‘Clerk’ has a long history in the English language, and its twists and turns encode a whole set of social attitudes and assumptions. ‘Clerk’ first seems to have entered the language to mean a churchman: the modern English terms ’cleric’ and ‘clergy’ are clearly related to this meaning. From the turn of the millennium we find the word ‘clerk’ meaning a person in holy orders, as when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle refers to ‘Gregorius: he waes clerc’ or the fourteenth-century poet Langland wishes for a day when the ‘covetise’ [desire] of ‘clerken’ is to ‘clothe the pore and to fede [them]’(examples from OED). In the sixteenth century we find an edict that ‘Clerkes sholde were no berdes nor longe heere’, in a declaration clearly concerned about the personal hairiness of churchmen.

Along with this meaning came other implications. Since those in holy orders were the most commonly educated in English society, and those whose duties (ideally) required them to write and to engage with books, ‘clerk’ became associated with literacy and learning. The first two verses of ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’, the fifteenth-century English carol which is still sung today, refer to the years of captivity (or ‘bonds’) caused by human sin, and its origins in the fruit eaten in the Garden of Eden:

Adam lay i-bowndyn,

bowndyn in a bond,

Fowre thowsand wynter

thowt he not to long

And al was for an appil,

an appil that he tok.

As clerkes fyndyn wretyn

in here book.

The last two lines of those stanzas refer to the fact that ‘clerkes’ will find this story written in their book (i.e. the Book of Genesis, or perhaps the whole Bible), making the link between religious teaching and the ability to read and write. ‘Clerkes’ here are both people concerned with original sin and its redemption by Christ, and those who can read the Scriptures which tell about these subjects.

From this spread of examples, we can see that ‘clerks’ are implicitly distinguished from two groups: lay people (those not in holy orders) and the illiterate. The meaning of calling someone a ‘clerk’ in medieval English might contain various shades of implication based on these social distinctions. The monk Jocelin de Brakelond records a joke that was made during the arguments over who should be the next Abbot of Bury St Edumunds, by the other monks:

‘In the same way, another man said of someone else, ‘That brother is educated and eloquent, as well as careful and strict in observing the Rule. He has shown great devotion to the convent and has suffered a good deal for the sake of the church’s possessions. He deserves to become abbot.’ To which somebody replied, ‘From good clerks, O Lord, deliver us: that it may please Thee to deliver us from all Norfolk tricksters, we ask Thee to hear us.’’

In this late twelfth-century example, ‘clerk’ is clearly a term of slight suspicion, even when uttered by a fellow monk. The person objecting to the unnamed candidate for the Abbot’s position improvises a parody of a verse from the Psalms, and calls upon God to deliver the brothers from ‘good clerks’ who are equivalent to ‘Norfolk tricksters’. Too much learning, too much cleverness with books, can make the ‘good clerk’ suspect even in a religious house devoted to piety and scholarship. Geoffrey Chaucer mentions a ‘clerk of Oxenforde’ amongst his Canterbury pilgrims, whose clothes were worn out, but who prized his books above anything. (This is where the title of Eleanor Parker’s splendid blog comes from.) When it comes to the ribald Miller’s Tale, another ‘clerk’ appears, called Nicholas. He is a student attending the university, who uses his Biblical knowledge and his ready wit to carry on an affair with his landlord’s young wife. Both Jocelin and Chaucer present ‘clerks’ whose learning potentially make them a threat to those around them, and who might be suspect of being too clever by half.

In later writing, ‘clerk’ becomes generally detached from the idea of religious life, and comes to imply the work of literacy: writing letters, note-taking, dealing with paperwork, etc. The implications of unusual knowledge and power gradually drain away from it, presumably as literacy became more general, and paperwork came to look more like a menial task. In The Merchant of Venice, when Portia and Nerissa dress up as men to attend (and argue at) the legal proceedings, Gratiano refers to Nerissa as ‘the boy, his clerk/ That took some pains in writing’. The implication of ‘clerk’ here is obviously a form of secretary or junior, whose job is to record things and deal with the papers whilst his senior argues about fine points of law and wins the case. By the time Anthony Trollope wrote his semi-autobiographical novel The Three Clerks, a ‘clerk’ was someone employed largely for paperwork: a skilled trade in an era when business had to be done by handwritten letters and documents, but with none of the earlier mystique of the ‘good clerk’.

The most famous clerk in Victorian literature shows the category at an even lower ebb. Bob Cratchit, the long-suffering clerk in A Christmas Carol, works long hours in cold conditions for a pittance doled out by his miserly employer Ebenezer Scrooge. His name, ‘Cratchit’, echoes with the twin miseries of his life: the laborious ‘scratching’ of the dip-pen with which he can barely scrape his living, and the ‘crutches’ which represent his son Tiny Tim’s illness and Bob’s fears that the child will not survive. It is worth noticing that the last two examples I have cited show clerks as minor or pitiable figures, unlike the assumed superiority of the reader, the writer, and the heroes of the literature in question. Despite the enormous number of people who made their living as ‘clerks’ in the nineteenth century, Trollope is relatively unusual in putting them at the centre of his fiction in the novel I mentioned.

Perhaps this had something to do with his own experiences. Trollope was a clerk for much of his early career, working for the Post Office. He did not particularly excel at the life to begin with, describing his first years as ‘neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service’, and caused irritation to his superiors by a rather unsatisfactory attitude to his work, to turning up on time in order to start it, and to those who pointed out how badly he was doing it This may have made it more natural for him to write from the point of view of the paper-worker of the Victorian era, and to regard them as more than incidental characters to other people’s lives.

A similar attitude can be found in the writing of some slightly later authors: both Rudyard Kipling and Jerome K. Jerome worked as clerks before finding literary and financial success, and their work shows evidence of it. The leisured ‘silly-ass’ antics of the Three Men in a Boat can sometimes trick readers into thinking that they are the kind of moneyed aristocrats to be found in P.G. Wodehouse, but early on in the voyage one of the party has to be picked up at a lock, because the bank insists he works Saturday mornings as well as weekdays.

In T.S. Eliot, however, there is an authentic touch of Modernist hauteur towards the people who have to earn their living by pushing papers around (papers, at least, which don’t contain great thoughts about Western Civilization), in his mocking description of a young man arriving to meet his typist girlfriend:

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

So the three clerks of Trollope’s title are the heirs to a long and complicated tradition. As well as the examples I’ve discussed, it takes in the pompous and sentimental Mr. Pooter, head clerk at Perkup’s in the City, whose Diary of a Nobody is an early twentieth-century classic, arguably goes on to include the hero of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving, whose technical drawing expertise gives him a good job and the chance to get into trouble with women, and even the ingenious and under-employed Clerks of Kevin Smith’s slacker movie, condemned to find some meaning in their life whilst they wait for customers whom they despise. The shifting implications of the word across history display a whole host of attitudes towards people who can read and write, and people who make their living from that skill, towards social class and paperwork, towards power and mystery.

However, running searches on particular terms can throw up irrelevant stuff, which nonetheless must be trawled through. I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing about John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi. I wrote my doctorate on its performance history from the seventeenth century to the 1960s, and I’ve produced articles involving it in the years since. I’m currently working on a draft of a book about its appearance in print and prose fiction across the years. Totting up the various files, I think I’ve written approaching one hundred and fifty thousand words about that particular revenge tragedy. It sounds a bit excessive when you put it like that. Luckily for me it has quite a distinctive name. If I was writing about, say Romeo and Juliet or A Stitch in Time , searching newspapers for the title would produce endless irrelevant stuff. Fortunately “Malfi” is a rarer word. But…

In 1875 there was a horse running at Epsom called “Duchess of Malfi” I feel I know this particular nag well, given how many times I have opened a digital facsimile of a newspaper page and seen its name nestling amongst the other runners, or in the lists of odds, or accompanied by owner’s name and jockey. For example:

Of course, if an image carries the title “Sporting News” or “At Epsom”, you can be reasonably sure what you’re going to find upon opening in and tracking down the words “Duchess of Malfi”. But never absolutely sure. After all, newspapers crowd different sorts of articles onto the same page, and there might be an advertisement or a small column further down the page which mentions the play. It’s even more ambiguous when the page is titled “Entertainments” or similar: racing and the theatre are certainly parallel forms of public entertainment, and were even more so in the pre-TV era.

Once I’d got over the irritation, I rather enjoyed seeing the horse pop up, and noticing the other names around it. Above, for example, the Duchess is surrounded by horses with a variety of kinds of name. Garde Noble is I believe, the military unit tasked with providing the honour guard for the pope. Bugle March has a similarly martial flavour. As does Lord Rollo, in a slightly different way: it’s not obvious which bearer of that title the horse is named after, but the most notable Lords Rollo were all soldiers. One was a Royalist commander in the War of the Three Kingdoms (the Civil War to less historically-minded readers), one was important enough to attend the Great Hunt at Aboyne, where the Jacobite rising was planned, one died in North America during the Seven Years War, and one commanded troops at Pondicherry. (This latter better known to some as the origin of the name “Pondicherry Lodge” in the Sherlock Holmes story The Sign of Four.)

Other horses are somewhat picturesque: Woodlands, Alumette (French for lark), Thirsk and Glenalmond (in Scotland), Chypre (the French name for Cyprus), Brilliant (presumably in the sense of “diamond”), Chieftain and Village Lass. Chimene lands us back in France, assuming it’s intended to allude to the heroine of Corneille’s El Cid. Overall a fairly historical, rural and French set of names.

This day our equine distraction had a rather different set of companions. Reveillon and Chiquin show the continued interest in snappy phrases from other languages, Scimitar and Agate give a general sense of the heroic or exotic, continued by Sphynx. But I was cheered to see three characters in rivalry here: Webster’s Italian Duchess, the legendary King Arthur of Britain, and Polly Peachum, the daughter of a criminal fence in The Beggar’s Opera, who falls in love with the highwayman Macheath. A splendid jumble of genres. Part of the fun of reading these racehorse names is the glimpse they give into the Victorian mind. The names are inevitably well-known things, characters, ideas and so on – they may take a little pondering for us to understand them, but they would be drawn from the common currency of the language at the time.

The heroism continues, as the Duchess appears alongside Julius Caesar, and Queen Elizabeth. I’m so used to seeing that name as “Queen Elizabeth I” that I looked for the numeral, when of course there was no need for any qualifying before Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in the 1950s.

A great deal going on here. Red Cross Knight is the hero of the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, representing the chivalric quest for holiness, but he is apparently not at his post! (A familiar story for those familiar with Spenser’s allegorical romance epic – Redcrosse is prone to wandering off the path, possibly to tangle with Errour.) With him gone, Webster’s tragic heroine is a likely prospect, alongside the tellingly-named Plebian. Finding his sister mixed up with a Plebian is exactly what Duke Ferdinand fears most, in Webster’s play. (Strong-thighed bargemen, fellows who can do things with bars and sledges, a lovely squire who carried coals up to her lodgings, etc etc) He would be shocked but nor surprised. Then Water Lily and Hellenist give a botanical and Classical flavour to the contest. A phrase to treasure there, for students of Greek and its literature: “the good-looking and heavily-engaged Hellenist”.

