“I’m an estate agent. Trust me!”

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life coughed and spluttered her way to and from a City appointment. She brought back the Evening Boris Standard.

Page 2 has a post-Huhne pop-survey (dignified by Ipsos-MORI) on page 2. This tells us:

• 41% of interviewees “generally trust” (and 57% distrust) business leaders to tell the truth;
• which is more than 24% who trust (and 70% who distrust) estate agents;
• and more than the 23% who trust (and 70% who distrust) MPs in general.

Since the bottom of the reliability pile involves “Politicians generally” (18% trusted, 77% distrusted) it would need a keen logician to untangle in what ways the general public differentiate them from their sub-set “MPs in general”.

Remember and despair: one in four of our fellow citizens trusts the snake-oiled property shark.

At a single bound …

… we leap to page 59 for the letters, and the main focus is the “Mansion Tax”. As we might expect from the Evening Boris Standard, this is the usual balanced viewpoints:

• a no-no from “Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates”;
• a no-no-no from “M Truman, Taxation Magazine”; and
• a severe snipe from “Andrew Pearmain, author, The Politics of New Labour“.

We shall not, on this occasion, pause to marvel that a magazine (a glossy?) survives on the topic of licensed mulcting alone, nor a self-proclaimed “author” who needs his magnum opus soldered to his moniker. Well, perhaps for just a moment of mockery.

Let us instead hang on the words of Mr Abrahmsohn. Here is one with considerable North London street-cred (though it’s more “avenues” and “gardens” in Abrahmsohn’s refined world):

Meet the man who holds the keys to Billionaires’ Row

He has sold the world’s most expensive house and rubbed shoulders with the political elite – but life was not always so glamorous for the keeper of keys to Billionaires’ Row.

His office on the edge of Hampstead Garden Suburb, adorned with letters from prime ministers and press cuttings from national newspapers, is a far cry from the shabby hotel room in Golders Green where Trevor Abrahmsohn forged his reputation as estate agent to the globe’s glitterati.

Armed with nothing but a temperamental phone line and a photocopier, the 58-year-old went on to enjoy 35 years selling “trophy mansions” on The Bishops Avenue to Saudi princes, Chinese businessman and Russian oligarchs.

That’s a recent puff-piece from the Ham & High.

And, finally, we have Mr Abrahmsohn’s missive to the Evening Boris Standard:

Mansion tax will never happen

Labour’s announcement of a mansion tax and reinstatement of the 10p tax band yesterday is headline-grabbing before the Eastleigh by-election. What are we to make of the two Eds’ integrity, given they were thew joint architects of Labour policy at the time Gordon Brown abolished the 10p band?

If Miliband had any sense, there is no way he will actually implement a mansion tax that would alienate an important element of middle-class Labour support. In the London property market, the likely £2 million threshold is hardly a fortune: perhaps buying a two-bedroom flat in a leafy, but not super-prime, inner London area, and there are plenty of properties in this bracket that were bought for relatively little years ago.

A mansion tax would have a profound effect on the dynamics of the market: a lot of people would sell up and court cases would be certain as others try to revalue their property. Foreign investors have already been hit by the Coalition’s clumsy levy of 15 per cent stamp duty in the last Budget, and a mansion tax would only magnify their problems; why are we trying so hard to repel them? A far more plausible, consumer-friendly approach is to bring in a range of higher council tax bands above Band G.

Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates.

Kettling the pot

Spot the mutually-conflicting assumptions and statements there. Malcolm will tick just three.

For what it’s worth, the average price of a two-bed flat in NW11 (Mr Abrahmsohn’s home patch of Golders Green) is around £400,000. Only in five tight super-prime, inner London areas — W1 (Piccadilly), W8 (Kensington), SW3 (Chelsea), SW7 (South Ken)  and the Brompton Road (SW10) — would one readily hit on a £1 million plus two-bed pad. Those are not areas of solid middle-class Labour support.

Moreover, doesn’t any decent heart bleed for the misfortunes of those foreign investors who plump Mr Abrahmsohn’s portfolio? Malcolm regularly passes down the eternal building-site that is The Bishop’s Avenue (a.k.a. “Billionaires’ Row”). Its very existence involves tearing down perfectly-good (and hardly-offensive) granges, and erecting, in their place, over-sized but tawdry glass sheds — which, in turn, are gone in half-a-decade or so for something even more glitzy and ghastly.

