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A P Herbert
Alan Patrick Herbert is almost out of print, and should have more readers. Herbert served in two world wars, survived Gallipoli, was a longstanding member of parliament and a social reformer who worked to end outdated divorce and obscenity laws, and was knighted by Churchill. He wrote the lyrics to popular songs and shows, and once highlighted the complexity of the British licensing laws by accusing the House of Commons of selling liquor without a licence. This interest in the absurdities of the legal system caused him to write the Misleading Cases, six volumes that operate on a wonderfully simple premise; a judge and a defendant square off against one another in a series of skirmishes designed to test the limits of the law.
Albert Haddock is a tireless everyman who would test the patience of a saint; he makes out a cheque on a cow and leads it to the office of the Collector of Taxes. ‘Was the cow crossed?’ No, your Worship, it was an open cow.’ The question is, did he break the law? Haddock rows the wrong way up a flooded street, and is arrested. Haddock has his wineglass pinched by a waiter, and sues for damages. Haddock argues his way out of a charge of obstruction by referring to an obscure point in the Magna Carta. The cases were fictional, but were sometimes reported in the press as fact. Along the way, big issues were aired and serious political points were scored. What is the meaning of education? What exactly are politicians? How much freedom do we really have? Herbert’s tone is light, but the questions give one pause to think. ‘Misleading Cases’ aired as a television series (now apparently lost) that ran for three seasons in the 1960s, with Roy Dotrice as Haddock and the wonderful Alistair Sim as the judge. Sim is exasperated but clearly an admirer of the defendant’s knowledge of his rights. ‘People must not do things for fun,’ Herbert warns. ‘There is no reference to fun in any act of parliament.’ Read Herbert and bring back the fun.
Ronald Firbank
In a world that praises commonplace prose for its realism, it’s nice to have Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank, a sort of polar opposite to Andy McNab. Firbank, born 1886, had an eccentric narrative style that was an extension of his personality. For a man who wrote so much about society he was never comfortable in it, being too alcoholic, inarticulate and strange. Nevertheless, Firbank provides something of a natural link between Oscar Wilde and T S Eliot. He became a cult figure, which by his reckoning meant that he was read by a dozen clever people, but his work faded from even this attention.
His slim novels appeared in the aftermath of the First World War, but reflect nothing of the time. ‘The Flower Beneath The Foot’ takes place in a vaguely Balkan state, and is as exotic as a poisonous orchid. His plots are dismissable, but the dialogue is a distilled essence of the epigrammatic. ‘Whenever I go out,’ the king complains, ‘I get the impression of raised hats.’ ‘Raised hats?’ ‘Nude heads, doctor.’ This deeply shy, whispily neurasthenic author is important for a singularity of vision that proved inspirational. Joe Orton certainly absorbed his peculiar speech rhythms, recognising a truth in Firbank’s dialogue; conversation need not sound real to have veracity.
His prose condensed whole worlds while leaving much unsaid, in a way that is finally almost fashionable. Asked for his opinion of literature, he admitted that he adored italics; a typically oblique Firbankian remark. His books contain party chatter consisting of disconnected words and phrases, much as we might actually perceive them. Infamously, one chapter comprised nothing but eight identical exclamations of the word ‘Mabel!’. Dilettantes drift dreamlike through his pages, tainting the aesthetic style that Wilde venerated. Firbank could not write or live in any other way. His novels were scribbled on postcards in hotel rooms heavy with flowers, but at a dinner party given in his honour, he consumed a single pea. Being shallow is exhausting work, and can make exhausting reading, but Firbank is an example of a timeless author who should not be forgotten, because he is utterly unique.
Gladys Mitchell
Born in 1901, she was one of the ‘Big Three’ female mystery novelists, judged the equal of Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, but that’s not quite accurate – she’s more like a mad combination of both. Philip Larkin loved her and many admired her mordant and morbid mysteries. Diana Rigg starred in some bland TV versions of her novels that turn her Mrs Bradley character into a glamorous Miss Marple. The exposure has resulted in new demand for her books, which is good because they’re more interesting than Christie’s, if more problematic. Virago republished ‘The Rising Of The Moon’, but there are some 66 other volumes. Mitchell’s old lady detective has little of Miss Marple’s cosiness. She’s physically repulsive, parchment-skinned and usually likened to a vulture or even a pterodactyl, thrice married and witch-like. In ‘Dead Man’s Morris’ she’s described as having ‘the maternal anxiety of a boa-constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey’.
Mitchell was a schoolteacher who believed in the idea of the professional, progressive and somewhat Sapphic woman. Her title character was controversial and emancipated, and even considered murder justifiable if the occasion demanded. With such an outspoken heroine, Mitchell naturally made enemies. The Spectator described her as ‘a tiresome old trout’ whose mannerisms were the most trying in detective fiction, but many adored her work. Her murder cases have ambiguous solutions, and an air of the supernatural is never entirely banished from them. Her plots are on the farthest side of credulity, but to worry about realism is to miss the fun of her storytelling. In ‘Merlin’s Furlong’ a necromantic don runs a coven of witches. In ‘The Mystery Of A Butcher’s Shop’ the victim is minced into sausages and hung from hooks. Ultimately, Christie remained safer and more controlled, while the complexity of Mitchell’s uber-eccentric mysteries got the better of her. She tested the constraints of the murder genre by pushing them to breaking point, and by surprising too much she often disappointed – therein lies the clue to her canonical absence. But a flawed gem can still sparkle.
