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

by John Sutherland

  Carl Peterson returns for The Third Round (1924) and, finally, for The Final Count (1927), in which he hovers lethally over England in an airship, loaded with deadly liquid gas. Drummond forces his foe to drink his own poison. As he dies, Peterson ‘stood revealed for what he was. And of that revelation no man can write.’ Just as well, perhaps, that this author doesn’t try.

  Bulldog Drummond was dramatised for the London stage by McNeile in 1922 with Gerald du Maurier – son of the Victorian novelist (George), father of the twentieth-century novelist (Daphne) – in the lead. The first film based on the character came out in the same year. Eventually Ronald Colman played the part in what became a long-running series. The ten Sapper novels, and the film rights, made McNeile rich as the world spiralled into Depression.

  The formula was influential. In one direction, it leads to W. E. Johns’s juvenile hero Biggles. In another direction, Bulldog Drummond clearly blueprints James Bond, as Ian Fleming candidly admitted. After McNeile’s early death in 1937, the copyright was left to the author’s collaborator, Gerard Fairlie (thought to be the ‘original’ of Bulldog), who continued it with half a dozen posthumous titles. Lt-Col. McNeile was buried at Woking Crematorium with full military honours. He left £26,000.

  FN

  Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile)

  MRT

  Bulldog Drummond

  Biog

  ODNB (Jonathon Green)

  143. Hervey Allen 1889–1949

  The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty.

  Born in Pittsburgh, the son of a father described as ‘an entrepreneur and inventor’, young Hervey Allen is recorded as growing up ‘emotionally distant’ from his parent, whom he blamed for impoverishing the family with his crackpot schemes. Allen was originally destined for a career at sea, but after injury on the athletic field while training at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis (where he had won a scholarship), he was honourably discharged. He returned to his hometown university, graduating in 1915 with a degree in economics, and a sheaf of as yet unpublished poems.

  He had, meanwhile, enrolled in the National Guard, whose lower standards of physical fitness did not disbar him. He signed up for idealistic motives, hoping to be sent to Mexico, in support of the democratic revolution in that country. Woodrow Wilson was tempted to intervene, but in the event didn’t. Instead, in 1917, on America’s declaration of war, Allen was commissioned into the Pennsylvanian infantry and posted to France. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Marne – mustard-gassed and shell-shocked – and had the idealism knocked out of him. While recovering in hospital he wrote his hugely successful anti-war poem, The Blindman: A Ballad of Nogent L’Artaud (1919). A soldier encounters a villager, blinded a few days earlier in an artillery barrage. He is looking for his daughter, Elenor. The soldier takes the man to the ruins of his house, where the corpse of Elenor lies, gnawed by rats:

  The Blindman leaned against the door;

  ‘And tell me, sir, about the war,

  What is it they are fighting for?’

  ‘Blindman,’ I cried, ‘can you not see?

  It is to set the whole world free!

  It is for sweet democracy –

  All the father can ‘see’ is that ‘my little Elenor is dead’. The Blindman qualifies, with Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got his Gun and e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room as one of the classic American anti-war works about ‘the War called Great’.

  With peace, Allen studied literature at Harvard, specialising in Edgar Allan Poe, a writer on whom he would eventually write a creditable monograph. On graduation, he taught English at Vassar and published a memoir of his war experiences, Toward the Flame: A War Diary, in 1925. He still hoped to make a name for himself as a poet. Injudiciously – given the stern disciplines of the time – he fell in love with, and later, in 1927, married, one of his students, Annette Andrews. The ensuing scandal hounded him out of academia and the couple took up residence in Bermuda, supported by her parents and whatever writing Hervey could pick up.