But leaping on sixty-odd years, there is another bloody equine getting in my way. I also scribble a fair bit about Dorothy L. Sayers. And in 1938 a gee-gee appeared called “Busman’s Honeymoon”. There can be little or no doubt about the origins of its name. In 1936 a play was staged called Busman’s Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy in Three Acts, by Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St Clare Byrne. It tells the story of the honeymoon (and the murder investigation which that holiday involved) of Sayers’ long-running characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Sayers wrote the play up as a novel which was published in 1937. The Oxford English Dictionary cannot provide any examples of the phrase “busman’s honeymoon”, though it can give citations for the proverbial phrase “busman’s holiday”, which Sayers’ title is clearly a riff on. (For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it means a holiday during which you do the same sort of activity as you do usually – the joke being that when a busman gets a chance at a holiday, he finds himself taking a nice drive out to the country. I know the phrase is more widely used in British than US English, but I don’t know quite how widespread it is. I learned it early in life, since my grandfather worked on the buses in Birmingham, which gave it an extra jokey twist.)

So this is almost certainly a horse named after Sayers’ and Byrne’s play. It was successful enough to run for more than four hundred performances in London, and the title is a twist on a jokey common saying, thus the phrase seems ideal for a racehorse. The list here gives us another splendid set of characteristic names, rather different from the Victorian ones. Wayward Kid, Dance Little Lady and Carouse have a distinctly raffish air to them. Leading Topic and Welcome Gift have the feel, like Busman’s Honeymoon, of being popular phrases from the moment. The Scottish element is kept up by Kilmurry, and Castillian Princess is a remarkable coincidence which also isn’t one. The Duchess of Malfi is herself descended from the royal houses of Aragon and Castille, as her brothers make so much fuss about, so she is in a sense as Castillian Princess. That she should appear, thus disguised, on the same page as Busman’s Honeymoon is only a coincidence if you happen to have stumbled across these horses in the way I did.

Another remarkable clutch of horse names. Some puns, or what sound like them, in Time Please and Golden Thyme. “Time, please!” is what barmen shout to inform drinkers that the “last orders” period has ended and no more drinks will be served that night. (For poetry readers, perhaps most famously used in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) I wonder at a pun because barmen and racehorse owners are two of the most likely people to say “time, please”, the latter asking for the “time” in which a horse has run a measured distance. Larboard and Conceit are the “familiar but slightly unusual word or phrase” category. Tigrette remains a mystery to me. Catherine Parr returns us to the world of Tudor England, with a tragic tinge.

Zobeida is another touch of the “exotic” – if, as I’m assuming, it’s named after the wife of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. He appears in a number of the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, and was something of a proverbial reference in the literature of the British twentieth century. I don’t know the stories as well as I should, but apparently she appears in some, and indeed there was a ballet entitled Scheherazade (after the narrator of the tales) in the early decades of the century, in which Zobeida appears as a character. (Miss Marple types will remember that Mrs Bantry objects to be addressed as “Scheherazade” whilst telling her tale.)

Bridge of Sighs is so splendidly of its era, and entirely apt. It properly refers to the bridge in Venice known as the Ponti dei Sospiri, which connects the Doge’s palace with the prison. The name comes from the idea that prisoners traversing it sigh as they face their fate. I suppose Traitor’s Gate at the Tower of London would be the closest English equivalent. Or it would be, if there wasn’t a bridge in Oxford which bears the same name. It bridges New Lane, between two parts of Hertford College, and it’s near one of the alleys which leads to the Turf Tavern. In fact it doesn’t look much like the Venetian bridge at all, and in my time some people made rather a point of calling it Not The Bridge of Sighs, as in “See you at seven under Not The Bridge” etc. I even heard a couple of people call it Nonny Ponty, short for “Non I Ponti Dei Sospiri”, which was taking things a little far.

It is suitable, since the characters after whose trip Busman’s Honeymoon is titled finally fall mutually in love in Oxford, during Sayers’ previous novel Gaudy Night. Maybe the horse was named after the Venetian bridge, but I should think many more people in Britain thought of Oxford when they heard the name “Bridge of Sighs”. The bridge is such an “iconic” (for once that word is appropriate) image of Oxford that my own book on Sayers features it on the cover.

So, one final line-up (I should point out that there are many pages I did not include. These are very much the highlights. Though they were difficult to choose between once I started trying to find the most typical or most entertaining, which were often the same category.)

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will insist on getting mixed up with this horse, as Good Queen Bess is another name for Queen Elizabeth (I), and the Royal Oak was the tree in which King Charles hid when in flight from the Parliamentarian armies. Crazy Cat has the definite ring of the Jazz Age, and there was a famous 1930s band called Cliff Jackson and His Crazy Cats. Now Kindly Light is surely named for the popular hymn, whose words were written by John Henry Newman:

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet;
I do not ask to see the distant scene;
one step enough for me.

But it’s surely also another pun. If this horse is winning, the commentator will shout something like “And in the lead, Kindly Light, second and third are Blue Presto and Good Queen Bess…” Having first position in the race “encoded” into the horse’s name is a pretty decent bit of allusion.

So the horses started as a damned inconvenient thing, a swathe of noise in the data. But I became rather fond of them, and I enjoyed enormously the peek they provided into the mental world of the 1870s and the 1930s. I bet someone could write a whole book on horses named after literary works and characters - were there nags called Little Women and Sarah Gamp, were there Rob Roys and Blithe Spirits? It would be an intriguing bit of cultural history. But I’m in a hurry to write about the actual books involved. I suppose I got a good run for my money.

This has happened to an entertainingly exceptional degree in adaptations of Jane Austen and John Le Carré. These two most English of novels no doubt have a certain amount in common. Their focus on the small details of social life and social class; their plots with rely so heavily on the placing and misplacing of trust; the characters who have to deduce what has been happening out in the field from the limited information available to them. They were also adept at producing a very textured “world”, a particular vision of Britain with its own atmosphere and style. Nonetheless, I think most people would see those worlds as rather different.

But due to whatever coincidence, industry synergies or similar status as “classic English writers”, adaptations of Austen and Le Carré give the impression that the same group of people lived several centuries apart and found themselves caught up in two different kinds of drama. Rather like this:

We neither of us perform to strangers. After all, this is not a Circus.

Here he is, meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes can bestow in the confines of a secure reading room.

You come around suggesting a fellow has snow on his foots, that’s a damn strange way to behave. All this snow about, you might catch a bad cold, you know?

He is very well here, you see, with a small fire, obligingly lit by some lamplighters who wished to dispose of a document or two.

He is pleased to inform you that Lady Catherine was in excellent health only eight days ago. No nasty unforeseen accidents befalling our noble patroness, old son, not on your proverbial.

What is this, saith the Psalmist, it is THE SEA. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. And this poses to us that same question which was put to Job. Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou serve him in your fishy restaurant? Leviathan IS LAUGHING AT YOU!

Try.

And he has worn the knee-breeches and gaiters in his time, so don’t feel you have to talk too pretty.

To get his operational budget cut?! The encoding of the secure communication was badly done, badly done indeed.

If he loved England less, he might be able to talk about it more.

I had the weather would be cool for my lunch with Bunny, because my best jacket was a scratchy dark tweed, but when I woke on Saturday it was hot and getting hotter.

“Gonna be a scorcher today,” said the janitor as I passed him in the hall. “Indian summer.”

The jacket was beautiful—Irish wool, gray with flecks of mossy green; I had bought it in San Francisco with nearly every cent I’d saved from my summer job—but it was much too heavy for a warm sunny day. I put it on and went to the bathroom to straighten my tie.

It’s not just a jacket, it’s a jacket which nearly fits (it’s good quality material and the right style for his new persona, even down to being connected to the other side of the Atlantic), but crucially it doesn’t quite (it’s not what the erson he’s trying to be would wear in this weather.) In passing, it’s telling the we have the voice of a janitor appearing amidst Papen’s thoughts, to remind us of the class differences he’s trying to finesse. (And is it a coincidence that “Indian summer” is an expression which originated in the British Raj, dropping another historical British item into the imagery? Perhaps…) From the description the jacket probably looked a little like this:

That’s Harris tweed, so Scottish rather than Irish, and the flecks are a bit more bluish than Richard describes, but it’s really very similar. By an odd coincidence I bought that jacket as a student myself, from a second-hand stall in the market, fifteen quid haggled down to twelve, and did my best to wear it out over the next decade (I only failed because I don’t think you can wear out Harris tweed unless you’re actively crawling through gorse bushes, and perhaps not even then.)

Judy Poovey, the loudmouthed Californian who represents so much of what Papen is trying to escape, provides him with a solution:

“Have a good time,” she said listlessly, and started out the door. Then she stopped. “Say, aren’t you going to get hot in that jacket?”

“Only good one I have.”

“You want to try on this one I’ve got?” I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room.

“Is it yours?” I said.

“I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like, a bustier out of it.”

Great, I thought, but I went along with her anyway.

The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful—old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green—a little loose, but it fit all right. “Judy,” I said, looking at my cuffs. “This is wonderful. You sure you don’t mind?”

“You can have it,” said Judy. “I don’t have time to do anything with it. I’m too busy sewing those damned costumes for fucking As You Like It.”

A detail there which I missed on earlier reads: the jacket Richard wears to the lunch is literally given to him by someone who designs theatre costumes for her course. As soon as he arrives for the lunch, the jacket is foregrounded again. Richard has apparently not really hit the spot with this one either, but luckily Bunny seems to interpret it as part of his fake California ennui-set background:

“By the way, love that jacket, old man,” Bunny said to me as we were getting out of the taxi. “Silk, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It was my grandfather’s.” Bunny pinched a piece of the rich, yellowy cloth near the cuff and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers.

“Lovely piece,” he said importantly. “Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.”

“No?” I said.

“Naw. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they’re pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here they don’t let you run around in your bathing suit all year long. Blacks and blues, that’s the ticket, blacks and blues.…”

And into the restaurant they go, where we find (in a surprising twist) more people wearing clothes:

It was a tiny, beautiful restaurant with white tablecloths and bay windows opening onto a cottage garden—hedges and trellised roses, nasturtiums bordering the flagstone path. The customers were mostly middle-aged and prosperous: ruddy country-lawyer types, who, according to the Vermont fashion, wore gumshoes with their Hickey-Freeman suits; ladies with frosted lipstick and challis skirts, nice looking in a kind of well-tanned, low-key way. A couple glanced up at us as we came in, and I was well aware of the impression we were making—two handsome college boys, rich fathers and not a worry in the world. Though the ladies were mostly old enough to be my mother, one or two were actually quite attractive. Nice work if you could get it, I thought, imagining some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town on business all the time. Good dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car …

Some more clothes decoding to do here – at least for someone like me, unfamiliar with Hickey-Freeman – and, more to the point, decoding the meaning of clothes. To remedy my unfamiliarity with the suits in question, I undertook a two-pronged research.

Firstly, I looked the name up in Vinted, to see what they looked like second-hand, and what sort of prices they were commanding. Jackets tend to be a better guide than shirts or trousers, and Hickey-Freeman seem to settle around the same prices as some British clobber I’m more familiar with; roughly alongside Austin Reed, perhaps a bit below Charles Tyrwhitt and a bit above Brook Tavener and a step above Samuel Windsor. Assuming they’re still making a same general sort of thing as they did in the 90s, Bunny’s comment about blues and blacks seems accurate: there’s much less bright or pale colour (even when toned down with check) than the British equivalents, and certainly less flash of lining or collar. I get the impression that this might itself be class- or region-coded in the US: a more colourful check jacket, at least in the right style, is likely to make a British man look like a bounder or a cad, where in the US it’s more likely to make him look like a sportscaster or an Eminent Moose of the Confraternity Thereof and Of That Elk.

Secondly, I searched for Hickey Freeman’s website, only then interested in what they had to say about themselves. Not much, is the answer, aside from the advice that their wares can be acquired at “Dillard’s”, but there is a reasonably telling short video featuring chaps on a boat. Tailored jackets, what I believe is a “preppy” look, even extending to jackets worn over the more unobtrusive sort of hoodie, and a general air of putting the “Coast” into “East Coast”. It’s what I imagine Eddie from Below Deck used to wear on his family’s yacht, before he started running tugboats for a living.

