My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Michael Gilbert, plus bipartisan political vacuousness

A piece of gaseous conservative slogan-mongering in the National Review brought to mind Michael Gilbert's taking the piss out of a similar piece of gaseous liberal slogan mongering in his 1965 story "The Spoilers."  As a nonpartisan break from campaign-season brain rot, here's a post about Gilbert and politics.

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Thc occasional politically tinged passages that work their way into Michael Gilbert's stories about Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens are not always the most subtle, the hyperbole put in the mouths of young, speechifying men of leftish inclination especially wince-making (“Freedom,” said Tabor. “You’re prepared to accept inefficiency, selfishness, slackness, lack of purpose, timidity and greed – provided you have on the other side of the scales a fictitious thing called freedom.”).

But the books appeared in an unsubtle time (1966 and 1967) at least as prone to lunatic hyperbole as political discussion is now. Besides, politics and ideology are small presences in these tightly plotted, delightfully told stories. And, since today's readers want positive news, I thought I'd share a jab as pertinent and just as delicious today it was in the mid-1960s. It's from "The Spoilers," which appears in the collection Games Without Rules:

“`We’re getting so security-minded,' said Miss Nicholson, `that we might as well be living in a totalitarian state, under the control of the Gestapo.'

“Miss Nicholson, who was an intellectual liberal, often said things like this in letters to the Press and at public meetings, possibly because she had never lived in a totalitarian state and had no experience of the Gestapo."

Now, good readers, tell me your favorite political jabs from crime stories. Be a good sport, and tell me especially about lines with whose point of view you may disagree.

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As noted above, ideology does not bulk large in these stories. The powers against whom Calder, Behrens, and their fellow intelligence officers work are referred to far more often simply as Russia or China than as communists or commies, never, that I can recall, as "evil" or "Rooskies" and only once as "reds." More typical are non-ideological barbs such as this, from "The Spoilers":

"Mr. Calder, considering the matter, was inclined to agree. He knew that in certain branches of the Security Services, sexual irregularity was considered a good deal worse than crime and nearly as bad as ideological deviation."

or jabs at features of English life that Gilbert probably wished were in a higher state than they were. From "The Cat Crackers":

“`Splendid,” said the professor. `We will sit all afternoon and talk.'

“`Not in an English pub, you won’t,' said Tabor."

or this, from "The Headmaster," which sounds more than a bit like P.G. Wodehouse:

"The Hambone Club in Carver Street is the offspring of that eccentric aristocrat, Sir Rawnsley Clayton. Having been turned out of the Athenaeum for giving dinner there to a troupe of clowns, he had founded it as a place where he could meet his more bohemian acquaintances. It was still much used by actors and writers, but had acquired a solid addition of politicians who found the Carlton too stuffy and of soldiers who found the Senior too exclusive."

Gilbert, an Englishman who died in 2006, was both a Cartier Diamond Dagger winner and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.  Here's Martin Edwards on Gilbert. The highest compliment of all, however, and the most pertinent to this post, may come from Joe Gores, who wrote:

"A critic once remarked that Maugham's Ashenden is the finest collection of espionage fiction ever written. That critic is wrong. The honor goes to Michael Gilbert's Game Without Rules, and to its twelve-story sequel, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens."

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Martin Edwards accepts
his 2016 Best Critical/
Biographical Edgar
Award for The Golden
Age of Murder. Photo
by Peter Rozovsky.
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Martin Edwards will discuss Michael Gilbert as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you there.

See the compete Bouchercon panel schedule at http://www.bouchercon2016.com/#!schedule/c8k7
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2014, 2016

Talkin' (and talkin' and talkin') 'bout my generation: Tony Judt on the 1960s (plus a bit of Michael Gilbert)

(Detail of a giant revolving sign at Hard Rock
Cafe, Philadelphia. Hard Rock Cafe International,
founded in London in 1971. Photo by Peter 
Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper)

This could turn into a Tony Judt Postwar blog if I'm not careful. For now, though, I'll restrict myself to a few favorite bits from Judt's chapters about the 1960s:

"Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times — and their own selves — was one of the special features of the age."

And here's Judt's delicious account of the end of possibly the most self-regarding episode of the age, the events of May 1968 in France:

"In the ensuing parliamentary elections, the ruling Gaullist parties won a crushing victory, increasing their vote by more than a fifth and securing an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. The workers returned to work. The students went on vacation."

Finally, Judt's discussion of Western European students' complaints about their universities, overburdened and unprepared for the postwar flood of young people seeking places, makes excellent reading alongside the British crime writer Michael Gilbert's story "The Decline and Fall of Mr. Behrens" (in the collection Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens). Now that I've read Judt, the surprising ending to Gilbert's story makes even better sense as a piece of social observation, not bad from a writer who insisted his job was to entertain readers.

(See also "Rock and roll is here to pay.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2014