All published by Serpent’s Tail
Fitzrovia
is a geographical area of London bounded roughly by Portland Place to the west,
Oxford Street to the south, Tottenham Court Road or Gower Street to the east,
and the Euston Road to the north. But Fitzrovia was more than a geographical
area, it was a cultural milieu which had developed from the Bloomsbury district,
situated to the east of Tottenham Court Road, where intellectuals such as
Virginia Woolf had flourished, and which had given its name to the elevated
highbrow atmosphere which characterised the Bloomsbury movement. Fitzrovia was
altogether earthier; it was largely a pub culture which flourished in the
thirties and during World War II and in the post-war period. The story of
Fitzrovia has been described as a ‘story of talent blighted, promise
unfulfilled, and premature death through drink’ (Fitzrovia: London’s Bohemia, Michael Bakewell, 1999). One of the
most famous Fitzrovian characters was Dylan Thomas, and his well-known, self-destructive
alcoholic addiction was typical.
These
novels, each of which can be read as a stand-alone but in my view are better
read in order, present a fascinating picture of the Fitzrovian milieu in the
post-war period. The main characters are fictional but a number of real-life
characters appear in one or more of the novels. Many of the characters appear
in several of the novels but no character in all four so that together they
form not so much a series as a mosaic with the focus on some main characters in
one novel and on other characters in others.
‘The Twilight Hour’
Published as an ebook 30 July 2015. ASIN: BO12BU2QI
Regrettably, this
title is currently available only as an ebook. However, as the author’s last
novel, She Died Young, has been
long-listed for a CWA award, the publishers will hopefully republish in print
form. It is set in 1947 in London and the widespread and very visible damage
resulting from the wartime bombing is powerfully and vividly described. Winter
that year was appalling: it was unbelievably cold, there was virtually no
heating, not much food, and, two years after World War II and the immediate
post-war euphoria had evaporated, an all-pervasive drab and dismal atmosphere,
compounded by even stricter rationing than during the war. And there was the
growing realisation that the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, was now anything
but an ally. Not to mention the shadow of the atomic bomb. The story starts in
the real-life Fitzrovian pub, The Wheatsheaf, off Tottenham Court Road, where
Dinah Wentworth, the narrator in this novel although not in the others, and her
husband Alan are with their friends, Colin Harris and the real-life Hugh
Maclaren-Ross. Dinah is young and rather naïve and in the last year of the war
had escaped from a narrow middle upper class upbringing in which girls were
expected not to work but to stay at home until and unless they made a suitable
marriage by working at the War Office. Alan is somewhat older and had been a
producer of documentary films during the war as had Hugh; Dinah’s parents had
not approved of Alan as a husband, regarding him as being dangerously bohemian,
but she and Alan are happy together and she loves their exciting life in
London. Colin had actually fought, first for the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War, then in Europe; he is now a committed and rather humourless
Communist and will hear nothing against the Soviet Union and its allies. Hugh
and Alan have plans to continue making films and believe that they have found a
backer, the Romanian Radu Enuscu. Enuscu arrives in the pub with his mistress,
the beautiful film star, Gwendolen Grey. However, for all their plans, Alan and
Dinah, like most Fitzrovians, are broke and although Alan does find a job it is
deeply unsatisfying and badly paid. So Dinah, against Alan’s wishes, finds a
job with Stanley Colman, a possible backer for Alan and Hugh’s film plans, but
more interested in acquiring property which in bomb-scarred London is going cheap.