So I think I have a handle on the scene which greeted Bunny and Richard, even if the suits in question were a little more traditional in the 90s and being worn with gumshoes. It is not only the scene they see, though, which concerns Richard, but the scene they make. (Even before Bunny makes an actual scene by throwing around homophobic slurs, getting drunk and claiming inability to pay the bill.) “I was well aware of the impression we were making—two handsome college boys, rich fathers and not a worry in the world”. As ever, the clothes are about how well they’re playing a part. We already know that Richard is nothing of the sort; his father is not well off and refuses him money, he is insecure about his own appearance and he is racked with worries. He seems to be spending as much time congratulating himself on fitting in at this restaurant as he is on actually enjoying it.

That comment about looking handsome and carefree then slips into another telling appraisal of the clothes and appearance of those present. He has just described the women in the restaurant as “ladies with frosted lipstick and challis skirts, nice looking in a kind of well-tanned, low-key way”. I was sure I’d read about challis skirts in Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s Close-Reading the Reruns – “Separates – the skirts post” – but apparently I didn’t. I’m sure it’s in another of her pieces. In any case, I’m assuming the challis skirts in question are the kind made from silk and wool, where the lightness connotes not man-made fibres but the fineness of the material. (A bit like a linen and silk jacket.) It all adds to the understated wealth and taste, certainly a far cry from Judy Poovey’s cutoff jeans and spandex top (and the stolen silk jacket which Richard has annexed in time for the lunch.) Tellingly, his mind moves from their appearance, to his own appearance, to the possibility of a fling. Despite some of them being old enough to be his mother, Papen thinks it would be “Nice work if you could get it”, and “imagin[es] some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town on business all the time”. It opens up a prospect of “[g]ood dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car …”

Because of course he doesn’t fantasize about the sex or even the romance, his mind goes straight to what he might get out of an affair. I had, once again, missed this on previous reads, but The Secret History informs us pretty loudly that our hero is a grifter. He’s trying to climb into this new world in order to rake in some of the wealth which he assumes surrounds everyone in it. He’s like a less charming and emotionally complex Charles Ryder (and there’s a brief moment, to be discussed later, when he believes he might pull off some equivalent of Charles’ nearly inheriting Brideshead). And this is the great joke of the entire scene: Bunny’s a grifter too. One with a more solid background, but he’s a boy whose has been sent into institutions with not enough money to support him, and has learned to live off others. Tartt’s ironic plotting presents us with two conmen taking each other out to lunch, each convinced the other is a rich sucker. Papen thinks he’s made it into the inner circle and is setting in to loot the milieu; Bunny’ delighted to meet a Californian oil heir whom he can scrounge off for the next couple of years. Ironically, Richard is indeed undergoing his initiation into the closed circle of Julian’s pupils. He just doesn’t know that it involves Bunny tricking you into paying for an expensive meal.

I think this is one of the reasons why the clothes are so emphasized in this scene They’re effective scene-setting, and they show us Richard’s attempts to navigate Hampden’s different groups of people, but they also foreground the grifts the characters are running. Bunny’s scrutiny of Richard’s jacket is taken by the latter as proof of Bunny’s effortless savoir-faire, when it is actually an attempt to establish his own bona fides which rest of shaky foundations. Tartt is less famous for writing about clothes and brands than her Camden contemporary Brett Easton Ellis, but she makes telling use of them in this chapter. And it will not be the last time that Richard finds he’s scammed his way into the East Coast only to realize there may be a bigger deception going on…

Papen’s interview with Julian involves the tutor asking him about his life back in California, which gives an opportunity for the invented background which he’s already mentioned:

I gave him the spiel. Orange groves, failed movie stars, lamplit cocktail hours by the swimming pool, cigarettes, ennui. He listened, his eyes fixed on mine, apparently entranced by these fraudulent recollections. Never had my efforts met with such attentiveness, such keen solicitude. He seemed so utterly enthralled that I was tempted to embroider a little more than perhaps was prudent.

“How thrilling,” he said warmly when I, half-euphoric, was finally played out. “How very romantic.”

“Well, we’re all quite used to it out there, you see,” I said, trying not to fidget, flushed with the brilliance of my success.

This is one of the moments of irony I mentioned. In earlier readings, I thought Papen has successfully bamboozled an unworldly intellectual into letting him join the select inner circle. The rather vague explanation of why Julian refused him and then agreed on the second time of asking gave a hazy, magical air to the outcome, rather like the mention of Julian looking like a figure from a fairy tale. Reading it more slowly this time, I came to the opposite conclusion. Julian is indeed intrigued and charmed by Papen. Not by his successful lies, but by the lost and manipulable character which they reveal. The comment about him being “tempted to embroider a little more than was perhaps prudent” and being “flushed with the brilliance of my own success” gives a nod to this possibility. The same flash of irony is visible when Julian asks what he thinks of Hampden and… “I provided an exegesis, not as brief as it might have been, of why at the moment I found the college satisfactory for my purposes.” (Which is also a very funny line.)

Though the vividness of the description is coming from Richard’s experience at the time, we are repeatedly (if quietly) reminded that it is the later Richard who is telling us all this. There are perhaps even two layers of irony happening at once here: the younger Richard is talking to Julian, with the older Richard looking wryly over his head, noticing meanings which evaded him at the time, but we are so also looking over the head of the older Richard, picking up on some things which he has missed even all these years later. In either case, the scene seems to show not Papen’s triumph but his deception by Julian; he is accepted not as a brilliant scholar, but as a very equivocal sort of protegee, another one of Julian’s lost boys.

The fact that the elder Richard is still in thrall to Julian is suggested by his description of the first tutorial he attends with the whole group.:

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one—especially after so many years—without losing a good deal in the translation.

It’s a very useful narrative device to present Julian as a remarkable talker, but then disclaim the ability to reproduce what he said. It forestalls any reader who might comment that this fellow doesn’t seem as wonderful as all that. I think it potentially allows that second level of irony as well, where later Papen is reporting the words relatively accurately, but he still thinks an incredible philosophical symposium took place, where some readers see mostly wind and quotation. (I still find it a fascinating scene, I should add – but I’m now aware that it may not simply make most readers wish they were lucky enough to be present in that group.) The disclaiming device most reminded me of a scene from another great novel about education: the Victorian school story Tom Brown’s School Days:

And then came that great event in his, as in every Rugby boy’s life of that day—the first sermon from the Doctor.

More worthy pens than mine have described that scene—the oak pulpit standing out by itself above the School seats; the tall, gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice, now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light-infantry bugle, of him who stood there Sunday after Sunday, witnessing and pleading for his Lord

There’s the same sense of an authoritative figure whom the listener is remembering but cannot reproduce, partly because at the time they didn’t quite understand what was happening:

We couldn’t enter into half that we heard; we hadn’t the knowledge of our own hearts or the knowledge of one another, and little enough of the faith, hope, and love needed to that end. But we listened

Matthew Arnold goes further in not actually telling us what Dr. Arnold said in that sermon, where Tartt gives us an abbreviated account of the conversation, finished with the insight that the only true human desire is to live forever. Before the comparison with Dr. Arnold’s sermon it had never occurred to me that Julian, in outlining the desire for eternal life, is saying something rather similar to the locals at “Redeemed Repair”.

During that conversation there’s a final kind of irony which only occurred to me on this reread. It begins with a comment from Julian about tactics:

“Though after all your Xenophon and Thucydides I dare say there are not many young people better versed in military tactics. I’m sure, if you wanted to, you’d be quite capable of marching on Hampden town and taking it over by yourselves.” Henry laughed.

“We could do it this afternoon, with six men,” he said.

“How?” said everyone at once. “One person to cut the phone and power lines, one at the bridge over the Battenkill, one at the main road out, to the north. The rest of us could advance from the south and west. There aren’t many of us, but if we scattered we’d be able to close off all other points of entry”—here he held out his hand, fingers spread wide—“and advance to the center from all points.” The fingers closed into a fist. “Of course, we’d have the advantage of surprise,” he said, and I felt an unexpected thrill at the coldness of his voice.

Julian laughed. “And how many years has it been since the gods have intervened in human wars? I expect Apollo and Athena Nike would come down to fight at your side, ‘invited or uninvited,’ as the oracle at Delphi said to the Spartans. Imagine what heroes you’d be.”

“Demigods,” said Francis, laughing. “We could sit on thrones in the town square.”

“While the local merchants paid you tribute.”

“Gold. Peacocks and ivory.”

“Cheddar cheese and common crackers more like it,” Bunny said.

I had always thought of this as another proof of what unexpected learning can be provided by the Classics. A quiet critique of the idea that only “useful” education can yield practical results, and a mark in favour of the supposedly abstruse humanities. However, rereading it now, I wonder if something else isn’t going on. The comment from Bunny about what the actual townspeople would be likely to bring jars the discussion back from the world of demigods and Xenophon to the local conditions of Hampden. (The passage goes on to say that Julian alters the direction of the conversation because Bunny’s remark displeased him. )

After all, Henry’s supposedly foolproof commando plan involves the isolation and occupation of the town by a handful of students acting with their superior knowledge. It’s not clear whether his “six men” are “the six of us here” (Bunny, Francis, Charles, Richard, Henry, Julian, with the assumption that Camilla shouldn’t fight) or just a notional “six heavily armed light infantry soldiers could do it”. But they’re talking about walking into Hampden and instantly quelling it with six armed men. This may be an example of me misunderstanding the East Coast from across the Atlantic, but isn’t Vermont a relatively armed state? I looked up the restrictions of gun ownership in the 1990s, when The Secret History was published. Apparently the state is so well-known for the permissiveness of its gun control that “Vermont carry” is the slang term in the US for regulations allowing a legally-owned firearm to be carried without a permit (whether openly or concealed.) Indeed, a few years before Tartt’s book was published, Vermont passed a law ensuring that heavier gun restrictions could not be imposed at a more local level:

Except as otherwise provided by law, no town, city, or incorporated village, by ordinance, resolution, or other enactment, shall directly regulate hunting, fishing, and trapping or the possession, ownership, transportation, transfer, sale, purchase, carrying, licensing, or registration of traps, firearms, ammunition, or components of firearms or ammunition.

The idea that a handful of college students could invade a Vermont town effortlessly, armed mostly with their knowledge of Xenophon, looks somewhat implausible in this context. It’s surely likely that they would find themselves on the wrong end of a huge firepower asymmetry. Seen from this point of view, the passage underlines just how badly Julian’s students have misunderstood the world they’re living in – and how little they know about the people who surround them. I mentioned above that I might be misunderstanding things here, After all, Hampden is a college town, and I am not suggesting every Vermonter is carrying a gun around. The farmers whose land surround Francis’ aunt’s house (of which more later) are no doubt a different type to the citizens wandering around the streets. But isn’t it likely that the gas-station owner might have s shotgun behind the counter, or that there’s a secure cabinet in the office of the bank? If so, then there’s another irony happening here, as the characters reveal a profound ignorance of what Hampden is actually like…

A few practicalities: I’ll be picking books I’ve read before, so I won’t just be “recapping” the plot or describing my reactions to the developing story. I’ll choose books which I think plenty of other people will have read, so it should remain interesting without reading along week by week (though obviously people are welcome to do that!) I will try to avoid the dreaded spoilers as much as possible, but can’t guarantee I won’t give away some of the later narrative if it’s particularly relevant – big plot spoilers I’ll mark so they can be avoided. I’ll also note points which I’m unsure of, or don’t know the answer to – if anyone reading can put me right I would very much appreciate it. I’d love this to become a weekly conversation about the books concerned, so do add any comments you have, no matter how tangential or abstruse. I think that’s all the floor-sweeping that needs to be done, so on to the book.

