Not a bad place for research. Duke Humfreys Library, part of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
I first came across Marshall Browne a few years ago when I read The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, about a one-legged detective investigating the Mafia in the south of Italy. Having once lived in a southern Italian town I was impressed by Browne’s ability to portray that society, and I liked his investigator, Anders – an eccentric, introspective elderly cop with a false leg. A few years later Browne created Franz Schmidt, a German investigator with some similarities to Anders – he’s a very correct, scrupulous man, with an unexpected capacity for bravery, but instead of a false leg he has a glass eye (hmm, what is it with Browne and prostheses?) Schmidt is a bank auditor – an unlikely hero, seemingly – whose innate decency sees him involving himself in dangerous activities as Nazism takes hold in the years preceding the Second World War (The Eye of the Abyss). Clearly, one of Browne’s themes is the capacity of the individual to take action in the midst of a hostile and deadly environment.
Browne was a member of a panel (on Sunday 30 August) that included Robert Wilson and Glen David Gold. Like Browne, Wilson has written several novels that draw on modern history, among them The Blind Man of Seville, featuring detective Javier Falcon, which is set partly in the present and partly, through a series of diary entries by Falcon’s father, during the Second World War. Glen David Gold’s latest novel is Sunnyside, about Charlie Chaplin and the rise of Hollywood. Interviewed by Alan Attwood at MWF, the three discussed the process of creating fiction set in the past.
The topic interests me because a few years ago I attempted to write a novel set in 1920s Paris, and failed quite spectacularly – partly because the research took over, swamping both characters and narrative. But I am still interested in finding ways to construct narratives in which the past is in dialogue with the present. So I was interested to hear about the ways these guys approached their research.
Browne said that research is a two-stage process for him – first he reads very broadly, to get an in-depth knowledge of the period, then his reading becomes more specific as he seeks to learn specific pieces of information. It’s in that early stage that “you can go up blind alleys”. With the Schmidt novels, Browne began from a position of knowledge – having been a banker for many years he had a good grasp of how the industry worked, and had even visited some of the old private German banks that had been around since the 1930s. He was fascinated by their history, and saw their potential for fiction.
Research, for Browne, is largely but not entirely a matter of reading – I particularly liked his idea of using old editions of Hansard to help him get the language right for his trilogy of historical Melbourne novels (The Gilded Cage, The Burnt City, and The Trumpeting Angel). Wilson also reads very extensively before writing a new novel – never on the internet, always in books (he’s lucky enough to have access to The Bodleian Library). But he also makes use of interviews, and in order to get the character of Javier Falcon right, Wilson dropped in on a working chief inspector of the Seville police, whom he found surprisingly keen to answer the English writer’s questions. Gold, in talking about how he got Chaplin’s language right, referred to the many magazines that carried verbatim interviews with the man, whose fame coincided with the rise of the cult of the celebrity.
Having said all this about the importance of research, it was good to hear the panellists assert that in a novel, the most important things are the characters and the narrative. “The biggest technical problem is being faithful to history, while maintaining narrative drive,” Wilson said. At the end of the day, what makes a novel successful are its characters and its narrative, not the accuracy or otherwise of the historical background. So, while these writers are all careful to get their facts right, they are quite clear that their books belong in the fiction section, not history. As Gold put it, the object of research is “to help the writer capture the spirit of the times – not dry archaeological pedantry.”
MWF: Alexander Waugh
August 30, 2009
A few years ago I read Alexander Waugh’s marvellous biography of five generations of his family, Fathers and Sons. Alexander is the son of Auberon (‘Bron’) Waugh, whose scathing, outrageous columns I used to read in Private Eye when I was a teenager. Bron was the son of Evelyn, author of cynical 1920s novels like Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop, all of them wonderful, and, much later, Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn was the brother of Alec, an untalented hack and erotomaniac, and they were the two sons of Arthur, a rather strange, over-religious and under-talented late-Victorian literary gentleman. Arthur’s father was a mid-Victorian sadist known as ‘The Brute’ who enjoyed locking his son in a cupboard all night and firing off guns in his ear without warning. A classic English upper-middle-class family in other words.
With material like this to work with a biographer can hardly go wrong, and Alexander’s task was made easier by the fact that all of these men, except the Brute, were copious writers of letters and diaries. Alexander claims to have some 12,000 letters in his house – I think that’s what he said – and there are many more in various libraries and universities. His book is wonderful, not just because of the bizarre stories it contains, but as a case study of weird parenting passed on through the generations. Interviewed by Peter Craven at MWF, Alexander did not disappoint, providing more than an hour of entertainment which almost lived up to Craven’s characterisation of him as the finest biographer since Boswell wrote The Life of Johnson.
