A mid-list crisis struck some time ago, and I necessarily turned my eyes away from the Gold Dagger winners to replenish my reading needs from a fresh watering hole. As I returned to the list, I struck a deal with myself – after reading several dozen mysteries, I am granting myself the ability to simply skip those books that so quickly become deplorable, unremarkable, or simply mediocre such that they cannot sustain my attention for more than the first few pages. I hoped not to need it, but…
The Perfect Murder. 1964’s winner, and with a name like that surely we are setting ourselves up for intricately plotted, ingenious crime the likes of which had never been seen until the year it won. Possibly it hasn’t aged well, but nonetheless, having won only a year before one of the best reads to date – Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar – we can have high hopes indeed.
No.
My hopes were extinguished by the end of the first page. The novel takes place (so far as I could tell) in India. In what might otherwise have been a refreshing move, the protagonist appeared to be a native, which would make for our first non-British or American. But the language so quickly made me wince, the characters so quickly felt like a caricature (Apu from The Simpsons turned into a detective) that I could barely turn the page. “Sahib” abounds, and when the heavy-set Indian merchant complains about his wife and his Westernized son, lapsing into the third person at times, I clenched my lips together, suspecting the end was nigh. But I read not a single sentence further than when the protagonist (whose name I cannot even recall) revealed that the already-mentioned “perfect murder” referred to the victim – a Persian secretary by the name of Mr. Perfect.
No thank you. It may well be the case if I had persevered I would have been rewarded, but I simply could not find a reason to do so.
And then I moved on to John le Carre. His winner from 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was one of the books I omitted to buy because I was already familiar with the plot. Similarly, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Night Manager meant I was quite familiar with his work, but I had never read any of the books (shame on me). I approached 1977’s winner, The Honourable Schoolboy, with cautious enthusiasm, knowing I was expecting some sort of X factor but being more than slightly suspicious that the ability to extract a good screenplay was no guarantee on the quality of the book. How pleased I am my suspicions were wrong and that I at last met Mr. le Carre face to face.
Wonderful! He really was a genius prose writer. Immense style, and while some of the 70s attitudes and terminology (particularly those of the hard-drinking newsmen covering the wars of Southeast Asia) feel if not stale that much older than the rest of the book, I’m certainly willing to put that down to an accurate portrait that simply aged particularly quickly. There are notes of O’Brian here, in that le Carre has captured a cross section of a certain lifestyle at a certain point in time and geography, and has it inhabited so fully it is almost overwhelming in detail. To be sure, the fact that he is dealing with spies means he has leeway that we mere civilians will never be able to check – le Carre loves to throw us asides, tiredly knowing, about the jargon of the spy trade – but the depth he goes to blows most other writers on this list out of the water, even if his power is in his explicit descriptions rather than interior landscapes.
The plotting is Byzantine but somehow comes off feeling light and streamlined. Without reaching anything like the breakneck plotting of contemporary novels, le Carre manages to keep his many characters moving along briskly as we happily follow along in their wake. The more action-oriented scenes of Southeast Asia needn’t take extra weight from the scenes in London, where George Smiley and his helpers work constantly to unravel the secrets and discern the course of the whole novel. Indeed, I found the descriptions of Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis to be the most enjoyable of the novel – just the sort of brilliant eccentrics we want to believe are at work in the intelligence services, but with enough esoteric knowledge and legwork that they feel like more than window dressing. From Vientiane to Tuscany, Hong Kong to London, le Carre manages to invert the world we think we know and builds out the infrastructure of the world of spies in a way that beguiles the reader and makes the entire exercise feel conspiratorial, almost as though we were reading the file of the Dolphin case ourselves in the immediate aftermath of events. Delicate use of temporal omniscience primes us for what is to come, knowing that “afterwards” or “later” or “never again” judgements and actions would befall characters who still have many twists and turns left to navigate.
Smiley, at the center of it all, I found easy to love but hard to like. As a well-known counterpoint to James Bond, Smiley’s quiet, composed air, encyclopedic knowledge, and feeling of being three steps ahead makes him an enigma whose every move we want to watch in case it gives away something of what might be going on inside. The fact that this creature is in an overweight shell with thick glasses on just adds to the layers to unpeel. This remoteness can make Smiley hard to root for on a personal level, however, and while he acts as the figurehead for the Circus and therefore “the good guys,” I couldn’t help but feel unmoved by the few scenes we got a more human picture, most of which seemed to involve his unfaithful wife Ann. This detail is perhaps a humanizing note that should make Smiley more than a dull civil servant with a particularly unusual brief, but I wonder if le Carre revealed his real attitude about this when he had Smiley reminisce about the funeral of Control, Smiley’s old boss. Control’s late wife had thought he worked for the Coal Board, and a mistress goes so far as to ask Smiley if Control is truly dead, or if he has gone back to his wife. Smiley answers the question, but is the point that he tells the truth? Or that, if he isn’t, it all attaches to the greater question of the purpose of all these clandestine exercises? The personal lives of the characters are petty and, if they have moments of romance (or at least of a romantic flavor), mostly unimpressive and even sad. All serving at the whims of parliamentary masters whose own goals are as difficult to divine as Smiley’s doings, the intricacy of the plot stands against a whispered background of “so what,” emphasized in this book perhaps by the background of failure in Tinker, Tailor and the happenstance that the person of interest in this book is in Hong Kong – the last island of British influence in Asia, which is otherwise firmly in the grasp of the Americans. Vanishing influence, changing times, but still the conviction that something must be done adds to the atmosphere of the book and makes it that much more than a mere intellectual exercise or masterclass in plotting. I will make it a point to avoid le Carre’s Wikipedia page for the next few years – hopefully my memory will begin to fail such that I can read his other works with fresh eyes down the line.
On a final note, I am going to add to the rankings not just the two books mentioned here, but for completeness’ sake all those I will not be reading along with my rationale. Accounting for those, I believe we are approaching halfway done, although it feels like we are farther along than that.
Updated ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Peter Temple – The Broken Shore
- John le Carre – The Honourable Schoolboy
- Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
- James Lee Burke – Sunset Limited
- Mick Herron – Dead Lions
- Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
- Jose Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
- Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
- Winston Graham – Bridge to Vengeance (The Little Walls)
- Sara Paretsky – Blacklist
- Michael Robotham – Life and Death
- Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh
- Minette Walters – The Scold’s Bridle
- Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
- Arnaldur Indrioason – Silence of the Grave
- Bill Beverly – Dodgers
- James McClure – Steam Pig
- Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
- Emma Lathen – Murder Against the Grain
- Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
- Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
- Barbara Vine – A Fatal Inversion
- John Hutton – Accidental Crimes
- H.R.F. Keating – The Perfect Murder
- Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)
Not ranked (in chronological order):
1963 – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre – familiar with the work already from the film and le Carre’s general notoriety.
1988 – Ratking, Michael Dibdin – I love the Aurelio Zen TV films so much I suspect I have seen them at least three times by now, so the book would hold no surprises for me.
2001 – Sidetracked, Henning Mankell – Wallander was and is gateway drug to all Nordic noir. I’ve seen the Swedish series several times and the (inferior) British one once, so alas this one would also be too predictable.
2006 – Raven Black, Ann Cleeves – The Shetland series made by ITV struck an interesting note for me – the mysteries themselves were perfectly enjoyable but the landscape and unique prospect of the Shetland Islands is what made it stand out. Having re-watched it a few times, Raven Black is a familiar friend, and so holds no mysteries for me.
smq.world 