Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sanditon – ‘I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’

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Andrew Davies, Another Lady, Georgette Heyer, Marie Dobbs, Mr Woodhouse, Sanditon

In rereading Jane Austen, we are able to experience something of that age of elegance which too often eludes us in the twentieth century. We are unrepentant about this form of escapism and turn to her six novels for relaxation… Like Mr Woodhouse, we enjoy the company of these old friends best; and though we prefer their actual company to secondhand discussions and speculations about them, anything concerning them will always hold a fascination for us…. writes Another Lady AKA Marie Dobbs.

In her An Apology from the Collaborator, included at the end of Jane Austen’s Sanditon completed by Another Lady published in 1975, Marie Dobbs admits that she offers her version for our sheer enjoyment, aware that Jane Austen’s language, integrity and meticulous technique cannot be faithfully copied.

She was too hard on herself. Marie Dobbs’ completed Sanditon is peppered with delightful passages poking fun at human vanity and folly, which feel as though they could be written by Jane Austen herself. The Miss Beauforts… were certainly no longer content to remain on their balcony now these two personable young men were to be perceived strolling about admiring the Sanditon views. Indeed, they felt a definite obligation to improve the landscape for them immediately by dotting graceful feminine silhouettes wherever they be most visible. The very next day Miss Letitia carried her easel out of doors and began moving it from sand to shingle, from hill to Terrace with tireless and unselfish activity. No concern for completing her own sketches interfered with her sense of duty to adorn whatever vista might require her presence.

There is some splendid Austen-ish dialogue too, as in this speech from Reginald Catton, one of the only two on-stage characters added by Marie Dobbs: ‘So that was Miss Denham! Predatory female – Sidney warned me. He said I would not be in the least danger from anyone else – could handle all the Miss Beauforts with ease – but Miss Denham would be hanging about me forever if once she caught sight of my barouche. I told the groom to keep it well out of sight in the stables.’ 

Reginald Catton may also remind fans of Georgette Heyer of her comic young men about town, such as Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child. Marie Dobbs makes the hero Sidney Parker resemble the witty, charming, teasing Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, but in his unassuming kind-heartedness there are echoes of Georgette Heyer’s endearing Freddy in Cotillion. The later developments of the plot come close to Heyer regency romances too – no problem for those of us who love both authors, as we must suspect Marie Dobbs did  – but perhaps some literary critics might argue that Jane Austen was intending to take a different and sharper line.

It’s difficult not to feel disappointment that Andrew Davies’ recent television adaptation of Sanditon didn’t follow the story and tone of the Another Lady/Marie Dobbs completed version. In the eleven chapters Jane Austen wrote before illness stopped her in March 1817, she set up everything we love in her other novels and Marie Dobbs fulfils the sparkling early promise with grace, respect and humour. Added to this we have in Sanditon a merciless satire of hypochondriacs and medical quackery, speaking to us all the more poignantly when we remember that Jane Austen was only four months away from her death on 18th July.

But as the ever-so-sensible heroine Charlotte says to the would-be seducer Sir Edward who has read more sentimental novels than agreed with him: ‘our taste in novels is not at all the same.’ Nor is our taste in television adaptations all the same, and this is probably a very good thing.

Albert Finney and Rosamunde Pilcher

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Alan Sillitoe, Albert Finney, Christopher Marlowe, Cornwall, German TV, Henry Fielding, Room at the Top, Rosamunde Pilcher, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Tamburlaine, Tom Jones

Albert Finney RIP – I think I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning before I saw the film (it will have had an A or an X certificate and I wouldn’t have been old enough to get into the cinema) but remember realising that the novel was something different.  And Albert Finney on film as Arthur Seaton was, well, definitive.  (I don’t know where my own copy now is, but seeing that old Pan paperback pictured this week I noticed that it really did say on the front “Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party”: I’d thought that that was just a cliché, but no, it was really used.)

An aunt took me to see Tom Jones at the cinema – another amazing Finney performance – and my copy of the book has my name and ‘1966’ written in it in her best calligraphy.  I see that the book cost a massive 8/6 – a lot for a schoolboy, so maybe she gave it to me.  I don’t know which I did first – see the film or read the book.  I’m sure I missed a lot of Henry Fielding’s jokes but I do remember the excitement of seeing as an A Level English student what a skilled writer could do with irony and description and character.  And why not go on for 800 pages?  Why stick at the 180 or 200 my usual reading matter then had?