  Allen now began writing fiction and spent five years working away on his first published novel, Anthony Adverse. The swashbuckling saga of sex and piracy in the eighteenth-century Caribbean was accepted by Farrar & Rinehart and went on to make both author and publisher rich. At 1,200 printed pages, costing a daunting $3, it was marketed astutely as ‘three novels for the price of one’. Anthony Adverse topped the American bestseller lists for two successive years, 1933–4 and pioneered the ‘blockbuster’ work of fiction as a viable ware. That customers in their droves would buy such a big costly thing was a revelation to the book trade. Farrar & Rinehart declared themselves ‘stunned’ by the novel’s sales. The narrative opens with an extended prelude, dated ‘1775’. Don Luis, a Spanish grandee, has taken a young Scottish girl, Maria, twenty-five years his junior, to wife. While on their honeymoon in France, Maria forms a liaison with a young Irish officer, Denis Moore. The marquis discovers he has been cuckolded and kills his rival in a staged duel. Maria dies giving birth to Denis’s child, whom Don Luis leaves as a foundling, to be brought up in a convent in Leghorn. Years pass and the waif grows up as Anthony Adverse – destined for a life as adventurous as his name.

  The novel’s long-term sales were boosted by Warner Brothers’ film, with its million-dollar-budget, cast of thousands, and a fleet of galleons the size of the Armada. The movie starred Fredric March and scooped up all the 1936 Oscars. It also made Allen very rich. He and his wife lived their last decades in Florida, where Allen died happily composing an epic cycle of novels set in colonial America. He loved the state’s Everglades, and was an early environmental activist. As a pacifist and hater of war after 1918, he was a patriot again (as he had been in 1916, when he was hot to go to Mexico) after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

  None of Allen’s subsequent novels achieved the popularity of Anthony Adverse, which marched on to claim 1.5 million sales worldwide at the time of his death. It was very much a novel for the Depression years – escapist, and a Beach Book (as similar sized blockbusters would later be called) for readers who could not, this year alas, afford to go to the beach. For all the formative impact his novel had on the American fiction trade, Allen is one of the forgotten of American literature. Had he followed his head rather than his heart, and not ‘misconducted’ himself with a student, he would probably have been remembered as a distinguished Poe scholar.

  FN

  William Hervey Allen, Jr

  MRT

  Anthony Adverse

  Biog

  S. E. Knee, Hervey Allen: (1889–1949): A Literary Historian in America (1988)

  144. Enid Bagnold 1889–1981

  I exchanged Sickert for Beaverbrook.

  According to her own, autobiographical, account, no life was jollier than Enid’s: ‘I was born’, she recorded, ‘with the first motor cars, and I never thought I should die. Death is so unnatural.’ Bagnold’s father was a senior army officer of peppery disposition. When she sent him the manuscript of her first novel ‘He absolutely forbade publication. He said he couldn’t go into his club in London … “I should feel,” he said flatly, “as if she’d been raped under a hedge by a sergeant.”’ A higher class of sexual experience awaited Enid, it would transpire. The formative event in her girlhood was her father being appointed to a governor’s position in the West Indies, which meant three years in Jamaica, with horses, mules and donkeys, and coloured servants to wait on her, hand, foot and hoof.

  The family returned to England when she was fourteen – a magical age for her throughout life. She was packed off to Julia Huxley’s progressive Prior’s Field school in Godalming, and was finished, according to the conventions of her class, in Switzerland, and duly ‘came out’. She should, of course, have promptly ‘gone in’ as the wife of some suitable young gent, but against the grain of her class she resolved to study art in Camden, working with and sitting for Walter Sickert (possibly Jack the Ripper, if a fellow lady novelist, Patricia Cornwell
, is to be believed).

  Eager to be seduced but ‘terrified to be touched’, she lost her virginity in 1914 – ominous year – to the great cocksman of the age, Frank Harris. She felt, she said, ‘like a corporal made sergeant’. She picked up from Harris (now a very old and rather beaten-down dirty dog) tricks of the journalistic trade. During the First World War, Bagnold worked as a nurse and ambulance driver, but criticisms of the hospital service in her book, A Diary Without Dates (1918), led to dismissal. She began serious writing after the war and married Sir Roderick Jones, the chairman of Reuters news agency, in 1920. He was twelve years her senior. The couple settled in Sussex in a fine house previously owned by Edward Burne-Jones, their needs attended to by ‘two nurses, a nurserymaid, a chauffeur, two gardeners, a groom and a strapper’.