Stan is from the East End and working-class unlike the Fitzrovians who for all
their louche lifestyle mostly come from public-school backgrounds. Stan is
rather a wide boy but endearing in his way and Dinah takes to him. So when Stan
asks her to take an envelope to the unpleasant and lecherous surrealist artist
Titus Mavor in the semi-wrecked house in which he is currently camping out she
does. She finds Mavor but he is dead. Stan asks her not to tell anyone; first,
she tells only Alan but then she finds herself in a position where she lies to
the police. Once it is established that he was murdered, the police start
looking for suspects. They light on Colin who had had a violent and very public
argument with Mavor; Colin’s Communist identity is held against him, but he has
no apparent alibi for the time of Mavor’s death. He is charged with murder
which at the time carried the death penalty. Dinah and Alan and Colin’s other
friends feel sure that he must be innocent. In fact, there are many people who
would have liked Mavor dead but can the evidence be found which will exonerate Colin
before it is too late?
‘War Damage’
Published 4 February 2010. ISBN: 978 1 84668 692(PB)
By
1948, although the dreadful winter of 1947 was over, the austerity regime was
continuing with rationing in full force and a generally all-pervasive
atmosphere of drabness. But the raffish Fitzrovian life is in full swing, and
one of the most prominent members is the photographer Freddie Buckingham,
highly sociable, larger than life, overwhelmingly camp and apparently immensely
popular. Then, one mild autumn evening, Freddie is found shot dead on Hampstead
Heath. Was it just a botched robbery by one of London’s criminal underworld? Earlier
that day he had been to a party given by the beautiful Regine Milner, a
would-be society hostess, and the police, in their search for information about
Freddie, question her about who had been at the party. But Regine is less than
frank with the police; she has, after all, a lot to hide starting with her own
past about which Freddie had known but no-one else. Or so she thinks. But
Regine has an immense capacity for self-deception particularly in her sudden
infatuation with the beautiful schoolboy Charles Hallam; he, however, is much,
much more interested in Freddie. And she also wants to keep quiet about
Freddie’s homosexuality which was then a criminal offence and fiercely
prosecuted by the Vice Squad. And about how she and Neville had searched Freddie’s
house for his will and for photographs before the police got there. And she
doesn’t want the police to know that a member of the current government who has
been caught up in the real-life Sidney Stanley scandal was there, not with his
wife but with a friend of Regine’s. The top brass at Scotland Yard would like a
quick result preferably identifying a botched robbery by a member of London’s
thriving criminal underworld. But once Freddie’s homosexuality is established
blackmail is established as a possible motive. And then a low-life thug with fascist
connections is found shot dead with a bullet from the same gun that had shot
Freddie. Before the war Freddie had toyed, as a few young men had, with fascism
though not for long. Is there a connection there? And what happens when a
former husband of Regine whom she had presumed dead in the chaos of war
suddenly appears. He is broke and thinks she has something of his. Altogether
there is an immense tangle of lies and deception which the detectives
investigating the case find well-nigh impossible to disentangle.
‘The Girl in Berlin’
Published 16 May 2013. ISBN: 978 1 84668 827 0 (PB)
It is now 1951,
and the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have just defected to Moscow
leaving the security services with a considerable amount of egg on their
collective faces. The story pivots around the mysterious and manipulative Miles
Kingdom of MI5. Jack McGowan of Special Branch, who appeared briefly in War Damage, has been instructed to work
with Kingdom to establish if there are further moles in powerful positions within
the British Establishment. One of McGowan’s tasks is to watch Colin Harris who
has unexpectedly returned from East Berlin, where he had gone after his successful
acquittal on appeal for the murder of Titus Mavor, to London. He is as tortured
and unhappy as ever and when he announces to his old friends, Alan and Dinah
Wentworth, that he wishes to marry and bring to the United Kingdom a German
girl, Frieda Schroder, they are surprised, the more so since he has admitted to
them in the past his homosexuality. However, he needs a job: can Alan who is
now a BBC Radio Three producer help? Not really, is the answer. Alan goes to
Deal on the Kent coast to interview an elderly refugee scientist, Konrad
Eberhardt. Not that the interview goes well: Eberhardt is confused and
cantankerous although he does admit to Alan that he is writing his
autobiography which will reveal ‘many secrets’. On his way back Alan encounters
Kingdom; unfortunately Alan is with a woman, not Dinah, but someone else, and
Kingdom manipulates Alan into telling him about Eberhardt’s proposed
autobiography. Meanwhile, McGowan and his sidekick Manfred Jarrell see Colin at
a funeral with Eberhardt who hands Colin a parcel. When Eberhardt is found
drowned, Colin, afraid of being framed for yet another murder, returns to
Berlin and McGowan is told by Kingdom also to go to Berlin and make contact
with various people among whom is Frieda now desperate to escape from East
Berlin and her corrupt and violent father. But all these people have secrets,
even the beguiling Frieda, and McGowan finds himself in danger, first in
Berlin, then in London, until he uncovers the shocking, squalid truth behind
the secrets.