There is a sound — nay, urgent — argument to be made for reforming the Council Tax. It was designed by Michael Heseltine as a regressive tax. It has become far more oppressive with subsequent postponements of revaluation — most recently, and seemingly twice, with malice aforethought, by Eric Pickles. What Abrahmsohn also elides is the distinction between national and local taxation: Council Tax is just that, local.

Bottom line

We should be looking at how we tax property. Since it is even more static than parked cars (which we tax and fine), it’s not rocket science to evaluate its worth and slap a duty on it. The over-inflated property market in London and the more-bourgeois areas of the South-East is ripe for plucking. Only the most self-interested Tory fails to recognise that. Doing so (and improving transport links) could and should encourage “trickle-down”, first to those crumbling areas adjacent to London, then further afield.

Once we’ve agreed the need, it’s only method that matters. Miliband and Balls have taken aboard the ‘mansion tax’, with due acknowledgements to the likes of Vince Cable. Why not go a step further, and snuffle around site-value/land-value taxation? Which was amply dealt with recently by George Monbiot in The Guardian and taken further by Alex Hern in the New Statesman.

If nothing else, it’s guaranteed to raise the Abrahmsohn blood-pressure.

It’s not just railways

Once is happenstance.
Twice is circumstance.
Three times is enemy action.

Thank you, Auric. Now you deserve a lie-down. You cheated, too, but mainly at cards.

This ConDem lot do it on a national scale

Whatever the West Coast Main Line mess is all about (and the story of low-level civil-servants cocking-up the sums looks more ragged by the hour ✱), it is intensely political.

As they say, it doesn’t add up:

• The heavy-lifting was done with Theresa Villiers as Minister of State and Philip Hammond as Secretary of State. He was plucked forth, the emergency replacement for Liam Fox (fallen on sword) at Defence. She was lately whipped away and sent to Northern Ireland.
• Justine Greening was slotted into Hammond’s warm seat in October 2011, and promptly  shunted out again to Overseas Development at the start of this September.
• By all accounts the most Greening was told (and that late on) involved “minor irregularities”. The main lead in today’s Times [£] has this:

Three Department for Transport (DfT) officials were suspended after it emerged that they had failed to assess the impact of inflation and rising passenger numbers on expected returns when deciding to award the £9billion contract to FirstGroup. The fallout immediately engulfed other lines, including long-distance trains to the West Country and key commuter routes into London as Mr McLoughlin announced a pause in bids to run three franchises due to begin next year.

The Times understands that Mr McLoughlin’s predecessor, Justine Greening, learnt of a potential flaw in the West Coast bid a week before the Cabinet reshuffle on September 4.

Ms Greening called in auditors from PwC to vet figures compiled by DfT officials. Mr McLoughlin was informed on Monday evening that the official figures did not add up.

We also have a side-box accompanying that Times piece:

No 10 said that government ministers should not be expected to take the blame for the “highly technical” errors in the West Coast bidding process. Justine Greening, the former Transport Secretary, and Theresa Villiers, the minister in charge of railways who oversaw the decision, are safe in their new roles because they were assured by officials that the process was robust.

Err … right.

• So when Hammond was Secretary of State, he never laid eye or finger on the £9billion franchise? He must have been remarkably busy to have to pass a matter of such importance all down to the wee girl. Luckily, then, he doesn’t have to take responsibility.
• Yet when Greening got the hot-seat, suddenly it all went to the top?
• In all that time, nobody capable of reading a prospectus was around to suggest that FirstGroup were — how shall we say … — massaging the figures? Yet, when the franchise result was announced, every commentator was leery, and pounced on just that.

The Guardian, editorialising on the same story, is a whit clearer in alleging motives:

When the franchise was awarded to FirstGroup, industry critics tended to dismiss cries of foul from the existing franchisee, Virgin Trains, since Richard Branson advisers had reportedly, in an unguarded moment, described it as a licence to print money. But the claim that First’s revenue projections were based on a “preposterous” increase in journeys was more sympathetically heard. They were not due to happen for 10 years, and there were allegations that the company would game the system – an accusation it has faced in connection with its Great Western contract.

