The Suburbs of Hell

by Randolph Stow

  ‘Relaxed as a newt,’ said the boy, ‘if you ask me. Are you goin to Harry’s?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions,’ Frank said. ‘Yes, I’m going to Harry’s. Because Jim Ufford, the brother, asked me to look after things for a while. I go there every evening, to feed the animals.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to go in that house,’ said Killer. ‘But I s’pose—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Frank said, ‘you’re right. It’s pretty much the same at mine.’

  He could see the next question forming, and forestalled it by walking on. There was nothing to tell about his wife. She was as near death and as far from it as usual.

  But Killer, though he had given up that enquiry, did not mean to lose his company, and walked or scampered beside him, with a scuff of training shoes.

  ‘That was something surprising,’ he said, ‘about Dave. I couldn’t hardly credit that. I shouldn’t never have thought that was someone as thick as him.’

  ‘You watch your mouth,’ Frank said, ‘you little pissant. You’re twelve, and he was a grown man.’

  ‘No, he weren’t,’ said Killer. ‘Dave was about fifteen, I reckon. Hey, Frank, is that true that he murder Harry?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Frank said. ‘No one will ever be sure. But I think he was sort of hinting at that to me, as I told the law. He was feeling very bad about something. Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Then Harry knoo,’ said Killer, with excitement. ‘Harry must have found that hidin place in the yard with the rifle in it. Thass why Dave would kill Harry; he knoo Harry was on to him.’

  Frank slowed his pace a little, and looked down on the child with a thoughtful face.

  ‘Harry knoo,’ said Killer, working it out, ‘and Dave knoo he knoo, but Harry dint know Dave knoo he knoo. Thass how Harry get murdered: he waited too long. But Harry would have done something, you can bet on that, a man like Harry.’

  ‘Would have done,’ Frank asked soberly, ‘what?’

  ‘Oh, killed him,’ said the boy, with conviction. ‘Not handed him over to the law, not Harry, not when that was Dave. Somehow or other, Harry would have killed him.’

  ‘Here’s my door,’ Frank said, producing a key. ‘Jim Ufford’s door, I mean. Killer, you’ve got a mind so devious that you’re practically a nut-case.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ asked Killer, wistfully. He stood for a while in the mist, dwelling with his eyes on the slammed door.

  World! ’Tis the only region of death,

  the greatest shop of the devil, the

  cruelest prison of men, out of the which

  none pass without paying their dearest

  breath for a fee.

  Malevole in The Malcontent

  In the kitchen the animals have finished eating, and he takes an empty tin to the dustbin in the yard, which is very neat, the police having stacked the timbers once more over the hiding place, which was gaping open when they were summoned there by Charlie the crane-driver.

  He goes back to the kitchen and looks at the mess on the table. Because he is drunk, has been drinking most of the afternoon alone in his own unfriendly house, he was clumsy in reaching down the tin of pet food from the cupboard, so that his fingers tangled in a cloth dangling from the highest shelf and started a landslip of cleaning gear. Now he gathers it together and fetches a chair on which to stand.

  On the highest shelf is a parcel wrapped in Christmassy paper. He lifts it down and examines it.

  Taped to the paper is a birthday card, which he opens, and reads:

  ‘A drop of something to make you merry

  On your 25th.

  With cheers

  from

  Harry’

  That brings back their voices to him very clearly. In their speech, the rhyme was a true one.

  He removes the paper and looks at the expensive whisky in its box, murmuring to himself: ‘I bet that didn’t pay duty.’

  In the living room he has a large fire burning on which he throws the paper and the card. He likes an open fire, and it is a more peaceful house than his own. He has passed several evenings here, with the animals which seem to have grown fond of him.

  The firelight still shines, but more dully, on brass which is growing dimmer. Harry’s presence is going from the place, from the brass and the china horses and the model ships. But not yet for a while; for a while he is still here in the room which remembers everywhere Suffolk meadows and plough-land running down to the sea.

  He takes the whisky from its box and twists off the cap. ‘Cheers,’ he says, and raises the bottle to his mouth.

