Crime Writers and Other Animals (6 page)

The drumming sound they made against the walls of the van stayed with me. It kind of reverberated in my head. And now I've arrived at the new prison, I can hear it again. I've met the governor, I've been through all the entry procedures, and now I'm being led to my cell. The drumming sound comes from all the other prisoners, banging things against the doors of their cells.

I can hear things shouted too. Not nice things. I can hear that word ‘nonce' that the man in the remand prison used. I wonder what it means.

Still, I'm sure it'll be all right. They may find the person who really did those horrid things to Bethany Jones, and set me free. Or they may reduce the length of my sentence. I've heard they do that for some prisoners. They reduce the sentence ‘for good behaviour'. And I'm going to continue to do what Papa told me. All the time I'm here, I'm going to be on my absolute best behaviour.

I wonder what it'll be like here. I know there are only certain times when you're allowed to watch television in prison. Maybe Children's BBC will be one of those times.

I hope they have golden syrup in this prison.

To have killed Bartlett Mears from motives of jealousy would have been a small-minded, petty crime; but fortunately Carlton Rutherford had a much more respectable, wholly practical, reason for eliminating his old rival.

Murder had not been involved in his original plans for settling old scores, but Carlton Rutherford felt not the tiniest twinge of regret when he realized it would be necessary. In a sense, it would tie together a lot of ends otherwise doomed to eternal looseness.

The rivalry between the two writers had lasted nearly forty years, and though Bartlett Mears, had he been questioned on the subject, would have dismissed it with a characteristic shrug, for Carlton Rutherford the wound had never healed, and its scab required daily repicking.

Both had written their first novels at the end of the fifties. By then Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and others, burglarizing the shrine of pre-war British values and shattering its first hollow images, had declared the open season for iconoclasm.

Carlton Rutherford, at that period climbing the North Face of a doctorate on George Gissing at the University of Newcastle, had used his spare time to good effect and written his first novel,
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
.

This was a work of searingly fashionable nihilism, the story of Bob Grantham, a working-class genius, son of a postman in Salford, who struggled, against the odds of misunderstanding parents and virginity-hugging girls, all the way up to university. The book contrived to pillory traditional educational values, and at the same time potentially to alienate everyone with whom the author had come into contact in the twenty-five years he had been alive.

And therein lay its problem. Bob Grantham was so patently the
alter ego
– in fact, not even the
alter ego
, just the
ego
– of Carlton Rutherford that all of the book's other characters became readily identifiable.

Dashiel Loukes, the lean and hungry literary agent to whom (randomly from a reference book in a Newcastle library) the manuscript had been sent, confided to its author over a boozy lunch at Bertorelli's in Charlotte Street, that, though he was ‘excited, but very excited' about the book, he was ‘just a tidge worried' about the libel risk. And thought a little bit of rewriting might be prudent.

That had been in 1958. Though simplified by the death of both Carlton Rutherford's parents in a charabanc crash soon after his meeting with Loukes (you cannot libel the dead), the rewriting had proved unexpectedly difficult and time-consuming.

Eventually, a year later, at another Bertorelli's lunch, the author presented the agent with a revised manuscript, announcing that he had contrived to disguise all of the living characters save for that of Sandra, the toffee-nosed solicitor's daughter who had proved so tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Bob Grantham and so provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity.

Dashiel Loukes, thin and acute as a greyhound, had asked how closely this character resembled its original, and dragged from Carlton Rutherford the unwilling admission that, except for the detail of having had her eyes changed from blue to brown, Sandra was identical in every particular to Sylvia, a toffee-nosed solicitor's daughter who had proved tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Carlton Rutherford and provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity (still, though Carlton did not mention the fact, intact in 1959).

The agent, aware that in
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
he had a fashionable and marketable commodity, suggested an extreme solution to the problem. The author should send a copy of his manuscript to Sylvia/Sandra and ask her to give a written undertaking that she would not take any action if the book were published. They had nothing to lose; it was worth a try.

Sylvia/Sandra was not for nothing the daughter of a solicitor. Now married to another solicitor, she was appalled by the manuscript and announced her firm intention to put an immediate injunction on the work if it was ever scheduled for publication.

Another gloomy Bertorelli's lunch, and Carlton Rutherford returned to another year's rewriting. In his new version, the Sylvia/Sandra character was virtually erased from the text. The dynamics of the novel were somewhat weakened by this alteration, but at least
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
could now be published without fear of litigation.

But a new shadow stretched over the 1961 Bertorelli's lunch at which Carlton Rutherford handed over his newly sanitized manuscript to Dashiel Loukes. The Sunday papers that week had been full of rave reviews for
Chips On The Elbow
, a first novel by a hitherto-unknown author, Bartlett Mears.

This was a work of searingly fashionable nihilism, the story of Ted Retford, a working-class genius, son of a milkman in Stockport, who struggled, against the odds of misunderstanding parents and virginity-hugging girls, all the way up to university. The book contrived to pillory traditional educational values, but what distinguished it from the novels of the other voguish ‘angry young men' was that it told the story with a sense of humour.

According to the
Sunday Times
, ‘It is spiced with a refreshing wit, and, whereas other contemporary novelists have used their tongues to lash outdated institutions, Mr Mears keeps his firmly – and wisely – in his cheek.
Chips On The Elbow
contrives to express its own distinctive anger while at the same time deflating the pretensions of the other “angry young men”. In Bartlett Mears the arrival of a major new literary talent must be celebrated.'

The ensuing events were predictable. When, in 1962,
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
was finally published, its launch caused only minor ripples on the surface of literary life. The
Observer
referred to ‘yet another whining catalogue of the ways in which the working class misunderstands the hypersensitive artist in its midst', and the
Spectator
even spoke of ‘a self-regarding diatribe in the manner – but without the wit – of Bartlett Mears'.