My third Finney/literature moment was seeing him on stage at the National Theatre as Tamburlaine in 1976.  I’d read Tamburlaine and had wondered how this prolonged bombast-fest could possibly be staged (and what constitution the actor in the lead role must have!).  Well, Albert Finney was magnificent.  He made it work.  Christopher Marlowe would, I’m sure, have been delighted to see this massive anti-hero brought so compellingly to life.

Rather a different writer was Rosamunde Pilcher, who has also left us this week.  She sold 60 million books!  60 million.  Think of the sheer quantity of the pleasure she brought to her readers.  And that pleasure spread far and wide: a happy part of my Czech mother-in-law’s week would be watching Rosamunde Pilcher’s stories made by a German film company, in the most glorious Cornish settings, with Czech subtitles.  I don’t remember seeing those programmes in England but they have gone down well in Central Europe. Lots of red phone boxes and letter-boxes to remind the viewers where they are.

Must read The Shell Seekers one day.

So thanks, Albert Finney, and thanks, Rosamunde Pilcher.

 

The Case of the Prolific Penman

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Courtroom drama, Della Street, Erle Stanley Gardner, Fleeting fame, Hamilton Burger, Paul Drake, Perry Mason, Raymond Burr

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Another case of fame in a writer’s lifetime, but absence from the bookshop shelves today, is Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970). I loved his books when a schoolboy. I had quite a collection, now shrunk to the three pictured (following the domestic mishap mentioned in my post about John Creasey at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/no-longer-on-the-bookshop-shelves/).

In the 1960s he was in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific author, as I recall. Wikipedia lists over 150 of his novels, plus short stories. American editions of his books alone sold 170 million copies, and he was America’s best-selling novelist for a chunk of the 20^th century. He wrote by dictating, and sometimes had more than one book on the go at a time. Given the successful and repeated formulas of his books this might have caused confusion, but if it did I never noticed. According to his obituary in the New York Times he liked being called “the fiction factory” and even “the Henry Ford of detective novelists.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Stanley_Gardner_bibliography)

I can’t find him in first-run bookshops now – though I can still come across Perry Mason films late at night in the upper reaches of my cable channels.

The ever-present characters: Perry Mason, the intrepid and skilful defence lawyer, who always unmasks the real villain in a courtroom climax, to the relief of his unjustly accused client; Della Street, his loyal and efficient secretary; Paul Drake, the private detective who has an apparently inexhaustible number of employees able to drop everything to help Perry, with hardly ever a mention of a bill being presented; and Hamilton Burger, the hapless District Attorney who loses to Perry Mason almost every time. I came to feel sorry for Hamilton Burger. My own image of Perry Mason wasn’t the Raymond Burr of the TV series: my Mason was more, er, youthful, and slimmer. However, I read now that Raymond Burr actually auditioned for the part of Hamilton Burger, but when ESG saw him he said he was just how he imagined Mason.

ESG wrote other characters as well as Perry Mason, including his ‘DA’ series, possibly as a change from the victorious defender Mason, or to show that he could sympathise with the prosecution too?

His titles are great come-ons: to take some at random from the list, The Case of the Daring Divorcee, The Case of the Phantom Fortune, The Case of the Horrified Heirs, The Case of the Troubled Trustee.

And we all love a courtroom drama, don’t we?

ESG never claimed to be a great literary novelist. But he brought pleasure to millions. Thanks, Erle.

Going for Gold – or maybe for the Bridport…

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Dorothy Parker, Team GB, University Challenge

It’s said that the average British athlete will have trained for six hours a day, for six days a week, for twelve months.

Could this dedication be applied to our writing? Obviously lesser mortals have to factor in jobs, families, trips to the supermarket, walking the dog and finding time to watch University Challenge. Writing also requires different disciplines, although the astute Dorothy Parker considered it to be simply ‘the art of applying the ass to the seat’.

Maybe there are lessons to be learned from the magnificent Team GB about persistence. What couldn’t I achieve if I determined to write even for one single hour a day, for six days a week for twelve months?

 

 

‘The Shape of Water’

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Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Montalbano, Lunch, Poirot, Sicily, Venice, whodunits

Our creative writing teacher would have not have allowed us to interrupt the narrative simply to describe the meal our hero was sitting down to enjoy. No, no, I hear, you’re breaking the flow, this isn’t relevant to the plot, you’ll lose your reader.