The Secret History seems a suitable book to start with. It’s a very rereadable book. In fact it rather demands it. I read it first at school, and it gave an entrancing picture of university life to me. The life of the mind, the possibility to transcend the modern world, for learning to totally change the way people lived. How I managed to get that out of this novel, with its violence, dysfunction and deceit, I’m unclear. Certainly the opening chapters must have loomed much larger in my memory than the unfolding of the plot. I used to return to it now and then during my university years, in fact. I usually reread those early portions of the book without finishing the whole thing, which rather shocked a friend of mine when he found out. He suggested that it amounted to a character flaw in itself, a desire not to be disillusioned about things. Returning again to The Secret History after some more years, the book seemed to be mostly about very lost group of young people who’d found a way to recast their angst as superiority, in rather the way that some heavy metal fans consider their own tastes to be too refined for others to understand. Another later reread persuaded me it was a book about a rich, selfish and manipulative man who needed impressionable others to bolster his own self-image. All of these are true of it, in a sense, but I’ll be very interested to see how it looks now.

The Secret History is suitable for a reread for another reason. Though it is a crime novel, it begins with the crime itself and traces its causes and climax, before moving to its aftermath. There is no whodunnit about the book, and hardly any howdunnit, only whydunnit. The story is presented as Richard Papen retelling the story of Bunny’s death and his part in it, as he has apparently retold the story hundreds of times (if only in his own mind.) And once the reader has reached the end of the novel, it is likely to look very different when reread. Papen’s account of the characters at Hampden becomes more and more suspect on closer attention, and it is difficult to untangle the people he is describing from the illusions he still has about them, or the justification for what happened. So rereading is fairly appropriate.

I intended to write one piece per chapter, but Tartt put relatively few chapters in the novel, and there is a great deal that seems to pop up and demand discussion in each. It looks more likely that two per chapter (or even three) will result. Even before the prologue there are the epigraphs, from Nietzsche and Plato. “Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes” – people (by which I mean me) often forget that the Republic does not start as a plan for the ideal state, but as a discussion of education. One of the things that Papen keeps emphasizing about Julian’s group is their mannered quality, which he sees as a quality to be admired, rather than condemned. He wants their kind of education. Of course the epigraphs could both be ironic in retrospect: Papen is indeed educated, along with Julian’s other students, but not necessarily by their academic studies.

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” A cracking opening for a novel. In the few pages of the prologue we get the fact that Bunny is dead and the narrator is responsible (along with a group of other people) for his death. We’re also informed that this is all happening at quite a distance of time, and that the narrator is going over memories. This passage is very characteristic, I think, with its rather melodramatic sentiment disavowed by the claim of ennui:

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.

Vintage Donna Tartt: the parallel structure of “walking through…walking away”, the insistence on uncertainty in “now I am not so sure”, the large statement about the arc of the narrator’s life and the strong imagery of trees and weather to end it. This is pretty much what you’ll get in the novel, I would suggest, and you can like it or not.

Into the first chapter, where Papen introduces himself, describes his childhood and how he ended up at Hampden. “I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature” is another great line, immediately emphasized by saying he’ll only admit that now, after the fact. (What fact, asks the reader? What indeed.) It’s also very interesting to mention the childhoods of his friends, whom we haven’t really met yet, and whom he hadn’t met at the time. It stresses that the story is going to be about them as a group. Like Humphrey Carpenter’s group biography of the Inklings, in which he attempts to write the story of them as a collective, Or, since I’ve used the word group, perhaps a bit like Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I’m always reminded of McCarthy when rereading The Secret History¸though usually of her novel The Groves of Academe (of which no doubt more in later posts). The Group takes a set of friends just graduating from college, and traces their later lives – maybe The Secret History could be seen as the inverse, a story of how these friends never really had later lives, certainly not in the way they expected.

The narrator stresses his rootlessness, in contrast with the vividness and security of the others. Bunny died in the prologue, and we get his beginning here:

Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banker. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.

I find it interesting that the novel tells us Papen is going to New England soon, and then we get all this about people’s backgrounds. It only struck me because I’ve read a fair few of a somewhat niche subgenre: paranormal witch romance mystery. A great number of them involve characters discovering they’re a witch, struggling to deal with their newly-found supernatural powers, solving a crime, falling in love (or hesitating between the werewolf police detective and the vampire librarian) and so very often ending up in New England. Parallel, of course, is the genre where our heroine inherits a bed and breakfast (or a haunted Victorian house, or of course both because they’re the same building) somewhere in New England and goes there to find herself. Probably it’s because I happen to read that sort of story, But for some American authors, there does seem to be an instinctive connection between writing about who they are, and ending up in New England. (This is, incidentally, one of the first points on which I suspect many readers of this piece will have a securer handle than I do. I have never been to New England.)

And another extremely Secret History sentence:

I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound odd in light of the story I am about to tell.

The foreshadowing, the disclaiming, the undercutting, the insistence on two time sequences (the events and their retelling), not to mention “I do not now nor did I ever have…” which combines a minor chiasmus with the echoes of accusation (“Are you now or have you ever been a member fo the Communist Party?”) It’s rich stuff. You wouldn’t want a whole novel in this tone, but in these early pages she establishes the tenor of the piece. I wonder if the young Donna Tartt had read Larkin – that combination of an absolute and its careful doubting reminds me of the end of “An Arundel Tomb”: “and to prove/ Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.” But it’s much more American than that, to my ear.

So Papen ends up at Hampden, or at least he ends up looking at the brochure:

Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont. Even the name had an austere Anglican cadence, to my ear at least, which yearned hopelessly for England and was dead to the sweet dark rhythms of the little mission towns. For a long time I looked at a picture of the building they called Commons. It was suffused with a weak, academic light—different from Plano, different from anything I had ever known—a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

I’d misremembered this passage in the past, thinking he’d said “Anglican” only, and not “England”. That matters because the novel seems to be very much about England as well as New England. At least an imagined England. And it matters because of ecclesiology. “Anglican” to a reader like me, is the adjective for the Church of England. Anglican as distinct from Roman Catholic, Baptist or United Reform. To me, “Anglican” cadence and austerity implies the choir stalls of a cathedral, and the chanting of Evensong. I think I must have been wrong, though, and Papen means it as the adjective for England – or possibly for what England and New England have in common. Does that make sense? Perhaps someone might confirm or deny in the comments. Another thing that gave me pause was the later reference to Bunny’s family being Episcopalian, which I would think of as the “Anglican” denomination in the US, but which Papen seems to regard as somewhat naff and perfectly in keeping with Bunny’s vulgar all-American background. (Or there again, am I missing something, and is his family’s Episcopalianism part of their attempt at social climbing, when their forebears would have been southern Baptists…?)

That emphasis on light and gazing into a picture wishing you could be there is weirdly prescient, given the way The Secret History laid the groundwork for the Dark Academia aesthetic online. Not immediately, of course, but when the technology and the cultural mood had developed suitably, this became the founding text of Dark Academia. That movement, or style, or tendency, or whatever it is, could only really develop in an era when it was possible to obsess over analogue technology via digital means. In the 90s it was not possible to build youtube rooms of libraries with flickering candlelight, or collect Pinterest boards full of pens, jackets, architecture, sunsets, scarves, and so on. I’m not knocking Tartt’s novel when I say that it is entirely suitable for consumption and reworking in this era. It’s even possible to argue that The Secret History essentially warns against Dark Academia’s wilder excesses, since it offers a story about a callow young man who is obsessed with the physical trappings of learning, attempts to ape those higher up the social scale, and ends unluckily. If you remove the novel from the aesthetic, you also remove its irony.

When the college is actually reached, there’s a telling rhapsody:

a white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s. On my first night there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano’s voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can’t remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano.

[…]

And I was happy in those first days as really I’d never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. A group of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying, their shouts and laughter carrying faintly over the velvety, twilit field. Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost.

It’s cracking writing, providing a very tempting set of images whilst warning us (in a way we don’t notice first time around) that this is not just an impression, it’s an illusion: “stunned”, “drunk”, “hazy”. It’s odd that Papen says he’d never felt so far from California because only a few pages ago he’d said this about his life in Plano:

I couldn’t really begin to understand it; and I would have been angry if someone had suggested that it was due to a strong Puritan streak in my nature, which was in fact the case. Not long ago I found this passage in an old notebook, written when I was eighteen or so: “There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.”

The novel’s imagery quietly suggests that the two places have much more in common than he saw at the time. Hampden has the rotten apples, the smell of decay, the (angel of) death just as much as Plano does. Even when introduced to Hampden via Papen’s entranced eyes, the book still subverts what he’s telling himself.

I assume the girls playing soccer is again “Anglican” colour, since I understand it’s seen as an inherently European game. Bunny’s father played college football at Clemson, the girls at Hampden play soccer. (Ironically, girls playing soccer is an inherently American image to many British readers, given the different in terminology.) When we discover the names of Julian’s “set”, they give a definite English flavour – or as I’m going to call it, with risk of confusion, “Anglican” in the Secret History sense. “Henry Winter” shares his last name (though not its aristocratic tag” with Max de Winter, the brooding hero (anti-hero?) of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebbeca. The characters are not particularly parallel, but the names do point up the similarity of atmosphere. Du Maurier’s heroine is a young, naïve woman on the edge of a wealthy, cosmopolitan set. She is suddenly and almost inexplicably picked out by one of its members (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool!” as a friend of mine used to call across in greeting across the pub) and finds herself completely out of her depth. There is a mysterious mansion where a murderous past comes to light, and a crisis which ends in the heroine living an insipid, drifting life ever afterwards, dreaming that she’s back in the house. The opening of Tartt’s novel owes a lot to du Maurier’s, I think.

I initially thought that Bunny Corcoran’s name might suggest that Tartt had been reading John Le Carrés 1990s spy thriller The Night Manager. Major Corcoran, known as “Corky” has both the name and a similar sort of diminutive. He is the second-in-command of the arms dealer Richard Onslow “Dicky” Roper, whose closed circle of friends the agent Jonathan Pine manages to infiltrate. Corky even becomes murderously jealous at the way Pine has supplanted him within the group, and comes to a messy end. (He was memorably, so very memorably, played by Tom Hollander in the TV adaptation. The delivery of lines such as “…sadly not buggery, but we’ll work on that.” and “What is this? It is…the sea!” perfectly get over the character. Hollander’s performance had something in common with his portrayal of the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, another drunken man full of dangerous secrets, when he demanded “Do you want a fucking winkle, Boris?!”) A definite potential inspiration for the shades of Bunny’s character, signalled by the fact that Tartt borrowed the surname. However, the theory doesn’t survive contact with the calendar; The Night Manager was published in 1993, a year after The Secret History. The characters and their names provide the sort of coincidence that should keep one humble. (But might instead prompt wilder theories about the literary zeitgeist…)

But I really don’t think I’m over-reading two characters called Charles and Camilla. I know this was the 90s and the US, and neither were as internationally significant as they are now. But she’s writing a book whose tone and aesthetics harp on England, and a pair of characters appear named Charles and Camilla. Unlike The Night Manager the dates do work here: there was tabloid coverage of the difficulties in the Prince of Wales’ marriage and his name was publicly linked with Camilla Parker-Bowles’, I don’t even need to argue that Tartt did this deliberately. There are all sorts of instances where an writer produced something from their imagination which looks to the reader like a conscious and obvious allusion or piece of symbolism. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in The Mind of the Maker about the way one of her novels has two plots which fit together to form an overall symbolism It seems perfectly obvious on reading the book, but she had no idea whilst she was writing it. (I’ve had the same experience myself, in a less dramatic way.) It’s perfectly possible that Tartt was trying to invent characters who sounded suitably “Anglican” and this pair of names swam to the surface of her imagination whilst she was musing on tweed coats and horses and clock towers and ivy. But Charles and Camilla they certainly are. A perfect example of the way this novel sits on the East Coast looking out across the Atlantic.

