Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  That summer the Rougiers went to Cornwall for a month’s holiday, taking Richard and his governess, Miss Butler, with them. This time Georgette also took her manuscript. While Richard and Miss Butler swam at Kynance Cove, played, explored, and went sailing with Ronald, Georgette got on with her writing. She joined her family on some of their expeditions around the peninsula but confessed that she was “too busy to see much of it.” She was working

  knee deep in maps, despatches, roll-calls, & a welter of notes, & spend frenzied periods searching for a forgotten piece of information. I’ve never done anything that required more work, & have to make notes for each chapter—first, the political events; 2nd, what I wish to quote from Despatches; 3rd, what the fictitious people are to do; 4th, which real characters must drift through again. My hair will shortly be white, I expect.

  She had yet to write the Battle chapters and still had not settled on the book’s title. She had so far rejected Colonel Audley, At Waterloo, Loud Sabbath, Sepoy General, The Crowded Hour, Doubtful Battle, But Still in Story, A Damn Nice Thing, Unless With Victory, and Arm, Warrior, Arm.

  She managed to complete the first fourteen chapters on holiday. With the manuscript written in longhand she begged Norah Perriam to find her a typist “Who will come to my house, complete with machine, & take the book at my dictation.” It meant having a stranger at Blackthorns but Georgette explained that “It wouldn’t be for many days, & if she was of the typist-class she could consort with my governess in the evenings. If not, it wouldn’t matter.” In the end, Norah Perriam found her the ideal person. Sylvia Gamble stayed at Blackthorns for a fortnight while Georgette read aloud, “complete with punctuation,” from her manuscript which Sylvia took down in shorthand before typing it up.

  It was obvious to Sylvia that Georgette took great pride in her subject, and she later described her as having “a beautiful brain” and an “ordered intellectual apparatus” which liked nothing better than to be immersed in meticulous research. Georgette had taken great pains over her Waterloo book and frequently found herself struggling with the “welter of contradictory information” which made it “difficult to know what was accurate and what not.” After months of hard toil, however, she felt able to declare: “I have done my best: at all events I can quote chapter & verse for everything I say of the real part of the story.”

  The book was almost finished when she suddenly found the title: “Whoopee! I’ve got it at last, & it’s a Peach! You needn’t bother to hunt around for any more suggestions; this is Final. Forgive, Brave Dead! It comes out of that beautiful Scott poem, the Field of Waterloo.” She was delighted with the flash of inspiration and felt that it was just the sort of title to “catch the eye; it has a ring; & it disarms criticism from all these who feel inclined to say, who are you to write about Waterloo?” She was well aware that some of her readers and reviewers might feel that she did not have the credentials to write a book with so much military history at its heart. But her ability to combine history with story was one of Georgette’s great skills and her account of the Battle of Waterloo (the final ten chapters) would eventually become recommended reading at the Royal Military College Sandhurst. She had become very protective of her Waterloo book, rating it much higher than any of her previous work and she desperately wanted it to be a success: “I hope that the book will be liked. I am too close to it to have a very clear idea of it. All I know is that it has entailed a tremendous amount of work, & I have loved doing it, & feel a bit shattered by it.”

  With the manuscript finished she hoped that her agent or someone at Heinemann would read it and give her a professional opinion. When Charles Evans’s joint managing director took an interest in the novel she was delighted. He even had decided views about its title. Georgette was no longer sure of her choice of Forgive, Brave Dead and had offered her publisher an alternative; she was pleased to discover that the director’s choice “coincides precisely with my preference!” His name was Alexander Frere-Reeves and the preferred title was An Infamous Army.

  15

  Presumably, if you continue to hand over the goods your sales are bound to increase a bit.