Arthur Waugh, having been brutalised by his own father, devoted extraordinary love and attention to his older son, Alec, convinced that Alec would be a sporting and literary genius. In fact Alec was nothing of the sort, and it was the neglected Evelyn who became the literary star, with books that his father regarded as contemptible. Evelyn got his revenge by portraying his father in absurd and demeaning guises in his fiction. In one of Evelyn Waugh’s short stories, ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’, a lunatic is taken for a day out by a lady on a bicycle, whom he then strangles, before returning happily to the asylum. This is a not-too-subtle dig at Arthur Waugh’s fetish for lady cyclists.
Evelyn Waugh, according to Alexander, was a pretty good father to his own son, Auberon – although when Bron nearly killed himself with a machine gun while doing national service in Cyprus, Evelyn refused to visit the young man as he lay close to death. Evelyn’s diaries are full of derogatory references to his children, but according to Alexander that is because he was: a) unusually honest about how irritating one’s children can be, and b) he always wrote his diaries in the evening when he was pissed. Alexander’s own father, Bron, seems to have been the best when it came to parenting skills, although now Alexander considers him to have been almost excessively supportive. When Alexander was kicked out of school for pushing the maths master’s cupboard down a flight of stairs and smashing it (he thought it contained a secret stash of women’s underwear) Auberon wrote in his son’s defence to the headmaster, saying “Vandalism is no more senseless than playing tennis.”
There are too many stories to go on quoting them so you will have to obtain the book if you want to know any more. The serious point, I suppose, is the many ways in which parents can mess up their children’s lives, whether through lack of love or excess of it.
MWF: Ned Kelly Awards 2009
August 29, 2009
This object is a Ned Kelly Award – memorably described by Shane Maloney as looking like “a sawn-off anthracite dildo” – now one of my most prized possessions since Ghostlines won the award for best first novel last night at the Ned Kelly Awards – the annual awards for Australian crime writing. On the underside it has the letters “C.W.A.A” which stand not for Country Women’s Association but Crime Writers Association of Australia.
This wasn’t one of those stuffy awards nights of polite applause and formal speeches – as became clear early in the piece when MC Jane Clifton flashed her magnificent spangly derriere at the audience. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that but maybe the official photographer snapped it.
The night kicked off with a debate on the topic “Women do it better” between (for the affirmative) Liz Porter and P.D. Martin, and, (for the negative) crime legend Peter Corris and Underbelly co-author John Silvester. Porter and Martin claimed that women are much better at crime than men for the simple reason that they carry it out so well that they never get caught. This was only slightly undermined when Martin pulled a (toy) gun out of her handbag upside down. Porter, though, produced a stiletto from her boot with convincing style. Women, they claimed, are more likely to get away with a crime: unlike men, women do not have an irresistible urge to boast about what they have done. In contrast, Corris gave a list of all the male writers who he claims invented the various genres of crime writing (Conan Doyle, Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler - he ignored Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers) and claimed that “women couldn’t drive getaway vehicles – they can’t even find a park at Chadstone”. You have to be a crime legend to get away with a line like that.
But Silvester brought the house down with anecdotes of the Melbourne underworld. He started with a blatant suck-up to the women in the audience, by claiming that females are just too smart to get involved in crime in the first place. Then, contradictorily, he cited Melbourne matriarch Kath Pettingill as his exemplar of a female criminal. One of Kath’s master crimes, according to Silvester, was her attempt to shoplift a toy dinosaur from a department store. The dinosaur was equipped with a voice box to give it a terrifying roar, and while Kath had it stuffed under her clothes the thing started to groan. Kath tried to pass it off by claiming she had terrible flatulence, but even this cunning ruse didn’t succeed. Silvester also weighed into the debate about criminal nicknames (a topic which I considered here), saying: “When you hire a hit man, you want someone with a nickname like “Steel eyes” or “Two guns”. Judy Moran (allegedly) decided to choose someone called “Nuts”.
I don’t know who won the debate – the applause seemed to me about equal for both, though Lynne unaccountably thinks the women won – but the Ned Kelly Awards went to:
- Lifetime achievement award – Shane Maloney (Interview with Shane in The Age here)
- Best novel: shared by Deep Water by Peter Corris and Smoke and Mirrors by Kel Robertson
- Best true crime: The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
- Best first fiction: Ghostlines by Nick Gadd
- S.D.Harvey short story award: Scott McDermott.
The Neddies have some quirks, I have discovered. One is that on the night they distribute a handout of judges’ comments on all the books. Nothing odd about that, you might think – except that just about all the comments are neutral at best or negative at worst. (It wasn’t just my book, it was all of them). So on your night of nights, you have the pleasure of reading comments like “solid” “not over-laboured” and “the supernatural element is unnecessary and confusing”. Ah well – it provided some material for my speech.
Slightly more annoying is the almost complete lack of publicity for the awards. If the point of the Ned Kellys is to promote crime writing, you would think the organisers could at least put out a media release of the winners and update their own website! As it was, the Neds weren’t even reported in the daily bulletin of the Melbourne Writers Festival, of which they were ostensibly a part. Fortunately some bloggers reported on the event – among them, Perry Middlemiss, Mysteries in Paradise and Angela Savage.