All this was gall and wormwood to Carlton Rutherford – particularly because he knew he had finished his novel before Bartlett Mears had even started his.

Another spur to fury was the discovery, from the deluge of newspaper profiles, radio and television interviews of the new genius, that Bartlett Mears was not even the genuine article. He was not the son of a milkman in Stockport, but of a bank manager in Guildford. He had been educated at a minor public school and – of all places – Oxford University.

Chips On The Elbow
had not been written in the light of bitter experience, but as a patronizing satire by a Southerner on the kind of life that Carlton Rutherford had led.

Given such a start, it was perhaps not surprising that the relationship between the two writers should end in murder.

The reception of their first books set the pattern for the future. Carlton Rutherford, having made a borehole into it in
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
, continued to mine the rich seam of his own childhood hardship and consequent feelings of alienation. The heroes of his subsequent novels were not all
called
Bob Grantham, but they all
were
Bob Grantham. Or, to put it another way, they all
were
Carlton Rutherford.

However, the vogue for gritty Northern realism passed. Other authors moved on to new subjects. Only Carlton Rutherford continued to produce the same tales of unrecognized genius. And, in an ironically self-fulfilling prophecy, his genius was recognized less and less with each succeeding book.

The novels, laborious to write, became even more laborious to read. Those reviewers who had found promise in
Neither One Thing Nor The Other
found it thereafter in decreasing measure, and eventually applied their ultimate destructive sanction – by not reviewing Carlton Rutherford's books at all.

Dashiel Loukes, initially such a champion of his author's cause, also proved a fair-weather friend. Through the sixties the agent grew fatter and more sleek, as he gathered under his banner an ever-increasing troop of ever-more-popular novelists. His early commitment to what he had described to Carlton Rutherford as ‘really sensitive literary fiction' gave way in his priorities to the pursuit of the dollar.

Publishing changed, going through yet another of those recurrent attempts to shake off its image as the last refuge of a gentleman and prove it really
is
a hard-nosed commercial business. This involved, among other economy measures, the shedding of a large number of middle-list ‘literary novelists'.

The British film industry began to disappear. The vogue for films of the type that might have offered Carlton Rutherford hope,
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
or
A Kind of Loving
, gave way to breathlessly trendy reflections of Swinging London, which in turn gave way to nothing.

Dashiel Loukes, fatter but still as sharp, trimmed his sails accordingly. He began to specialize in cold-war thrillers, which offered possibilities of lucrative American film deals.

Carlton Rutherford became more and more a dinosaur in the agent's stable of fleet-footed winners.

The crisis came in 1967. Dashiel Loukes was unable to find any publisher willing to take on the latest novel, in which Bob Grantham (by now named Sid Doncaster and working as a novelist) had another disastrously unconsummated love affair and suffered from writer's block.

For Carlton Rutherford, though it still continued to strain constipatedly off the typewriter, the writing was on the wall.

His agent broke the news in a pub one evening after work. Carlton Rutherford no longer justified the expense of a lunch. Indeed, had the author not insisted on a face-to-face meeting, Dashiel Loukes would have made the perfunctory severance by telephone.

(As things turned out, though, the encounter was not without its uses for the agent. He was at the time in the throes of a very heavy affair with an editor from Hamish Hamilton. Telling his wife he had to meet ‘that dreary old bellyacher Carlton Rutherford' gave him the perfect alibi. So long as he kept the actual meeting brief – which he ensured that he did – Dashiel Loukes efficiently managed to carve out two hours of uninterrupted bliss between the editor's satin sheets in Notting Hill.)

Such categorical obliteration of his hopes might have turned a less resilient author away from the literary life for good, but it did not have that effect on Carlton Rutherford. Partly, he was made of sterner stuff; and partly, his doctorate on George Gissing having been abandoned some years before, there was nothing else he could do.

So Carlton Rutherford set about constructing something which a surprisingly large number of other literary folk have managed – a career as a writer that does not involve the publication of books. He gave lectures on the theory and practice of writing. He attended seminars and symposia on writing. He joined writers' committees. He wrote reviews of an increasingly waspish nature, deploring the decline of British letters since . . . well, since his own books had been regarded as publishable.

And, of course, he taught creative writing courses.

In spite of all these activities, he still found time to go on writing his own novels, which charted further the conspiracy of an unfeeling and philistine world against Bob Grantham.

And he lived in daily anticipation of a change in the fickle tastes of the literary marketplace. The revived career of Barbara Pym in the late seventies prompted hopes for a similar rediscovery of Carlton Rutherford. When these were unrealized, he began increasingly to rely on thoughts of posthumous acclaim like that accorded to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And when such thoughts proved inadequate to check his spleen, Carlton Rutherford comforted himself with fantasies of revenge on the man who had blighted his entire career. Bartlett Mears.

It might have been easier for him if Carlton Rutherford could have been unaware of his rival's activities, but the career of Bartlett Mears continued to maintain the high profile initiated by the success of
Chips On The Elbow
.

Mears, unlike Rutherford, had not allowed himself to be trapped into rewriting the same book time and again. Each of his publications was different from the last, each one attacked a new target, and in each the author's wit was more venomous. The books themselves did not get better – indeed, they undeniably got worse – but they did get reviewed.

And they got talked about. Bartlett Mears had an instinct for subject matter that would prompt controversy. His books gave rise to passionate love and passionate hatred in equal measure, but they always gave rise to some reaction. Each new publication was derided as evidence of a sad falling-off in the author's former talents, as each one made its inexorable way into the bestseller lists.