A Young Girl Dressed Deeply in Black.

‘The finding of the missing girl was due to disciplined legwork,’ the Police Commander leading the investigation into the unnamed teenager’s disappearance explained last night. 

     The first bulletin released a description of the runaway, he went on, which stated, ‘Jane Doe, age fourteen years, eyes blue, blonde hair, height 5 ft 2 ins, slim build, scar on left elbow, quiet-spoken, and possibly amnesiac.’

     

     Acting on operational intelligence, however, after the grandmother of the runaway revealed certain details of the traumatic effects of a recent bereavement on the girl, a city-wide all-points police broadcast to patrolmen swiftly resulted in the subject of the search being traced.

     Since the tragic death of her parents, both killed instantly in a fatal multi-vehicle expressway crash in November last year, the teenager it was understood had become profoundly affected by her loss and she had vanished from her home. Investigators believed that the girl, due to profound grief, had lost her memory and according to latest reports this appears to be the case.

     The fact that the girl wore mourning attire of a distinct character meant that a large number of witnesses came forward who remembered vividly her last movements, as it unusual to see a young girl dressed deeply in black, and her whereabouts were soon known to close the case without undue delay, or distress to the missing teenager.

Anti-Chekhovian Sentiments.

‘Why do you always wear black?’
    This question recalled Masha’s famous opening line in the first act of The Seagull, Jane Doe later reminded a policewoman (she had studied Chekhov’s play at junior high school). 

      ‘But don’t think for all that I am in mourning for my own life,’ she insisted. ‘Let there be no doubt it is the lives of my devoted parents I devoutly mourn.’  In detention the grieving girl had also stated, ‘I can’t be treated as if I were any normal girl of fourteen.’

      Curiously, this run-in with a police squad, so early in Jane Doe’s formative years, would come to be seen as a significant precursor to a later encounter with NYPD patrolmen on the occasion of her sensational disappearance, age twenty-four, in the case once popularly known as the Nuke-Shelter Spy Nest Affair.

      In 2008, when a notice heralding the authorised account of the notorious case first appeared (Thought Police, see page 414 of Catherine Eisner’s Sister Morphine published by Salt), the announcement concluded that ‘. . . when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [i.e. A Room to the End of Fall Salt 2014].’ 

      This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Jane Doe’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery. 

The Second Disappearance . . . Burrowing Under the Floor . . .

In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Jane Doe’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonable flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.

      The cops are friendly and polite. 

      They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’  

      ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’

      A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.

      In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.

      ‘The prisoner (writes Jane Doe), amazingly, in four years, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like . . . like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?

      ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage . . . as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor . . .” ’

Anomie and related neurotica. 

‘Jane Doe’ evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. 

     Despite admitting to severe psychological adjustment problems, she claimed her sense of dislocation from a once familiar world was due, essentially, to the extreme mistrust and suspicion with which she regarded her literary agent, Sherman Seymour Dane. Specifically, she falsely accused Dane of ghostwriting the major portion of her novel, An Auroral Stain, which was published to mixed reviews during her enforced absence. ‘For Seymour, it was more than a case of corpus delicti when I disappeared,’ Jane Doe alleged, ‘it was a case of a missing opus whose inconvenient absence was remedied when he presumed to “complete” the work without my authorisation.’ 

     That she was wholly misguided in this belief the narrative A Room to the End of Fall now happily remedies. See her unredacted text in A Bad Case, 2014. Please note: To allay suspicions of editorial tampering (spelling, punctuation, usage, etc.), which for very sound reasons this American narrator maintains, her native US orthography in this account remains unchanged.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

English Manners: the Gentle Art of Jew-Baiting . . . the Holy Terror and His Honour the Judge.

A gulf of ignorance – or more probably the detachment of an inbred disinterest – can go but only a little way towards explaining the seeming heartlessness of English satirists and respected fictionists in their characterisation of Jews as comic victims of ridicule in the first half of the 20th Century, their prejudices imbued, we may assume, with stiff-necked attitudes so often customary in the works of their 19th Century literary masters.

It’s a kind of Pavlovian response that is no better instanced than in this character sketch by the popular English novelist Henry Seton Merriman when exhibiting his deep-dyed hostility to one of his villains (1892).

