Kings and Queens of Crime

Essays on major Crime Writers

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) by Reginald Hill

If it is objected that his lordship has little or no claim to feature in a series with the title Kings and Queens of Crime, then my defence must be that I'd love one day to write the kind of crime novel Byron might have written had he ever set out to write a crime novel.

That he could have done so, I do not doubt, for it is impossible to study him without being overwhelmed by the range and variety of his creative talents. He is a great writer twice over; he is a great Romantic and a great Augustan. In his first significant production, the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, (provoked by a mocking notice of his volume of juvenilia Hours of Idleness in The Edinburgh Review), he vigorously attacks the new school of romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, etc., while defending with equal vigour the work and neo-classical outlook of Dryden and Pope and their followers. His satire, composed naturally in the heroic couplet of his great exemplars,never achieves their polished perfection, but to the end of his life he stands alongside them in his exposure of cant, hypocrisy, and second rate writing.

Yet at the same time he creates almost single-handed the quintessential Romantic hero who is about as far away from eighteenth century ideals of rationality, balance and decorum as you can get without falling off the edge of the world. Nearly every example of that commonplace of modern crime novels and movies, the outsider, the good baddie, the loose cannon, the rough diamond with a heart of gold, can be traced back to the Byron prototype. Childe Harold who basked him in the noontide sun, Disporting there like any other fly; the Giaour whose sallow front Is scathed by fiery passion's brunt; Conrad the Corsair whose dark eyebrow shades a glance of fire; Lara who is Conrad redux; Alp, the Adrian renegade; incestuous Hugo, Mazeppa the original bareback rider; Mr Christian of the Bounty; all our craggy, rough, violent; young, beautiful secretly suffering; brave, chivalric heroes begin somewhere in this lot.

(Incidentally, it occurs to me that as Sir Walter Scott, who should certainly figure in any royal lineage of crime fiction, started to write novels mainly because Byron's verse tales knocked him off the top of the poetic pops list, here is another justification for his lordship's appearance here!)

But what really delights me about Byron is that as well as being the supreme romantic, he is also the supreme realist. He sees everything twice, switching effortlessly from the man-of-the-world's sharp focus to the poet's soft filter. For instance, his departure in 1809 on the eastern tour which was to provide material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is recorded at least three times. One version is Harold's Good Night, in which ten stanzas beginning Adieu, adieu, my native shore Fades o'e the waters blue gives a bitterly introspective view of the event. Another is an eleven stanza poem in which the poet blames unrequited love for his sad exile. And the third addressed to his chum Francis Hodgson is a splendid rollicking account of what it was really like to set out in a small sailing ship. The following lines give the flavour. (Hobhouse, another chum and also an aspirant poet, was his travelling companion.)

Hobhouse muttering fearful curses,
As the hatchway down he rolls.
Now his breakfast, now his verses,
Vomits forth - and damns our souls.
               'Here's a stanza
               On Braganza -
Help!' - 'A couplet' - 'No, a cup
              Of warm water -'
             'What's the matter?'
'Zounds! My liver's coming up!'

In his poetic masterpiece, Don Juan, (sixteen and a bit cantos, unfinished when he died, and a handful of gems on every page), Byron finds the form and the language to unite the two sides of his artistic personality. It is by turns and often simultaneously comic, farcical, tragical, lyrical, reflective, peopled with fascinating characters and powered with a tremendous narrative drive. And if you're thinking that a facility with narrative poetry is not necessarily an index of capacity to write a decent novel, I refer you to his other masterpiece, which consists of his correspondence and journals. His wit, his powers of observation, his fluency of style, put him among the top half dozen letter writers of the language. If he had never written a line of poetry, he would still be worth reading for his prose alone.

His creative output was vast despite the fact that he led a very active life and died, nobly, at 36. Makes you think, doesn't it? His work celebrates those virtues often neglected in some fields of modern literature but not, thankfully, in ours, of honour, courage and tolerance. He sends up with a wry humour the minor vices of pomposity, self-importance and self deceit, and attacks with fluent savagery their major cousins of hypocrisy, venality and inhumanity.

As for those Memoirs I always claim to wish I had written, Byron's literary executor, Tom Moore, allowed himself to be persuaded that it was in everyone's best interest to destroy them, which he did. It would be nice to think that in the Sixth Circle of the Inferno, those who indulged in such posthumous vandalism, like Lady Burton and Cassandra Austen, have their rears gently roasted by a heap of burning manuscript.

It does mean, however, that even if I never produce anything like the great crime novel Byron could surely have written, I may still with the help of a planchette be able to achieve that other frivolously expressed ambition and actually reconstitute those dear departed, much missed Memoirs. Watch this space!

Reginald Hill