‘She Died Young’
Published 10 March 2016. ISBN: 978 1 78125 484 4 (PB)
1956. The year of
the Suez fiasco and the failed Hungarian uprising. The scandal caused by the
Burgess and Maclean defection to the Soviet Union continues: was there a ‘third
man’? (Kim Philby was suspected but cleared!). So it is hardly surprising that
the accidental death of the prostitute Valerie Jarvis in a seedy Kings Cross
hotel is barely news. Except to one person, journalist Gerry Blackstone who had
been fond of Valerie, and he asks Jack McGowan of Special Branch, to enquire
into Valerie’s death. But McGowan has been tasked with investigating the
antecedents of the Hungarian refugees now in Oxford, and he has also to
establish whether Professor Quinault of Corpus Christi College might know
anything about the ‘third man’ so he tells Jarrell to look into the matter.
Jarrell finds evidence implicating Valerie’s landlord, the Maltese Camenzuli
who has links to London’s vice gangs; Camenzuli is duly charged and locked up.
But later the doctor who wrongfully certifies Valerie’s death as an accident is
found dead – coincidence? Unlikely. Blackstone’s own enquiries lead him to
Sonia, the madam of the high-class brothel where Valerie had once worked and
wife of Vince Mallory, a leading figure in London’s criminal underworld.
Meanwhile in Oxford McGowan has encountered Charles Hallam, now a postgraduate
student of Quinault. And Hallam has encountered the Tory M.P. Rodney
Turberville, a friend of Quinault’s and the lover of Regine Drownes (formerly
Regine Milner). Charles discloses to McGowan some rather odd finds in Quinault’s
house. McGowan’s suspicions are aroused. And is there a connection between
Quinault and Sonia? And precisely who is Sonia? And then a young Hungarian male
student with whom Charles had a brief liaison is found drowned. Lots of questions
– will they be answered?
I
found these four novels extremely impressive. The author’s depiction of the
post-war period is masterful and convincing and her control of the multiple
plot strands and the multitude of characters and the shifting mosaic of their
relationships is extraordinarily skilful. The author is a leading writer on
feminist issues and this is well reflected in the way in which many of the
female characters’ roles are governed by their sexuality – almost the only
exception is Dinah who has been working at the Courtauld under Anthony Blunt
(who for reasons readers will appreciate) is permanently tense and nervy. She
is also an authority on the history and significance of women’s fashions such
as Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look and this features in the novels.
Coincidentally, while I was writing these reviews (July 2016), BBC Radio 4 was
broadcasting a fascinating series of programmes on the early Cold War
culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. From the ending of She Died Young it would appear that more
books in the series are likely; certainly the whole period provides plenty of
material. Highly recommended
------
Reviewer: Radmila May
Elizabeth Wilson was born in 1936. She was educated
at St Paul’s Girls school and Oxford. She trained as a psychiatric social
worker because of an interest in psychoanalysis. An independent researcher and writer best
known for her commentaries on feminism and popular culture, she is currently
Visiting Professor at the London University of Fashion. She lives in London.
Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has
lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She
read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for
many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them
including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late
husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015.
She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two
of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is
to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now
concentrating on her own writing.
