William Boyd The Predicament

 

 

I have read quite a lot of spy fiction, mostly Eric Ambler and John le Carré but also Joseph Kanon and Graham Greene. I enjoy a good spy novel and that is how I came to pick up this one from the Waterstones table despite the implausibly large number of product endorsements – some of them not about this novel but about the writer’s work in general.

Apart from the fast-paced climax I thought it pretty awful. The prose is clunky, the dialogues ditto (notably the supposed transcripts of the hero’s psychoanalytic sessions). The narrative is padded out with alcohol being drunk and cigarettes smoked, everything given proper names intended to nail a 1963 period atmosphere (Gitanes, Kools) but again clunky and feeling more like product placement. It would have been entirely in keeping if The Cat (one of the better crafted characters) consumed only branded cat food (it would have to be Kit e Kat).

Structurally, most of the initial plot involving MI6 and the Russians is abandoned as the story is developed and replaced by a different narrative involving MI6,  the CIA and a rogue element within the CIA.  Sub-plots simply  pad out the length; the sex scenes don’t work. The story finally settled on – a rogue CIA plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Berlin – is  a good one because it is structured to imitate features of the actual assassination: the would-be Berlin assassin is killed before he can spill the beans about who paid him just as Lee Harvey Oswald was promptly shot by Jack Ruby.

If I had been an editor advising I would have asked for a more focussed plot line and some restraint in endlessly naming drinks consumed and cigarettes smoked. The jacket design barely connects to the story except insofar as an antique car hints at the period and images of a woman and a man promise a Romantic Interest. I guess that was the sum total of the  brief.

Hallie Rubenhold Story of a Murder: the Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen

 

Modern book publishing is a branch of the packaging industry, as a visit to Waterstones will attest. It is necessary to open the pages to get a first sense of whether the text is the work of an author or a content creator. This one is definitely the work of an author.

Hallie Rubenhold is a serious social historian who researches thoroughly and writes measured prose, both evidenced in this book as in her previous one The Five. Here she is re-telling the stories of the wife-murderer Dr Crippen, his two wives, and his mistress who was acquitted of any complicity in the murder of the second wife but who Rubenhold thinks was both more knowledgeable and more culpable than she ever admitted. Part of her argument is that the mistress, Ethel de Neave, was very much an agent though strategically depicted by her 1910 defence counsel as a victim. To me, this has contemporary relevance in a world where journalists continue to operate more or less automatically with the trope of the female victim. It makes for a simpler, less challenging story, and a preferred narrative of female weakness, “vulnerableyoungwoman” a journalistic cliché.

Rubenhold’s detailed and quite leisurely narrative held my attention; towards the end she springs some surprises in the form of evidence, recorded at the time, but which was not brought to court. She leaves some questions open though in one case I felt she left a small part of the story simply  unfinished: stuff was burnt in the gardens of Crippen’s house after the murder but what was being burnt is not clarified.

Like her previous one, a very good book.