He was dark of hair with a sallow complexion and a long drooping nose—the nose of Semitic ancestors. A small mouth, and the chin running almost to a point . . . He returned and stood at the table with slightly bowed legs—not the result of much riding, although he wore top-boots and breeches as if of daily habit—but a racial defect handed down like the nasal brand from remote progenitors . . . He knew that he only possessed one thing to risk, namely, his life; and true to his racial instinct, he valued this very highly, looking for an extortionate usury on his stake . . . Here again was the taint of the blood that ran in his veins. The curse had reached him—in addition to the long, sad nose and the bandy legs . . . for a Jew never makes a soldier or a sailor, and they are rarely found in those positions unless great gain is holden up.

The Old Bunch.

Like Anton Chekhov in his early drama, Platonov, even a modern master of sophisticated English prose can fall prey to reflexive prejudices as a product of an atavistic cultural inheritance. 

Consider, then, Evelyn Waugh in whose Vile Bodies (1930) there can be read ‘Dirty yid,’ spoken of a Jew by a struggling actress; indeed, there is also Waugh’s Scoop in which the foreign correspondents arriving in Ishmaelia are described as ‘All the old bunch,’ with the exclusion of just one reporter. ‘Yes, and there’s a highbrow yid . . . but we don’t count him.’

For those who affect the condescending manners of the quintessential Mayfair Man-About-Town we should look no further than The Romantic Lady (1921) by Michael Arlen, a bestselling writer of Armenian origin. There is an offhand back-handed putdown of another émigré class in this character sketch : 

[He] had actively sat as member for __ since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.

From his writings it’s clear that Michael Arlen cunningly adopted an English class consciousness and xenophobia to negotiate the exclusiveness of London’s high society. And, here, in this passage can be detected a kind of inverted antisemitism, which both praises the virtuosic outsider and condemns him.

Today we can spot this same knee-jerk cultural envy in the long-running cartoon strip in the satirical magazine, Private Eye, which lampoons London’s publishing houses whose founders, in many well known instances, were émigré Jews of exceptional brilliance who’d coupled their names with certain scions of the tweed-jacketed English County Gentry. Thus, Snipcock & Tweed.

The brass plate of Snipcock & Tweed may have slipped over time, but its significations still have a precarious hold on Britain’s collective unconscious . . . and stir half-forgotten guilty impressions from reading certain popular fictions in our youth . . .

Dateline for despatches from the Empire of Xenophobia.
So let’s take a look at these extracts from pages of hazy recall with their concordances to a DATELINE of world events at the time of publication as a sobering counterpoint. As Max Hastings writes in the same vein: 

‘Before the second world war, such [antisemitic] sentiments were commonplace, not least in the “Clubland Hero” thrillers of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates. “Bolshevik Jews” were responsible for many of the villainous conspiracies frustrated by Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and Jonah Mansell, before they gave the culprits a good flogging.’

Let us then begin with a quintessential Edwardian . . . because I intend this modest conspectus of hints and glints and glimpses to end with one.

The Un-Rest Cure.

We begin in the first decade of the 20th Century with Saki (H H Munro). 

           DATELINE 1911: The persecution from recurring outbreaks of 

           pogroms has driven over 2 million Jews to flee the Russian 

           Empire between 1881 and 1910. 

           “To-night is going to be a great night in the history of Christendom,” said Clovis. 

           “We are going to massacre every Jew in the neighbourhood.”

           “To massacre the Jews!” said Huddle indignantly. “Do you mean to tell me 

           there’s a general rising against them?”

           “No, it’s the Bishop’s own idea. He’s in there arranging all the details now.”

           “But—the Bishop is such a tolerant, humane man.”

           “That is precisely what will heighten the effect of his action. The sensation will 

           be enormous.”

           That at least Huddle could believe.

           “He will be hanged!” he exclaimed with conviction.

           “A motor is waiting to carry him to the coast, where a steam yacht is in 

           readiness.”

           “But there aren’t thirty Jews in the whole neighbourhood,” protested Huddle, 

           whose brain, under the repeated shocks of the day, was operating with the 

           uncertainty of a telegraph wire during earthquake disturbances.

           “We have twenty-six on our list,” said Clovis, referring to a bundle of notes. 

           “We shall be able to deal with them all the more thoroughly.” 