Now, isn’t that a golden — nay, Auric — phrase to treasure: game the system? The Guardian suggests that the gamesmanship and Goldfingering was happening elsewhere, even in the DfT:

… darker rumours of institutional antipathy for Virgin Trains have circulated the rail industry for years. Those gained further credence with Wednesday’s announcement. It stems from a renegotiation of the west coast franchise in 2006 – the consequence of a bungled upgrade of the route – that left the DfT feeling that it had been outwitted and outmanoeuvred, to the benefit of Branson and to the detriment of subsidy-paying taxpayers. Over the past 10 years, the Virgin rail operation has paid out £381.7m in dividends, split between Virgin Group, a 51% shareholder, and Stagecoach, which owns the remaining 49%. One industry source said the about-turn would reignite fears, voiced privately by Virgin, that it was always doomed to lose west coast.

Anyone smell rats?

Let’s stick with The Times, its main editorial, a moment longer:

Not one but two reviews are now under way to find out what went wrong and whether the bid process is fit for purpose. But certain aspects of the narrative are already clear. Over 15 months, the Department for Transport allowed basic errors in inflation and passenger growth projections to distort the auction for the West Coast franchise. It failed to factor inflation into the real value of the bidders’ revenue forecasts and to take proper account of the fact that most of First Group’s anticipated passenger growth was to take place towards the end of the 15-year franchise — too far into the future for any sober actuary.

First Group was awarded the franchise because it bid £700 million more than Virgin, even though its high debt burden raised serious concerns among analysts as well as rivals about whether the company could afford it. Virgin’s relatively conservative bid failed despite its strong record in customer service and investment. When Sir Richard Branson demanded a judicial review the Government at first expressed confidence in its decision. When the time came for Mr McLaughlin to state his case in court, he executed the most dramatic U-turn of this Parliament instead.

Sobriety needed

Hold on: Malcolm is confused. Greening summoned auditors from PwC to vet figures compiled by DfT officials only in late August, after First Group had been given the goodies. Yet a 15-year franchise extends too far into the future for any sober actuary. Then, only when it all went legal, the lawyers told McLoughlin to pull the plug? Does that make sense, at all?

Before we pass on:

• Hammond was an international business consultant, and adviser to the World Bank;
• Villiers was a barrister and university law lecturer;
• Greening was a high-flying accountant and manager with, among others, the afore-mentioned PwC.

Now for the local news

It might sound familiar, and have echoes of the above.

This one is from the Ham & High, by-lined to Tara Brady, but not on the website (yet):

Doctors in Camden have been snubbed by an NHS trust after it awarded a contract to cover emergency out-of-hours to a private company.

Campaigners from Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) are angry the new contract was handed over to a company called Harmoni. Haverstock Healthcare Ltd, a consortium of local GPs who already run urgent care at the Royal free Hospital, Hampstead and University College London Hospital (UCLH), Bloomsbury, was not even short-listed.

• The local authorities were not consulted.
• There was no public consultation.
• An anonymous outside operation is preferred over local knowledge.

Makes perverse sense in this political climate.

It’s all too secret for the plebs to be involved:

An NHS North Central London spokesman said the scoring process used during the bidding process was confidential and so cold not explain what a private company was chosen over local GPs.

He said: “Haverstock was invited to participate in the procurement process following their expression of interest, and made a submission.

“Unfortunately, they were unsuccessful in being short-listed to allow them to take part inn the final selection stage.”

Doubtless all those “processes” were “robust”.

____________________________________________

✱ And already has!

The BBC reports (4 October 2012 Last updated at 19:36):

Former Transport Secretary Justine Greening did not know about the problem which led to the collapse of the West Coast Main Line franchise award, the Department for Transport has said.

The award of the franchise to FirstGroup was scrapped on Wednesday because of bidding process “flaws”.

The Times has reported that she learned of a potential flaw a week before the Cabinet reshuffle on 4 September.

The DfT says this was not the error that caused the process to collapse.

Three civil servants – who face possible further disciplinary action pending an investigation – have been suspended after the government admitted major failings over the contract to run the rail line.

BBC transport correspondent Richard Westcott said the department told him Ms Greening had been made aware of an area of “potential concern” but that she had been told it would “not affect the outcome”.

She asked officials to check it further and it turned out to be a “minor error”. The department insists it is not related to the main flaw that they found later on and which brought the whole process down.

Two days gone; and this

make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower

still haven’t manufactured a straight story.

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 28: Naomi Royde-Smith

Good grief, Malcolm! It looks as if we haven’t seen one of these in an age! Are you sure of the count?

