Winston Graham (1908–2003)

Why would you start a literary prize for genre fiction? Publicity, obviously. But why would you want publicity? Because you're confident that your genre has reached a point of maturity from which proselytising might reap converts? Or because you're quietly anxious that the genre is ailing, and the congregation might dwindle without reinvigoration?

As the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, "The Little Walls" supports the latter speculation. It's an anxious novel. The most enduring work of Its author, Winston Graham, is the series of Poldark novels, inspiration for multiple Sunday-night-sexytimes TV adaptations. But he turned his hand to various forms and genres, and he certainly had a keen sense of the competition in the crime genre; through his characters, he ventriloquises jabs at private dicks "who risk their lives and their virtue for ten dollars a day and expenses" and "literary Catholics" (apparently the only case in which religion is still fashionable).

Considering the award it won, the book hasn't much crime in it, nor much mystery. It's a manhunt and a womanhunt combined, and both are essentially solved two thirds of the way through the book. So what's left? For the hunted man and the hunting man to fight over the hunted woman, as a direct reckoning over past sins and as a proxy for a clash of values.

Ah yes, the clash of values. The book's action is accommodated to a battle-of-ideas framework in which a dogged Christian morality incorporating a firm belief in right and wrong is set against an anarchist live-as-you-will tendency very loosely inspired by a mix of Freud and Nietzsche. This framework is somewhat laboriously constructed from elements of set-piece dialogues, reconstructed diary entries, and the protagonist's private musings. No prizes for guessing which side wins. It wins by winning the woman, who (perhaps unsurprisingly, but not pleasingly all the same) seems to lack much by way of agency, and a fair bit by way of character---though she definitely has a physical appearance. Another period trope to tick off the bingo card is a disabled person whose disability is quite explicitly presented as an outward marker of inner corruption.

All the same, there's enough here to see why it might have won an award; it's not badly written, the bloviating about the nature of morality gives it an air of superiority over the mere genre stuff, there is some interest in the plot and some nice observations of particularities of feeling, thought, and action. Several minor characters seem superfluous, but do allow the author to efficiently invoke an atmosphere and a milieu.

This last seems faintly incredible from 70 years distance. The book is set in a post-war Europe in which it is very possible for a member of the monied, educated upper middle class to arrange personal meetings with senior police officers in multiple countries, to turn up in Capri confident of ingratiation into a society circle, to all in all act as though the world is very much at their command. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I suppose it's not unbelievable. The population was much smaller, and the percentage of the population occupying this particular social stratum was smaller. Perhaps a person within that stratum did indeed get to have the doors opened for them by other members of it.

To be more generous about the ideas, the book's atmosphere also imbues a sense that this is a Europe shaken by the war and the Holocaust, sitting loosely now on its moral foundations, where a kind of ethical anarchism might really be an appropriate intellectual stance, not just a convenient excuse for knavery. In a Europe like that, one might feel the need to have one's protagonist shore up the foundations, and to do it with something besides brute force. All the same, it's hard not to conflate the book's anxiety about the moral state of Europe with the CWA's anxiety about the state of the crime novel—as if it's time for the genre to reflect on its own moral state, and to do so through introspective reflection. I'm all for introspective reflection, but one can have too much of a good thing.… (altro)