Thirty Nine Old Steps

I’ve been re-visiting some old friends recently.  Books, I mean, but these are books I’ve known for years, and to pick up an old favourite is very like meeting an old friend.

Take The 39 Steps for instance.  This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film.    There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.

Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity.  Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand.  Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.

He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay.  (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)

Now, so far, so jolly.  However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper.  Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money.  Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself.  He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is.  Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.

Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is.

Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity.  It’s significant, isn’t it?

I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book.  Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print.  However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again;  success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui.  Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world.  A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid.  He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.)  Was it enough?  Perhaps not.

It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.

Baking the Books

My sister bought me a bread maker, so I’ve been baking my own bread recently.  Now some people, undoubtedly, think this is a bit of a cheat, as what the machine cuts out all the kneading, knocking down, more kneading etc – but I choose what goes in there and the end result tastes fantastic.

You put all the ingredients in, set the machine (which is really a mini oven with a mixing blade) and three hours or so later, out comes a loaf.

I was thinking about the bread maker when I read about an event called NaNoWriMo on the mystery website, DorothyL. NaNoWriMo (I can’t say it without doing a cod Chinese accent) is short for National Novel Writing Month.

That’s the first little hint to be wary.  Is your life so frantic that you haven’t got time for a few extra syllables?  Even when – granted that language is meant to be a means of communication – your listener or reader hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about?  Chill, guys.  You can write shorthand, but do you have to speak it?

So what is National Novel Writing Month?  Well, the idea is to write 50,000 words in a month.   If you’re not used to thinking in word counts, it’s useful to know that’s an awful lot, but the shortest published novels are usually round the 60-65 thousand words, which is 10-15,000 words short.  A usual sort of average for a writer is something around a 1,000 or so words a day.

Some writers, of course, write a great deal faster.  Barbara Cartland could knock out a book in a fortnight or so, Edgar Wallace dictated a entire novel in the course of a weekend (it’s called The Devil Man if you’re curious) and there are a good few others, most famously, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days.  However, these surely are the exceptions.

The point of writing is to be read. And, by and large, the way to write the very best you can, is to plan it.  Then to write it.  And then to go over it, however many times it takes.  And, incidentally, take time to do lots more planning on the way.  If you are bursting with inspiration, as Stevenson was, don’t hang about, certainly, but that story came to him in a dream.  That means his subconscious was bubbling away with it for how long beforehand?

Surely the most likely result of driving yourself nearly mental for a month to produce 50,000 words is to have a sort of literary fast food, when, with more time, you could have a gourmet meal.

To go back to the bread maker, the flour, milk and yeast etcetera go in the pan, together with any added extras that occur to you.  It all, to be honest, looks a real mess and the only result of tucking into the bread-in-waiting at this stage would be a long, thoughtful stint on the loo!  But give it time and heat, those separate elements miraculously transform into a delicious loaf.   So give it some time.  Anything less is half-baked!

Stephen Fry Gets It Wrong

I don’t know about you, but I love the TV programme, Q.I.

The main reason for loving it is that it’s presented by Stephen Fry who is dead funny, hugely urbane, unfailingly polite and very (not Quite as the programme title would have it) Interesting, with the amounts of facts, knowledge and quirky little bits of information at his fingertips.  An ideal dinner guest?  You bet.  I’d even bring the wine. And the food.  And my full attention.  And bore everyone stupid about it for the rest of my life.  He’s worth watching whatever he does, but sometimes he’s gets it wrong.

Last night, for example, he threw into the conversation (it was about the weirder ways of collecting tax, of all things) that there was no evidence at all – none whatsoever – for the famous census which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. By the time he’d finished, the whole of idea of the Romans having a census, with everyone trooping back obediently to their place of origin, seemed downright dorky.

Now, it’s perfectly true that we don’t have the census record for Bethlehem in BC/AD whatever, but the Romans certainly did take censuses (or should that be censii?).  They were a bureaucracy, after all and, like all bureaucracies, loved records.  In Roman Egypt census returns were made every fourteen years from about A.D. 20 till the time of Constantine. Many of these census papers have been discovered (they were called apographai, the name used by St. Luke.)  In the Venice Archaeological Museum, there’s the tombstone of a Roman Knight, one Q. Aemilius Secundus, who was decorated for his service in Syria under Augustus and who also conducted a census of 117,000 citizens.  In the British Museum there’s a papyrus from Roman Egypt AD 104 which orders people to return to their homes for a census.

So although we haven’t got the actual census, to say that the idea is inherently silly seems – well, silly.

Incidentally, years ago, when things were a bit more settled in the Middle East, I heard a spokesman for the Bethlehem Tourist Board on the radio asking, in a rather despairing kind of way, that if people wanted to visit Bethlehem, could they do so at another time of year than Christmas.  “You can’t,” he said, “get a bed for love or money in Bethlehem at Christmas.”

Some things never change!

Decling Dolores or What's In A Name?

My pal Elaine asked me to come and talk to the Girl Guide troop she runs about being an author.  This was part of a evening devoted to giving the girls ideas about what sort of job they’d like in later life, so we had a doctor, a chief and a teacher (all women) and me.

The doctor, the chief and the teacher didn’t have a problem I had; convincing the kids I wasn’t an Evil Genius.  The problem was my name.

If I had to put my hand on my heart and own up, I have to say I’m not crazy about the name “Dolores”.  Hardly anyone can spell it and precious few can say it from a standing start.  When I was a kid, my friend Anne’s mother used to sing an old Bing Crosby number, How I love the kisses of Dolores, every time I walked through the door.  This was trying.

Moving on to secondary school, we did Latin.  Wow.  What an absolute scream.  I mean, it’s bad enough trying to address a table (mensa, mensam, mensae – who wants to say all that to a table?) followed by the side-splitting moment when we – we being thirty-five thirteen year-olds, all anxious to point out one another’s shortcomings - reached the Third Declension and My Name was declined, so to speak.

Dolor, Doloris, Dolori, Dolorem, Dolore in the singular (and there was only one of me) or Dolores, Dolorum, Doloribus, and - I know it sounds like repetition but it’s the Accusative and Ablative - back to Dolores and Doloribus.

At this point Life teaches us it could be worse.  I mean, I could have been Doloribus… Which sounds as if a kind Municipal Authority runs a transport service just for Me, but would (I feel this instinctively) have caused Hilarity.

The trouble is, however you decline it, the word Dolores means Pain, Grief and Suffering.

And I’d decline all that, no problem.

It’s because of the meaning of the word Dolores that JK Rowling bestowed the name Dolores on Professor Umbridge, Ministry of  Magic employee, sometime Headmistress of Hogwarts, a woman whose idea of detention is to make Harry repeatedly carve on the back of his hand, in his own blood, the words, I must not tell lies. Add to that, being the most boring teacher in the world, undermining Dumbledore, flinging anyone in prison who disagrees with her and setting the Dementors loose in Little Whinging, Surrey, and you get a picture of an all-round bad egg.  I mean, Voldermort is utterly evil, but Dolores Umbridge is just pants.

So, the girl guides reacted with alarm when Elaine brightly said, “Here’s Dolores!”

At least they didn’t sing Big Crosby at me.  And Harry Potter was a good place to start talking about books.

But I still remember the wise words of Bertie Wooster, addressed to Jeeves; “My word, Jeeves, there’s some raw work at the font!”

Exactly.