  —Georgette Heyer

  Frere-Reeves came into Georgette’s life at a time when she was predisposed to like anyone at Heinemann who would respond positively to her books: “I was extremely pleased to find, from my conversation with you [Norah Perriam] this morning that Mr. Frere-Reeves is inclined to take this book of mine seriously.” She sent him a detailed summary of the plot and several suggestions for the cover design and was gratified to receive from him a rough sketch of the proposed dust-jacket. “I find it an excellent design,” she told him. “It is very much ‘in period.’” For the first time Georgette felt that there was someone at Heinemann who understood and appreciated her work. But Frere-Reeves’s interest in her work at this time was only temporary, for it would be another year before he took a permanent role in her writing life and she still had several unresolved grievances against the firm.

  “Anxious to hear an unprejudiced opinion” of the new book, Georgette gave one set of proofs to her bookseller friend and another to her mother (although Carola still sometimes read her manuscripts, Georgette no longer sought Joanna’s input). Sylvia often read her daughter’s novels in draft, but in recent years Georgette had found that she no longer valued her mother’s opinion as she once had and tended to dismiss her views if they did not concur with her own. In the end neither reader gave her the response she wanted: “My bookseller friend thinks I shall bore my schoolgirl public—which I don’t mind—and says she personally longed for more ‘Wellington bits.’ My mother—quite the man in the street—is now reading it, and is uninterested in the Wellington-bits (I think bored, too) but seems to like the romance—which I think rather poor.”

  Disappointed, she begged Moore to read it: “I wish—if you’ve a spare reading-evening anywhere—you’d take one of the proof-copies home, and read it. I want a professional opinion badly.” But neither Moore nor Frere-Reeves nor anyone else at Heinemann apparently read An Infamous Army prior to its release. While it was a measure of her success and reliability as an author that neither her agent nor her publisher felt the need to read her manuscripts, in this instance Georgette felt badly let down. She was obliged to wait until publication to see how the book was received.

  An Infamous Army was due out in November. In the meantime she had promised Hodder a new detective novel. They were keen to receive another thriller from her for They Found Him Dead was selling well and Georgette’s reputation as a crime-writer was growing. She had written a general outline for the new book but was waiting on Ronald who was “largely responsible for the plot.” This usually meant explaining to Georgette how the murder was committed and leaving her to tell the story. But Ronald was busy with his Bar exams and she could not give Hodder a synopsis until after they were over.

  She had received several good reviews for They Found Him Dead, but not everyone admired the novel. A young tobacconist’s assistant wrote demanding an apology for a speech uttered by the fictional hero’s mother (who has just met her son’s fiancée for the first time):

  “Jim tells me you are going to be married. I should think you’ll suit one another very well. It’s always been my dread that he might marry something out of a tobacconist’s shop so you can imagine what a relief it is to me to know he’s had the sense to choose a really nice girl. Not that I’m a snob, but there are limits, and young men are such fools.”

  Georgette’s reaction to her reader’s letter was frank: “I can see not the slightest reason for encouraging her,” she told Norah Perriam. “I don’t write for that kind of person, after all, & if she chooses in future to ban me from her library list it’s all the same to me. What is more, there is nothing to be said. I should regard it as a major tragedy if my son were to marry a tobacconist’s assistant.”

  But the reader’s letter was a reminder that there would always be those who read her contemporary novels and related
them to their own lives and circumstances. Several years after the tobacconist episode Georgette received a complaint from a solicitor whose name she had unwittingly given to an unattractive minor character in another of her thrillers. In neither book had she deliberately set out to offend her readers—she was writing fiction after all—but the incidents did emphasize the advantages of setting her novels in the historical past. No one could take offense at the snobbery and injustice inherent in the social hierarchy in Regency, Georgian, or Medieval England. Georgette could write with impunity about such things as the perceived inferiority of the lower classes, the disastrous consequences of an ill-judged marriage, or the moral hypocrisy of the aristocracy, sure in the knowledge that her readers could not object to behavior, ideas, or attitudes that were a matter of historical fact.

