The Unfortunate Englishman: Another historical hit from John Lawton

Does John Lawton write spy novels? If so, when did espionage fiction edge over from geopolitical thrills to meditations on identity and personal and national character? Which authors and books are responsible? And does it matter?

John Lawton's Unfortunate Englishman takes thief-turned-spy Joe Wilderness to Berlin at the height of the Cold War, where he is to mediate an exchange of prisoners between Great Britain and the U.S.S.R. The title character is a schlemiel nabbed for his ineptitude as a spy for the British, and the action consists of efforts to swap him for his opposite number and of flashes back and forward between the early and the mid-1960s.

Along the way, we see the Berlin Wall rise before our eyes and Wilderness encounter Nikita Khrushchev on the Soviet leader's (imaginary) solo tour of the city. Two supporting characters in the novel are shot by the Soviets for their activities, but the executions happen off-stage and they make their presence felt through the schlemiel's brief but intense reaction to them. The reticence of the portrayal makes the executions all the more chilling.

This character-based storytelling works in a kind of alchemy with Lawton's closely observed period detail to reinforce the status Lawton built in his Frederick Troy books as quite possibly the best historical novelist we have. Fans of those novels will be happy to know that Troy and his brother Rod make brief appearances in The Unfortunate Englishman.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

How do authors keep history fresh? How about bloggers and old posts?

Damn me, but has it really been three years since this post first appeared? Must be; Blogger doesn't lie. Anyhow, I've been thinking so much about fiction and history recently that I thought I'd bring back this post on that stimulating subject.

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 Authors of historical fiction have a problem: Readers know how the story ends, at least the historical part, but the writer still has to keep them reading.

How do they do this?

Here's what John Lawton does in A Little White Death, third of his novels about Frederick Troy. A physician has come to the United States to treat John F. Kennedy for Addison's disease and has met up with a fellow Brit just before returning to England. Here's how the doctor who has just treated Kennedy ends the meeting with his friend:

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

That's a powerful little chapter-ender. The speaker of that line carries the weight of the history that the reader already knows about. And he does this without ever ruining the illusion that he exists in a world innocent of that history, which had not yet occurred at the time Lawton portrays. At the very least, that's a neat bit of fun on Lawton's part.

He does something similar in Black Out, the first novel in the series. I won't give that example because it's a bit spoilerish, coming as it does near the end of the book. I will reveal, for those who have not read the novel, that it reinforces the series' status as a social history of mid-twentieth-century England, critical, personal and unsparing.

In other words, you should read the book. Until you do, ponder this question: How do historical novelists get around the annoying fact that the reader knows how the history turns out?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Another good bit from John Lawton

John Lawton is so good that I don't want to stop reading his novels long enough to take notes. That makes blog posts a nuisance, but I have found one bit from his debut novel, Black Out, that I think encapsulates some of what makes him special:

"The warden looked from Troy's face to the card and back again. 

"`When I was your age I was in the trenches.' 

"Troy looked into the man's face. He was almost entirely in shadow, but his age seemed clear enough; the clipped mustache, the received pronunciation, the creaking joints all bespoke a man in his fifties — a generation Troy had come to loathe, with their constant justification of what they had done in the war, their jingoistic fervor that their sons should also risk their lives in another German war — a generation of drawing-room drones, League of Nations naïves, chicken-farming chunterers. Troy had long ago ceased to regard the ARP and the Home Guard as anything but a patriotic nuisance."

That passage tells us something about Lawton's series protagonist, Frederick Troy. It gives us, in the person of the officious civil defense worker, a memorable human portrait. It gives a vivid, small-scale picture of life during wartime (London, 1944), and, as Lawton often does, the small-scale anecdote expands into a barbed comment on English character and manners.

As a bonus, we North American readers may learn a bit of English slang and social history from the passage. ARP stands for Air Raid Precautions, a British civil defense organization. A chunterer is someone who grumbles and scolds, and I say it's a fine word.

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John Lawton was part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: John Lawton on being a "crime" writer

I first heard of John Lawton on crime fiction blogs, and I first heard him read at New York's late Partners & Crime mystery bookshop. His series protagonist, Frederick Troy, is with London's Metropolitan Police, and Lawton attends crime fiction conventions now and then. But when I wrote that Lawton reminded me more of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or even, in spots, P.G. Wodehouse than of crime writers, a reader huzzahed all the way from Canada. He wrote, too, that he was baffled by the occasional descriptions of Lawton's books as spy novels. So, is Lawton a crime writer, or a spy writer, or what? If not, why do some people say he is? And does it matter? I sought answers from the source, and here's what Lawton had to say:

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“I can't recall any discussion with my editor at Weidenfeld – Ion Trewin, who edited all my work until the move to Grove – as to genre. Black Out had no tags. Nor did any subsequent novel. I was reviewed as either fiction or crime. It wasn't an issue. `Genre' is a tag neither to be sought nor resisted. Like a book prize – neither sought nor resisted.

