So, Dave, where did it all go wrong?

That headline misrepresents the Ritz/Savoy Hotel room-service (and fictional?) waiter who delivered champagne to George Best’s room, to find Best and (at least one) Miss World  sprawled on a bed covered with his winnings from the casino. Improve the story as you wish.

On May 5th, which happens to be the day in 1215 the Barons renounced their allegiance to King John, Britain will vote on the Tory-led coalition government’s referendum on introducing the Alternative Voting system (AV). The chickens came home to roost at Runnymede with Magna Carta (15 June 1215). Mr Gove please note:  it was a joint Scottish and French invasion presence in London that encouraged John to  sign, a small detail not often mentioned in English school histories.

Should anyone be in doubt, Malcolm will be voting No. His reasons are:

• It is a contemptible lowest common denominator. No political party in the 2010 election campaign was in favour of AV.
• It is not proportional representation, which was the creditable Lib Dem ambition.
• Nor is it a credible alternative vote . Without the “top-up” list it does not reach the standards of proportionality Labour introduced for the Greater London Assembly or the devolved Assemblies.
• If that needs summarising, Nick Clegg (now the prime supporter of AV) denounced it as a miserable little compromise. That interview with The Independent is worth reference:

Until now, the Liberal Democrats have suggested they would accept the alternative vote (AV), with people listing candidates in order of preference, on which Labour has promised a referendum next year. But Mr Clegg is now demanding the “alternative vote plus” system, which unlike AV is proportional and was recommended by Lord Jenkins of Hillhead in 1998.

Mr Clegg said: “AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo. If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone’s votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed. At least it is proportional – and it retains a constituency link.

So AV and the whole referendum farrago is, at best, at stitch-up. In the back-stairs coalition negotiations it was the least the Lib Dems could accept, and the most the Tories could concede. A spavined camel is a horse designed by a cabal.

• As this degenerate Malcolm recalls (from a briefing circa 1965 by his then other half, the sage of Kinnegad) the Labour position should be based on a definitive Conference vote. Labour went into the 1918 Election pledged to introducing AV+. That had been the proposal of a Speaker’s Conference, which had passed the Commons, and was only aborted by the Conservative and Liberal dinosaurs of the House of Lords. As far as Malcolm recollects, no subsequent Labour Conference has overturned that commitment. Mr Ed Miliband’s distance may, unfortunately, vary.
• Beyond all that, it would not work. it would not deliver the goodies promised.

Meanwhile, The Economist is publishing a very important article which argues:

Reform of the voting system is causing more than just constitutional upheaval

Here’s the meat:

… AV is forcing David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, to choose between pleasing his own party and placating his Liberal Democrat coalition partners. Many Tories, who are opposed to AV, want to exploit the unpopularity of Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem deputy prime minister who champions voting reform. They think voters are likelier to reject AV if told that it will mean more seats for the Lib Dems, and more king-making power after elections for third-party leaders such as Mr Clegg, whose reputation has been hurt by his various policy compromises since allying with the Tories.

But Mr Cameron cannot attack his deputy without jeopardising the coalition. The Tory party’s official anti-AV campaign material makes no mention of the Lib Dems, and the prime minister is thought to have leant on the independent “No to AV” campaign to lay off them, too. Opponents of voting reform, however, can’t afford the luxury of deploying only their most decorous arguments: one recent poll gave the pro-AV campaign a lead of ten points.

Were AV to be approved by voters, Mr Cameron would be in serious trouble with his own side. Many Tories already harbour grievances against him: for his allegedly aloof, cliquey leadership style; for failing to win the last general election outright; for conceding too much to the Lib Dems (including, during last May’s coalition negotiations, the promise of the AV referendum). If he is seen to have hamstrung the anti-AV campaign, he will find it hard to command the support of his backbenchers.

What is, quite frankly, amazing is how Clegg has sold this to his foot-soldiers. It represents precisely that to which they have been objecting these many years. Those, in all parties, who wanted and argued for genuine electoral reform, have been sold down the river.

Clegg cannot step back now. He cannot argue that this is a step on the way to proper proportional representation. He has bought himself a pig-in-a-poke: he has no clue how this will alter his party’s standing, or British democracy, in any short or medium term.

Lib Dems, as a flock, are a herbivorous, not a prepossessing lot, but  as was said on a previous occasion:

Mr Tweedy; [being attacked by chickens] Mrs Tweedy! The chickens are revolting!

Mrs Tweedy: [not paying attention] Finally something we agree on.

The whole AV referendum was an attempt to make an instant omelette without breaking eggs. The eggs, unfortunately, are now well past any reasonable sell-by date.

David Cameron has had a easy time since May.

Miss Lib Dem had rolled over, once she had pocketed her reduced price.

Room-service is now knocking at his door, with the bill.

