A nasty intro

We've not ventured into the teccy stuff — and my shelves groan with each addition, most recently the collected works of Mick Herron (and he's bound to get a mention somewhere down the line).

But I was considering openings for novels in that previous post. Which allows me to present you with the most gross. If this doesn't offend, nothing can.

9. Christopher Brookmyre: Quite Ugly One Morning

The entire 'Tartan Noir' thing has to be one of the most remarkable outbreaks of the last few decades in British fiction. It often gets traced back to Val McDermid, who has been knocking them out since the end of the 1970s. In her train came a whole blether of younger ones: none more successful or celebrated than Ian Rankin. Perhaps there's something adrift with the water of the Kingdom of Fife.

Ummm ... I seem to remember, a bit further back, J.I.M. Stewart (a.k.a. 'Michael Innes') who was chilling the blood pre-WW2: I particularly recall Lament for A Maker, from 1938: not to everyone's taste, very donnish, but it made me read Henryson and Dunbar (sad omissions from my 'prescribed reading):

I that in heill wes and gladnes,

Am trublit now with gret seiknes,

And feblit with infermite;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

This fals warld is bot transitory,

The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

William Dunbar there, sometime very early in the sixteenth century, defining crime fiction.

But I promised Brookmyre and some real filth. This is how Brookmyre introduced himself back and the unfortunate McGregor in 1996:

‘Jesus fuck.’

Inspector McGregor wished there was some kind of official crime scenario checklist, just so that he could have a quick glance and confirm that he had seen it all now. He hadn’t sworn at a discovery for ages, perfecting instead a resigned, fatigued expression that said, ‘Of course. How could I have possibly expected anything less?’

The kids had both moved out now. He was at college in Bristol and she was somewhere between Bombay and Bangkok, with a backpack, a dose of the runs and some nose-ringed English poof of a boyfriend. Amidst the unaccustomed calm and quiet, himself and the wife had remembered that they once actually used to like each other, and work had changed from being somewhere to escape to, to something he hurried home from.

He had done his bit for the force – worked hard, been dutiful, been honest, been dutifully dishonest when it was required of him; he was due his reward and very soon he would be getting it.

Islay. Quiet wee island, quiet wee polis station. No more of the junkie undead, no more teenage jellyhead stabbings, no more pissed-up rugby fans impaling themselves on the Scott Monument, no more tweed riots in Jenners, and, best of all, no more fucking Festival. Nothing more serious to contend with than illicit stills and the odd fight over cheating with someone else’s sheep.

Bliss.

Christ. Who was he kidding? He just had to look at what was before him to realise that the day after he arrived, Islay would declare itself the latest independent state in the new Europe and take over Ulster’s mantle as the UK’s number one terrorist blackspot.

The varied bouquet of smells was a delightful courtesy detail. From the overture of fresh vomit whiff that greeted you at the foot of the close stairs, through the mustique of barely cold urine on the landing, to the tear-gas, fist-in-face guard-dog of guff that savaged anyone entering the flat, it just told you how much fun this case would be.

McGregor looked grimly down at his shoes and the ends of his trousers. The postman’s voluminous spew had covered the wooden floor of the doorway from wall to wall, and extended too far down the hall for him to clear it with a jump. His two-footed splash had streaked his Docs, his ankles and the yellowing skirting board. Another six inches and he’d have made it, but he hadn’t been able to get a run at it because of the piss, which had flooded the floor on the close side of the doorway, diked off from the tide of gastric refugees by a draught excluder.

The postman had noticed that the door was ajar and had knocked on it, then pushed it further open, leaning in to see whether the occupant was all right. Upon seeing what was within he had simultaneously thrown up and wet himself, the upper and lower halves of his body depositing their damning comments on the situation either side of the aperture.

‘Postman must be built like the fuckin’ Tardis,’ McGregor muttered to himself, leaving vomity footprints on the floorboards as he trudged reluctantly down the hall. ‘How could a skinny wee smout like that hold so much liquid?’

Also your introduction to Glaswegian cant.

I bought my first Brookmyre — this one — at the station and magazine counter on Barking Station,  and took it to the clapped-out DMU that provided my 'service' for Crouch Hill and then home. I disgraced myself, guffawing, as we bounced and rattled to Woodgrange Park.

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Gored

Gore Vidal came to London: it must have been his last visit. He was promoting his final collection of essays.

A select group assembled in the basement of Bush House, where he was interviewed by James Naughtie. That's a bit presumptuous in itself: Vidal was never greatly to be confined by the limits of an 'interview', and pontificated in his usual acerbic generality.

I have collections of Vidal's essays here; but that's not my topic here.

8. Gore Vidal: Narratives of Empire

The curse of being an acclaimed American writer is the chimera of The Great American Novel. Nobody has ever successfully planted the flag on the top of that prominent peak; but generation-after-generation they keep trying.