“It's flattering to be told `this book transcends genre,' but it's not a phrase that holds up to scrutiny. Five nano-seconds later, you're asking yourself, `What does he/she think is inferior about genre writing?' And when toastmasters at crime gigs harp on about crime being `as good as literature,' you think, `So what?' And when a crime novel is deemed `too literary,' you think, `Ain't no such critter.'

“It's marketing ... whatever gets you on the shelves and then off the shelves and into hands. And marketing is different country to country.

“I first became aware of an `invisible' crime tag only when the CWA called in (so I was told) Riptide for consideration for the Ellis Peters Award. As I said, you don't seek it and you don't resist it. It's only an issue if you win – who in their right mind, after all, would want to sit through an award ceremony they didn't have to?

“Paint and drying come to mind.

“The book after this was Sweet Sunday. Ion and I agreed this wasn't `crime.' Still ... it got reviewed as crime. But a review is a review ... not to be knocked. Better by a yard and a half than being ignored.

“And a few years later I was asked in an interview to categorize myself. I said something like ... `historical, political thrillers with a big splash of romance, wrapped up in a coat of noir.' What they're not is mysteries, and I think there is a tendency to assume that crime and mystery are synonymous. They're not.

“There are crimes in most of my novels. Occasionally unsolved. They aren't there to be `solved;' they're a propellant to drive the book along.

“Pretentious bit coming up ... I don't think I'm doing anything different from my immediate contemporaries. ... McEwan, Faulks, Amis, Hare, Turow (all born within months of me). ... In intent.

“That said, I've never written anything set in the present, and none of them has written a series around a policeman. Scott Turow is regarded as `crime' – he has no problem with this. (I asked him.) And at this point the sensible thing to say is, if Scott has no problem with `crime' neither should I.”

— John Lawton

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Here's Lawton's Web site with essays and other information about the Troy novels. Here's a New York Times review that asks: "Is there any genre convention John Lawton hasn’t boldly disregarded, often to brilliant effect? "

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John Lawton will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

John Lawton

I'm no surer now than when I first read one of John Lawton's Troy novels how Lawton wound up being labelled a crime writer. He reminds me more of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell or P.G. Wodehouse than of any detective, thriller, or crime author I can come up with off the top of my head.

Lawton's fiction is comedy, social history, acute, amused (and sometimes angry) commentary on English life in, depending on the book, the 1930's, '40s, '50s, or '60s, and the Troy novels are the books I'd recommend first to a literate, intelligent person who asked, "What's England?"

Currently on my reading docket are Lawton's Flesh Wounds (published as Blue Rondo in the U.K.), set in 1959, and the story "East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road," in Otto Penzler's Agents of Treachery collection.

Here's Lawton's Web site.   And here are posts about Lawton and history, Lawton and English identity, and Lawton and Wodehouse.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

John Lawton on nationality and civilization

I don't know how John Lawton's books wound up being called crime novels, but if the label lures unwary readers (as it lured me), they'll be the better for it.

A Lily of the Field, seventh and most recent of Lawton's Troy novels is shaping up, like its predecessor Second Violin as, among other things, a touching meditation on the fragility of nationhood as a vehicle of identity:

"Magda was Austrian through and through, Roberto was the son of Italian immigrants, Inge was as Viennese as Magda — but Jewish."

or

"Since 1926, Imre had worked side by side with Phillipe Julius. A man as Viennese as he was himself, but with origins as mixed as his own. The Voyteks had come west a generation ago from Hungary. The Julius family had travelled east from France at about the same time. Central Europe was less a fixed point in geography — more a flying carpet."

(Prepare for A Lily of the Field with Lawton's essay on Second Violin. You'll find a fair sample of his righteous anger, a bit of Wodehousian wit, and a look back at an unedifying episode in England's wartime past.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More Chandler and two fine openings from John Lawton

I can't get away from this Chandler thing. I've started Frank Miller's Sin City, an early landmark in the current golden age of crime comics, and both the first volume's title and its occasional wisecracks are obvious Chandler tributes. That title? The Hard Goodbye.

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Back in the non-graphic world, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field promises another aborbing and touchingly human look at civilian life during wartime. Here's the beginning of the prologue (and no one writes better prologues than Lawton: "It had not been the hardest winter."

And here's the opening of Chapter One:

"The war began as a whisper—a creeping sussurus that she came to hear in every corner of her childhood—by the time it finally banged on the door and rattled the windows it had come to seem like nature itself."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010