I’ll end this piece here, and go on the rest of the first chapter later. I hope you’ve enjoyed this wander through the book, and I’d love to hear any responses, comments, comparisons, tangents, corrections, and so on, below.Th

Textual criticism isn’t a discipline often employed in the study of detective fiction, as far as I know. The establishing of reliable texts, the comparing of variant printings and manuscripts, arguing over disputed readings and emendations, tends to happen more when dealing with older or more generally valued texts. We probably don’t need the kind of exertion to establish exactly what Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie wrote which would be necessary for Chaucer or St Paul.

Though there are some similarities between the action of textual criticism and the plots of detective novels. In both cases the investigator examines “witnesses”, keeps a shrewd eye out for discrepancies, and has to construct a story about what “actually” happened from the story as it is told. We deduce that a particular scribe mistook the word “Burton” for “Barton”, for example, or that a manuscript was damaged so it spelled out “I can’t go on” rather than “I can’t go on Friday”. A lot of branches of research are compared to the actions of a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, but I think textual criticism has some claim to a comparison.

However, in my roaming through the novels of the four ”Queens of Crime” (Allingham, Christie, Sayers, Marsh) there are occasional moments when the text throws up a problem which needs solving. In the few months a couple of Ngaio Marsh novels provided passages which I think need explanation.

The first comes in Killer Dolphin, the US edition of Death at the Dolphin – and the fact that it’s the US edition matters in my theory. One character is a playwright and director, and he lives with a friend who specializes in stage design. He comes home in one scene to find the designer working on a model for a production:

That might not be an obvious problem. The title of the play is quite plausible, and it sounds like a vaguely high-tone arty piece, with plenty of potential for dramatic scenery. Except it made me pause. Because I have never heard of the play Venice Observed, but I have heard of the play Venice Preserv’d and the travelogue Venice Observed.

The former is a 1680s Restoration political tragedy by Thomas Otway, one of the most memorably grubby examples of the genre. One scene particularly stays in the recollection, in which the senator begs the dominatrix to spit in his face and pretend that he is her dog, and she tells hm to hurry up and finish because she’s getting bored. It was more successful than most examples of the genre, possibly because it was so obviously about contemporary politics whilst claiming to be about political crises in historical Venice, and entered the repertoire in a small way.

It would be perfectly reasonable for a theatre club to be producing Venice Preserv’d in the mid twentieth century. The revival of the “Older British Dramaists” (Renaissance and Restoration playwrights other than Shakespeare) was carried out in large part by small theatre groups and societies, such as the Phoenix Society at Cambridge. So my suggested emendation to the text, “Preserv’d” for “Observed” would at least make sense on the surface.

The travel book Venice Observed was written by the American novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who also famously wrote The Group and Groves of Academe. (Highly recommend, incidentally.) As far as I know, it was never adapted into a play, nor do I know of another play from that era with the same title. A slight complication is introduced by the fact that I’ve always assumed McCarthy’s title is a pun. Her two Italian travel books were entitled The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed, which I took for granted were plays on Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d.

If McCarthy did indeed have those titles in mind, the confusion between “Observed” and “Preserv’d” in the US edition of Marsh’s novel has a rather better pedigree than most typographical errors. In mistaking one for the other, the typesetter in fact reproduced McCarthy’s mild play on words, though accidentally.

My suggested emendation to the text of Killer Dolphin can be cross-checked relatively easily. Consulting the UK edition of the text, I find that it was indeed Venice Preserv’d that the designer is working on. But there is still a theory to be developed about the mistake. After all, this is not simply a mechanical slip, like setting “an” for “and”. The person setting the type had to substitute a new word for the existing one, and we need an explanation for why they did so.

I think the answer can be found in the context of the printing. Just as the US edition gave the novel a slightly baffling cover, we might attribute the change in word to a transatlantic misunderstanding. A typesetter working for Harcourt Mifflin in the 1960s might well be familiar with the ruthless prose and dry East Coast wit of Mary McCarthy, but unfamiliar with the satirical tragedies of 1680s London. They might well also be unfamiliar with the small theatre groups of midcentury Britain, with their penchant for Early Modern drama. The swapping of one word for another might have been unconscious. But it might also have been intentional: after all, “Preserv’d” is not a word in modern English, so the typesetter might have thought the title had been mangled in the original version, and that in substituting “Observed” they were actually correcting an earlier type mistake.

It’s not a major point about the novel, and it’s easily correctable by consulting another edition, but I like the way that this typographical error tells a story about the way Marsh’s book travelled and was interpreted. It is, in its way, a piece of literary history about what people expected to find in a detective novel, and how they bent the text to their expectations. And, of course, it is sheer deduction. I have no supporting evidence for the story of the typesetter who knew McCarthy but not Otway, and who thought they were repairing a flaw in the text. I only deduce their existence from something which doesn’t fit in the fictional world of Inspector Alleyn – a discrepancy in the story I was told – and from what I know of the literary and theatrical context of the time.

The second textual crux appears in Marsh’s Overture to Death. I was reading a paperback reprinted within the last twenty years when I came across this passage:

This, also, gave me pause for thought. Of course it could be part of the story but since no-one else in the scene remarks on it, I assume there has been a textual error. I suspect there was no beretta on the table by the hymn books, but rather a biretta.

The one is a weapon made by one of the oldest gunsmiths in Italy, and popular in midcentury thrillers. The other is a form of clerical headgear worn by Catholic clergy.

I thought originally that it was a variant spelling I didn’t know. After all, they are both Italian words, and English has not always incorporated words using only one spelling. But I could not find any reference to the hat spelled “beretta”. So I concluded that there had been another mistake in the typesetting.

This is a pleasing error for more than one reason. Firstly, because both words are clues to the character of the clergyman about to appear in the scene. Although the paragraph suggests this is a perfectly average clerical house, the existence of a biretta is supposed it distinguish it from other rectories. The wearing of a biretta by a clergyman of the Church of England indicates distinctly Catholic or High Church leanings, especially in this period. This later becomes an important part of both the plot, as does the fact that this parish has recently resumed the use of the sacrament of confession. It’s not quite so dramatic a clue as the presence of a beretta might be, but it is certainly a part of the murder plot.

Secondly, I like this error because it also suggests an emendation which has been made by the typesetter. The lack of capitalization (“Beretta” takes a capital letter, as does the “Colt” which appears correctly elsewhere in the text), and the fact that this error appears twice in the text, suggest deliberate alteration. The person setting the type must have assumed that “biretta” was simply bad spelling, or a misreading of the manuscript, and altered it to what they assumed the writer had meant.

In doing so, they revealed their expectations of the genre, and perhaps their previous experience of crime novels. They do co-exist in some novels, no doubt, but birettas and berettas suggest different subgenres of crime. A reader confronted by the name “Beretta” without further comment might be expected to distinguish it by name from a Smith & Wesson or a Walther PPK, whilst one who is told a “biretta” was on the table should probably mentally contrast it with a mitre, a shovel hat and a preaching scarf.

Just as the error in Killer Dolphin suggested a geographical misunderstanding, I think this one indicates a understanding of genre, and possibly time. Marsh writes the kind of novel where being able to tell the religious tendencies of someone from their clothes might help you in solving crime, but the typesetter thought they were in a novel where telling firearms apart was more useful. It’s possible that this also reflects a change in decades, to a period when the latter knowledge was more widespread amongst readers of crime fiction than the former. The typography of the novel seems to be yearning to be free of the British Golden Age, and to rush into the American Hard-Boiled era.

Some classic Golden Age murder to be expected here. Brick chimneys, knot-garden overlooked by numerous windows, creeper providing external vertical axis. The Tudor-style beams and pseudo-Jekyll garden mark the building out as 1930s pastiche of the architecture of the Old Time. Beside the decanter in the study is an electric bell-push with a motto in black-letter calligraphy, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep”. Last thing at night the servants turn the keys in the locks of the downstairs rooms, securing them from the corridor side. Footsteps pad down the landing, and the carpet makes it easier for those in neighbouring rooms to pretend they didn’t hear anything. The investigation will later reveal an extra-marital affair, but not the one everyone expected. It’s Ngaio gently mocking Agatha territory. Called something like “Death in the Aforesaid Manor”.

Open-air stuff this, English vista, buildings in the distance. It suggests a couple of possibilities. Firstly a huntin’ or racin’ murder: “A Sporting Chance” or “Where the Buck Stops”. In the former, at least one character swathed in Prince of Wales check. Disagreement over whether fillies like being called fillies, and at what age it starts to sound unkindly satirical. The hero is taken to a Commedia del’ Arte performance, and entertains himself by working out what each set of odds would be if all this hand-waving was happening in the Ring at Newmarket. If it’s the latter instead, there’s an old Colonel who makes a point of wearing flat buttons on his hunting pinks, “Because everybody round here knows who me family are, and if they don’t I’m not letting ‘em get close enough to find out from me haberdashery.” The people who’ve bought Long Grange think it’s terrible the way these animal activists and saboteurs are allowed to do whatever they please. The Colonel disagrees; he quite enjoys “a lively weekend of sabs versus sahibs”, even if they don’t have an inkling about proper skirmish tactics.

Intense, Calvinistic little murders, I suspect. A style influenced by Donna Tartt’s first novel – what’s that line about yearning for the austere Anglican cadences of Hampden and being deaf to the sweet, dark rhythms of little mission towns... Lots of mentioning that they live at the bottom of the hill. “Our parents and grandparents used to worry so much about casting the first stone,” says a girl, “But I suppose Shirley Jackson solved all that for good.” Epigraphs from the more worrying bits of Pilgrim’s Progress. Maybe called “Absolute for Death” or “And I Saw There Was A Way”

Highly-wrought, self-consciously artificial crimes, with a touch of the shadow of Empire catching up with characters. Descriptions of light through leaves. A body in, under or thrown off the pagoda, obviously. Rather a lot of epigraphs, all from poetry, though whether from Basho or The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a matter of taste. The sort of thing Hector Hugh Munro might have written if he’d landed up in the mid twentieth century. “The Sound of Waters” or “In a Green Shade”.

Another classic: the British institution in crisis murder. Late Golden Age, early second generation. The sort of thing P.D. James and Cyril Hare made central to their careers. Lots of descriptions of the buildings, and how the various rooms are now put to different uses. A useful plot hinge is the fact that they now cost an awful lot to maintain and repair, whilst the land they stand on is much more valuable then anyone could have dreamed when the institution was founded. There are factions and disagreements about the future direction things should go in. The crime forces us to weigh justice to the individual against the interests of the college/ chambers/ chapel etc. Perhaps “In Quad”, or, if set in an ecclesiastical foundation, probably “A Cloistered Virtue” (without epigraph) or if in the law some complete butchery of Latin in a pun like “De Mortuaries” or “Decree Nisi Bonum”

Breezy murders with games laid on for the guests here. Hearty girls in tennis shorts, boys in sweaters and cocktails before dinner. “We’re all down here for the weekend,” she laughed, “But we’re not all the weekending type!” One awkward intellectual boy who quotes John Betjeman mordantly but still falls in love. The detective is called J.H. Donne, and has to keep reminding people it’s pronounced “like the colour, not like the professor”. The cook makes these really remarkable concoctions of fruit and cream, all whipped up and chilled. They’re so refreshing after a day outside, and are known as Flannelled Fools. In terms of titles, “Anyone for Murder?” or “French Windows Ajar”.