                                                                                                              [ The Unrest-Cure, 1911.]

Before they’re sorted out ...

Here, as we advance into the 1930s, ‘well-bred’ snobbery blends with not-so-subtle racial antipathy signalled by biblical allusion to the condemned and redeemed.

           DATELINE 1933: The Nazi Party assumes control of the German

           state and the SS establishes the Dachau concentration camp.

I put up at . . . a second-rate hole [in Paris] . . . It had two distinct clienteles . . . there was a sprinkling of English honeymooners . . . balanced by an equally large sprinkling of doubtful Semites; altogether a very well-proportioned mixture of sheeps and goats—like Judgement Day, you know, only before they’re sorted out.

[Risk by Margery Sharp, 1933.                  

From The Strand Magazine .]                 

They make everyone do jus’ what they like 
an’ send them to prison if they don’t.
Yes, the insular British can be blinkered to the point of ostrich-like self-deception, but what is difficult to accept, however, is the cold reality of an extraordinarily casual dismissal of human suffering by that favourite English schoolboy mischief-maker, William Brown, created by Richmal Crompton.

           DATELINE 1935: The antisemitic Nuremberg Laws for the Protection 
           of German Blood and German Honour are passed in Nazi Germany 
           by the Reichstag; together with the Reich Citizenship Law, which 
           declares that only those of German or related blood are eligible 
           to be Reich citizens.

‘What did you say they were called?’ said William.                       ‘Nasties,’ replied Henry, who as usual was the fount of information on the subject.                                                                 ‘They can't be called nasties,’ said William. ‘No one would call themselves a name like that. That mus’ be what people call them that don’t like them.’                                                          ‘No, it’s their real name,’ persisted Henry. ‘They really are called nasties. Nasty means something quite different in Germany.’                                                                                                ‘Don’t be silly,’ said William. ‘Nasty couldn't mean anything but nasty anywhere. What do they do?’                           ‘They rule all the country,’ said Henry, ‘an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t.’                                                                                              ‘I’d be one of them if I was in that country,’ said William, ‘but I bet I’d find a better name than nasty.’                                    ‘I tell you nasty means somethin’ else in Germany,’ said Henry.                                                                                                      ‘Well, why can’t they say somethin’ else instead of nasty then?’ demanded William. ‘Haven’t they got any sense? What else do they do?’

                                                                                            [ William and the Nasties, 1935.]

‘The Effects from Transfusion of Jewish Blood.’

From the 1937 Year Book of a British Commercial College (Secretarial Shorthand and Typing), this ‘Joke’ is recorded:  ‘A man after a serious operation had to undergo a blood-transfusion, and the blood was given by a Jew, who was presented with £10. A few months later it became again essential for another transfusion and, after the sacrifice by the same donor, the man rewarded him with £5. Unfortunately, bad luck fell his way again and the same procedure took place, but this time the donor received nothing!’

            DATELINE 1937: Under the Reich, plans are laid to ban Jewish 

            doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, a ban effective in 

            July of the following year.

 

‘I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here . . .’

That an Oxford Professor of Poetry, Cecil Day Lewis, could conceive in 1938, even as caricature, the callous views in the passage quoted, below, is all the more remarkable from the lover of a distinguished woman of Jewish lineage, Rosamond Lehmann, his mistress of a nine-year affair.

            DATELINE 1938: Exclusion of Jews by a new German decree closes 

            all Jewish-owned businesses. In desperation, Jewish parents send 

            their unaccompanied children abroad to escape Nazi persecution.

            The first Kindertransport arrives in Great Britain.

            A film executive introduces the novel’s protagonist to a starlet who complains

            of Weinberg, a producer, and takes to task one of Weinberg’s sidekicks, another

            imputed Jew who’s made advances to her. She protests all in a rush: 

‘I keep on telling Weinberg he must ring up the Embassy and have the man deported the country’s not big enough to hold both of us either he goes or I but of course all these Jews are in league I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here though I do rather bar rubber truncheons and sterilisation . . .’

                                                                       [The Beast Must Die by Cecil Day Lewis 

                                                                                    writing as Nicholas Blake, 1938.]

‘A sub-Aryan called Cohen.’

