused on Casy and Tom as the core of the film and that the central role of Ma Joad in explaining the family’s gradual realisation of the need for community and cooperation is underplayed. I would agree, and I suggest that Ma Joad is one of the great characters of American fiction. She develops throughout the novel and her gradual assumption of both actual and moral control over her family is beautifully drawn. She is superb. Motley draws on the writing of Robert Briffault to explain the sense of matriarchy as exemplified by Ma Joad’s growing sense of authority over her clan as defining a relationship of cooperation, as opposed to the typical patriarchal relationships based on power. And it is through this that one can sense a note of optimism in a largely pessimistic book: 

“Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people - we go on.” 

And what a wonderful rallying cry that is.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ten Percent by Simon McLean

 

In The Ten Percent, Simon McLean, a former police officer with Strathclyde Police, takes a wry and witty look back on his long and eventful career. From callow beginnings, being sent to Campbeltown when only vaguely aware of where it was, to leading experimental attempts to quell the tsunami of drug misuse that overwhelmed Glasgow, Simon McLean threw everything into his work. He progressed quickly, becoming a weel-kent face in Campbeltown and showing he wasn’t going to be given the runaround by anyone. His investigatory skills were noticed by his superiors and at a very young age he was made a detective and later joined the Serious Crime Squad. There, he dealt with many difficult and traumatic cases but the black humour famously present among those who work in trying circumstances – police, fire and rescue, the medical profession etc – means that the stories are told in an engaging and involving way. Interspersed are many extremely funny tales, many of which – this being the west of Scotland – revolve around copious consumption of alcohol.

What we get in the book is a picture of a dedicated and proficient officer, someone who gave his all for the job and wouldn’t accept compromise but, equally, someone determined to enjoy every moment and seek fun and adventure in life.

The Ten Percent is a rattling good read, at times hilarious and at other times unbearably poignant. It is perfect for a cold, long winter’s evening, by the fire, with a dram close by.