Charming, coquettish murders here. Crimes with fair prospects and possibly a prettyish sort of a little wilderness. Deaths in between risqué Regency goings on. An argument breaks out over whether lansquenet should be generally played instead of faro. The hero says of his best friend “The poor fellow is so put-about, he don’t know whether he’s eloping or deloping.” The hero himself always makes sure to be wearing trousers whenever there’s any danger the party will end up at Almack’s. There are rumours that he has “caused positively acres of green gowns, my dear.” It is all monstrous diverting. The title would need to be something like “A Flinter for a Flirt”, or “A Very Petty Mort”

Rather over-cooked Gothic killings. Possibly even with a “k” at the end. (If it has the extra letter, at least one character is obliged to be a witch.) The novel is very aware that Poe wrote detective fiction as well as horror, and seems keen to repair the dissociation of those sensibilities. May end up in YA or fantasy in the attempt. Mandrakes are definitely involved somehow. Is “dark cottagecore” meaningfully distinct from “witchcore?” Only the readers can decide. To be entitled “A Box of Wormseed” or “Whither the Raven”

Time murders here. J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time filtered through Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Children of Green Knowe, picking up on the enchanted midcentury time/space stuff which Agatha and Dorothy bounced off in Sleeping Murder and The Documents in the Case. A vague sense that the solution to the mystery doesn’t clear up the emotional atmosphere which the novel has created. The ending is either consolatory or in need of consolation. Called “The Clock Upbraids” or “Cancel Half A Line”.

The classic late-C20th academic murder in its natural habitat - densely-theorised deconstructionist killings. Includes late 1980s feminist murders. “Did you see the head of philosophy chairing that meeting? She made me wonder if Bertrand Russell actually wrote a book called Power Dressing.” Includes a few pages, which most readers skip, in which two characters argue about whether such a thing as a “clue” can exist in a world where the relationship between signifier and signified has been shown to be arbitrary. They’re wrong to skip that bit, though, because the writer has put more plot secrets in there than Austen put in Miss Bates’ monologues. Such books have to be called things like “Death of the Auteur” or “Jouissance de La Tec”

Aha, an inviting but lethal spot, this. Specialist, cultivated murders. Abstruse knowledge mixed with personal obsession. Did you know that laurels emit very faint traces of cyanide when broken? The protagonist’s uncle certainly knows. Victorian collectors used them for killing butterflies, because that way they die with their wings outstretched. “You take care, old son. With a mind like yours it could be only one step from botany to Botany Bay.” The gates make one think it was accident that Marvell’s address to that enamoured lady combined the image of iron gates (or grates) of life with the growth of his vegetable love. Two variations on the same basic title: “More Kinds of Ivy”, or “Each After His Kind”.

Some crimes in a small family hotel. Strong flavour of Cyril Hare and Mrs Pargeter. The cracking veneer of respectability emphasized by the polite address at dinner. Separate tables, of course. “He will always ask if there’s any chance of kedgeree for breakfast this Saturday, so kind of him, I used to think he was greedy but it’s just to show he thinks we’re the sort of place that might serve it.” The smoking room has so many retired military men that it resembles that line in Anthony and Cleopatra: “Call to me all my sad captains.” And we all know how that ended. (Though as a matter of fact, the Major has no right to that rank.) In terms of title, “Mark the Bottle” or perhaps “ No Respecter of Persons”.

Gunshots at night blamed on poachers. Stolen diamond necklaces which were fakes in the first place. Is it really adultery if he’s married to one of the family? It rains a great deal, and this means the clumps of rhododendron play an outsize role in the plot. “This estate her fiancé has up north of the border – is it Scots baronial or Scotch mist?” A pack of entitled (in every sense) cousins. At certain times of day the sun turns the upper windows into a one-way mirror, which is convenient or inconvenient, depending on your point of vantage. Likely titles include “The Guinea Stamp” or “Glee in Hall”.

Haunted, obviously. Late Golden Age, lethally wistful and the plot interspersed with midcentury dance tunes (”Apres la guerre, there’ll be a good time everywhere”, “In the mountain greenery where God makes the scenery”) There’s an implausibly handsome nephew who’s always on hand when he’s needed. Much in the plot hinges on the fact that pearls take their lustre from being worn next to the skin. Everyone remembers the grandfather who went to Spain to fight in the 30s, but it turns out not everyone remembers which side he went to join. A certain sub du Maurier tone to proceedings. Possible titles “Debs and the Maiden” or “Those in Glass Houses”

Trollope has one claim to attention which the others I mentioned don’t: people actually set their own stories in the world he’d invented. The “Barsetshire” novels depict life in an imagined English county somewhere in the West Country. Much of the “action” of the works happens in and around the cathedral town of Barchester. The sleepy, old-world quality of the place is emphasized by the way life keeps being disrupted by forces from outside. A new bishop is appointed and comes down to Barchester accompanied by his liberal opinions, his power-hungry wife and his Evangelical chaplain. A local alms-house attracts the unwelcome attention of a reforming newspaper in London. A local clergyman is recalled to his post, and returns from Italy with a wastrel of a son and a vamp of a daughter. The novels are often about change, rather than provincial stasis, but this technique of contrast means that many people remember them as about a quiet, forgotten England.

They were formative for me in various ways, not least the BBC adaptation of the first two books – The Warden and Barchester Towers – which we had on video when I was a youngster. The TV series is entitled The Barchester Chronicles and is a complete joy. (Or possibly it got me at such an impressionable age that I can’t see its flaws.) The scripts were written by Alan Plater, who wrote the novel The Beiderbecke Tapes as well as a lot more scripts. The quiet clergyman Mr. Harding is played by Donald Pleasence, his irascible colleague the Archdeacon is played by Nigel Hawthorne and the bishop’s wife is Geraldine McEwan. It is all, as you can imagine from those few names, magnificent. The bishop, who is torn between being domineered over by his wife and his chaplain, is Clive Swift, apparently practising to be cast in Keeping Up Appearances. I would say that Geraldine McEwan is warming up for her central role in Mapp and Lucia, but that would imply there was something unfinished about her performance here, which there is not. And the creepy, plotting chaplain Obadiah Slope is brought to life by Alan Rickman. If whoever cast him as Professor Snape had not once seen him stalking round the gothic architecture of Barchester with his black coat flapping, or watched him denouncing his fellow clergymen from the pulpit, I would be very surprised. Slope is more oily and ingratiating than Snape, but Rickman really looks as if he developed the Potions master from his earlier role. Imagine Snape enunciating the words “meretricious melody” and you’ll have some sense of Slope’s impact on a viewer.

Back to Barchester on paper, though. Trollope’s fictional setting was so effective that people began dropping it into their own work. Msgr. Ronald Knox, the member of the Detection Club who the Ten Commandments of the genre, wrote an entire novel of pastiche, entitled Barchester Pilgrimage, some years on from Trollope’s characters. M.R. James wrote a horror story called “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”. J.L. Carr, he of A Month in the Country, apparently has a novella which involves a football team from Barsetshire. Angela Thirkell did it most extensively, with a whole series of “Barsetshire” novels, set in a contemporary version of the county and emphasizing the way the world had changed. There are a surprising number of writers who’ve either mentioned the name, made a casual allusion, or borrowed Barchester and Barsetshire on a slightly longer-term basis. The Archers is set in Borsethire, come to that. (As it sounds, I have a file of notes for a book on the subject, which will probably be my next-but-two. I need to go through Narnia and Amalfi to get to Barchester).

I’d like to explore three small examples of writers borrowing Barchester. They are by no means as elaborate as Thirkell’s, James’ or Knox’s use of the setting. Their brevity makes them interesting other reasons: they show how pervasive Barchester was in the imagination of writers in the twentieth century, and how writers could assume their readers would understand what an allusion to it implied.

The first is a short story by Agatha Christie, which was published in 1928, under the title “The Wasps’ Nest”. (I will avoid revealing the end of the story – I have mixed feeling about “spoilers”, but it’s perfectly possible to avoid one here.) It begins in an English country garden:

Out of the house came John Harrison and stood a moment on the terrace looking out over the garden. He was a big man with a lean, cadaverous face. His aspect was usually somewhat grim but when, as now, the rugged features softened into a smile, there was something very attractive about him.

John Harrison loved his garden, and it had never looked better than it did on this August evening, summery and languorous. The rambler roses were still beautiful; sweet peas scented the air.

A well-known creaking sound made Harrison turn his head sharply. Who was coming in through the garden gate? In another minute, an expression of utter astonishment came over his face, for the dandified figure coming up the path was the last he expected to see in this part of the world.

‘By all that’s wonderful,’ cried Harrison. ‘Monsieur Poirot!’

But yes, it is Poirot himself. The great detective admits he finds the weather and the garden a bit much, and accepts some refreshment. His host remarks that it is surprising to see Poirot out of his milieu:

‘Alas, my moustaches are limp. It is this heat!’

‘And what brings you into this quiet spot?’ asked Harrison as he dropped into another chair. ‘Pleasure?’

‘No, mon ami, business.’

‘Business? In this out-of-the-way place?’

Poirot nodded gravely. ‘But yes, my friend, all crimes are not committed in crowds, you know?’

Their conversation turns to the presence of wasps, and the fact that a mutual acquaintance is going to do Harrison the favour of sorting out a wasps’ nest in the garden. He is going to use petrol, but as Poirot comments:

‘There is another way, is there not?’ asked Poirot. ‘With cyanide of potassium?’

Harrison looked a little surprised. ‘Yes, but that’s rather dangerous stuff. Always a risk having it about the place.’

Poirot nodded gravely. ‘Yes, it is deadly poison.’ He waited a minute and then repeated in a grave voice, ‘Deadly poison.’

‘Useful if you want to do away with your mother-in-law, eh?’ said Harrison with a laugh.

It is during this discussion that we discover where the story is set. This is not simply a garden anywhere in England:

But Hercule Poirot remained grave. ‘And you are quite sure, Monsieur Harrison, that it is with petrol that Monsieur Langton is going to destroy your wasps’ nest?’

‘Quite sure. Why?’

‘I wondered. I was at the chemist’s in Barchester this afternoon. For one of my purchases I had to sign the poison book. I saw the last entry. It was for cyanide of potassium and it was signed by Claude Langton.’

Harrison stared. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘Langton told me the other day that he’d never dream of using the stuff; in fact, he said it oughtn’t to be sold for the purpose.’

Poirot reveals that he has come down to the country in order to prevent a murder, and warns Harrison about his friend:

‘I mean,’ said Poirot, and his voice had a new note in it, ‘that a man may conceal his hate till the proper time comes.’

‘Hate?’ Harrison shook his head and laughed.

‘The English are very stupid,’ said Poirot. ‘They think that they can deceive anyone but that no one can deceive them. The sportsman – the good fellow – never will they believe evil of him. And because they are brave, but stupid, sometimes they die when they need not die.’