T. Lobsang Rampa
W H Auden was wrong; there are some books which are best forgotten. By the time the memoir of a Tibetan monk entitled ‘The Third Eye’ turned up on the desk of Secker & Warburg, it had been turned down by most leading houses. S&W took a punt and published it in 1956, and the book shot into the bestseller lists, with the esteemed Times Literary Supplement suggesting it was close to being a work of art. Doubts were quickly raised by Tibetan scholars; after all, the book included trepanation as a standard procedure for induction into priesthood, neophyte monks zipping about on giant kites, and Rampa’s meetings with both his mummified former incarnation and an abominable snowman.
The press scented a story and exposed Rampa as a Devon plumber called Cyril Hoskin, who had never been near Tibet. This Blavatskyan revelation did not appear to bother his readers, who were happy to purchase another eighteen volumes of his Tibetan memoirs. Hoskin held back a late chapter involving his visit to the planet Venus, and said he had been possessed by the spirit of the monk after falling out of a tree while trying to photograph an owl. He further stated that his book ‘Living With The Lama’ had been dictated by his Siamese cat Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers. Naturally this was enough to convince his new age followers. With an entire industry springing up around him, as well as his family turning out books to capitalise on his success, Rampa grew weary of being described as a con-man and decamped to Canada, where he remained until his death in 1981. By now he had many new Canadian fans who accepted the books as proof of Buddhist principles, and were happy to endorse his unpublished chapters on flying saucers. They still maintain his fan site, should you wish to purchase the latest Lobsang Rampa calendar.
For non-believers the books are problematic, especially when Hoskins explains auras or soul transference in terms that would make any scientist fall off a chair laughing. Still, the books give an alarming insight into the naivety of ideas about exoticism in the postwar spiritual vacuum of the 1950s, and will always be tracked down by intellectually inert seekers of easy enlightenment.
William Sansom
Here’s a truly forgotten author, all but expunged from literary history. William Sansom was once described as London’s closest equivalent to Franz Kafka. He wrote in hallucinatory detail, bringing every image into pin-sharp focus. It was his strength and weakness; it made his stories hauntingly memorable, but his technique often left his characters feeling under-developed. His style was as cool and painstaking as that of Henry Green, also a wartime firefighter. His collection ‘Fireman Flower, and Other Short Stories’ may be his pinnacle. In ‘The Little Room’, a nun waits for death after being bricked up in her windowless cell for an unnamed transgression. To make her fate worse, a meter on the wall marks the incremental loss of the air in the room, and Sansom describes her changing state of mind with passion and clinical precision.
‘The Equilibriad’ owes a little too much to Kafka but shares the same strangeness, as the hero awakes to find himself only able to walk at a 45 degree angle. He was good with an opening hook; One story starts ‘How did the three boys ever come to spend their lives in the water-main junction?’ Sansom’s publisher described his work as ‘modern fables’, but what makes them so ripe for rediscovery is their freshness and currency. His characters face inscrutable futures with patience and resignation, knowing that they can do little to influence the outcome of their lives. Sometimes terrible events, like the collapse of a burning wall, slow down and expand to engulf the reader. One of his strangest tales is ‘The Long Sheet’, in which captives are required to wring out a great wet sheet with their hands, and the process is described in flesh-smarting detail. Nor can the sheet ever be completely dried, because fresh moisture is constantly sprayed on it. But the final lines of the story reveal the true nature of torment while pointing the way to another prescient writer, J G Ballard. Sansom writes of head-aching hatreds and hopeless ecstasies, of malevolent objects and wasted lives. In his short fiction, he’d describe a taxi or an umbrella in a way that eluded him with the characters of his novels. He fell from favour, but now there is a movement to rediscover his finest works.
Peter Tinniswood
In our quest to rehabilitate popular writers whose fame has been diminished by time and fashion, no-one is more deserving than Peter Tinniswood. There’s a strong tradition of Northern comic writers who can hold tragedy and comedy in harmonious balance. Keith Waterhouse, Alan Sillitoe and David Nobbs also spring to mind.
Nobbs and Tinniswood were scripting partners, but went separate ways in their literary styles. Nobbs wrote the Reginald Perrin books, while Tinniswood commenced the long-running saga of the Brandon family with A Touch Of Daniel, which was popular enough to be serialised by the BBC. He’s a lovely scene-setter: ‘It was the time of year when bus conductors first appear in linen jackets.’ His deadpan throwaway style translated poorly to television.
He wrote the surreal cricketing series Tales From The Long Room, but was capable of stranger stories. When an author is made more popular by television adaptation, the success seems to remove longevity from his unadapted work. I can think of no other reason why his comic masterpiece has disappeared from the public radar. The Stirk of Stirk is a highly peculiar prose poem that drops the reader into Robin Hood’s darkest winter as, with rumbling stomach and perishing soul, the bandit faces his greatest enemy. Hood knows that creeping age and his inability to live up to his own legend will finish him off, yet simply refuses to die. The book is suffused with Northern chill and melancholy, but even in the blackest moments Tinniswood lights candles of hope. Here a laugh is described as ‘a sound that would curdle the eggs in a goldcrest’s womb’ and ‘saliva makes bitter fountains in the mouth’ as the starving Hood staggers on into history – and out of the bestsellers’ list. This kind of heightened stylisation has fallen from popularity. Reading Tinniswood is like skimming any recent book on fast-forward, such is his ability to drag the reader through a colourful story. At his best, he’s capable of reminding you that reading should always be a pleasure, never a chore. A Touch Of Daniel was reissued in 2001, two years before he died.