 The Office of the Dead
 17 Jan 00
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The Judgement of Strangers
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The Four Last Things
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First British Edition HarperCollins (2000) |
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I started to think about the Roth Trilogy more than six years ago. The process began with a phrase: the Four Last Things: I wanted to use it as a title before I even knew what it meant. Then I discovered that in theology the Four Last Things are Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. I'd stumbled on the perfect foundation for a crime novel.
Another starting point was the idea that crimes don't just happen: they have a secret history; they are usually the consequences of a series of events that stretch far into the past, perhaps over generations. The West case was a particular influence: the murders took place near where I live; people we knew had had their lives touched by Fred West and his victims. ("Such a nice man. He'd do anything for you.")
Crimes involving children and young people as their victims are more terrible than most. I wanted to try to make sense of a series of these by digging out their causes. To do this, I knew I would need to write several novels. From the start I had in my mind the image of an archaeological dig: each novel strips away another layer of the truth.
In the trilogy, I wanted to look at this secret history from different angles and at different times. Laurence Durrell's Alexandra Quartet and Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy show characters and events from a variety of perspectives. I wondered if it would be possible to use a similar technique in crime fiction.
I think the structure of the trilogy is technically unique, certainly in crime fiction. It goes backwards in time. In this it mirrors real-life criminal investigations, which move from effects to causes.
Each book had to be self-contained and also work as part of the whole. This is not just a matter of having an integrated storyline involving recurring characters and themes. For the idea to work, each book had to modify the other two. I hope this will eventually make the trilogy as a whole something more than the sum of its parts.
Each of the novels uses the conventions of a different type of crime fiction - the first is a psychological thriller, the second toys with the format of the traditional whodunit, the third concentrates on a woman in peril (the "Had I but known..." sub-genre), though the perils are not of the conventional kind.
| First British Edition HarperCollins (1997) |
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The first novel, The Four Last Things, is set in the present, mainly in a seedy area of north-west London where I used to live. It's a Gothic whydunnit, rather than a whodunit, which concerns the kidnapping of four-year-old Lucy Appleyard. The story is told from two viewpoints - that of the child's mother, who's training to be an Anglican priest; and that of Eddie, the male sidekick of a beautiful child minder called Angel. Our culture tends to assume that physical beauty has a moral equivalence. Angel, on the other hand, is one of those nannies from hell. She has reasons of her own why she likes to steal children, why she likes to do certain things with them, and why Lucy, of all the children in the world, is special.
| First British Edition HarperCollins (1998) |
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The Americans have a word for the traditional whodunit: they call it a "cosy", which has been defined as "a crime novel with a cat in it". I felt this was a challenge. The book uses many of the conventions of the cosy, including the cat. It's set in the "village" of Roth. The main characters are the family at the vicarage and the people at the big house. There's a Tudor teashop, a church fete with a fortune teller, and lots of clues. There's also a churchwarden who fancies herself as an amateur sleuth in the Grand Tradition of Mayhem Parva.
But Miss Oliphant isn't really Miss Marple - and Roth isn't a village any longer. Since the turn of the century, Roth has become a dormitory suburb for London, crammed with Cortinas and pebble-dashed houses. In the 1930s half of the parish was turned into a reservoir, drowned beneath 7 billion gallons of water.
The cat is called Lord Peter and its headless corpse is eventually found hanging in the church porch. So I suppose it forms part of new sub-sub-genre: the Cosy Noir.
The third book, The Office of the Dead, is set mainly in 1958. Most of the action takes place in the outwardly sedate environs of a cathedral close. It's the first novel I've written entirely from a woman's viewpoint, and in the first person.
My narrator's name is Wendy. She's an atheist with a taste for gins and tonic. She's on the run from a broken marriage and a ruined life, and she comes to stay with her old friend Janet. Rather annoyingly, Janet has the perfect marriage, to a dashing clergyman, and the perfect child, a beautiful little girl called Rosie. The novel starts with Rosie, the little girl, saying that her name is Nobody. And when Wendy asks why, Rosie explains that her name is Nobody, because Nobody's perfect. Which turned out, rather to my surprise, to be the theme of the book, and perhaps the trilogy as a whole.
This book (like the earlier ones) has been full of other surprises for me. For example, when I was planning it, I reread The Judgement of Strangers. In that book I had invented a slim volume of Victorian verse by a minor poet. It was called the Tongues of Angels. The title was mentioned four times in the text. To my horror I found that on two occasions it was referred to as The Voice of Angels, not The Toungues. I hadn't noticed the mistake - nor my wife - nor the editors - nor the proof readers - nor the reviewers. In fact this gave me a major subplot for The Office of the Dead: the Victorian poet became much more important than I had planned. There are now two slim volumes - one Tongues, the other Voices. Almost identical in contents, but not quite.
For me at least, the Roth Trilogy has been worth the long haul of writing it. It has shown me that crime novels can at least try to deal with serious themes and use innovative literary techniques.