  In between children, and social engagements, Bagnold wrote a number of well-received plays and novels, notably the much revived The Chalk Garden (1955) and the bestselling National Velvet (1935). The last is a Cinderella-in-jodhpurs story of fourteen-year-old Velvet, one of three sisters with ‘zulu bodies and golden hair’, who masquerades as a male jockey to win the Grand National on a piebald horse she bought at a fair. The first edition was prettily illustrated by Bagnold’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Laurina. The tone of the work is illustrated by its first sentence: ‘Unearthly lumps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants.’ The novel was adapted for the stage and triumphantly filmed, starring Elizabeth Taylor, in 1944. By 1975, the book version had sold some 2 million copies in American paperback.

  Bagnold faced death (‘a terrible old nuisance’) as she had lived – with unforced gaiety and the pluck so valued by her class, writing to the end. The last line in her memoir is: ‘This morning the surgeon has replied and made a date. How horrible, and yet it’s like being engaged.’ Enid’s brother Ralph Bagnold founded the Long Range Desert Group during the Second World War. Her great-granddaughter is the wife of David Cameron, British Prime Minister at the time of writing. Enid would have liked that.

  FN

  Enid Algerine Bagnold (later Lady Jones)

  MRT

  National Velvet

  Biog

  A. Sebba, Enid Bagnold: A Biography (1986)

  145. Erle Stanley Gardner 1889–1970

  I know something about what the public wants and a hell of a lot about what the public doesn’t want. Erle Stanley Gardner

  The creator of Perry Mason (smooth defence attorney) and Bertha Cool (big, foulmouthed PI), with estimated worldwide sales under a barrage of pen-names of some 400 million, Gardner qualifies as one of the top-selling popular novelists in the English language. He had over 140 novels in print at the time of his death, including some eighty ‘Perry Masons’, whose titular hallmark was the prefix ‘The Case of …’ There were also twenty-eight ‘Bertha Cools’ in print. At the highpoint of his career he was publishing five titles a year, feeding the voracious 25-cent Pocketbook market.

  Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts. His father was a mining engineer whose work took him all over the US, eventually landing the family in California when Erle was thirteen. He remained a Southern Californian for the rest of his life. As a young man he boxed for purse money and – all too ready with his fists – was expelled from college in 1909, in his first month of study, for slugging his professor. Through private study, Gardner went on to qualify as a lawyer in 1911. He was still boxing and, reportedly, sported two black eyes on the day he passed his Bar exams. For a while, however, he worked as a salesman before setting himself up as an attorney in the Los Angeles area where he practised successfully until 1933.

  He contributed his first story to a pulp magazine, aged thirty-four, in 1923. Thereafter, lawyering by day and writing by night, he produced hundreds of such stories, many under pseudonym. His first Perry Mason story, The Case of the Velvet Claws appeared in 1933 and his first Bertha Cool story in 1939. He contributed more stories to Black Mask (over 130) than any other of that magazine’s distinguished stable of hardboiled crime writers (Hammett, Chandler, Cain, etc.). The Mason series was boosted by the Saturday Evening Post, which serialised them from the 1930s to the 1950s and, latterly, by the TV series, starring a lugubrious Raymond Burr as Mason, which ran from 1957 to 1966. As a plot-writer, Gardner loved unexpected twists, surprises and ambushes on the reader – typically, in a courtroom climax. The hardboiled quality in his early work gave way to an easier-going, ironic mode of narration, particularly in the aptly named ‘Cool’ stories, but he always took great professional pains with the legal accuracy of his plots.

  Having established himself as a writer, Gardner set up production of his fiction on factory lines, using dictaphones and armies of secretaries. The pulp magazines which flourished between the wars had an insatiable appetite for his wares. In 1938 Gardner, now rich, took up residence at the Temecula Ranch near Riverside, some fifty miles from LA. Although he gave up active legal work in 1933, with the sale of his first full-length novel, he was a founding member of ‘The Court of Last Resort’ (now more soberly called the Case Review Committee), a legal aid organisation for the wrongly imprisoned.