And what are we to make of this unthinking character sketch in 1939 from a master practitioner from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Cyril Hare, once appointed to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions before he was made a county court judge.

            DATELINE 1939: Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia begins.

            Germany invades Poland.  Persecution of Jews in Poland and     

            Czechoslovakia; all Jews in Nazi controlled territory forced to wear 

            the yellow star.

‘There’s no such person – in the office of Vanning, Waldron and Smith, anyway.’                                                                                                                            ‘How do you know?’                                                                                                  ‘I looked them up in the official list . . . I checked up on accountants as well. And there wasn’t a Vanning . . . Not a solitary one. So far as this crowd goes, the partners now are Waldron, Smith and a sub-Aryan called Cohen . . . ’

                                                                                        [Suicide Excepted, p.154. 1939.

                                                                                                                       by Cyril Hare,       

                                                                                    Judge Gordon Clark, 1900-1958]  

‘A modern Jewish colony provokes an outburst . . .’

A feted writer of children’s fiction, John Verney, an old-Etonian (see Harold Macmillan below) reveals in 1940, in letters home from Israel, residual prejudices from his schooldays. It is true that at that time, in the early days of WW2, this young English soldier would not have been deeply aware of the Shoah whose full horror was to be uncovered by Allied combatants in the latter days of the war.

            DATELINE 1940: In May, SS command establishes the Auschwitz 
            concentration camp (Auschwitz I) outside the Polish city of 
            Oswiecim, located in German-annexed Upper Silesia. 
            In November, German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto to 
            be sealed, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent 
            of the city's population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles, 

A wounded dog bites any hand however friendly and to bite at something, at everything, became for me too often the means of relieving my feelings. A few weeks later the contrast between my own state and the sight of happy civilians leading a normal life in a modern Jewish colony provoked the following outburst:                                                                                 “The spring is fully upon us in a blaze of sunny days and sprouting grasses. The red mud everywhere has turned to green, the birds sing as never before, the anemones grow out of the concrete and the young repulsive Jewish male casts a furtive suggestive look at the young repulsive Jewish female as they walk together beside the plough.”                     In the mood I was then in, I am sure I would have written the same words had I found myself in Scotland instead of in Israel. 

                                                                    [Going to the Wars by John Verney 1955]

                                                                                   

Harold MacMillan, 
1st Earl of Stockton 
Eton (1906–10)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . . .  

and so to the UK in the 1980s . . .   

to recall an Edwardian Etonian’s celebrated bon mot.  

[A telling extract from You can take the boy out of Eton . . . by Nick Fraser from The Guardian, 2005.]    

There have been a number of Etonian prime ministers, among them William Ewart Gladstone, and, in modern times, AJ Balfour, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. More than half the members of AJ Balfour's 1902 cabinet were Etonians, but there were nine in Macmillan’s 1956 government and 11 in Douglas-Home’s.  Neither Ted Heath (cabinet-maker’s son) nor Margaret Thatcher (grocer’s daughter) displayed any conspicuous love for Eton. There were Etonians in Thatcher's first cabinet, but it appears that she didn’t feel easy in their presence. 

In 1983, she sacked four of the most prominent Tory Etonians, prompting Macmillan's snobbish (and anti-semitic) mot about there being more Old Estonians than Old Etonians in the cabinet. 

Last Word from T S Eliot at 5.55pm September 14th 1943, Wigmore Hall, London.

We know with certainty that at teatime, on an autumnal Tuesday in London, T S Eliot spoke these lines from his Gerontion:

            My house is a decayed house,

            And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

            Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp . . .

During the WW2, over 20,000 of the Antwerp’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, rounded up between 1941 and 1942 by the Germans with the collaboration of the local police. 

In his TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form Anthony Julius writes: ‘Eliot’s offence lies in his willingness to give offence, in his deployment of anti-semitic language. Eliot’s anti-semitic poetry is very deft . . .  Refusing either to acquiesce in, or to rail at, Eliot’s contempt for Jews, one strives to do justice to the many injustices Eliot does to Jews. This is what adversarial reading allows. It is an alternative to two kinds of silence: the coercive silence of censorship, the passive silence of the submissive reader. It combines resistance with respect.’

Post postscriptum: Cricket averages of consuming interest to Brits.

