Alec Marsh - A True Crime Story from the Annals of His History

The inspiration for ‘Ghosts of the West’, my new Drabble and Harris mystery, came during a boat trip on the Thames. We had just passed Rotherhithe and voice on the loudspeaker pointed out the Mayflower pub – named after the famous ship that took pilgrims to North America in 1620. The 102 would-be migrants aboard founded what would become the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the continent at Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts. (Another crowd founded Jamestown in Virginia 13 years before, but that was temporarily abandoned giving honours to Plymouth.)

As the title of ‘Ghosts of the West’ implies, the plot has at least something to do with the West – and as you’ll discover if you read it the Great Plains of the United States. Unsurprisingly it therefore has a strong Native American dimension.

Which soon fed into my motivation for writing the book. For as well as having the opportunity to venture into the Western genre – and who doesn’t like a Western? – but I also wanted to highlight what one could argue is one of the greatest crimes in American history. 

A great deal of important soul-searching has gone on in the US and elsewhere in respect of the Atlantic slave trade and in the US, the plight and legacy of Southern slavery. But there’s been less attention on what happened to the original inhabitants of North America.

When those first colonists landed in North America, it is estimated that around 500,000 Native Americans lived across the vast continent, though some people believe it was much higher than that. By 1900, however, most are agreed however that just 300,000 Native Americans were left. At the same while the European immigrant population had risen from zero to more than of 76 million. 

In addition to seeing their population decline through warfare, outright oppression and having their ecosystems destroyed – I’ll come to that – the Native American popular had by then been shepherded into several hundred reservations. Today the United States has 574 federally recognised tribes spread over 326 Indian reservations covering 15 million square acres, an area of territory a littles smaller than Latvia (and you don’t need a geography degree to know that compared to the expanse of the Pan-Continental United States that’s not much.) 

So while ‘Ghosts of the West’ is set in 1938, the wider story of what happened between 1600 and 1900 is very much part of my narrative. In the book it is personified in the character of an aged chief named Black Cloud, who is in part inspired by Red Cloud (1822-1909), a real life chief of the Oglala Lakotas, a branch of the Great Sioux Nation, who was described by one prominent contemporary as ‘the Red Man’s George Washington.’

This means that, whatever the ostensible crimes at the heart of my story, the greatest crime touched on by the book is that committed by generations of European-white migrants. And it took hundreds of years. In a sense the stage of the ‘Indian wars’ that took place in the 1860s and 1870s in the great plains of the West, was the last major campaign in war last several hundred years.

Ultimately, it was won by exterminating the source of the Native Americans food and shelter, the buffalo – they ate its meat, used its hide for clothing and to weatherproof their tepees. American military strategists and leaders –President Grant among them – saw the annihilation of the buffalo as the solution to the ‘Indian problem.’ As a result some 30 million bison were massacred from 1850, with the last of the great herds destroyed in 1883-84. (Much of it was to feed the demand for leather in Europe, too.) With the bedrock of their civilisations destroyed Plains Indians had no choice but to accept life as farmers on the reservation.

That the lands set aside for reservations were often those that whites did not want will tell you something of the quality of the land. (‘The Wasichus [white men] had slaughtered all the bison shut us up in pens,’ said the medicine man Black Elk, bemoaning his starving people. ‘We could not eat lies.’) But in addition to coping with hunger and the enforced dependence on inadequate handouts, the Native American’s whole culture and belief systems were under grave assault. If you are a semi-nomadic warrior and a hunter who is forced overnight to become a farmer, what do you teach your children?

Of course the United States is not alone in having done horrific things in the past: Britain ruled an empire covering a quarter of the world’s population at its fullest extent in the 1920s, and sadly the long term effects of that corrosive colonialism can be observed still. But there is a point of difference: Britain, either willingly or at gunpoint, finally quit its colonies. As did the other European colonial powers, (with varying degrees of magnanimity). But the ancestors of immigrants Americans are still there and – for obvious reasons – aren’t going to go anywhere. 