  In October came the news that Doubleday Doran were thinking of publishing An Infamous Army in America. Though pleased by the interest in her cherished novel, Georgette thought that “On a pure matter of policy, it would be a mistake.” She worried that allowing Doubleday to bring out her Waterloo book when they had already turned down Regency Buck (“to which this new book is almost a sequel”) would not necessarily enhance her reputation in the United States. Her fears proved unfounded. Doubleday did a splendid job with the novel, and the American reviews were excellent. Georgette’s uncharacteristic anxiety about the potential American reaction to one of her books reflected her feelings about An Infamous Army. She thought it her finest novel to date—and held great hopes that it would be well received by the British critics.

  When An Infamous Army came out in early November, Georgette pounced on the newspapers and was devastated when no review of it appeared the first Sunday after publication. She instantly wrote to Moore to tell him of her “failure”:

  I suppose you’ve seen that both the Sunday papers have ignored An Infamous Army. It may be my fault for having failed, but nothing will ever convince me that I should have fallen so flat with another—any other—publisher. I think the newspapers must dislike Heinemann, for how is it that Longmans & H. & S. never fail to get their books reviewed? The blurb that Heinemann wrote of the Army makes me sick—but what could I expect, when the man whose business it is to write blurbs sent me a specimen with the cool information that he had not been able to read the book? I am feeling so dispirited, that the grave seems the only tolerable spot to be in.

  Her reaction was premature. Within a week reviews of An Infamous Army appeared in all the major papers including one in The Times Literary Supplement which must have pleased her:

  Here is a romance of which the historical details are presented not merely with astonishing care and accuracy—bibliography and maps all complete—but with a comprehension of the essential features of the Waterloo campaign even more unusual, and which yet holds from first to last our keen interest in the fate of the principal personages…The meaning of the opening moves of the campaign is better grasped than in some historical accounts, and there is even a sound criticism of Wellington’s strategy…For Waterloo we take our places on the field as spectators, and if a battle has ever, in fiction, been more vividly and accurately described from the point of view of a staff officer hurrying from one part of the line to another, one cannot recall an instance. The ordinary reader will find these episodes good, but he will not realize just how good they are.

  The Daily Mail was even more enthusiastic: “One of the clearest and most balanced accounts in the English language of the Hundred Days…A brilliant achievement.”

  Unfortunately, Georgette’s original view that Heinemann had not done its best for An Infamous Army prevailed, and she found herself dreading her future with the company. Within a day of the reviews appearing she wrote to Moore outlining her “burning grievance against the firm.” Her perception was that Heinemann made “just enough money to make it worth their while to stick to me while they can—but not enough for them to think it worth their while to push my work.” She thought the firm could have done a lot more to promote An Infamous Army and Georgette’s diatribe was directed mainly at Charles Evans. The chairman’s apparent indifference to her concerns was surprising from a man who was renowned for his shrewd and energetic handling of so many popular authors and their books. Evans had been ill, however, and he may have thought her complaints trivial and unwarranted (although he had frequently taken the time to soothe other writers’ ruffled egos). Whatever the cause, his perceived indifference to her writing prompted Georgette to shelve plans for the serious historical book she had been intending to write about Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s ill-fated daughter. Georgette’s bitterness over what she saw as Heinemann’s neglect of her endured for over a month as letters passed back and forth between her and Evans via Moore to the satisfaction of neither party.

  What Evans had failed to perceive was the degree of Georgette’s emotional involvement in An Infamous Army and that in giving Heinemann the novel she had “handed them the best of which I was capable. I put my whole heart into that book, and I did expect my publishers to put some of theirs into its production.” She now felt this had been “touching but misplaced confidence,” for not only had the head of the editorial department, Arnold Gyde, failed to read her book before writing its blurb, but “some meddlesome and illiterate” person had also taken it upon himself to change her spelling and punctuation after she had passed the proofs for publication. This was intolerable: “What I cannot stomach is an intellectually conceited person tampering with my work without so much as a by-your-leave. One would have thought, moreover, that the perusal of my book, and its bibliography, would have made him a little chary of interfering with the work of one who obviously had made a fairly profound study of her subject.” To Georgette, these egregious actions by members of Heinemann’s staff were not to be borne.

