Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Buchan was born in Perth, the eldest son of a Free Church minister. A ‘high-flier’, he won a bursary to Glasgow University and three years later a classical scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he glittered as the most brilliant undergraduate of his year. Among the private documents of this period is a list drawn up by him of ‘Things to be Done and Honours to be Gained’. They were indeed done and gained – and early in life. In the 1898 Who’s Who there is the extraordinarily precocious entry: ‘Buchan, John, undergraduate …’ He was just twenty-three and already a ‘Who’.

  While still an undergraduate, Buchan read manuscripts for Oscar Wilde’s publisher, John Lane; was elected President of the Union; and contributed to Lane’s fin de siècle Yellow Book; and, effortlessly, he took one of the best firsts of his year. He had begun to write fiction – mainly historical romances set in his native Lowland Scotland. Among the ‘Things to be Done’ was the resolve to make himself the second Walter Scott. On graduation, Buchan read for the Bar – the first rung to any number of top careers in British public life. Along the way he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor and had four children – Alice, John, William and Alastair.

  Those already at the top always took to Buchan. Still in his mid-twenties, he was invited to South Africa by the High Commissioner, Alfred Milner, to assist with post-war reconstruction. The British concentration (‘refugee’) camps for interned Boers made a deep impression. So, less favourably, did the Jewish entrepreneurs Buchan encountered, leading to a black vein of prejudice which can sometimes embarrass modern admirers. A Haggardian novel, Prester John (1910), about the mythic leader of all the Africas, resulted. What is striking is Buchan’s prescient thesis that Britain’s eventual problems would come not from rival European colonial powers, but from the ‘Kaffirs.’ ‘Supposing a second Tchaka turned up,’ the old-hand Wardlaw muses, ‘who could get the different tribes to work together … If they got a leader with prestige enough to organize a crusade against the white man … Africa for the Africans.’ The echo thrown back is ‘Mandela’.

  Back in England, Buchan wrote legal treatises and joined his friend and contemporary Thomas (‘Tommy’) Nelson as chief literary adviser to the great Scottish publishing house of Nelson, making monthly trips up to Edinburgh. He would never be poor thereafter. Now happily married, Buchan failed at his first attempt to get into Parliament, as a Unionist, in 1911. He would later serve – dutifully – as member for the Scottish universities. As war drew closer, Buchan suffered the first symptoms of a duodenal ulcer – the trademark illness of the overdriven. In August 1914 he was ordered to bed by his doctors where – restless as ever – he began scribbling his ‘shilling shocker’, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Richard Hannay’s single-handed rescue of Britain from the Hun is much read, but few readers pause to look at the dedication to ‘My Dear Tommy’. Nelson, like Buchan’s younger brother, Alastair, would die at the Battle of Arras. The invalid Buchan ached to join the fray, and did so, as best he could manage, with his immensely arduous twenty-four-volume serial History of the War (1915–19) for Nelson. He was recruited into the newly formed military intelligence service, and did sterling work in recruiting fellow-novelists as propagandists.

  In adult, post-war life, Buchan was loaded with more honours than even the undergraduate had forecast. His ascent to the truly great of his time climaxed with appointment as Governor-General of Canada in 1935, as Baron Tweedsmuir. He was a good choice: as imperialists go, few were more enlightened. It was his right hand which signed Canada’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939.

  Buchan’s fiction, all dashed down with his left hand, falls into various categories. Most long-lastingly popular are the five Hannay ‘shockers’. Sir Edward Leithen, a barrister (and an evident self-portrait), features in a string of quieter thrillers. Thirdly, Buchan wrote a series of comic-adventure yarns centred on the retired Glasgow greengrocer, Dickson McCunn, and his ‘Gorbals Diehards’ band of street urchins. Buchan never managed a serious novel. The nearest he came was his last, Sick Heart River, begun in 1939, as he was dying. In it, Leithen, himself dying of TB, meditates on his life as successful barrister, Cabinet Minister, secret agent and man of the world. His ‘inner world is crumbling’, his achievements are hollow, his honours meaningless. He devotes his remaining months of life to the search for a French Canadian gone missing in the frozen North who can, it is hoped, preserve the North American federation. Leithen dies for Empire: the one worthwhile thing.