A British P.o.W. escapee, who was witness to the genocidal purges of the Nazi regime, explains:

“War crime!” sneered McIntosh. “I paid my first visit to Belsen in ’38, Major, when you people back home knew more about Hutton’s centuries than Hitler’s rest-homes for the Jews. Things were much the same then as they were later.”

Richard Pape. Fortune Is My Enemy (1957)           

•

For German literary antisemitism in 1944, see also

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

See also my father’s despatch from Paris in 1944

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html

•

For a tragedy of a native German’s alienation in the face of the NSDAP’s inexorable rise to power incited by antisemitism see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library

http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Killers Slipping Through the Net: Murder in a Paranoid Nanny State . . . Christina James’s Fair of Face.

It will strike discerning readers of Fair of Face that the central problem confronting the major incident team, in Christina James’s new and totally gripping torn-from-the-front-page thriller of a double murder on a Lincolnshire sink estate, is their resigned surrender to compassion fatigue induced by the conduct of any number of unconscionable dependants of Benefits Britain they encounter within today’s dystopian underclass. 

‘Don’t be nesh,’ a suspect cautions an apparent accomplice who’s reluctant to enter the crime scene but, before this compelling account of seemingly motiveless malignancy is ended, the reader may be sure they too will share the cold dread that comes from uncommon knowledge of macabre and incomprehensible crimes . . . the killing of a sleeping infant and mother, and a mindless family massacre.

‘We cannot see into the mind of another,’ a celebrated Scottish judge once concluded before sentencing the accused to be hanged for an unusually inhuman murder. ‘The springs of action are hidden. Human personality is such a mysterious thing that one person can never enter into the personality of another. All we can do is judge them by their acts and conduct and by surrounding circumstance.’

His bleak summing-up can be taken as almost a formula for the psychological police-procedural crime novel, which as a genre withholds moral judgement and shuns an authorial point of view with no glib answers forthcoming in denouements that very often, far from unknotting the narrative, tighten the mystery with a further series of unexpected twists. In short, if we consider the prime suspect in any superior suspense novel as a notional conflicted ‘analysand’ in an unresolved case of psychotherapy, then the crime novelists who emerge as the most distinguished open-minded documentarians of contemporary anomic murder will be found to be adherents of that student of early psychiatry, Dr Chekhov, a literary social scientist who declared he had no ideology and no convictions yet denied he was an indifferentist.

Specifically, the objective yet compassionate Chekhovian crime novelist adheres to this author’s belief that what is obligatory for the writer ‘is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly.’ So . . . when the reader is faced with a vicious crime (described relativistically and not by an omniscient narrator), can one be certain of one’s own moral compass to judge?

Self-deception in a speckled mirror.

Such a novelist is Christina James, whose forensically scrupulous prose in her latest DI Yates novel, Fair of Face, the sixth in her crime thrillers, features a methodology that imitates the split-screen effect of diverse testimonies from both the crime team and their suspects and witnesses, all to some degree the depositions of unreliable narrators who are wanting in self knowledge. Even Detective Inspector Tim Yates is revealed as blinkered to his own bad habit of taking the credit for the successes of his loyal Detective Sergeant, Juliet, his ‘unofficial Girl Friday’ cast in ‘the nice tea lady role’, for whom equally there dawns a recognition of damaging character flaws, ‘I stare at my face in the speckled little mirror that hangs over the sink . . . I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never understood less what I’m doing with my life.’ Loyal readers recognise that James is an astute anatomist of the dynamics of command.

These character flaws not only impede the investigation but are further exemplified by the blundering actions (‘mealy-mouthed do-gooding’) of a number of do-gooders from the Social Services, whose  prickly demarcation disputes between departments compound a bien pensant bureaucratic correctness that amounts to a virtual paranoia consuming the Nanny State. These passages of the novel are social satire of a high order, as if from the pen of a latter-day Zola to skewer petty officialdom’s buck-passing, which in this case fatally sets in motion the final tragedy. The character sketches of a professional child psychologist are the most acute: ‘She’s wearing a mid-calf dirndl skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse with huge puffed sleeves. Her thick blonde hair has been tied back with a piece of embroidered ribbon. She could pass for a very generously-proportioned Coppélia . . .  with an aggressive brand of altruism.’ 

