29 Herriott Street: by John Hutton

 

"...he had been a shade too set on making a fine figure. It was part and parcel of that immense, secret vanity of his, the vanity which had led him to avoid promotion and wilfully seek obscurity."

With a such a philosophy one can imagine the horror of Wilfred Rimmer as he is charged, condemned and hanged for the murder of his wife. The case becomes a sensation. Years later a true crime writer attempts to shed new light on the facts, but is unable to penetrate Rimmer's character, which remains active beyond the grave in the memories of those few remaining people who knew him. Worse, Rimmer's philosophy is class-based, which brings him into conflict with the pre-conceived bias of the writer. By all accounts a shabby, bespectacled and determined loser, those who knew Rimmer speak of him as a gentleman. But if he was innocent, why won't they speak to absolve him? Well, it was Rimmer's tragedy to marry above his station and everything flows from there...

A complex and infuriating first novel by John Hutton, whose observations of class hypocrisy in England set him apart from the usual run of crime and so-called literary novelists. His two books are unique in the history of post-war British literature. And make no mistake, they are literature. If only the arts knew their business. But that is covered in the novel too. Recommended.

Accidental Crimes: by John Hutton

 

Conrad Nield finds himself in a spot of bother; having given a lift to a hitchhiking girl, he leaves her stranded on a country road. When the body of a murdered girl is found nearby, Conrad lies to the police, denying he was even in the area. He becomes a person of interest and as his story unravels, so does his life, police attention impacting his marriage and his job.

More a character study than a crime novel, Accidental Crimes is a closely written account of an unpleasant character getting something of a comeuppance. Nield is a typical English Tory type - a patronising narcissist, his own worst enemy, but kept from the consequences of his actions because the suffering tends to fall on his victims; his wife, colleagues and students. In this instance, however, he oversteps the mark, with some gratifying results for the reader.

It appears that author John Hutton only penned two novels, this being his second and last, published in 1983. Which is a pity as his work seems excellent and rather timeless in its characterisations. Hutton engages the reader's antipathy towards his main character in the way other authors go for the easier option of sympathy. The book is over a generation old but still powerful both in style and intrigue. Highly recommended.

Who Killed Enoch Powell?: by Arthur Wise

The assassination is real enough, and nicely underplayed; but what follows is a grab-bag of small arms. Public disquiet leads a weak Prime Minister to appoint ex-colonial military hard-man, Colonel Monckton, to lead the investigation. Meanwhile rightist and anarchist groups seize the opportunity to cause mayhem. There are widespread race riots in London, and at Powell's funeral in Wolverhampton, leading to many casualties among minority groups. The police, desperate to contain matters, extend their own investigation across country, but the murder of Powell is still treated as a local affair, and so much of the plot falls on the shoulders of small-town Chief Inspector Taylor, who quietly pursues his leads with due diligence. Monckton by contrast cracks down with curfews, mass arrests, and eventual false flag terror tactics to consolidate his power and position. His dragnet starts out with foreigners, naturalised or otherwise, then expands to take in leftists, hippies, undesirables, and then just about anyone. In the end the entire nation is suspect because it harbours so suspicious a thing as grief.

Who Killed Enoch Powell? is a hybrid affair: part political thriller, part routine thick-ear, with a smattering of detective work thrown in to make it respectable. Wise has a habit of withholding a little too much information from the reader and for too long, resulting in an often frustrating read. However, conducting the text on a need-to-know basis is in keeping with the operation that is eventually mounted to remove Monckton from power. It falls to Taylor, an ordinary policeman, to infiltrate a military HQ and take Monckton, dead or alive. His passage is such that it is clear the operation is proceeding with no questions asked by officers, policemen and highly placed militia. Only Monckton's personal bodyguards appear to be out of the loop, a fact that seems to render them singularly incompetent. In this case the author is playing on espionage tropes; having elevated Taylor from ordinary policeman to secret agent, he then acquires Bondian skills of tradecraft, as though establishment sanction bestows superpowers. It's an amusing if rather suspect tactic, but it offers the author all the plausible deniability he needs to wrap matters up nicely.

Slow-burning to begin with, Wise builds a fair head of steam, primarily through some excellent descriptions of public disorder, and the book ends before the plotting begins to unravel. Ultimately, a beckoning strange one.

Armoured Doves: by Bernard Newman

In Newman's 1930 history's fault line is that of France and Germany; all wars are Franco-German, even if they turn global, and this simplification serves a narrative which leaves Britain and the US curiously absent. The Second World War is pushed back to the 1960s, when sufficient technical advances permit a group of rogue scientists to develop super-weapons which destroy war itself. The genius behind this innovation is subdued Hank Scorpio, Paul de Montigny, and his weapons which destroy weapons are much sought-after. But when representations from world powers take the form of family reunions it is clear that Newman has hit upon a truth uncovered by Thomas Hardy; that one coincidence is the province of an amateur and two coincidences that of a charlatan; but many coincidences co-joined, piled up into a colony, are dynastic; they are born pregnant and so are self-generating. Hence much of Armoured Doves is a family affair; missing fathers turn up as foreign ministers and presidents; wives are reformed spies. The conflicting loyalities which are subsequently thrown up are played out in the manner of soap, wherein domestic strife replaces attrition and war is an arrangement of seats at the dinner table. The endgame, in which a few European cities are sacrificed for the greater good, is eerily predictive of Fail Safe and the concept of mutually assured destruction.