  Buchan himself died of a cerebral thrombosis – that other ailment of the over-achiever – aged just sixty-five. He had done a multitude of great things in his career. Had he done fewer of them, he might have written a great novel. But would he have admired himself for so doing? ‘Writing is a delightful hobby’, he told a friend, ‘but it becomes stale and tarnished if adopted as a profession.’

  FN

  John Buchan (later Baron Tweedsmuir)

  MRT

  The Thirty-Nine Steps

  Biog

  J. Adam Smith, John Buchan and His World (1979)

  120. Edgar Rice Burroughs 1875–1950

  I write to escape … to escape poverty.

  An acknowledged ‘King of the Pulps’, Burroughs was born in Chicago where his father, a Civil War veteran, had his own electrical battery business. Aged fifteen, Edgar spent six months on a relative’s ranch in Idaho – to shield him from an influenza epidemic raging in his home city. No namby-pamby, it was in Idaho, as he liked to claim, that he acquired a lifelong love of the great outdoors, hobnobbed with cow-pokes, and became himself an expert ‘trick’ horseman and handy with a six-gun. He was always good at tall tales. From 1892 to 1895 he was enrolled in the Michigan Military Academy, but his military career was set back when he failed his entrance examination for West Point. His father, who resolutely termed himself ‘Major Burroughs’, was very disappointed. In 1896 ‘Eddie’, as he was known, enlisted to fight the Apache in Arizona, in the US Seventh Cavalry. He saw little action, a heart condition was diagnosed and, on his honourable discharge in 1897, Burroughs’s military career ended ingloriously. He left, as he had entered, a buck private.

  In 1899, he bought a copy Darwin’s Descent of Man, a work which profoundly influenced the subsequent conception of ‘Tarzan of the Apes’, a decade later. It would be a troubled decade. Burroughs married a childhood sweetheart, Emma Hulbert, in 1900. For ten years thereafter he tried his hand at a bewildering series of jobs: he was a miner, a railroad policeman, a construction worker, and even – at low points – a door to door pencil-sharpener salesman, before, as his last resort, turning to fiction. Burroughs began writing A Princess of Mars (a ‘John Carter’ story) and Tarzan of the Apes around 1911. The apeman tale was sold to the pulp magazine, All-Story, and published entire in its pages in October 1912: fame was instantaneous. The John Carter SF romance did equally well and both novels initiated hugely successful series. The Pellucidar series was launched in 1914, marking a third epochal leap forward in pulp SF. Its adventures were located in a subterranean civilisation (the idea was borrowed, transparently, from Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth). Burroughs published sixteen novels in these three series between 1911 and 1914. His fourth long-running series, the ‘Venus’ chronicles, was launched, considerably later, in 1932. He would publish some seventy-five novels in all. Thanks to film adaptations, The Land That Time Forgot (1918) is the work of his which, along with the interminable Tarzan saga, has lasted best.

  An astute curator of his literary property, Burroughs profitably sold subsidiary rights to his stories to Hollywood. The first Tarzan films began to appear in 1918. He disapproved of what film-makers did with his work, but gratefully pocketed the dollars. Seeking what was left of the American frontier, Burroughs left his home town Chicago in 1919 for Southern California, where he was to spend the rest of his life. Now very rich, he bought a vast ranch in the San Fernando Valley which he called, shamelessly, ‘Tarzana’. He sold off lots during the 1920s real estate boom. By 1930 t
here was sufficient population for Tarzana to incorporate itself. In 1923, Burroughs had incorporated himself as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. By this point in his career he was earning up to $100,000 a year. Few novelists have escaped poverty more successfully.

  Politically, Burroughs was a hard right-winger; also a hard drinker, he was a vociferous opponent of Prohibition. In 1934 he divorced his first wife, Emma, by whom he had had three children, and in 1935 made a second marriage. He moved to Hawaii in 1940 but in 1941 his second marriage broke up. The following year, despite his advanced age, Burroughs managed to persuade the authorities to accredit him as a war correspondent in the Pacific theatre. Nearly seventy now, he was the oldest correspondent so to serve. One of the last of the Tarzan adventures, Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (1947), portrays an apeman similarly immune to the passing years.

  Burroughs suffered a serious heart attack in 1949. That pesky defect, which had denied him a miltary career all those years ago, finally caught up with him and he died in 1950.