Fey teccies?

A fair part of the Redfellow Hovel attic is occupied by shelved detective novels, to which Malcolm is addicted. When he goes on his last trip to Golders Green Crem, a skip (US translation, purely for Zach’s benefit: dumpster) will be needed to cart away a lifetime spent in futility.

Once, right at the start of his blogging, Malcolm considered producing an authoritative history, only to find others had done it pretty thoroughly already. To name just the one, Maxim Jakubowski.

A new departure?

Is there, though, something new under the sun?

Malcolm ventures this thought when he noted that there was a sub-genre developing:

1. Is it fair to group disparate writers in this way?
2. Is it peculiarly British?

The evidence:

The thought came as he was finishing Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (again, for US consumption, this will be retitled Midnight Riot). Only when Malcolm was polishing this draft did he discover Orion were  pushing this one on the “sf’/fantasy” page.

Aaronovitch has been round the block a couple of times, and the coincidence of surname with the Times columnist isn’t (they are brothers). His previous stuff has been mainly tv scripts and novelisations; but he seems to have hit the mark with this one.

The premiss is a cross-over from two established types of populist fiction: the police procedural and the tale of the “other dimension” of ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night. So newly-minted Metropolitan Police Constable Peter Grant is about to be consigned to back-office duties in the Crime Progression Unit, who:

do the paperwork for the hard-pressed constable so that he or she can get back out on the street to be abused, spat at and vomited on. Thus will there be a bobby of the beat, and thus shall crime be defeated and the good Daily Mail-reading citizens of our fair nation shall live in peace.

No, this is not too-over-serious stuff.

Fate intervenes , as inevitably happens around (as here) page 29, in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale is the sole member of the Met’s ghost and ghoulie squad. Peter Grant is immediately adopted as his apprentice. Traditionalists sigh with recognition at Nightingale’s:

Jag, a genuine Mark 2 with the 3.8 litre XK6 engine.

The in-joke, presumably, being that Morse’s Jag in the tv adaptations was, in fact, a tarted 2.4 Daimler (in the books, of course, it’s a Lancia).

So begins the pursuit of the killer of William Skirmish, neatly beheaded (on CCTV, of which the West End is rife) under the portico of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. That leads into two parallel threads: the Punch and Judy show, and the warring Thames family. Read the rest for yourself: it’s worth the trip.

As an aside, anyone looking for yet another addition to the all-devouring vampire literature will find Aaronovitch allows pages 124-133 for such nonsense, all the way sarf’ uv de riva in:

Purley, famous place, Purley, know what I mean?

Cognoscenti will recognise a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?

Two No. 80 W[hite] P[hosphorous] Gren[ades], courtesy of the London Fire Brigade:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we deal with vampires in Old London Town.

An incident at Eel Pie Island  (the adjacent White Swan at Twickenham, a worthy riverside pub, gets a name-check) introduces the feuding Thames deities. On the way, Constable Grant and Inspector Nightingale pause at Richmond Bridge for a piece of PC-demolition:

‘I’m just going to have a chat with this troll,’ said Nightingale.

‘Sir,” I said, ‘I think we’re supposed to call them rough sleepers.’

‘Not this one we don’t,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s a troll.’

I saw movement in the shadow of one of the arches, a pale face, ragged hair, layers of old clothes against the winter cold. It looked like a rough sleeper to me.

‘A troll, really?’ I asked.

‘His name is Nathaniel,’ said Nightingale. ‘He used to sleep under Hungerford Bridge.’

‘Why did he move?’ I asked.

‘Apparently he wanted to live in the suburbs.’

Suburban troll, I thought, why not?

Neat in itself, incidental, and a useful plot device at this point:

I asked Nightingale whether Nathaniel the troll had been helpful.

‘He confirmed what we suspected,’ he said. That the boys in the boat had been followers of Father Thames, had come downstream to raid the shrine at Eel Pie Island and been caught by followers of Mother Thames… Downstream the Thames was the sovereign domain of Mother Thames, upstream, it belonged to Father Thames. The dividing line was at Teddington Lock, two kilometres downstream from Eel Pie Island.

That is also the limit of the tidal Thames (and, if Malcolm’s memory serves aright, the end of the Met Police Thames Division’s beat — of which Malcolm’s dear old Dad was once a member).

Aaronovitch develops this conceit: Mama Thames:

‘ … came to London in 1957 … I wasn’t a goddess then. I was just some stupid country girl with a name that I have forgotten, come to train as a nurse… I failed all my exams …

‘I was so heartbroken,’ said Mama Thames, ‘that I went to kill myself … So I went to Hungerford Bridge to throw myself into the river. But that is a railway bridge, and the old footbridge that ran along the side — very dirty in those days. All sorts of things used to live on that bridge, tramps and trolls and goblins. It was not the sort of place a decent Nigerian girl wants to throw herself off. Who knows what might be watching?