  Had he been involved in the correspondence, Frere-Reeves might have been able to smooth things over and allay her concerns—something which Georgette herself acknowledged:

  In justice to Mr. Frere-Reeves, I should like to say that while he was in charge I had nothing to complain of. Whether he was interested or not, he at least assumed an interest, and by his tact and courtesy, and his way of answering letters immediately without any moan about being too harassed by libel-cases to attend to anything else, did much to reconcile me to my fate in having to give another book to a firm which prides itself on being able to say that my sales have not actually dropped-off.

  If he ever saw it, Frere-Reeves would have derived a good deal of satisfaction from this letter, for he and Charles Evans had been adversaries from their first meeting in 1923. Then Evans had been manager of the firm and Frere-Reeves a Doubleday protégé. In 1927 Frere-Reeves was made a Heinemann director and in 1933 he was appointed joint managing director of the firm. Evans strongly resented what he saw as an incursion into his territory and there had developed a mutual dislike and a rivalry between the two men which had not abated over time. Georgette’s complaints against Evans aroused Frere-Reeves’s interest and he deliberately set out to succeed where his rival had failed. It cannot have been a difficult undertaking. Georgette’s resentment was palpable and she was ripe for attention and a sympathetic ear.

  On 3 December 1937, Merely Murder opened on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre. Three performances later it closed. For Georgette, it was a disappointing finale to a long drawn-out series of rewritten scripts, renewed options, changing playwrights and producers. She was not surprised by the play’s failure and it only increased her skepticism of similar proposals for adapting her work for the theater. She had already been discouraged by Frank Vosper’s play script for Behold, Here’s Poison in which he had “cut out the wit & added nothing to replace it.” Neither Thomas nor Vosper had succeeded in conveying the inherent humor in her novels and Georgette herself declared “if a success is to be made of me I must be treated in my own vein—that of broad comedy.” She and Ronald thought of writing a play themselves but never made the time for it. Instead she put
her comedic gifts to work on a new detective-thriller.

  By the second week of January she had produced twenty thousand words of draft, “some of it quite funny,” she told Norah Perriam. “You’ll be glad to hear that the corpse is discovered on the first page, & there is no assembly of characters to be sorted out.” A month later she delivered the completed manuscript to her agent. She originally thought to call it Blue Murder but on finding the title had been used changed it to A Blunt Instrument. It is, in some people’s estimation, Georgette’s masterpiece among her detective novels and even “Torquemada” of The Observer called it “the best, and for want of a better adjective—the truest of Miss Heyer’s detective novels” (Georgette confessed that she “almost let it go to my head!”). Her creation of Malachi Glass—a dour, evangelical police constable given to uttering reproving Old Testament scriptures to anyone he meets—certainly set the book apart.

  Within hours of completing A Blunt Instrument Georgette was planning her next novel. Renewed troubles with her cash flow had also prompted her to consider writing some short stories for Woman’s Journal “to frighten wolves with” and she hoped to sell the serial rights for A Blunt Instrument to Dorothy Sutherland as well. Her interest in serial rights had been reignited by the sale of An Infamous Army to the Australian Women’s Weekly.

  Georgette was becoming increasingly popular in Australia, where her historical novels had been successful from the first. Her “colonial” market included Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada and reliably brought in several hundred pounds annually. A few years earlier Georgette had sold her rights in those and her European markets to her mother “for a token sum—persuading her that by buying them she was really doing me a favor, and saving me from Sur-tax demands!” It was a generous act which gave Sylvia financial independence and saved her from the indignity of having to ask her daughter for money. Although Georgette often found her mother frustrating and difficult she loved her and was genuinely concerned for her well-being.