  How they have annoyed me with their diversions and sidetracks leading to no development; pathological killers of time.

  He switches on the television set and does not watch it. The liquid in the bottle grows less. His minutes, his hours, are like an inexhaustible flock of partridges, there to be killed, which he is there to kill.

  A book lying on a table attracts his attention, and he picks it up, and opens it where an empty cigarette-paper packet marks Harry’s place. It is called The Murderers’ Who’s Who, and is marked at the letter Y.

  How fluid they are, their characters all potential, veering between virtue and vice, charity and atrocity, begetting and laying waste.

  The poison, he reads, was called thallium. Symptoms: stomach pains, loss of hair, numbness in the legs. In the case of one victim, diagnosed as peripheral neuritis.

  But I am the end of all potential. Where change is finished, there I am inside. By me these shifting shapes are fixed. After me, they may be judged at last.

  The dog yaps as the bottle is kicked across the floor. He is on his feet, but staggering. There is numbness in his legs, pain in his stomach, a formication in the roots of his hair.

  He wants to run to the yard. He has thrust fingers down his throat. But terror works faster than fingers. Gasping, straining, he pukes and pukes across the floor.

  The animals keep at a distance from us: silent, staring, appalled.

  He lies on the floor in his vomit. He stares up into my face.

  He sees me in my own likeness, without disguise. For flesh is a disguise.

  He cannot speak or breathe. Yet he speaks to me, with his blazing eyes.

  I can read his eyes. I have read many.

  So soon? he says. Oh, so soon.

  AFTERWORD

  Like a Thief in the Night by Michelle de Kretser

  MY COPY of The Suburbs of Hell (1984) is a handsome Heinemann first edition salvaged, like so many treasures, from a remainder tray. The dust jacket features a golden hourglass and type on a sky-blue ground: the colours Fra Angelico favoured for the vaults of heaven. A travel card that served as my bookmark is still tucked away in its pages; the date-punch informs me that I first read the book in October 1985.

  Whenever I want to re-read the novel I have difficulty locating it. I know the shelf it sits on—not an especially crowded one—but my eye keeps gliding past the book. When I finally isolate it, the glorious blue and gold always brings a little jolt. I’ve been looking for a black jacket, one that matches my recollection of a devastating tale.

  *

  Randolph Stow dedicated his ninth and last novel to William Grono, an old friend from Western Australia, ‘twenty years after “The Nedlands Monster”’. The Nedlands Monster was a serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, who murdered eight people in Perth and attempted to murder many more. In one horrific night in 1963 Cooke shot five people, among them the teen age brother of a friend of Stow’s. Stow was out of the country at the time but returned shortly afterwards to a city gripped by rumour and fear. The Suburbs of Hell bears witness to the hold of these events on the novelist’s imagination, as well as to the imaginative alchemy that has transformed a murder hunt into something far more rich and strange.

  The novel updates the action to the early 1980s and replaces Perth with Tornwich, a fictionalised version of Harwich, the Essex port where Stow lived for the last three decades of his life. The small co
astal town is quickly but indelibly drawn: its quays and pubs, its mediæval houses ‘crammed cheek-to-cheek’, its numbing cold. Secret passages designed for smugglers conjure a colourful past, fishing boats attest to a pragmatic present, while unemployment and drug dealing suggest the shape of things to come.

  Stow’s masterly evocation of place is matched by the brilliant economy of his characterisation. A single example will do: Eddystone Ena, who lives in a disused lighthouse, is ‘a bouncy little woman, bosomed like a bullfinch’. Given the run of a neighbour’s posh kitchen, she is ‘delighted and overawed’: a phrase that conveys Ena’s modest social status, her lack of envy and her endearing readiness to be pleased—all in three words.

  Like 1960s Perth, Tornwich is a backwater. In this peaceful place, a man is inexplicably shot and killed in his home one night; other murders, equally baffling, follow. For the reader, Stow’s evocation of the Nedlands Monster has already created the expectation that the familiar gratifications of a murder mystery are in store: the agreeable frisson created by a killer on the loose, the smarty-pants pleasure of trying to guess ‘whodunnit’, and the catharsis of the eventual unmasking, when evil will be vanquished and Eden restored. For readers not conversant with the Nedlands Monster, Stow alludes early on to the Yorkshire Ripper. (The latter, Peter Sutcliffe, was arrested in 1981 after a protracted and highly publicised investigation; that Stow was moved to write The Suburbs of Hell soon after is probably not accidental.)

