Culture

In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement was in full swing across Europe. You could probably date its birth from the publication in 1775 of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the gloomy novel of unrequited love that led to a spate of suicides among young men in Germany. Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, with its Taoist argument for simplicity and the importance of contemplating nature. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1794 and his daughter Mary Shelley’s extravagant Gothic novel Frankenstein in 1816. The Romantics attacked the new numbers-based utilitarian philosophy which underpinned the Industrial Revolution.

At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of short stories, several volumes of verse, countless newspaper and magazine articles, movie scripts, radio plays and more. His work was dictated, transcribed and sent directly to the publisher. In one year alone (1929) he wrote a dozen books. People joked about getting ‘the weekly Wallace’. Despite their speed of creation, Wallace’s stories were, said The Spectator, written in plain, clear English and ‘read by everyone, from bishops to barmen’. His influence on the thriller genre was extensive, profound and continuous. He inspired a thousand imitators with The Four Just Men, Mr J.G. Reeder, Sanders of the River and Educated Evans.

The musical Cats reopened in the West End in December, with a judge from The X Factor in the lead role. The music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the songs are, of course, by T.S. Eliot. Eliot died 50 years ago this year, and retains a curious kind of fame, which encompasses West End musicals and scholarly collections of his letters, lovingly published by Faber (most recently, Volume 5: 1930–1931. At 800 pages, this is for true Eliot-fanciers only). In 1948, a line from one of his poems was used in an ad for Esso petrol (‘Time future contained in time past’). In 1956, he gave a lecture on literary criticism in a baseball stadium in Minnesota, and 14,000 people turned up to listen. He was and remains a strange, paradoxical figure: a famous serious poet.

I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written in the present tense. Almost always it will be violent, unnecessary and will give far too much away about coming events. I like to be unsettled. I like a story to build at its own particular rate. So, ignoring its prologue, Peter May’s Runaway (Quercus, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.99) is a well-told tale about five youths who escape from Glasgow in 1965, heading for London and fame and fortune as a pop group. Instead, they fall into a world of drugs, radical doctors, lost love and death. Fifty years later the surviving members of the group return to London to uncover the truth about a long-ago murder.

One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book, particularly if it comes into the category of ‘not a suitable present for your great-aunt’. I always dislike this duty, since it spoils surprises, which are the essence of enjoyment in reading; but Adam Thirlwell’s first novel, Politics, did perhaps require a few alerts. The title gave no clue that it was about a sexual threesome, and would have introduced the putative great-aunt to rimming, undinism, and an exhausting range of esoteric practices. The flavour of Thirlwell’s third novel, however, Lurid & Cute, is blazoned on the cover. You can’t fault this one on the Trade Descriptions Act.

Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will Boast spent years trying to turn his life story into fiction, but eventually gave up and wrote an autobiography. In Epilogue, he describes how his mother died of brain cancer when he was in his first year of college; two years later, his younger brother Rory was killed in a car crash, then his father set about drinking himself to death. Later, he discovered that his father had had two sons from a secret previous marriage, so he tracked them down and made friends. Boast certainly has plenty of material to work with, but this book feels like it’s been written more for himself than for his readers.