Thought not! So it’s E&OE.

It’s also something of an apology. And those are certainly in vogue this week.

In Malcolm’s case it happened because he indulged in a bit of fact-checking. He had fixed in his mind the attribution of:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

He knew, for sure, that was a Hilaire Belloc gem. No question. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s, as he noted previously, Naomi Gwladys Royde-Smith, circa 1928,

Who she?

Well, she was more than a small literary celeb in her day — and her day stretched from being born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1875, until her kidneys gave up, and she was planted in Hampstead cemetery as late as mid-1964.

She was the eldest of six daughters of Michael Holroyd Smith (so the later double-barrelled surname is an affectation) and Anne Williams of Penybont. He was the electrical engineer who in 1889-90 fettled up the City and South London Railway, the first deep bored “tube” in the world, which we now know — if not love — as the Bank branch of London Underground’s Northern Line. She was the God-fearing, Bible-reading daughter of a Welsh divine.

After schooling at Clapham high school and a Swiss finishing school, Miss Royde-Smith was living in Chelsea, and writing for the Saturday Westminster Gazette. A small-circulation “clubland” publication, the Gazette  was, to some, “the most powerful paper in Britain“. It had the patronage of Lord Roseberry at a time when Liberalism was riding high.

Almost a national treasure

From being a contributor, Royde-Smith was soon editing (with her sister, Leslie) the ‘Problems and prizes page’ and from there, and writing reviews, in 1912 she became literary editor — the first woman in Britain to attain such a position. And it was no small distinction: she promoted the work of a galaxy of rising literary stars — Rupert Brooke, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene.

At this time she was the inamorata (or bit-on-the-side) of Walter de la Mare who wrote her hundreds of love-letters. Reviewing Theresa Whistler’s biography of de la Mare, Jeremy Treglown was somewhat caustic about the reality of this involvement:

Another supporter was the beautiful Naomi Royde-Smith, literary editor of the Saturday Westminster Gazette – the only woman who held such a position at the time. They fell in love. De la Mare wouldn’t leave his family and wasn’t much interested in sex, although he was exasperatingly jealous of Royde-Smith’s other friendships. She continued to read, heavily edit and publish his stuff, and in other ways helped along the possessive and increasingly hypochondriacal author. It is clear, although Whistler is tactful about this, that there was a good deal of tough, instinctive calculation behind de la Mare’s Skimpole-like infantilism. Devoted to his own children (he was a pioneer of male nappy-changing), he was sulky and obstructive when his daughters came to marry. A generous man when he could afford to be, the balance sheet always remained in his favour.

‘Beautiful’ Royde-Smithmay have been but, as implied there, she seems to have swung both ways. She had a ‘close relationship’ with Rose Macaulay; and together they ran a coterie of literary lions ( Arnold Bennett, Yeats, the Sitwells, the Huxleys) at Royde-Smith’s Kensington flat. Virginia Woolf came visiting and recorded Royde-Smith:

… dressed à la 1860; swinging earrings, skirt in balloons … sat in complete command. Here she had her world round her. It was a queer mixture of the intelligent & the respectable.

Read into that what you wish.

When Rose Macaulay put Royde-Smith into her 1926 novel, Crewe Train, it was as ‘Aunt Evelyn’. The central character, Denham Dobie, is brought to London by her maternal Aunt Evelyn and seeks to come to terms with this alien literary sophistication. Macaulay, though, makes Evelyn Gresham both incisive and smart (in every sense) but also interfering, waspish and a gross gossip.

A man and a quieter life

The Liberal hour passed and gone, the Westminster Gazette expired on its 35th birthday, 31st January 1928. Royde-Smith needed new worlds to conquer.

One was the accession of a man into her life. At Lynton, in Devon, ten days before Christmas 1926, she married Ernest Gianello Milton, a mixed (in all kinds of ways) Italian-American actor, a regular with Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic company. Milton’s finest few minutes were to be as Robespierre in Alexander Korda’s 1934 The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Quite what the marriage involved is open to prurient speculation. The bride was aged 51, and a full fifteen years older than her new husband (though she continued to massage the age difference). When Theresa Whistler, writing that study of de la Mare, described the liaison, it was:

a triumph over unlikeliness by the strong-minded, romantic woman she was, and the histrionic, highly-strung, generous-minded actor. He placed her, for life, on a pedestal of admiration, though not by temperament drawn to her sex.