  Certain aspects of the novel reinforce the reader’s expectations by conforming to whodunnit conventions: the closed community; the tight-knit group of suspects; the atmosphere of dread as, one by one, victims are picked off and the noose, as they say, tightens around the rest. Even the mist that reduces streetlamps ‘to dandelion-balls of light’ seems to have strayed from the pages of Conan Doyle.

  Gradually, however, the reader will notice an alarming thing: the police have virtually no presence in the novel. The official investigation into the murders exists only as so many noises off: the details of its unfolding, integral to the whodunnit, are suppressed. That absence is an early indication that solving the murders might not be uppermost on this novel’s mind. Taffy Hughes, the sole representative of authority, is not a police officer, but only ‘something quite high up in Customs’. Nor is he that figure beloved of who-dunnits, the amateur sleuth; a pipe is all he has in common with Sherlock Holmes. Harry Ufford, the novel’s central character, comes nearest to fulfilling the role of detective, but it’s a very approximate performance. Readers who stake their interpretative hopes on Harry will be disappointed. He displays little of the puzzle-solving acumen necessary to the part and will fall well short of masterminding a denouement. In fact, the denouement itself will fail to show.

  Another break with convention is more striking still. The Suburbs of Hell is interspersed with brief chapters that appear to be narrated by the murderer, a strategy frowned on by whodunnit purists: it risks the untimely revelation of motive and identity, which should be deferred for as long as possible. (The ideal whodunnit is narrated by Scheherazade.) But the really unnerving discovery is that the narrator of these passages is Death itself, who follows close on the heels of the murderer (a nice literalisation, that) and records each victim’s last moments with glacial calm.

  The whodunnit is anchored in realism (usually, realism of the puréed, easily digestible kind, but in a way that’s the point—it can be taken for granted). Stow’s human characters, like their setting, are presented with realist precision; his verist rendering of the local idiom is exemplary. The introduction of an allegorical figure—as with the absence of an authoritative investigator—muddies the novel’s generic identity, causing a familiar narrative type to turn slippery and weird. The disquiet this arouses in the reader mirrors the consternation of the characters as their known world grows terrifyingly strange. Like the Tornwich Monster, whose familiar face masks a killer, The Suburbs of Hell has an uncanny ability to shift shape.

  Nicholas Jose, a superbly insightful reader of Stow, has pointed out that his realism is always shot through with the numinous. In Stow, the divergent impulses of scientist and shaman converge (he was, after all, a poet: by definition at odds with common sense). Novels like Visitants and Tourmaline yoke a compulsion to depict the world accurately to a conviction that the world is not as it seems. The literary novel, a lively and elastic thing, can accommodate bizarre shacklings of this sort. What transfixes in The Suburbs of Hell is Stow’s grafting of the visionary onto the calcified form of the whodunnit. That both the detective and the mystic seek the truth behind appearances seems self-evident only when it’s pointed out. Fuelling Stow’s imaginative leap is the kind of creative je m’en foutisme that Edward Said identified as characteristic of late style: counter-intuitive, intransigent, unafraid.

  The title of the novel and its epigraphs come from plays by John Webster. Stow, like Webster, was ‘much possessed by death’, and this wasn’t the first time he had turned to the playwright for an epigraph. Like the reference to the Nedlands Monster, the quotations from Webster are ominous, and prepare the reader familiar with the Jacobean stage for a proliferation of corpses.