But more to the point of Armoured Doves, just who was Bernard Newman? Despite being a prolific author, or perhaps because of it, his prescience smacks of an inside track. His novel Flying Saucer, issued a mere few months after the Roswell incident, suggests a Mockingbird style operation in publishing houses, given its proximity to the event. Ditto his wanderings across the globe at times of international peril - almost an on the spot fictioneer. The Blue Ants, which posits a Russo-Chinese war, was written and published while American involvement in Vietnam was at its height and at a time when tensions in South-East Asia threatened to consume the world. This all reminds me of Paul Linebarger aka Cordwainer Smith, whose US intelligence links monster his fey science fantasies.

Armoured Doves is billed as an anti-war novel, but it is of course nothing of the kind. It is rather a dossier compiled as fiction and assessing the emotional intelligence of scientists, and their dynastic possibilities.

The Silent Voice: by Christopher Hodder-Williams

Four astronauts returning from a mission to Mars are diverted from their landing at Cape Kennedy to the coast of England. Here they find there has not been a nuclear war - but the entire population believes there has been one, as if suffering some form of mass delusion. The country is under martial law; ARP wardens enforce rough justice; and columns of refugees straggle between intact cities, chewing hungrily on their stiff upper lips. The astronauts soon find it is the same across the globe. But what has gone wrong? They suspect the computers which diverted them have staged an electronic coup and that the early-stage artificial intelligence recently introduced into NASA's systems has allowed the computers to co-ordinate a sort of brain wave which maintains the delusion of war. This delusion also has the effect of wearing out brain cells, leading to extinction. After donning tin foil hats, which they wear for the duration, the astronauts confront the computers in a nuclear silo disguised as an oil rig; and the plot degenerates into a version of Fail Safe in which the computers are ultimately talked down. The narrative consists of tape recordings made by the various astronauts as they struggle through a series of mostly old-fashioned and underwhelming plot points.

Hodder-Williams started out writing aviation thrillers during the 1950's, before progressing through two apocalypse thrillers - Panic O'Clock and Chain Reaction - both in the manner of John Christopher rather than John Wyndham. These allowed him to develop a minor talent for cruelty, which he put to good use through-out the rest of his career and which marks him as an authentic fantasist in the revenge mode. He is at his most effective in realising that human emotions can withstand any catastrophe, though often in a form abbreviated by radiation or botulism or voices in the head. It is the abbreviation which concerns him; the moment of the kill. In fact, the only female character in The Silent Voice is killed twice; once so that she might have a metal plate inserted into her head, and twice so that the plate can be used to eviscerate any love interest which might interest the reader.

The Silent Voice is not a bad novel. It's quite satirical in places, such as in the use of human frailty to enforce delusion; and there is much in the climax that cannot be summarised. The computers, whose only presence is that of pain, remain discretely bundled in the ether, and the real villain of the novel is that of self-fulfilling prophecy as a form of open-source software. In this repect, Hodder-Williams really was onto something, tin foil hat or no.

Massacre in Rome (1973)

1973's Massacre in Rome is a surprisingly artful Euro co-production concerning the Ardeatine Caves massacre in 1944. The film calls to mind a later, more acclaimed film concerning a list. Except, in this instance, the list means death, not life.

 As a reprisal for the murder of 33 German soldiers by partisans in Rome, Hitler orders the execution of 330 Italians. The orders are carried out, though they prove to be a logistical nightmare. Much of the film consists of the routine compiling of this list of names; the interminable squabbling between jurisdictions; the swapping of responsibilities between ranks; and the eventual swelling of the names from the rolls of the usual suspects - petty criminals, communists and Jews. And then locating a site of execution which would also serve as a burial ground. All of this takes place in the beautiful and elegant surrounds of high art and architecture, and director George Pan Cosmatos misses no opportunity to provide brutal contrasts between human frailty and human potential. Much of the film's visual palette is an attempt to capture these contrasts, and at times it is spectacularly successful, particularly during the ambush sequence in Via Rasella.

 At the centre of it all is a splendidly robotic performance by Richard Burton as Kappler, the SS Officer with responsibility for the executions, whose self-pity degenerates into a self-serving fatalism that he wears as a badge of duty. It is a sympathetic portrait swathed in diction and middle-distance, and one of Burton's finer moments. It should be noted that this portrayal of Kappler departs from the historical truth - he was in fact an ardent and zealous Nazi. Leo McKern plays his hot-headed superior, happy to delegate the dirty jobs, but less interested in their details. His ravaged one-eyed face is perfectly evasive in this instance, happy to see and not to see as it suits. Marcello Mastroianni handles the difficult role of Father Antonelli with some sympathy; he is less successful appealing to Kappler's conscience than he is organising his frocks around Vatican indifference. In the end it is the German appeal to self-interest, with the Americans at the gates of Rome, that has more sway in determining the list.

Where Massacre in Rome falters is in its production values, which are those common to Euro co-productions during the 70s (dubbed minor parts), and in a fairly blunt script which introduces an unnecessary melodramatic twist to the end-proceedings. Still, it is full of memorable scenes, perhaps the most striking of which is Kappler instructing his officers on the task of close-range execution by picking out a junior by way of demonstration. If Massacre in Rome is remembered at all today it is perhaps that of an understudy to Schindler's List; but it tells a darker truth - that most lists mean death, not life.

Shadows in the Sun by Chad Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Oliver's odd little novella is far from being a classic, but it is certainly more original than many more acclaimed sf stories. Anthropologist Ellery finds the small Texas town of Jefferson Springs is not all it should be. None of the residents have been there longer than 15 years, and all seem peculiarly ornery. They go through the motions of being alive, until Ellery discovers they have quite another kind of life. These are not invaders - they are colonising aliens, and upon discovery they invite Ellery to join them in a sort of reverse colonising process. This leads to a will he/won't he climax in which the protagonist defers to the author, who imposes a cop-out ending as a form of meta-narrative - Oliver's experience as an anthropologist is one of brooding pessimism, here disguised as getting the girl by not getting the galaxy.