Ahem! Again, read between the lines.

Later years

Naomi Milton (as she now was) forwent the social life, and effectively “retired” — at one time the Mitons were living in a house which had once been Nell Gwyn’s: 34 Colebrook Street, Winchester (as above). She did a bit of art-criticism for Queen magazine, but her main occupation became the authoring of a string of some forty largely-forgotten novels, a couple of biographies, and four plays. Only one of the novels, The Tortoiseshell Cat, “a Good First Novel“, seems to have stayed in print (and that intermittently).

Her niece, Jane Tilley, described Naomi Milton in her later years  — first at Winchester, then a permanent resident of the Abbey Court Hotel in Hampstead’s Netherhall Gardens, as:

hugely amusing, chain-smoked, was large and uncorseted, and wore large patterns

The final novel, Love and a Birdcage, was published in September 1960, when she was in her eighty-fifth year, possessed of very poor eye-sight. Ernest Milton survived her by a decade.

… our outward consciences, And preachers to us all

The Pert Young Piece relates that her professor explained the great reformation schism approximately thus:

Were I a Catholic, and you failed to deliver your essays on time, that would be my fault and the guilt would be on my head, in that I had not properly gained, pastored, and led you, my flock.

Were I a Protestant, I wouldn’t give a shit, because it’s all down to you and your individual consciences.

Which brings us to Malcolm in Row C of the Hampstead Theatre, for Propeller‘s final performance of Henry V.

Any good production should reveal new presentation, new aspects of even the most explored play-text — and this is, without question a great production.

One of the revelations came in the well-worn Act IV, scene i, the night before Agincourt. Before the sound-and-fury of the rest of the Act, Henry, in disguise, engages in an intimate exchange with John Bates, and then — called back to leadership by Erpingham — has his one great soliloquy, ending in a prayer.

This is most often treated as Shakespeare’s afterthought on Henry IV’s musing on the burdens that go with power:

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep!…
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Before Agincourt, though, that is taken a profound stage further:

Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, 
Our debts, our careful wives, 
Our children and our sins lay on the king! 
We must bear all. O hard condition, 
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath 2080
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel 
But his own wringing!

Therein is the professorial Catholicism which began this post. But Henry has already argued with Bates against that:

So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness by your rule, should be 
imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master’s command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in 
many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant’s damnation: but this is not so: the king is not 
bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services.

A late-Elizabethan Church of England, if not downright Protestant Henry, surely.

Malcolm first encountered Henry V in his teens, in the 1950s. The treatment then, either because of the target student age-group, or because of the climate of the day, was by and of Laurence Olivier and the highly-accessible 1944 film.

That version became so ingrained in English popular culture, that Brannagh’s 1989 interpretation was somehow “revisionist” (whereas, in all truth, much was derivative, just done on a small budget).

Consequently, and as a mark of Malcolm’s intellectual limits, it took some time for him, in his teaching, to reflect that the King in Henry V is a far more complex individual than the Olivier version.

Anyone coming anew to the continuing controversy over how to interpret the eponymous Henry V can find the current state-of-play in Shakespearean Criticism, or a very concise summary here. There’s a pertinent reference to Edward Hall’s 2000 Stratford production; and since Hall is artistic director of Propeller, this interview is worth a look. Hall is obviously couching his notions in terms of Iraq and Afghanistan:

Henry himself is cast as a man full of doubt, full of fear, full of conflict, who doesn’t know how to relate to God, but who is supposedly carrying out God’s will. He’s a confused jihadist if you like, who doesn’t quite know how to execute his responsibility whilst keeping a moral centre. I wonder how our contemporary leaders take the responsibility of blood on their hands?

Why not both?

Malcolm isn’t smitten by any Manichean critic’s need to make Henry either the brute extrovert with a power complex or the tormented introvert with homoerotic urges. He has always maintained that Shakespeare, with a big of textual excavation, can provide sufficient nutriment for any flower to burgeon.

What he did wonder about yesterday at Hampstead: does it help further to explicate the oddities of Shakespeare’s faith?

To give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing post, Malcolm will now revisit his profound rumination from October 2007.

Downhill, all the way

Because this is a leap year, yesterday (20th June) was the longest day — unless, of course, you are one of Malcolm’s readers south of the Equator.