I’ll leave the story there, since there’s no need to give the ending away in order to consider the mention of Trollope’s cathedral town. Perhaps this is simply Christie plucking a name from the air; after all, it does not affect the plot. However, I think it adds a tinge of the atmosphere she is sketching very quickly. The idyllic description of an English country garden, which is itself being observed by the owner, is followed by the appearance of Poirot and the comment that he is out of place in this scene. Then the emphasis Poirot lays on the English character and how different it is to his way of looking at the world. Barchester here seems to underline the particular kind of Englishness of the setting.

It is not the England of London, where Harrison met Poirot and Langton at a dinner party. It is not the rural England of Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” novels, or Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. It is a provincial England of gardens. In fact, Poirot has seen somewhere and deduced something in London which will have a bearing on what happens that afternoon in the garden. The mention of Barchester helps build the contrast between the plot’s locations. Perhaps “simply a garden anywhere in England” was in fact the right term for it. When “The Wasps’ Nest” was published, Christie had not written her first Miss Marple novel, or her first collection of Marple stories. There had been a story featuring her the previous year, and I wonder whether this vein of provincial English detective fiction, which she developed in the Marple stories in contrast to the Poirot stories, was developed partly inspired by Barchester. Or at least, when she took her work in that direction, she sometimes used Barchester as a mental reference point.

In the late 1940s Enid Blyton produced Third Year at Malory Towers. She had written the St. Clare’s series in the first half of the decade, and would complete Malory Towers by the early 1950s. It has the familiar combination of schoolgirl japes and mild moral dilemmas, all rolling along with the established characters meeting a few new arrivals. This, incidentally, is the Malory Towers book in which the horse-mad Bill is introduced, and Zerelda the American appears. Darrell has been hoping to get into the lacrosse team, as an important match is coming up. She finally succeeds, though she is initially disappointed because she looks for her name amongst the reserves rather than the main team. You will probably have guessed where the opposing side come from:

It was a lovely thing to Darrell at that moment. She thought she had never been so happy in her life before—just when she had felt so disappointed and miserable, too! She was almost in tears when she saw the pleasure and pride of the others. “Why, they must like me an awful lot!” she thought, happily. “Oh, I do hope I play well on Thursday. If only we can beat Barchester! We haven’t for a whole year.”

She could hardly wait till Thursday came—but it dawned at last, sunny and clear—the ideal day for a match. It was a home match, and as it was the day before breaking up, all girls who wished to could watch it. Most of them turned up to cheer the Barchester girls when they arrived in their coach. Then they all streamed to the field to find seats on the wooden forms.

It ends with Darrell scoring the winning goal, and general jubilation. I find this mention of Barchester striking because it is relatively blank. There is nothing particular about the Barchester girls; no particular plot-line or atmosphere which requires them to be from Barchester, the name is simply mentioned a number of times. I mentioned that this is the third in the series, and Blyton had already written the five St. Clare’s novels because this adds to the mild bafflement. Barchester is not named in the other series, nor the two preceding Malory Towers books. If this were her first school series, or the first book in a new one, it would make slightly more sense. Some writers work in material from an author who has influenced them whilst establishing their fictional setting, and then leave it behind as their develops. Reginald Hill’s “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels, for example, owe a fair amount to Dorothy L. Sayers’ books in the early volumes. Simon Brett has done this twice; both his “Mrs. Pargeter” series and his “Fethering” series begin with books which use influence from Sayers’ work to jump-start the setting. I speculated above that Christie may have done something in the same line (but much fainter) when she set “The Wasps’ Nest” near Barchester and then developed St Mary Mead. No such thing going on here. I even double-checked the dates on Angela Thirkell’s “Barsetshire” novels against Malory Towers, in case I’d misremembered and Thirkell had just started her series whilst Blyton was writing hers, and she’d borrowed the idea third-hand. No, Thirkell had been going since the 1930s, and there is no obvious big shift in the books around this time which might have caught Blyton’s attention, if she was reading Thirkell. So I think Third Year at Malory Towers is just an example of how widespread Barchester was in the world of books during the twentieth century.

The last allusion, and the one which gives this post its title, comes from an article in a literary magazine in 1960. I found it in the two-volume anthology Some Men in London: Queer Life 1945-1967, edited by Peter Parker. That collection sheds a great deal of light on various parts of books I’d previously read – notably Anthony Powell’s sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. It reprints an article written by the novelist Simon Raven for a magazine called Encounter. This was a small literary and political magazine, founded by Stephen Spender and propped up by funding from the CIA. Raven’s piece was entitled “The Male Prostitute in London”, and includes character sketches of the different “types” of men involved. Raven tells the reader that the piece is based on interviews and knowledge, which has necessitated the changing of some details to avoid identifying people. He insists that this does not make the article’s descriptions any less accurate or typical. His typology begins with Tom, a soldier whose service in London led him to spend all his wages and occasionally sell sex to make up the shortfall. There is Rodney, an assistant in a ladies’ hair and beauty emporium, who uses the money to buy luxuries. Len is an unemployed warehouse hand whose encounters combine a resentment against the well-off with a vague threat of violence if the money isn’t good enough. The penultimate character is Micky, a spiv whose involvement sits alongside other dubious employment such as running bets, carrying small quantities of drugs, and stealing. The final example, Raven emphasizes, is the most unusual:

The fifth category is that of the full-time professional male prostitute, who lives solely by his sexual trade, is anxious to improve his art and his clientele, is sometimes to be found living in very good circumstances indeed, and can often persuade a rich man, if not to set him up, at least to take him on luxurious foreign holidays. I mention this class of boy last because he is extremely rare. Among the male prostitutes, ‘part-time’ is the rule: the full-blown courtesan is not only an exception but is in many ways radically different, in outlook and accomplishment, from all the rest, save perhaps for the hairdresser, Rodney, who rather shoddily resembles him in manners and taste.

Raven continues his description, giving the figure a name:

Conrad, one of the very few full-time male prostitutes I know, is a finished article. Polished, witty, by no means unread; highly vocal and even knowledgeable about current plays, exhibitions, and scandals; a good cook, a light but sophisticated drinker; above all, to judge from his conversation, a person of inexhaustible resource in matters of sexual technique, Conrad might well be mistaken for an amusingly epicene member of an exacting cosmopolitan set – were it not for two misfortunes: he speaks no language other than English; and this he speaks with a slight lilt, of which, try how he may, he cannot rid himself and which is quite undeniably Welsh.

The article gives examples of their typical encounters, including Conrad’s: “[his] expected guest has arrived at the flat off the Edgware Road, bringing with him a bald head, no money but a sound cheque book, and a nicely bound volume of very curious pictures.” Raven emphasizes the casual nature of their involvement (apart from Conrad), and that their circumstances will soon change:

But just as pubs and bars change, so do Tom, Rodney, and Len change – change and disappear. Micky and Conrad last rather longer, because they are tough and clever; indeed Conrad, if he chooses his clientele and his lotions with care, may last until he is forty, when he will have saved enough to buy a little shop in a country town. But in this world, change is the rule: clients would soon get bored even if the boys kept their looks, and they are far from doing that. Boys will be boys indeed; but not for long.

The future outcomes of their lives are outlined: Tom will get his girl pregnant and settle down, Len will end up in prison, Micky may become addicted to drugs or dead due to his criminal connections. Raven makes one final suggestion about Micky’s prospects before imagining Conrad’s antique shop in that small provincial town:

The best one can hope is that a queer bookmaker will take a fancy to him and make him stick steadily to the business of laying small bets in the Silver Ring. The Silver Ring is about Micky’s mark in life: you need quick wits, there is some entertaining bustle and enough shady practice to keep Micky happy, and he will be following his favourite game – taking the money of fools.

Conrad will be content selling fancy brassware in Barchester. He will be able to afford a week or two at Cannes every year, remember past glories in present independence, and perhaps learn a little French at last. Having earned and deserved all he has, he is careful, in the Welsh way of his Welsh fathers, to keep it.

The character sketches of these five “typical” male prostitutes end here, with Conrad living quietly in Barchester. Raven is surely amused at the image he has conjured up, of a male “courtesan” retiring to peddle bibelots in the shadow of the cathedral. One can imagine George Pillson from the Tilling novels picking up an objet d’art from Conrad’s shop whilst on a trip, and passing it off back home as inherited from a distant aunt. Perhaps Conrad would find himself outbid at auction by Hugo Tolland from A Dance to the Music of Time, still running his exclusive interior décor business accompanied by the large, quiet friend he met in the army. The moral earnestness and clerical setting of Trollope’s Barchester novels are part of the point of the joke: Raven is deliberately imagining a character with an “unsuitable” past slipping into into those respectable precincts.

The provincial quality of Barchester seems significant too. Conrad has presumably left London because Barchester is cheaper to live, but also because he has retired from his previous life. No-one in the new town will know what he did in the city, and he can make a new persona for himself. Rather like Poirot coming down to Barchester from London in “The Wasps’ Nest”, bringing some clues discovered there to the garden of his unsuspecting host, Conrad’s appearance in the cathedral town depends on London secrets.* Both emphasize the calm of Barchester in contrast to the whirl of London, and both imply that calm could be thrown into turmoil by a man stepping off the London train with a couple of documents in his travelling case. They rework, in rather different ways, that tension which is present in the original Barchester novels.

In fact, the distinction between London and the provinces may have been very much on Simon Raven’s mind when he wrote that article. It was about that time (to within a year or so) that he himself agreed to leave London permanently. His publisher, Anthony Blond, offered him a regular wage to write, on the understanding that he went to live elsewhere. Raven’s previous career had included racing debts, love affairs with both sexes, a near court-martialling for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” (he was allowed to resign instead to avoid the public scandal) and a chaotically hedonistic orientation to life. Blond evidently thought that he would settle down to work if he was banished from the capital. Perhaps Raven was pondering the idea of dubious Londoners relocating to provincial towns with a personal application. In fact, more than a decade after this article, he became entangled with Trollope’s novels in a practical and lucrative way. Raven was commissioned to write the scripts for the BBC’s 1970s TV version of the “Palliser” novels about politics and public life.

But I must admit I’m less interested in what the allusion might have meant to Raven privately than what is suggests about readers at the time. He could obviously rely on the audience for his article recognizing the reference to Trollope; appreciating both the atmosphere it summoned up, and the slyly comic image of Conrad retiring to that particular town. Like the Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton references, it’s intriguing because it’s so brief. These allusions don’t read as if they’re intended to be literary decoration or cultured nods to “the classics”. They’re mentions of an easily available and casually shared literary landscape. During much of the twentieth century, whether you were reading about inventive methods of murder, school-girl lacrosse matches, or gay life in London, you were never that far from Barchester.

However, Dead Man’s Folly has an intriguing bit of Cold War puzzle hidden inside it. I find this one of her most fascinating novels, for a number of reasons. It’s clearly about her own house in the country (down to the description of the Palladian façade and the placement of the boathouse), it’s a novel in which the most significant murder is only deduced to have happened, and the body is never “seen” by the reader, and it’s one of those mid-century reworkings of Jane Eyre which almost constitute a subgenre in themselves. The novel starts with Poirot being called down to a country house by Ariadne Oliver. She has been invited to organise a “murder mystery treasure hunt” for the village fête to be held in the house’s grounds, on the grounds that her celebrity as a detective novelist (and possibly a self-mocking self-portrait of Christie) and her invention make her suitable for this job. She calls in Poirot because she feels that something is going on behind the arrangements for the fête and the treasure hunt. She has the impression that she’s being nudged in various directions, though she can’t pin down who is doing it, so that the occasion might set up the circumstances for a real crime.