I’ve just read my first Inspector Montalbano story. I’d seen a few episodes on TV and thought I’d try one of the books. And, sure enough, just as on TV he goes to his favourite restaurant and discusses the menu with his host, here we also break for lunch. And it’s great. We are, after all, in Italy. Lunch is important. A few years ago on an anniversary trip to Venice my wife and I had foolishly allowed ourselves to be transported to the glass island of Murano; we were fearful of how we could possibly escape the inevitable hard sell at the end of the tour without too much damage to our bank balance, but to our relief we were spared because it was LUNCHTIME ON SUNDAY. All the hard sellers just disappeared, and we slipped away unnoticed.

So eat on, Salvo. The nearest I can think of a parallel in English whodunits would be Poirot stopping his ratiocination to lovingly prepare a meal for Captain Hastings or Inspector Japp.

The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is, as I’ve said, my first Montalbano. A complex and occasionally comic Sicilian whodunit. It wasn’t possible for me to work out the solution – we get the clues at the same time as the good Salvo himself (and sometimes afterwards). It was a quick read – with generous spacing on the page, and lots of dialogue. As well as lunch we get glimpses of Sicily, and a picture of corruption in local government and of the bureaucratic confusion of the various Italian law enforcement agencies. There are some helpful notes at the end explaining especially Sicilian and Italian references.

Silvio Luparello, a well-regarded engineer and local bigwig, is found dead of a heart attack in his car in the Pasture, a squalid area known for prostitution. Our hero smells a rat: Luparello had just three days before become Provincial Secretary, leader of the Council, and after years of careful politicking to achieve that dizzy (and profitable) height would not have risked his reputation thus. Pressure to close the case from the great and the good (including the local Bishop) only encourage Montalbano to continue his investigation.

There’s a complex cast of characters, including rubbish collectors, Mafiosi, journalists, various beautiful women, and other leading politicians.  One scene I especially enjoyed takes place in an abandoned chemical factory, both for the description of the place and for the comic action that takes place there. As the blurb says, “Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.”

A good read. I’ll read others. First published in 1994. English translation published by Picador.

Buon appetito!

‘Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders’

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John Mortimer, Penge, Rumpole, The law

LOL!   That was me on the train from Stoke-on-Trent to London Euston on Monday, reading Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by the late John Mortimer. I don’t know how annoyed or amused my fellow travellers were by my unsuppressed hilarity as I was too busy reading.

Devotees of Rumpole will know that throughout his career at the criminal bar he refers to his early success in the Penge Bungalow Murders case, which he won “alone and without a leader”. It’s a running joke. The details of this are not (as far as I’m aware), spelled out in the earlier books. Then, towards the end of his thirty-year long Rumpole-writing career, in 2004 John Mortimer decided actually to tell us this story.

What makes the novel so delicious is that we also discover the very first occasion that Rumpole gets involved with the Timson family, the irredeemably thieving family from South London, and their eternal feud with the Molloys. They are to feature throughout Rumpole’s career at the criminal bar. We also learn what we must always have wondered (well I have, anyway) – how on earth Rumpole got married to Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed. The details of their courtship (hardly the right word) are here laid out for our delectation. Poor Horace Rumpole …

We are in the 1950s. Rumpole is at the very beginning of his career as a criminal barrister (a ‘white wig’). He finds himself in the chambers in Equity Court in the Temple that we are going to get to know so well in his future stories. Two ex-RAF war heroes are found shot dead in the bungalows they inhabit in the same road in Penge, archetypal south London suburbia. All the evidence points to their having been shot by the son of one of them. Rumpole’s Head of Chambers (father of the future She Who Must Be Obeyed) gets the case, but his concern for what he sees as ‘the finest traditions of the bar’ seem likely to doom his client to the rope. How Rumpole’s role in the case increases, and its outcome, are the guts of the story.

For me the best bits of the novel are the court scenes, written with all the experience and skill you would expect from John Mortimer QC. The ways Rumpole cheeks the judges always amuse me. But also the scenes in chambers, with characters we have got to know over the years, also appeal. And it’s not just funny: the hangman looms over the story throughout, and Mortimer’s dissection of the absurdities of the legal system has its serious side.  The principle that someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty is also a key focus.

I do see the actor Leo McKern when I read Rumpole. And the Penguin edition I’ve been reading displays McKern on the front cover. As many of the Rumpole stories were written after the TV series had been such a success perhaps Mortimer too came to see McKern when he wrote Rumpole. I see from Wikipedia that he initally wanted Alastair Sim for the role (“but he was dead”).