  FN

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  MRT

  Tarzan of the Apes

  Biog

  R. A. Lupoff, Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (2005)

  121. Sabatini 1875–1950

  He makes the past live again. Sabatini’s publisher, Hutchinson

  ‘Sabatini’, as he was universally known to readers, was born in Jesi, Italy. He may well have been illegitimate – a theme which is prominent in his later fiction. His father, Vincenzo Sabatini, was a well-respected Italian singer; his mother, Anna Trafford, a singer from Lancashire – whose musical traditions were as strong if less glorious. After much touring across the world, the Sabatinis settled in Portugal in the 1880s to set up a music school. Rafael Sabatini was educated in Liverpool, Switzerland and Portugal, developing a phenomenal fluency in European languages and a better awareness of European culture and history than he could have got from any university. After a false start in the coffee business he began contributing to magazines in the late 1890s. It was, he liked to quip, always more fun writing romance than reading it. His romance drew on the ‘Powder and Wig’ historical romances of Stanley Weyman, a genre which Sabatini would significantly enhance. He was also influenced by S. R. Crockett and, more remotely, by Dumas père. He himself credited as a major influence Mary Johnston, the American costume romance novelist who had been briefly popular at the turn of the century.

  Identified as an upcoming writer, Sabatini was recruited by the Amalgamated Press and Pearson empires, both of whom had a huge appetite for popular fiction for their myriad magazines. Fame came in the early 1920s, when America – and more particularly Hollywood – discovered him. The Sea Hawk, a buccaneering romance, was published in the UK in 1915, but made the American bestseller list belatedly in 1923, on the strength of a swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks film version – after which, he was on his way. Sabatini married Ruth Goad Dixon, the daughter of a prosperous paper merchant, in 1905. They had one son, Rafael-Angelo, who later died tragically aged eighteen, in a motor accident. He then divorced and made a second marriage in 1935 to a relative by marriage. The Sabatinis lived most of their later lives out of the world on the English-Welsh border (Sabatini loved borderlands) where he could indulge his fanatic love of angling.

  During the interwar years, he earned fabulously on the strength, mainly, of lavish Hollywood film options. But such wealth was not without its problems, and in the late 1930s he launched a quixotic countersuit against the American tax authorities, which he lost expensively. Thanks to rerun movies on TV, his most famous work is probably Captain Blood: His Odyssey (1922). According to George MacDonald Fraser (on whom Sabatini was an influence, and to whom he paid homage in The Pyrates) it is ‘one of the great unrecognised novels of the twentieth century, and as close as any modern writer has come to a prose epic’. Dr Peter Blood is first discovered as an Irish surgeon, peacefully plying his trade in the West Country. He scornfully declines to ally himself with Monmouth’s uprising in 1685, but he tends a wounded rebel officer and is sentenced by a remorseless Jeffreys to be hung, drawn and quartered. He turns the tables by diagnosing the consumption that is slowly throttling the hanging judge. Death is commuted to transportation to Barbados. Here he falls under the lash of the sadistic Colonel Bishop, but is comforted by Bishop’s angelic niece, Arabella. Dr Blood escapes, captures a Spanish man-of-war and transforms himself into the buccaneer Captain Blood. The second half of the novel is taken up with Blood’s exploits on the Spanish Main (more or less following the historical exploits of Henry Morgan) on his good ship Arabella. The action ends with him united with Miss Bishop, avenged on her uncle, and reconciled with the English authorities. The novel was filmed in 1935 with Errol Flynn in the starring role – his first leading part.

  A 1952 Technicolor film adaptation of Scaramouche (1921), whose narrative is set in pre-Revolutionary France, is famous for the longest sword fight in film history between an athletic Mel Ferrer and slightly less athletic Stewart Granger – who has the better head of hair, but less expertise with the glissades and sixtes. Sabatini’s political views were staunchly republican. Scaramouche has as its epigraph a quotation from Michelet: ‘sensible people who lament the ills of the Revolution really ought to shed some tears on the ills which led up to that event’. In 1921, this pro-Revolutionary sentiment (given events after 1917 in Russia) was inflammatory. The main plot element has the young Revolutionary swordsman, the harlequin Scaramuccia, turn out to be the bastard son of his duellist-rival, the wicked Marquis. This story was taken over by George Lucas, for the Star Wars epic (same romance, different costumes). Presumably the young genius of SF-movies saw the film as a teenager in his native Modesto.