  The Duchess of Malfi provides Stow’s title: ‘Security some men call the suburbs of hell, / Only a dead wall between.’ Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Perth killings was that most of them took place in the victims’ homes in quiet, well-to-do suburbs. People who had answered a knock at the door after dark were shot at close range; others were murdered in their beds. The Tornwich Monster, too, uses this modus operandi, one that guarantees psychosocial panic. ‘Safe as houses’, we say; but the security of houses is deceptive. Ena makes the point: ‘When you think of your house, normally, you think of doors and windows that lock and walls that are solid. But suddenly you find yourself thinking about windowpanes that break and bolts that don’t hold and smugglers’ tunnels into the cellar.’

  All this ratchets up suspense, in keeping with the novel’s whodunnit mode. But Webster borrowed his line from Thomas Adams, a London clergyman who in 1610 preached a sermon that warned, ‘Securitie is the very suburbs of Hell.’ Adams’ message is direct and uncompromising: wealth paves the way to damnation and death is always close at hand. It’s not surprising that this sentiment resonated with Stow, a communing Anglican with a strong interest in Taoism. The Suburbs of Hell opens with Death quoting the Bible: ‘Behold, I come as a thief’ and—a verse I found terrifying as a child—‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ These warnings have a worldly application in the whodunnit, but their metaphysical significance is more chilling and more profound.

  Allegory, no matter what it points to, has a tendency to disturb. A refracted mode, it treats the world as a sign, always gesturing beyond the tangible. While realism deals in solid projections, allegory is hollowed out, an eyeless socket. Walter Benjamin likened it to a ruin, and allegory can feel as desolate as glassless windows and roofless walls. The events narrated in The Suburbs of Hell are only one source of the novel’s wintry bleakness; its cold is formal and ingrained, a zero at the bone.

  The novel’s web of literary allusion is apparent in its liberal use of quotation. There’s nothing necessarily sinister about that. But, each time I re-read The Suburbs of Hell, I find the presence of those quotations creepier: they eat into the body of the text like worms. If that’s fanciful, it also testifies to the pervasive sense of menace generated by Stow’s poetics of dread.

  Stow drew attention to the novel’s intertextuality by describing it as a reworking of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Chaucer’s Pardoner, an itinerant clergyman and audacious con artist, models his tale on a mediæval sermon. It was customary to enliven sermons with moral anecdotes, and the Pardoner illustrates his message that greed is the root of all evil with a story about the falling out of three ‘rioters’ that has fatal consequences for all three. This parable can be traced back to the Vedabbha Jataka, a collection of ancient Buddhist tales. Variants of th
e story exist in many cultures; all of them concern characters who kill each other in their lust for material gain, leaving death in sole possession of the scene.

  Stow’s revisioning of this classic tale is plain in the latter part of the novel, which revolves around the local drug pushers, Dave Sutton and Frank De Vere. When Harry discovers their dealing, Frank wants him out of the way. As Frank’s paranoia flares, he persuades himself that Harry is the killer, a view he communicates to Dave. Whether or not Dave acts on this theory is left unresolved, but Frank later comes to believe that the killer is actually Dave. This proves to be the undoing of both men.

  William Grono has said that Stow was distressed by the atmosphere of suspicion in Perth in the months leading up to Eric Edgar Cooke’s arrest, and The Suburbs of Hell is, among other things, a study in the corrosive effect of rumour. By the end of the novel, the murderer’s victims are outnumbered by those whom suspicion has killed. (Possibly not outnumbered: the score might be a draw, depending on whether one of the deaths is accidental or not.) But whatever the cause of individual deaths, Death itself carries the day.

  The metaphoric import of Stow’s first epigraph, taken from The White Devil, now becomes clear. The Tornwich killings, too, are mere ‘flea-bitings’ in the comprehensive triumph of Death.

  While the whodunnit flourished in the interwar period, Stow composed his novel in the nuclear age, and at a time when the nature and spread of HIV was just starting to emerge in the public consciousness. Whodunnits typically offer the reassuring fiction that there is an end to killing when the murderer is caught, but in Stow’s novel the killing goes on. The Suburbs of Hell concludes with newspaper headlines that announce untimely deaths from around the world. The narrator of The Waste Land famously shored fragments against his ruin; the collapse into fragments of Stow’s narrative foreshadows only all-encompassing destruction. The last page of the novel features a Tarot card that represents Death—the sole image reproduced in the book.