In explaining all this, Ariadne Oliver tells Poirot about the fictional scenario:

‘Well, it’s like this. There’s Peter Gaye who’s a young Atom Scientist and he’s suspected of being in the pay of the Communists, and he’s married to this girl, Joan Blunt, and his first wife’s dead, but she isn’t, and she turns up because she’s a secret agent, or perhaps not, I mean she may really be a hiker – and the wife’s having an affair, and this man Loyola turns up either to meet Maya, or to spy upon her, and there’s a blackmailing letter which might be from the housekeeper, or again it might be the butler, and the revolver’s missing, and as you don’t know who the blackmailing letter’s to, and the hypodermic syringe fell out at dinner, and after that it disappeared…’

Mrs Oliver came to a full stop, estimating correctly Poirot’s reaction. ‘I know,’ she said sympathetically. ‘It sounds just a muddle, but it isn’t really – not in my head – and when you see the synopsis leaflet, you’ll find it’s quite clear.

As ever, Mrs. Oliver seems to suffer from the same problem as many boxers, chefs and actors: she can do it all splendidly in practice, but she can’t talk about it in a way which sounds coherent to anyone else. The names and relationships of the characters in the murder mystery treasure hunt are a little clearer when she takes Poirot to the house to see the items and documents in the case:

The three of them went across the hall and into a small room furnished plainly as a business office. ‘Lethal weapons to your left,’ observed Captain Warburton, waving his hand towards a small baize-covered card table. On it were laid out a small pistol, a piece of lead piping with a rusty sinister stain on it, a blue bottle labelled Poison, a length of clothes line and a hypodermic syringe.

‘Those are the Weapons,’ explained Mrs Oliver, ‘and these are the Suspects.’ She handed him a printed card which he read with interest.

Suspects

Estelle Glynne – a beautiful and mysterious young woman, the guest of

Colonel Blunt – the local Squire, whose daughter

Joan – is married to

Peter Gaye – a young Atom Scientist.

Miss Willing – a housekeeper.

Quiett – a butler.

Maya Stavisky – a girl hiker.

Esteban Loyola – an uninvited guest.

Poirot blinked and looked towards Mrs Oliver in mute incomprehension. ‘A magnificent Cast of Characters,’ he said politely.

There is a lot to ponder here. Estelle Glynne, for example, might remind the reader of Miss Havisham’s beautiful but toxic adopted daughter Estella, but also sounds an awful lot like East Lynne, the stupendously successful Victorian novel and play about a woman’s hidden identity. Esteban Loyola is a striking person to be found at an English country house, since his surname might well evoke St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the order of Jesuits. During the 1580s, when we are told the house in Dead Man’s Folly was originally built (before burning down and being rebuilt), Jesuit priests were often sent into England to tend to Catholic families and to gather intelligence. The name hints at Renaissance espionage and hidden compartments in English country houses.

Some of the rest of the characters are apparently cratylic names, which sum up their characteristics or their role. Quiett is the butler and Miss Willing the housekeeper, just like Mrs Loveit and Sir Fopling Flutter in Restoration comedy. Colonel Blunt apparently falls into the same category, as a bluff straight-forward soldier of the older generation. With the young people, though, we arrive at the Cold War. To be an “Atom Scientist” in the 1950s was to implicitly be involved in Britain’s (or America’s) nuclear weapons programme. To modern readers, the nuclear element of the Cold War is probably associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Chernobyl disaster, but neither of those had happened by the time Christie was writing Dead Man’s Folly. The book was published in 1956, at the point when nuclear stand-off had not become a normal state of the international order. The key events for the nuclear imagination in this period would have been the dropping of atomic weapons on Japan and the spying cases which punctuated the race between scientists in the east and west.

This is why “Atom Scientist” would not have signalled particle physics to Christie’s contemporaries. C.P. Snow’s The New Men had been published in 1954, a novel which described the inside of the British nuclear programme and a lightly fictionalised spying case. Klaus Fuchs had been arrested in 1950 for passing secrets about atomic weapons research to the Soviets, and the Cambridge Five were still partly operational. The five in question – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – were gradually discovered to have been recruited by Soviet intelligence agents whilst at Cambridge University. This case was particularly shocking to British people at the time, because the men were such a part of the traditional establishment, Maclean was a head of department in the Foreign Office, Burgess worked for the BBC (and also the Foreign Office), Philby was a senior member of the British intelligence service, Cairncross was a senior civil servant, and Blunt was a diplomat, Professor of Art History and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Their combination of upper-class milieu, sexual intrigue and espionage made them both glamorous and horrifying to the public, and subsequent fiction has paid them a great deal of attention. By the time Dead Man’s Folly was published, Maclean and Burgess had defected to the Soviet Union and were publicly known to have been spies. Blunt had been recalled from his embassy and interrogated, but publicly (and erroneously) cleared.

The surname of young Peter Gaye the Atom Scientist might raise a readerly eyebrow; the word “gay” was less widespread that in modern English, but it already possessed the modern meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary provides an example from the diary of the actor Kenneth Williams: “Met a charming young RAF fellow there obviously gay who played Debussy’s Bergamasque with more understanding than I’ve heard for many a day”. Given the defection of the famously homosexual Guy Burgess, and the frequent public discussion of homosexuality as a vulnerability in state officials, a young man working on atomic research with the name “Gaye” suggests that Christie’s imagination was somewhere in the vicinity of the Cambridge Five.

Moreover, the Atom scientist is married to a woman called Joan Blunt. This surname would also catch the reader’s attention, since she shares it with Anthony Blunt one of the Cambridge Spies. Blunt did not confess to being a Soviet agent until the 1960s, and his actions were kept secret from the public until the later 1970s. However, he was known to have been a friend of Guy Burgess, and after the latter’s defection, as I mentioned, he was suspended from the British embassy in Washington and (unsuccessfully) questioned. The maiden name of Peter Gaye’s wife seems far too apt to be a coincidence. “Colonel Blunt” may well be a cratylic name when applied to him, but it looks remarkably spyish when attached to a woman marrying Gaye the atomic scientist.

Incidentally, I think it’s possible that Christie did not deliberately plan all this out. Her imagination may have simply felt that these were suitable names when she was thinking up an espionage plot, particularly one which was intended to be a “mystery within a mystery” joke. The outline of the plot given by Oliver to Poirot indicates a bit of affectionate fun with the more lurid end of mystery writing. Perhaps she was simply in a hurry and the names fell together. Which leaves an intriguing question open: was Christie accusing Anthony Blunt of being a spy? His was a celebrated case, and he was publicly known to be under suspicion. I suspect she was simply borrowing names from a well-known case, but it remains a fact that Blunt’s name is in the espionage plot Christie cooked up as a joke, and then Blunt turned out to be a spy after all.

There is one final detail about the passage, which qualifies Dead Man’s Folly as a Cold War novel. Unlike the question of Blunt’s guilt, I don’t think it can be explained away by Christie’s capacious imagination working at top speed. This is either a (nearly literally) incredible coincidence, and I am seeing tigers in the pattern of the rug, or it is a deliberate puzzle left there by Agatha Christie. I have been discussing Joan as if her surname was Blunt but if Joan Blunt married Peter Gaye, she would be known as Joan Gaye. She isn’t listed under that name on the dramatis personae, but it is implied. The letters of Joan Gaye’s name are these:

J-O-A-N-G-A-Y-E

They are an almost exact anagram of a very famous Cold War name:

E-N-O-J-A-G-A-Y

As readers will know, the Enola Gay was the name of the US military aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was, in fact, named after another woman, the mother of the pilot. Perhaps the name sound similar enough that Christie accidentally, whilst she was thinking about Cold War espionage and atomic weaponry, invented “Joan Gaye”. She may even have invented the names of Colonel Blunt, Peter Gaye and Joan in a slightly different form and then noticed that they could be tweaked so they work as an anagram. But I suspect not. I think when she came to inventing a mock-mystery about Cold War, Christie hid her own small atomic secret in the novel.

So, Books in the Scullery. It’s called that because my desk, where I do a lot of my writing, is in the scullery of our somewhat ramshackle Victorian house in the Midlands. It’s in between the back wall of the kitchen chimney and the door to the garden. Behind me is a wall with a small window, through which can usually be seen spindly black twigs or the top of some lilacs, depending upon the season. The rest of the room is mostly encumbered with things we moved in here whilst clearing other rooms for Christmas, but which I have not yet sorted. The desk is in a similar state, piled with books which I moved there for a reason, but which I have not taken back to the shelves (or the rooms) where they belong, Glancing to left or right, I can just about remember what I was writing about when I brought that volume of the medieval mystery plays in, or that spy thriller, or that history of the English country house.

For a few years now I’ve been concentrating on writing books, which resulted in Allusion in Detective Fiction, Witchcraft and Paganism in Midcentury Women’s Detective Fiction, and three books on Narnia starting with Paths in the Snow. It has been great fun working on all these books, but there are so often ideas which I didn’t get to chase because they were much smaller in scale. The apparent puzzle about nuclear spies hidden in an Agatha Christie novel. The appearance of Barchester in a book about gay men’s culture in the 1950s. The difference between the opera which Lucia and Georgie watch in the Tilling novels, and the opera staged in the 1980s TV adaptation. I didn’t have a place to follow up these odd by-ways and peculiar turnings of literature. Now I do, and I’m looking forward immensely to writing about them.

Books in the Scullery will also give me a chance to write about the literary qualities of books. That might sound a foolish or redundance thing to say, but such a lot of modern writing about books, from academic literary criticism, to online book buzz, to cultural commentary, doesn’t seem concerned with them as books. They’re treated as moral positions, as containers for the right (or wrong) ideas, as vectors of trends or demographic evidence. The writing I often like most looks at books as literary artefacts, whose meaning is bound up with their shape. A renaissance sonnet can be read as a statement on gender roles, but it can also be read as an intricate and beautiful piece of workmanship, with twists of meaning that are surprising and enjoyable. A Victorian novel might be relevant to our current political debates, but it might also be extremely relevant to its own time, and present us with the chance to be immersed in a different social world. Books are interesting for their own sake, and Books in the Scullery will let me spend time examining them.

Favourite authors will almost certainly recur. When I’m asked what my favourite authors are, I try to name the ones that I spend most time with. It’s not the only honest way to answer that question – it would be reasonable to offer names which had most influence on you in the past, or names which you think represent the absolute best you’ve ever read. But for me, a favourite author is one I find myself returning to over and over again. Those would probably include the following: Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Powell, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, William Dunbar, C.S. Lewis, Patrick O’Brien, Georgette Heyer, John Le Carre, E.F. Benson, Elizabeth Fair and John Gower. Honourable mentions should go to E.M. Delafield, Milton, Angela Thirkell, J.R.R. Tolkien, P.D. James, Chaucer, Ngaio Marsh and Cyril Hare.

If those fill you with horror or boredom, I must apologize. I think they’ll probably keep coming up. Firstly because I find them endlessly interesting, so I’ll want to comment on them. Secondly, because they provide so much of the furniture of my mind – I’m likely to notice that a certain phrase or character in a newly-read book has a parallel in Anthony Powell or Elizabeth Fair. Thirdly, because rereading favourite books is a delight. To me, literary criticism’s most characteristic move is to show the reader a work or a page (or even a line) they already know, and then to show it to them in a new light. When the trick is done well, it persuades the reader that the work is even more complex and enjoyable than they had thought. Rereading a favourite author like Austen or Benson can produce this effect, as connections and subtleties become evident which were missed in previous reading.

I’m hoping that conversations will ensue with those of you who join me in these explorations. Talking about books is a pleasure, and talking about favourite books to people who understand and enjoy them just as much is a real delight. I’ll be posting at least once a week, to start with. I hope you’ll drop by the scullery now and then, and we can have a chat.

Subscribe now