By a process of elimination she ends with (old) London Bridge. She makes the leap, and becomes one of  the:

‘Genii locorum,‘ … ‘The spirit of the place, a goddess of the river, if you like.’

Around her are her daughters (the tributary streams of the Thames):

as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church … Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and never left.

This bourgeoise, we discover, is Ty (short for Tyburn) and the one who knows people who matter. Ty lives in fashionable Fitzjohns Avenue, Hampstead:

The house was a tall gothic confection with a mock tower at each corner and sash windows painted white.

Oh dear. Malcolm has amorous twangs about just that location (well, directly across the road), circa 1967.

Aaronovitch uses this device for a bit of social satire, and he knows his London: look at the map and find Shepherd’s Path, the small lane that links Fitzjohns Avenue and Lyndhurst Terrce. This is the supposed source of the Tyburn Stream. Similarly, at the very end of the story, near Heathrow, we have mention of The River Crane … Last one [of the sisters] this side of the river:

‘She’s never in the country … She’s always flying of somewhere, sending us text messages from Bali and postcards from Rio. She went swimming in the Ganges, you know …’

When we encounter Father Thames, he is bucolic:

He was short, with a pinched face dominated by a beaky nose and a heavy brow. He looked old, in his seventies at least, but there was a sinewy vigour in the way he moved, and his eyes were grey and bright. He wore an old-fashioned, double breasted suit in dusty black, the jacket unbuttoned to show off a red velvet waistcoat, a brass fob watch and a folded pocket handkerchief the bright yellow of a spring daffodil.

There is no question this is a well-constructed story, nor that the writing is somewhere beyond competent. Nor, too, that Malcolm is a customer for the remainder of the already-promised trilogy. It is also notable that, and this is no afterthought — Malcolm has a thing about it — Gollancz/Orian have turned out a decent production: the dust cover, for example, uses Stephen Walter’s inventive graphic map of London (clip, above).

And yet …

Mixing the worlds of gods and men is hardly original. Pretty well everyone from here, via Thornton Wilder, via Milton, via Shakespeare, all the way back to Homer himself, has had a go. Then there is one precise antecedent: consider Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

This is a fantasy of the underworld of London:

… a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Now refer specifically to the introduction (dated 28 July 2005):

I don’t write sequels. Still, the world of Neverwhere is one that I hope, one day, I’ll return to. In a book called The Lost Rivers of London, I read about a brass bed, found one day in a sewer. To this day, nobody knows where it came from or how it got there.

Ummm …

One further thought …

Such crossover fiction, the hybrid of fantasy and the crime novel, has become something of a British literary meme. There’s Malcolm Pryce knocking out those excellent Louie Knight stories (number six due later this year). Jasper fforde has the sixth of his Thursday Nexts dropping pre-ordered through Malcolm’s door this weekend. fforde encapsulates the issue:

It is a time of unrest in the Bookworld. Only the diplomatic skills of ace literary detective Thursday Next can avert a devastating genre war. But a week before the Peace Talks, Thursday vanishes. Has she simply returned home to the Realworld or is this something more sinister?

But all is not yet lost. Living at the quiet end of Speculative fiction is the written Thursday Next, who is attempting to keep her own small four-book series both respectful to her illustrious namesake and far from the grim spectre of being remaindered.

On the other hand, you see:

• you know where you are with Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole,

and

• Michael Connelly, be he giving us Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller (or both at the same time).

Down these mean streets a man must go … The Los Angeles legacy bears hard on writers from those parts,

• just as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser was fixed in Boston);

and we would not for a moment wish it any different.

Similarly

• Ian Rankin contains his Rebus adequately within the genre and largely to Edinburgh: to the extent that Rankin is rapidly becoming a public face of Edinburgh.
• Colin Bateman’s Dan Starkey is not just of Belfast, but even (in part) confined to a non-fictional fictional bookshop specialising in crime fiction: Bateman, though, has surrealistic longings on him.
• Even more so, Christopher Brookmyre’s Jack Parlabane has broken out of the envelope into political thriller, even into political satire and political rant (there’s a further instalment due this summer): by the way, Malcolm reckons Brookmyre’s opening of Quite Ugly One Morning is truly, repulsively, very, very funny.

So, if there is a British genre-blurring, it reverses the American’s criticism of British science fiction: “Here we are, trying to get off the planet, and you can’t even get off the island!”

The downside of that is the way the more “fey” British crime-writers become, the more they seem to be “comfortable” (the Pert Young Piece of Redfellow Hovel opines that it can all be blamed onLewis Carroll and that damned rabbit-hole).

But … about the worst insult anyone can throw at this genre is the term “cosy”.