With a playful nod to Graham Greene, Steven Carroll — the award-winning author the Glenroy novels and The Eliot Quartet — has turned his hand to writing ‘entertainments’. And it looks as if there are plans for more of them, because Death of a Foreign Gentleman is badged as No 1 in the Stephen Minter series…
Set in postwar Cambridge, Death of a Foreign Gentleman obeys the conventions of the crime genre in some respects. There is a world-weary cop with an unhelpful boss, there is a closed circle of suspects with motives that must be explored, there is a confined setting and (as in a caper or a heist) there is a possibility that the cop might be putting himself in danger. OTOH the victim, a philosopher with a Nazi past, is certainly not an innocent and there are plenty of people who hated him. Besides, the manner of his death might simply be a random event and not murder at all.
So while justice might be served by finding the culprit, the dead man’s victims might have different ideas about when and how justice has been done.
With its setting familiar to readers of The Eliot Quartet, Death of a Foreign Gentlemanalso explores class, belonging, and antisemitism.On the case of what might be more than a hit-and-run death of a cyclist, is Stephen Minter, the ‘co*ckney Jew’ who was assigned to find TS Eliot’s wife Vivienne in Goodnight Vivienne (The Eliot Quartet #4, seehere). The Love Interest Brigid Delaney turns up too #SpoilerAlert for Goodnight Vivienne: clearly she has survived her top secret wartime job.
Minter is an Austrian Jew whose family came to Britain before the war, but his parents were interned as enemy aliens and died in custody. Interviewing the suspects involves an encounter with the local aristocrat Sir Alex Grainger, who delivers a Statement of Authenticity when it comes to ‘belonging’. From the outset, when he is mentally sniffingMinter’s name, he represents the peoplewho are there to remind you that you’re a foreigner and always will be.
Sir Alec eyes him up and down again as you would an intruder, something blown in off the street, then turns to view the expansive rolling fields of the estate. ‘You are born into this land, Detective Sergeant, like the foxes and birds and badgers. Rooted to it, like the trees. Your philosophers mightn’t be able to tell us what’s true and what’s not. But I can.This,’he says, voice raised, gesturing to the estate with a sweep of his hand, ‘is what’s true;thisis what we went to war for…’ (p.77)
In this postwar period, the repressed trauma of war years is everywhere. While some people were lauded as heroes or mourned as innocent victims, others were not. Minter’s parents died not in the Holocaust but because of it while interned as enemy aliens. Bridget fled to safety but her parents died in Dresden. Minter’s London home was lost in the Blitz. And Pinkie the ‘spiv’ is one of the lost. After failing the medical he found other less heroic ways to be useful but the girl of his dreams is scornful of people like him.
Pinkie is a spiv, a species of life that grew out of the black-market era. He wears the uniform of the spiv: dark, tight suit; slicked-back hair; pencil moustache; and dapper shoes. Not that he stands around on street corners selling watches or silk stockings or French perfume. No, Pinkie works in the background, selling whatever sells, often to toffs and those with the money to buy. Pinkie is on first-name terms with Sir Alec, who has a taste for French cigarettes and rare French wines that Pinkie has a talent for tracking down. (p.80)
Pinkie, as readers of Graham Greene will know, is a character fromBrighton Rockand in the Acknowledgements, Carroll says thatin some ways this novel is a salute to Graham Greene.
Anna Schmidt [is] a clear reference to The Third Man, the finest film ever made. Other influences include the brilliant Penelope Fitzgerald, especially her novelsThe Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower.And of course , there are the informing figures of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, Martin Friedrich being a mixture of Heidegger and Sartre, with a dash of Camus. (p.267)
Henry VIII (Wikipedia)
There are all sorts of rewarding allusions, from a riff on a couple of constables who remind Minter of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet, and his musings on E M Forster’s analysis of universal elements in Aspects of the Novel. Minter is a reader, who has…
… learnt over the years that even the most bizarre things gathered from reading, even seemingly irrelevant facts, can suddenly, depending on circ*mstances, become useful. (p.43)
The narration is mostly from Minter’s PoV, but sometimes the narrator has his say. I don’t think Pinkie would be familiar with Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII… and anyway he doesn’t know anything about Daisy’s life, which makes his passion for her all the more poignant.
The world of ideas drew her from an early age, and, through a scholarship, that love of the world of ideas eventually led her to Cambridge, where she was lucky enough to attend a talk or two by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the King of Cambridge. And, this year, the famous Martin Friedrich. A meeting that eventually led to the park that Pinkie is surveying. Daisy sitting on a bench, Friedrich pacing about in front of her.
Then Friedrich stops, and stands staring at her as he speaks. His lips are moving, his legs apart, feet planted firmly on the ground, like Henry VIII addressing one of the wives he is about to discard and dispatch to the other side. (p.80)
(I wonder when the precious paintings were brought back from safe storage after the war? That must have been a great day.)
Bulls Head (1942) by Picasso
Here is Minter, considering a discarded shirt as a memento:
He draws her to him, arms around her, still with the faint sensation that he is dreaming and might wake at any moment to that routine, predictable life he’d slipped into after she left. ‘I might want to keep it, just the way it is. A sort of memento. Even frame it. A work of art,’ he grins. ‘Anything counts for art now, even a bicycle seat.’ He pauses. Or just something to look back on when we’re old and grey and nodding by the fire.’
You are a sentimentalist. I knew it, she says, chin resting on his shoulder. (p.58)
Bridget forms a bridge between Minter and Sir Alec. Class, and the way that connections between powerful men in Britain are forged from an early age and never go away, typically excludes women… They don’t feel the same loyalty to its conventions. Bridget tells Minter that her father went to school with Sir Alec, and she gives him a lesson in how society really works.
‘My father went to school with everybody. It was that kind of school.’ […] ‘Why’, she asks, ‘do you want to know about Sir Alec?’ (p.62)
From book coach Savannah Gilbo, I found this excellent summation of what readers expect when they read a crime novel:
Readers choose crime fiction because they want to feel a sense of anticipation and intrigue over whether or not the criminal will be brought to justice. They want to follow the trail of clues, make meaning of those clues, and figure out the puzzle right alongside the protagonist. By the end of these stories, most readers want to feel a sense of comfort, relief, and security when justice is served and order has been restored. So, they want to see the wrongs righted, and they want to see justice prevail.
But the wrongs that are righted in Death of a Foreign Gentleman are not those of a conventional crime novel. This is difficult to discuss without spoilers. Yes, Minter identifies the culprit, but there’s a twist in the tale, and there is some Old Testament justice for crimes that were not part of Minter’s brief. But that justice seems more like the kind of intervention dished out by capricious Greek Gods playing random games for their own purposes.
That pitch perfect cover design is by Louisa Maggio.
PS I confess to a frisson of delight when a quotation from my review for The Year of the Beast was reproduced among the blurbs in the front pages of this edition!
Author: Steven Carroll
Title: Death of a Foreign Gentleman (Stephen Minter #1)
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Cover design by Louisa Maggio, HarperCollins Design Studio
ISBN:9781460764589, pbk., 288 pages
Source: Kingston Library
Image credits:
- Portrait of Henry VIII, afterHans Holbein the Younger – eAHC0d0WiemXSA — Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21878559
- Bull’s Head by Pablo Picasso, 1942: https://www.pablopicasso.org/bull-head.jsp
