Bruce Alexander

Bruce Alexander, who died in 2003, wrote eleven period mysteries featuring the 18^th-century justice, Sir John Fielding.  (The last book in the series, Rules of Engagement, was published after his death.)  You can make a good case, that along with Ellis Peters, who wrote the Cadfael novels, they set a high bar.  Left Coast Crime, my own regional mystery con, has an award for historical fiction named in Bruce Alexander’s memory, which has been won by Jackie Winspear, Ann Parker, Catriona McPherson, and Naomi Hirahara, among others.

I thought I’d read all the Alexander books, but happily not.  It turns out I missed his next-to-last, The Price of Murder.  This is one of the more disturbing books in the series, a story about the disappearance and sexual traffic of children, along with a fair amount of GBH and literal throat-cutting.  It’s also got a road trip to Newmarket and a lively portrait of the horseracing scene, and an odd, somewhat aimless sidebar, which although it casts shade on suspected white slavery, and mob violence, doesn’t really go anywhere.  Its main purpose seems to be as an Easter egg, a real-life case involving the justice Henry Fielding, brother of Sir John, and author of Tom Jones.  Henry was appointed a magistrate first, and then John succeeded him.  The two of them, both historically, and in the novels, established the Bow Street Runners, which eventually became the Metropolitan Police.

 

One of the issues, for a reader, when you invest in a writer, and a series, and then they die on you, is that you’re left with the longer story arc unresolved: what happens with the characters beyond the books?  Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther novels, for example – he was only 62.  I remember being very upset when Bruce Alexander died, for the selfish reason that I’d never know how life was going to turn out for young Jeremy Proctor, the narrator of the stories.  There are hints and foreshadowings, but it’s not the same.  We do know, from the record, that Fielding himself died in 1780, five years after the story in the last book is told.  But this isn’t internal evidence.  It’s something you might look up, if you’ve a mind. 

 

The thing that’s cool, in any event, is that revisiting Georgian London with Alexander - the Blind Beak, and Jeremy, Seven Dials, and Covent Garden, and Lloyd’s coffeehouse – is so vivid.  It doesn’t smell of the lamp.  Or rather, it does, but not in the sense of being overstudied; rather, in the sense of you smelling the guttering candles and the spilled beer, gin and sweat and bad teeth.  The best historicals, Mary Renault, Patrick O’Brian, Bernard Cornwell, don’t show off.  They use detail sparingly, and let it settle, like ash.  You feel your way in.  Alexander does the same.  And there’s a trick to the language.  You can do a lot with word order.  I mentioned I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  You’re very aware, at first, that you’re reading prose written in the late 1700’s – which is, of course, exactly the era Alexander is effectively reproducing in the Fielding novels – and you could do worse than imitate Gibbon.  Not self-consciously, which is only going to be brittle and artificial, but if possible, to relax into those rhythms and speech patterns.  And you can use older literary conventions, had I but known and so forth, as long as you don’t lay it on too thick. 

I’m reminded of John le Carré’s comment, which I’ve found helpful in more than one context.  It doesn’t have to be authentic, it has to be convincing.  Bruce Alexander makes it seem effortless, but we know different.  He put a lot of effort into making it look easy.

The Matter of Arthur

I’m not quite sure why Rosemary Sutcliff floated into my periphery, recently - I saw her name somewhere, obviously - but as soon as it happened, I immediately went out and found her Arthurian historical, Sword at Sunset, which had fallen off my radar in the interval of fifty years, and read it again.  If you’re not familiar with the book, it reimagines the legend of Arthur much the way Mary Renault does with the mythological Theseus in The King Must Die, as an actual historical person, not a demigod.     

Arthur is, of course, the “Matter of Britain,” a story every English schoolchild once knew by heart.  The basic lineaments were around long before Sir Thomas Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur, in the 15^th century, going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the 12^th.  I’m more concerned with the modern iterations.  Leaving aside Prince Valiant, no disrespect, Hal Foster’s draftsmanship is astonishing, but he positions the Round Table in some sort of fairytale medieval period; excuse me, but no.  That puts Arthur some time after the Norman Conquest, which just doesn’t fly.  The better guess lines up with Rosemary Sutcliff and Bernard Cornwell, who place the historical Arthur after the fall of Roman Britain, the withdrawal of the legions to Gaul, around 400 AD.  Then come the Saxons, raiding across the North Sea, and the Picts, from beyond Hadrian’s Wall.  Arthur would appear to be the last hope of civilization and order, fighting a losing battle against the darkness.  

The version most of us know is T.H. White’s Once and Future King, which is the source material for Camelot.  I saw the Broadway-bound tryout.  (Back in the day, the big shows would work the kinks out on the road.  They’d open in Toronto, and then circle through Boston, Philadelphia, and DC, before they got to New York.)  The production of Camelot in Boston ran, as I remember, four hours.  They cut at least an hour, after that.  For my money, I would have watched Richard Burton for six hours.  He made Arthur tragic in a way I’d never even considered.  I thought the story was about Lancelot and Guinevere.  Not that Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet were chopped liver, but when Burton was on stage, every other character was a walk-on.  I wore out the original cast LP, and it reduced me to tears every time I listened to it.  

Camelot is somewhere in that Neverland along with Prince Valiant.  It’s a backlot fantasy, it doesn’t have the smell of smoky hearths and scorched meat, unwashed bodies in thick fur cloaks, blood and bowels and rape, but there’s a counter-narrative to both: Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mary Stewart, The Mists of Avalon and The Crystal Cave, which feminize the story, in the one case, and foreground the otherworldly or magical, in the second, but these are mirror narratives, the female principle (in myth, at least) a correlative of sorcery.  

Robert Warshow wrote a famous essay about the Western, in which he said there were only X archetypes, of plot, and character.  And we could haul in Joseph Campbell, or Robert Graves, or Jung, but the arc of the hero bends in similar ways.  A friend of mine was leaving Excalibur, and he overheard a young person say to their date, “It’s just like Star Wars.”  

We draw the sword from the stone, and our fate is foretold.  There’s no escaping it.