That comes to mind because Malcolm’s desk is on the north-facing side of Redfellow Hovel. So, for a few weeks in the middle of the year, he has late-evening sun shining over his left shoulder. Despite the repeated rain showers, this evening had a few brief glimmers.

Today was technically the first day of this English “summer”. This evening would, therefore, have marked the annual ritual performed by Malcolm’s Dear Old Dad.

A puffing of the pipe. A shrewd look out of the window. A significant nod. A further puff. Finally:

“The nights are pulling in, you see.”

[The image above is John Constable's Hampstead Heath, looking towards Harrow at sunset.]

A Fawksian sense of proportion

Today’s BIG story was News International biting the bullet.

And it is BIG, BIG.

Yesterday Hugh Grant for the New Statesman, transcribed a bugged interview with one of the News of the World hacks, Paul McMullan, which lobbed a smoking gun firmly into the upstairs flat of Number 10:

So basically, Cameron is very much in debt to Rebekah Wade for helping him not quite win the election … It’s just inconceivable that Cameron didn’t know he used to go horse riding with a criminal (given that now that [tapping mobile 'phones]‘s a crime). So that was my submission to parliament — that Cameron’s either a liar or an idiot.

Grant is no mere thesp: he was “a clever boy among clever boys” at Latymer Upper School, won the Galsworthy scholarship to New College, Oxford, and took a 2:1 in Eng Lit. Knock not his intellect.

Today News International has issued its mea culpa to something which Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates assured a parliamentary committee needed no further investigation and about which all parties compromised/bugged had been told. Ahem! Indeed, at one point Yates was implying that no offence could have been committed because the law didn’t cover this kind of bugging. Let us hope, for his sake, that (assuredly about to become, and quite rapidly, ex-Deputy Commissioner) John Yates has his pension plan firmly sorted.

So, we have a major political scandal which certainly reaches into parliament, and has tendrils in the innermost broom-cupboards of government

What did Paul Staines’s smear factory of plots, rumours and conspiracy make of all this?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

For Guido Fawkes the main events this Friday were the supplier of muffins and pastries to the parliamentary coffee shops who went bust overnight, and Cameron was photographed in an airport.

Priorities …

Liz locally

The Ham & High (Malcolm’s local rag) struggled personfully to get the death of Elizabeth Taylor onto its front page. It did so in close conjunction with the Jack Rosenthal/Maureen Lipman menage, and under a strap for the Tricycle Theatre.

But, darling, we’re all luvvies round here!

The Hampstead connection for Elizabeth Taylor is her childhood (pre-WW2) home at 8 Wildwood Road, as Golders Green rubs up against the back of the Hampstead Heath extension (and that’s really where, in the bushes, something stirs).

The Ham & High sadly missed a better local link, as Malcolm’s letter to the editor points out.

For many years a bar-stool in the Wells Tavern, NW3 (when it was still a self-respecting decent boozer), carried the indiscreet plaque Elizabeth Taylor sat here.

Malcolm’s (now also deceased) mother-in-law was never so happily perched.

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”.

Not a nice day

It wasn’t the weather, which has been wet and pre-autumnal in dreary London.

Everything went swimmingly well until mid-afternoon.

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the Old Boy himself had the need to collect documents in High Holborn. This, by common and unspoken consent, was the excuse for a liquid lunch.

OK, they got it wrong: the bus turned left out of Gray’s Inn Road into Holborn, when they needed to go right to High Holborn. Eventually, though, the correct location was found, the envelope collected and — by one of those nice happenstances — there was the Cittie of Yorke conveniently ccross the road.

Normally, this post would now become an paeon of praise to one of London’s better watering-holes. Unexceptional, if unexciting pub meals; more than adequate jakes; and Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter (it’s a tied house) at a sensational £1.99 a pint.

What’s to gripe about?

So, all went swimmingly until mid afternoon. The Lady headed home, and Malcolm made an excuse to go the other way.

A couple of unnecessary side-trips and he was at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, waiting for a 134 bus. A 24 came along: that would take him half-way, and it was raining. Good enough: he could change at Camden Town.

Suddenly Malcolm was dealing with a soul in need. A heavily-pregnant girl, on all appearances a Roma, was waving a paper into Malcolm’s face. She seemed to want the directions for St Thomas’s Hospital (which is in precisely the other direction). Any reader who already knows what comes next will share Malcolm’s moment of malevolence, to which we shall shortly come.