It is to be this fierce self-deluding altruism of the ‘Responsible Adult’ that hinders the investigative interviewing and blinds the investigators in their race to identify the true criminal intent behind the crime.  

Crucially, the DS, Juliet, protests to the child psychologist: ‘You know I’ll have to interview her again. I’d be grateful if you could let me get through it without interrupting. You can see how important it is . . .’
[Child psychologist] ‘My job is to protect her interests.’ She’s gripping the iron bannister rail. Her knuckles are white. ‘If I think the interview is distressing her too much, or causing her to incriminate herself unfairly, I shall insist that you stop.’

(How vivid! The child psychologist ‘was wearing a floor-length red cotton tartan skirt and a jacket with a nipped-in waist (insofar as it was possible to nip in her waist) in a clashing tartan of purple and blue.’ A note to movie producers (and their costume department): the depth and quality of Fair of Face as a suspense drama is positively filmic, as is the intensely sharp focus on its dramatis personae. And for set designers the mise en scène of the death scene is a marvel of concision. ‘There’s not much furniture in the room besides the double bed and a small old wardrobe with an oval mirror set in the door. Otherwise, just a chair with a rounded back that might have started life in a pub. It’s heaped with clothes.’ Started life in a pub. A Jamesian line that fully expresses the desperate hardscrabble times and familial dysfunctionalism of her Provincial Noir milieu. Feckless ‘on-off fathers who wouldn’t take responsibility for their children.’)

In many ways this mapping of tensions between the individual and a paranoid society reminds one of certain polemical works of fiction by Heinrich Böll, his Brechtian-styled political critiques of governmental dogma and the herd mentality of state functionaries . . . in this instance, a paranoid bureaucracy of exhausted, overworked and often demoralised social workers, a breeding ground, as frequent headlines tell us, for errors to multiply. Certainly James’s austere but muscular prose recalls the calculated intention of Böll’s devastatingly incisive reporting style.

James’s striving for objectivity, with multiple viewpoints, deconstructing events with documentary footage, as it were, brings these societal tensions to life with a naturalism that mirrors the inconclusiveness and mysteriousness of quotidian existence and the violent psychical forces that can be unexpectedly unleashed at an underclass’s Ground Zero. 

Lessons will be learnt?

Mercifully, we do not hear the emollient cliché in this novel so often broadcast after tragedies of the gravity explored in James’s fiction; she, as a social realist disdaining sententiousness, leaves it unsaid. (‘It is better to say not enough than to say too much.’ Chekhov.) In real life, after such failures of the Social Services documented in Fair of Face, we are told that ‘lessons will be learnt’, but James’s ‘mealy-mouthed do-gooder’, in his defence, has this to say:  

‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Every one of the people you mention was responsible for her physical or mental safety, or her day-to-day care, or some other fragment of her life, but no-one wanted to take on board what she had become.’

In other words, too much altruism makes do-gooders blind. It’s smother love. The Nanny State, in smothering, inadvertently kills. 

Predictive plotting.

Astonishingly, the events of James’s novel all too faithfully mirror certain notorious crimes recorded in the British tabloids (Sussex 1985 and Lincolnshire 2016) in so far as her narrative exhibits a very strange aspect indeed . . . the unexplained manifestation of predictive plotting. How is it, readers are going to ask, how is it that the grim epicentre of James’s crime novel – Spalding in South Lincs – was anticipated as the crime scene for a callow nihilistic murder in 2016 of a mother and child while they slept? Given that the gestation of a complex novel of some 300 pages, one would think, can be no less than eighteen months, never mind its production to publication (October 2017), how were the fictive crimes of Fair of Face foreseen, when the double murderers dubbed the ‘Twilight Killers’ killed in actuality in a remarkably similar manner in Spalding in April 2016? 

They say that you can make your own luck, but – the question remains – can a place make a crime? If this is the case, I would not want to be a denizen of Spalding with Christina James as my bard. Like Chekhov’s world, one enters a dimension of no neat answers.

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For a view of the first of Christina James’s crime novels, In the Family (2012), the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series, see Eisner’s blog-post at:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/christina-james-telling-detail-of-her.html

See also, ‘I am a Serial Killer Diarist’ . . . Unremarked Clues to Two Notorious Crime Sprees (John George Haigh and Colin Ireland) . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html