Susan Hill

Charles Cullen, an American nurse, murdered several hundred patients by the administration in overdose of restricted drugs. Hospitals should be safe places but they are actually rather dangerous: mistakes are made, accidents happen, medics may be careless or just exhausted. But although many patients die when they should have recovered, very few die at the hands of a psychopathic serial killer — so far as we know. The trouble is, we often don’t know. There could be a Cullen working and murdering in a hospital near you. Look up ‘Healthcare professionals convicted of murdering patients’ on the internet and you find 39, and note the ‘convicted’. Many have merely been suspected but escaped conviction because of lack of evidence. Alarmist?

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist.

Driving past several long abandoned second- world-war airfields in East Anglia last year I was struck by how spooky they seemed, just like the decommissioned army base that used to exist near me. Places where people have not only lived and worked but which form the background of wartime drama, and from which men went to their deaths, are bound to be haunted, and in Helen Dunmore’s short novel, it is an airfield that once saw Lancaster Bombers fly out into the night that forms a ghostly scene. Isabel is newly married to a doctor, Philip, and the two have moved to Yorkshire where he is now a GP. It is the early 1950s, the country is still redolent of wartime hardships, ration books, nasty linoleum in rented flats and nosey landladies.

This is a raw, untidy, ragged book. Well, grief is all of those things. On the other hand, Didion wrote about the death of her husband in an iconic memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, which apart from being raw was none of them. So she knows how it can be done.  That book was about the horribly sudden death of her husband, about shock and pain and then the confusion of bereavement and loss. But it was also a vivid portrait of the man himself. ‘One never knows when the blow may fall’, yet people have been surprisingly surprised that it fell again so quickly on Didion, when her adopted daughter Quintana, also died, a year later. But blows rain down relentlessly, not to say unfairly, on some individuals. Such as Job.

As a child, Mark Girouard must have been easy to buy for at Christmas.  An ideal gift would have been a puzzle, preferably the sort that looks easy, but is actually fiendish; one you have patiently to tease away at for hours until finally you unlock it, and long to share its cunning solution. This is more or less what Girouard does in several of the essays in this delightful collection. Girouard is our most distinguished architectural historian and writer on great houses, but here he solves puzzles, and also reveals a rich and diverse literary taste. He solves puzzles because he is sure there is something more to this or that received version of a story than meets the eye, and wants to dig deeper. Take two well-known facts about the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde.

M. R. James died at peace with himself and the world. We can be reasonably confident in claiming that after reading about his last weeks, during which he was ill, tired, weak and bored but probably not in pain, and even more on learning what his sister Grace said of his final days. During the tedious weeks of illness a group of Monty’s closest friends had made him the present of ‘a radio- gramophone of the latest type’ and he had taken to it immediately. Grace wrote: The radiogram proved such a pleasure to him and I can see him now after dinner … listening so intently, with his pipe in his mouth and matches strewn around.

Why do so many aspiring writers think it best to begin with the short story and graduate to the novel? It’s madness. The short story is infinitely harder to write well. Some novelists succeed at both — William Trevor and John McGahern are the names that spring to mind — but Chekhov never wrote a novel and, coming up to date, our leading woman short-story writer, Helen Simpson, has not been tempted to do so either. I can count on a hand the names of contemporary writers whose collections of short stories are worth reading, but Polly Samson has belonged on one of its fingers since her fine first volume, Lying in Bed. That was published ten years ago.