Because I’ve been watching and reading Rumpole for so long I can’t really imagine how this novel would work for someone completely new to it. The cosy feel of the familiar characters, the running jokes, all add to my enjoyment – I do think that it is so fluently written, and with Mortimer’s skill and knowledge, that a newcomer would still enjoy it. If that’s you, do give it a try, and post your reaction!

My family gave me this book for Christmas. They got it in the local Oxfam shop. A very little money well spent.

Alan Rickman

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Alan Rickman, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen

Adieu Alan Rickman. As well as his more famous roles let us not forget his fabulously odious Obadiah Slope in the TV Barchester, and his noble Colonel Brandon in the film Sense and Sensibility. The curl of Slope’s lip on its own made me squirm – it could convey insincerity, smarminess, contempt …. Contrast it with the Colonel’s concern for the ill Marianne and his anxiety to be of use – “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad”, he pleads.

Thanks.

‘And Then There Were None’

Tags

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, BBC TV, whodunits

I was in the happy position over Christmas, watching the amazing And Then There Were None on BBC TV, to be able to compare stage and TV versions of this classic Christie story. A group of ten strangers (each with a deadly and guilty secret in their past) find themselves cut off on an island, invited by the mysterious and apparently absent Mr U N Owen; they are then serially murdered, in the same sequence as in the nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys.

A group of us saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall in October, as part of their ten-months-long nationwide tour. (How well they must have known their words by the end!)   The cast included some names familiar to those of us of, er, more mature years: Paul Nicholas (star of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends), Mark Wynter (‘60s pop star, with hits such as Venus in Blue Jeans), and Deborah Grant (John Nettles’ ex-wife way back in Bergerac), to name but three.

The stage version gave us atmosphere and a storm, and the sense of being trapped. Unlike a film it couldn’t show us close-ups of bodies on jagged rocks, or transport us in momentary flashback to the Western Front or the drowning of a boy. But it did have the excitement of live theatre. Our group had a happy outing; I couldn’t remember whodunit, and the ending surprised me just as it had when I’d seen a film version years before. (This may have been the 1974 one with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer et al – this story does seem to appeal to all-star casts).

One of the motifs of the story is that there is on display in the house a group of ten toy soldiers. After each death the remaining characters discover that one of these has disappeared. That is easily effected in a film, but how did it happen on stage? In the interval I asked a fellow member of the audience, and he told me he’d seen one of the actors (one who was killed shortly afterwards) surreptitiously put one in his pocket. Maybe whichever cast member was nearest the toys at the time had the job of secreting one.

In our family we’re still enthusing about the TV version, shown on Boxing Day and the two successive nights in one-hour chunks. Wow! The atmosphere, the tension, the menace – and the absence of the semi-humorous tone you often get in Christie films – more, more! One by one the cast are killed, and they know it and can see it coming, and they fear each other. No supersleuth is there to explain the complexities of what is happening and to unmask the villain.  They just get killed, all ten …

I can see that some folk will have found too long the ominous pauses, but not us. To see Toby Stephens, Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and the rest put on their turns was just right for the dark evenings after Christmas when the festive supplies of food and drink need to be finished off.   I can’t see it myself, but the female half of our viewership were also much taken with Aidan Turner’s torso. Once displayed, why it then had to reappear quite so often I don’t know.   Yes, you guessed it – this was the role Oliver Reed played in the 1974 film: I can’t remember whether he kept showing us his chest.

Knowing who did it didn’t spoil my pleasure – indeed, it was fascinating to see the story unfold with that knowledge. What was difficult was not letting anything slip that would give the game away to my fellow viewers. Reader, I managed it.

The Twittersphere raved about the production – and the aforesaid torso was the detail most mentioned in that raving.

My favourite tweet was “They’ve really upped the stakes in the latest series of Big Brother.”

I don’t know why the BBC changed the skeleton in the policeman’s cupboard. In the play (and, I think, the original book) he has been bribed and has committed perjury, resulting in an innocent man being hanged. On TV he has instead kicked a young gay man to death in a police cell. One can only speculate why this change was made. 

Sometime I must read the novel to see how the Queen of Crime herself imagined the story. And to find out how it was that Mr U N Owen came to know all these terrible secrets.

I’ve heard it muttered somewhere that next year we may get Witness for the Prosecution (which I also saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at the Assembly Hall a few years ago). Bring it on!