  Sabatini is buried in Switzerland, a country he had visited annually, in earlier years, to indulge his love of skiing. Over his grave his wife erected a headstone bearing the opening line from Scaramouche: ‘He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.’

  FN

  Rafael Sabatini

  MRT

  Captain Blood: His Odyssey

  Biog

  http://www.rafaelsabatini.com

  122. Edgar Wallace 1875–1932

  The good stuff may be all right for posterity. But I’m not writing for posterity.

  Edgar Wallace did for English fiction what Henry Ford did for the horseless carriage. His was the Model T of fiction. Ford jested you could have any colour you wanted – so long as it was black. So, too, the Wallace addict could have: The Ringer, The Squeaker, The Forger, The Joker, The Mixer, The Cheater, The Gunner, The Twister. Wallace’s were books for the day – the hour, almost. Oddly, the only work that survives is the one he was working on at his death, in Hollywood, King Kong. His fertile brain, apparently, came up with the scenario. Wallace’s name is buried, alas, in the credit basement. Few take note of the ‘King of the Thrillers’ while watching the King of the Gorillas.

  In pedigree, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace is the archetypal Wellsian ‘Little Man’ – a cockney sparrer. He was born in 1875, on All Fools Day, spectacularly illegitimate. He was the child of a touring actress, a second-line performer in a third-rate troupe, Mary Jane ‘Polly’ Richards. A young widow at the time of her son’s conception, she surrendered her virtue at a drunken party to the company’s romantic lead, Richard Horatio Edgar. Edgar claimed not to remember the encounter and Polly sneaked away to bear her shameful offspring in secret in Greenwich. Barely hours after birth, he was farmed out to the family of an amenable Billingsgate fishmonger, who brought him up as ‘Richard Freeman’. Smart as paint, young Dick earned an honest penny as a printer’s devil, a newspaper vendor, and – as an early photograph indicates – a villainous-looking milk-van boy. He was dismissed from the last position for lifting a few dishonest pennies from the coin bag – cash was always his great weakness. Aged eighteen, Edgar enrolled in the army, under the name Wallace. He wanted to see the world, before becoming one of its wage slaves. The medi
cal examination records him as being possessed of a chest, expanded, of 33ins. He was stunted, like most children of the slums. The army would, they promised, ‘make a man of him’.

  Trained in the infantry, he was shipped to South Africa, in 1896, and wangled a transfer into the Medical Corps. It was a cushy berth. This was the high period of Kiplingesque barrack balladry. Wallace turned his own quick wits to profit as the ‘Tommy Poet’. In 1899, as the war with the Boers broke out, Wallace – no fool – married a local girl and bought himself out. By this point the Tommy Poet had cultivated contacts in the press. Reuters took him on; the Daily Mail (‘The Megaphone’, as it would be in his thrillers) bought the occasional piece. As a reporter (he despised the term ‘journalist’), he shrewdly ingratiated himself – by bribery, if necessary – with clerks, orderlies and others ‘in the know’. He knew the lay of the land better than the hacks sent out from Fleet Street with their cleft sticks, topees and Royal Ordnance maps. Young Wallace pulled off a series of scoops – endearing himself to the great mogul, Northcliffe, and infuriating the CiC, Kitchener, who would rather have shot English newspapermen than Johnny Boer.

  With peace, Wallace and his wife Ivy (a daughter having died) returned to Britain and the Daily Mail. His stipend was a comfortable £750 p.a., but Wallace’s life, however much he earned, was always a rollercoaster: lunch at the Savoy, bailiffs in the kitchen. An eye for the ladies and the horses – and a legendary open-handedness – kept him forever on the brink of insolvency. In 1905, he produced his first novel, The Four Just Men. The idea was ingenious. Four cosmopolitan vigilantes, of impeccable breeding, set out to overset Britain’s xenophobic Aliens Act (Wallace was always a champion of the underdog). The narrative pivots on a locked room mystery. The Home Secretary no less is warned that unless he liberalises the legislation, he will die. The minister ensconces himself in his Portland Place office, surrounded by guards. He is assassinated. But how? Read on.