Police and thieves

Confinement must give one lots of time to think and observe, or so I am told, and I bet John Lawton would agree.

His 2007 novel Second Violin puts co-protagonist Rod Troy in one of Winston Churchill's internment camps for internal aliens. There, Lawton offers the funniest and most moving portrait of national character I have read in any crime novel.

A Little White Death, published nine years earlier, has Rod's brother Frederick, Scotland Yard's chief detective, in a sanitarium recuperating from tuberculosis. Troy knows he will hate his confinement, yet two of his fellow inmates — a sharp-tongued workingman and an old general — are both more than they seem and vehicles for Lawton to poke and probe English class structure.

Why do you think Lawton set the scenes where he did? What makes confined settings attractive to a writer?

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A Little White Death takes place in 1963, just before "The Sixties" hit Britain with full force. The characters, of course, have nothing more than ominous presentiments, but we — and Lawton — know everything: Carnaby Street, sexual openness, the reaction against sexual openness, the rapid commodification of personality, police brutality and more.

Lawton finds several ways to foreshadow this — retrospective foreshadowing, one might call it — most effectively in understated accounts of police brutality and in references to police lying. In the latter cases especially, we readers are clearly meant to reflect bitterly that 1963 England could still be shocked at such a possibility. More on this interesting subject, perhaps, later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Ten Lays That Shook the World

I've been writing about John Lawton's novel A Little White Death, whose plot includes a scandal similar to the Profumo Affair of 1963, a sex-and-spies caper that contributed to the downfall of a government in the United Kingdom.

At the same time, Adrian McKinty has written about Iris Robinson (left), a Northern Ireland politician whose hot pants he suggests could derail the peace process there.

(That Iris Robinson is a born-again Christian who has railed against homosexuality and proclaimed that "the government has the responsibility to uphold God's laws" makes her own downfall especially delicious. Robinson has said she has been treated for mental illness. If she's telling the truth, I wish her well. I am also suspicious about the timing of her revelation, since she has also been linked to financial scandals, and mental illness, like addiction, is a convenient excuse for politicians caught with their hands in the till or other places where they don't belong.

(One of McKinty's comments also includes a well-deserved slap at the New York Times which, in a desperate grab for both relevance and snob appeal, takes a gratuitous shot at bloggers and "local newspaper headlines" for their coverage of the Robinsons' affair. We at the Times, reporter John F. Burns as much as sneers, would never descend to the level of "local" newspapers.)

I'll invoke Lawton's novel to claim this post's relevance to international crime fiction. And I'll ask your help: What are the most influential sex scandals in history? Extra credit for scandals that do not involve conservative politicians.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Verbal champagne and the other kind, too

I wrote yesterday about verbal champagne in the prologue to John Lawton's A Little White Death. I had no idea at the time that the first chapter proper would offer the real stuff, too. Here are the protagonist, Frederick Troy, and his brother Roderick after the latter has fled their game of Monopoly in disgust:

"`What have you found?' Troy asked.

"Rod wiped the label with his sleeve.

"`The paper's a bit perished, but it says 1928 and I'd lay odds of ten to one it's Veuve Clicquot.'

"`Does champagne keep that long?'

"`Haven't the foggiest. But there's only one way to find out.'"

"Pure," as loyal reader Loren Eaton likes to say, "gold."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What makes a novel worth reading?

I don't mean all that stuff about a compelling story and vivid characters and giving your protagonist an obstacle to overcome. I mean the bits of verbal champagne that make you want to tell your friends or put up a blog post.

The prologue of John Lawton's A Little White Death, third of his Frederick Troy novels, offers at least two. The first is in the book's very first paragraph:

"She knew revolutionaries. Short men, serious men, men who marked their seriousness physically by being bald or mustachioed or both."

The second follows some amusing byplay between two characters, one of whom is a physician come to the United States to treat John F. Kennedy for Addison's disease who hooks up with his fellow Brit just before leaving the U.S. Here are the lines with which the physician ends the prologue:

"`Fine. I understand. Now why don't you hop in a cab. We can have one last drinkie before I dash to Idlewild.'"

(Read about John Lawton's Second Violin here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010