Vidal went for this extended novel sequence, which developed into a heptology, seven of them,. Any one of which could stand here (and do squat, all in paperback, on the seventh shelf down behind me). The tattered state of my Burr (570-odd pages plus an afterword) shows it has been with me since the 1970s — so that was when I started on this exploration:

The publication sequence was:

• Washington DC, 1967 — but slots in as the sixth in chronology.  It is thinly-disguised autobiography of Vidal's family and youth, against the presidencies of FDR, Truman and Ike.
• Burr, 1973, was the secon in publication, but the first in chronology. Vidal, like a dog with a lamp-post, marks his territory by dedication the book to his nephews, inclding one, Burr.
• Bi-centenary year, 1976, was marked by 1876. Gore exploits that through an elaborate analogy on social divides and elctoral mayhem. This is the third in both publication and chronology.
• Fourth in publication, but second in the chronology, was Lincoln, 1984.
• For the fifth,  Empire, 1987, Vidal entered the world of the great capitalist families of the McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt era. A particular focus is the burgeoning media power of William Randolph Hearst.
• That leads naturally into the sixth, the mutual exploitation of media and government in the WW1 years and after: Hollywood, 1990. I expect many, taken by the character of Caroline Sanford, would mark this one as the pick of the litter.
• Finally, The Golden Age, 2000. Vidal takes on the then-fashionable notion that FDR manipulated US entry into WW2. Which led into the world-power era of the Cold War. Vidal gives himself a walk-on part.

As I said, anyone of those could deserve an entry in this choice.  The first and last of that order above are, arguably, the nearest to 'great literature'; and The Golden Age is Vidal's mature shot at 'The Great American Novel'. However, I'll go for Lincoln as my personal pick.

A classic starter for any fiction is the stranger moseying into town or, in Chaucer's Tales (don't worry — I'll get there!) two and a half dozen on their way out of town.

That's how Vidal gets Lincoln going. Try this:

Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch. The spidery hands showed five minutes to six.

“Wait here,” he said to the driver, who said, “How do I know you’re coming back, sir?”

At the best of times Congressman Washburne’s temper was a most unstable affair, and his sudden outbursts of rage — he could roar like a preacher anticipating hell — were much admired in his adopted state of Illinois, where constituents proudly claimed that he was the only militant teetotaller who behaved exactly like a normal person at five minutes to six, say, in the early morning of an icy winter day — of the twenty-third of February, 1861, to be exact.

“Why, you black—!” As the cry in Washburne’s throat began to go to its terrible maximum, caution, the politician’s ever-present angel, cut short the statesman’s breath. A puff of unresonated cold steam filled the space between the congressman and the Negro driver on his high seat.

Heart beating rapidly with unslaked fury, Washburne gave the driver some coins. “You are to stay here until I return, you hear me?”

“I hear you, sir.” White teeth were quickly bared and unbared in the black, cold-puckered face.

Washburne buttoned up his overcoat and stepped carefully onto the frozen mud that was supposed to be the pavement of a stately avenue leading to the squalid train depot of Washington City, capital of thirty-four United States that were now in the process of disuniting. He fluffed up his beard, hoping to better warm his face.

Washburne entered the depot as the cars from Baltimore were rattling to a halt. Negro porters were slouched along the sidings. Huge carts stood ready to be filled with Northern merchandise to be exchanged for Southern tobacco, raw cotton, food. Currently, the Southerners were saying that Washington City was the natural capital of the South. But they did not say it, if they were wise, in Washburne’s irritable Western presence.

Just past the locomotive, the representative of Illinois’s first District stationed himself in front of an empty gilded wagon whose sides were emblazoned with the name of Gautier, the town’s leading caterer, a Frenchman who was, some claimed but never he, the lost Dauphin of France.

As Washburne watched the sleepy travellers disembark, he wished that he had brought with him at least a half-dozen Federal guards. Since the guards were just coming off night duty, no one would think it odd if they should converge, in a casual sort of way, upon the depot. But the other half of the semi-official Joint Congressional Committee of Two, Senator William H. Seward of New York, had said, “No, we don’t want to draw any attention to our visitor. You and I will be enough.” Since the always-mysterious Seward had then chosen not to come to the depot, only the House of Representatives was represented in the stout person of Elihu B. Washburne, who was, suddenly, attracted to a plainly criminal threesome. To the left, a small sharp-eyed man with one hand plunged deep in his overcoat pocket where the outline of a derringer was visible. To the right, a large thickset young man with both hands in his pockets—two pistols? In the center, a tall thin man, wearing a soft slouch hat pulled over his eyes like a burglar, and a short overcoat whose collar was turned up, so that nothing was visible between cap and collar but a prominent nose and high cheekbones covered with yellow skin, taut as a drum. In his left hand he clutched a leather grip-sack containing, no doubt, the tools of his sinister trade.

As the three men came abreast of Washburne, the congressman said, “Well, you can’t fool me, Abe.

The small man turned fiercely on Washburne, hand half out of his overcoat pocket, revealing the derringer’s barrel. But the tall man said, “It’s all right, Mr. Pinkerton. This is Congressman Washburne. He’s our welcoming committee.”

Warmly, Washburne shook the hand of his old friend the President-elect of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, a fellow politician from Illinois, who was supposed to be murdered later on in the day at Baltimore.

Were I back teaching, I'd be using that as a casebook example. There's the essential racial theme established, the sense of menace, and critcal foreshadowing. Along with strong depiction of the context, and considerable characterisation lready.

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