Sure enough, Malcolm’s wallet had been cleanly picked out of his inside breast pocket by the girl’s accomplice.

For once Malcolm had his mobile phone with him. Within minutes he had called home and told the Lady to stop all debit and credit cards. She went further and put a stop on a couple of those loyalty cards as well. The good news is the last £10 note in that wallet had recently, and to mutual benefit, found its due place in the till of the Cittie of Yorke. So no great damage done, except to Malcolm’s self-esteem and personal convenience.

Now it is only a matter of time awaiting the replacement of those cards, the travel pass, and anything else. There’ll be need to replace the British Library pass, but that comes free with a crime reference number, and doubtless other bureaucracies to be contacted.

Our Malcolm, that most liberal of souls, fully admits it (and here we have that moment of malevolence): he is suffering angry mental flashes involving a Roma girl, a rope and a lamp-post. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, he fully knows. For once, though, he briefly finds himself in solidarity with your average benighted Daily Mail reader and President Sarkozy.

Perhaps his mood this Thursday night would not be so grim had it not been for the “care-in-the-community” episode on Tuesday. Then, a patient from the nearby hostel accosted Malcolm in the entrance to the local supermarket, came face-to-face, and spluttered a mouthful of some sticky liquid directly into Malcolm’s face.

Do, as Malcolm’s Norfolk-born granny superstitiously asserted, these things always come in threes?

Hossing around

We haven’t had a pub-crawl here at Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service for a while. So here goes.

A few days back Malcolm had little reason to be in Hampstead’s South End Green, but was there all the same.

Since he was really just connecting with the Lady in his Life, he intended idly waiting, browsing the daily prints, and sipping in a pub.

Now, there is a choice (and quite a good one) around here.

There’s the Garden Gate (née The Railway), conveniently located between the railway and the bus stations. A big sprawling mock-Tudoresque monster, it used to have the charisma of a barn. It has improved, has a wonderful garden for those occasional summer Sundays, serves acceptable food, and has a Cask Marque for real ales. Somehow, though, except for the Adnam’s Broadside, to Malcolm it doesn’t quite call. It must be the plethora of Weissbier and Peroni types who frequent it.

Up the hill of Pond Street is the Roebuck, not a bad joint now that Youngs have rescued it from being just another Bass-Charrington house. It is heavily geared to the food market (and surprisingly pricey too, even for NW3), and therefore tends to the chintzy end. Expect any peace and quiet to be interrupted by clinking cutlery and medical bleeps (it’s in range of the Royal Free across the road, and caters to the medics).

A few yards further, in the opposite direction, past Hampstead Heath station, turn right, and it’s the Magdala, which is probably the pick of the lot. It’s just off the beaten track, and tends out-of-season to be quieter and more of a “local”. The days have long gone since coach-parties came visiting, to see the bullet holes where Ruth Ellis (the last woman hanged in Britain) did for her errant lover, David Blakely.

But Malcolm chose to be in the most conspicuous, what he still remembers as G.E. Aldwinkle’s, and is now the White Horse, on the apex of Fleet Road. Among the armada (to maintain the “fleet” metaphor) of Victorian gin-palaces that are scattered across North London, this rates as little more than a light cruiser. Sadly, long ago, it lost its cut glass and dark wood (but kept a magnificent ceiling). Today it is a pale shadow of its former self, in a pale battleship grey, carpeted and tarted up. It retains, though, the proper island bar. The bogs in the basement, and the staircase down, are slick and tiled in recent, if not the latest, “taste”. That omnipresent menace, the internal designer has been this way.

Yet, it is a worthwhile experience. Expect the trendy dad bringing in the school-kid on the way home from school, the kaffeeklatsch of morning mothers (or, more likely, since this is just into NW3, their au-pairs), Boadiceas with baby-buggies. Later, allegedly, it gets more populated and livelier.

But we are here for the beer, and on the pumps is a choice: Deuchars IPA (it’s an S&N pubco lease), Doom Bar and  … yowee! … Old Hooky. OK, not quite up to the scratch of the Pear Tree, Hook Norton’s brewery tap, but fair enough. And the Lady was laggard enough for two slow pints.

If this were Michelin’s beer guide, the Hoss would be a two-star “worth the trip”.