  Gardner was an avid sportsman and – it is reported – spoke fluent Mandarin (many of his early clients were indigent Chinese) and was a keen naturalist, particularly expert on the breeding habits of the grey whale. Although guns figure centrally in many of his stories, his own favoured weapon was the bow and arrow and he was a frequent and expert contributor to Ye Sylvan Archer magazine. In 1913 Gardner married Natalie Talbert, a legal secretary, and they had one daughter, Grace. However, they separated and the marriage was dissolved in 1935, although the couple were never formally divorced. When his wife died in 1968, Gardner married another of his many secretaries, Agnes Jean Bethell – the supposed original of Perry Mason’s sidekick, Della Street. Unsurprisingly, Gardner lived to win every prize for which an American crime writer is eligible, most more than once.

  FN

  Erle Stanley Gardner

  MRT

  The Case of the Velvet Claws

  Biog

  Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate, Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Story Telling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner (1980)

  146. Agatha Christie 1890–1976

  It is as complete and shameless a bamboozling of the reader as was ever perpetrated. Raymond Chandler on And Then There Were None

  Agatha Miller was born in Torquay, the last of three children of an American father, Frederick, and an English mother, Clarissa (Clara). The Millers were well off and cultivated. Henry James and Rudyard Kipling were on household visiting terms. The years between five and twelve were, she recalled, ‘wonderfully happy’. Her father, who ‘never did a hand’s turn in his life’ was ‘a very agreeable man’ but feckless. He died of a heart attack when Agatha was eleven and life for the Millers thereafter was less wonderfully happy. A brother, ‘Monty’, went to the bad spectacularly after the war, and died, rather disgracefully, in 1929, leaving the Millers, as Agatha’s biographer puts it, a ‘matriarchy’.

  Agatha had been educated among this matriarchy as ‘a little lady’: she read voraciously – but, as her manuscripts reveal, never quite mastered grammar or spelling. Later she studied music in France with a view to an eventual career as a pianist or singer. In the event neither her nerves nor her voice were strong enough. Aged twenty she spent a season in Cairo, where she ‘came out’. On her return to England she joined the country-house party circuit, absorbing the Edwardian gentility which breathes serenely over her subsequent fiction. At this period of her life she wrote poetry and had tried her hand at at least one unpublished novel. She married Archie Christie, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at Christmas 1914 – his being the third proposal she had received. ‘I love him dreadfully’, she told her mother, who opposed the marriage. Almost immediately Lieut. Christie was posted to France and Agatha cried all night.

  Christie survived the war
– a sinus complaint invalided him out of active service in the air, and relegated him to a desk job. During hostilities Agatha worked at Torquay Hospital and was put in charge of the dispensary. Here she gained her formidable practical expertise about drugs and poisons. In 1916, on leave from hospital, she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), a locked-room murder story, introducing the retired Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, who, as always, solves the mysterious affair by the application of his infallible ‘grey cells’. The wax-moustached and slightly comical detective was inspired by the cluster of war refugees from Belgium currently exiled in Torquay – but Poirot would stay on. He reappears in some thirty-three novels and fifty-two short stories, until his demise in Curtain (1975), alongside his Dr Watson, the stolid and unimaginative Captain Hastings.

  After the war the Christies moved to London. Archie got a job in the city and made money (but not much). Agatha got pregnant, giving birth to a baby girl, Rosalind, in 1919. She was a conscientious mother but not enthusiastic about the role nor, some have suggested, sex. There were no more children. But books there were. Christie had arrived on the literary scene at a period when detective fiction was all the rage. She varied her output with The Secret Adversary (1922), a ‘romantic’ thriller which introduced a light vein of comedy in the form of the detective duo, Tommy and ‘Tuppence’ Beresford. But her great advance came with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), another ‘Poirot’. The novel laid down Christie’s main formula over the subsequent decades: a mysterious murder (typically by poisoning), a claustrophobic setting (typically a country house, but sometimes a ship or a train), a shortlist of suspects all equally plausible, trails of false clues and reader deceptions, ending with a startling denouement.