‘The past,’ L P Hartley famously wrote, ‘is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Thank goodness for that. One of the benefits of fiction is that it helps us to remember and revisit our stories, including crimes of such enormity and general cultural acceptance that we sometimes don’t even see them for what they are. It also offers the chance to ask, ‘What if?’ And that’s an opportunity, too. 

Ghosts of the West by Alec Marsh (Headline Accent) Out Now

When daring journalist Sir Percival Harris gets wind of a curious crime in a sleepy English town, he ropes in his old friend Professor Ernest Drabble to help him investigate. The crime is a grave robbery, and as Drabble and Harris pry deeper, events take a mysterious turn when a theft at the British Museum is soon followed by a murder. The friends are soon involved in a tumultuous quest that takes them from the genteel streets of London to the wide plains of the United States. What exactly is at stake is not altogether clear - but if they don't act soon, the outcome could be a bloody conflict, one that will cross borders, continents and oceans... Meanwhile, can Drabble and Harris's friendship - which has endured near-death experiences on several continents, not to mention a boarding school duel - survive a crisis in the shape of the beautiful and enigmatic Dr Charlotte Moore?

More information about Alec Marsh and his Drabble and Harris series can be found on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @AlecMarsh

Alec Marsh on Enemy of The Raj

 

I decided to set my new Drabble and Harris novel, Enemy of Raj, against the backdrop of British India because, as well as making for a thoroughly entertaining thriller, I wanted to explore the phenomenon of the Raj.

The history of Britain in India, which one can date from the formation of the East India Company in 1600 (through grant of a charter by Elizabeth I) right up until 1947 when the country gained independence, is longer than most people probably realise and reflects the rise and decline of Britain as a world power. 

But the long association and the relative amicability of post-colonial relations obscures a genuinely troubling narrative, (one that William Dalrymple, for example, has done an important job in exposing in his recent book The Anarchy). Importantly, therefore, I also wanted Enemy of the Raj to be an opportunity to debunk the prevalent swathe of nostalgia about British rule in India – what one might call the Merchant Ivory view of history. 

It was not the benign costume drama depicted in popular culture. It was as most know already, a thoroughly ghastly and morally repugnant example of societal exploitation, the dominance of one culture over another. Not only that but it’s one that when it reached its zenith in the early 1900s was based on pretty diabolical notions of white racial superiority, the consequences of which we are still living with today as the BLM campaign this summer has highlighted.

And in this, the title of the book is particularly deliberate – for today, we are all enemies of the Raj. But when the story is was set in 1937 supporting the Raj was an absolutely respectable position. Don’t forget that when Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940 he declared that he had not ‘become the King’s first minster in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’. And when he said that he chiefly had India in mind. 

So it was important for me that the book correctly locates the British where they were in the 1930s – which is, I’m afraid to say, on the wrong side of history. 

But when you consider that 100,000 Brits were running India – which then had a population of 300 million – you realise it’s not a simple matter at all. 

For a start, 100,000 Brits can’t all be bad. In the book, I have several British colonial figures, many of whom I firmly believe to be a thoroughly good people – really no different to you or me – but doing what is bad work, as diligently and efficiently as he could. But understanding that perfectly decent, ordinary people can be involved in collective evils and behave monstrously is a vitally important part of understanding how things like the Raj – or horrors such as the Holocaust or the transatlantic slave trade for that matter – can come about. 

So, notwithstanding the fact that Enemy of the Raj is primarily an entertainment (as Graham Greene put it) and is conceived as a gripping, light thriller, there is a very serious point that I wanted to highlight.

The second book in the Drabble and Harris series (the first was Rule Britannia, published last year) story follows London newspaperman Sir Percival Harris (he hates his first name and is known simply as Harris) and his old friend Ernest Drabble, a Cambridge professor of history and amateur mountaineer, in India to interview a famous (and real life) maharaja, named Sir Ganga Singh. Pretty quickly after arriving in Delhi, however, they discover that forces are at work and soon they become involved in an audacious assassination plot...

As well as offering an opportunity to demonstrate the unpleasant side to the whole matter, the story also offers the opportunity to indulge in counterfactual speculations. In an early conversation with another (pro-empire) British journalist they discuss how long British rule has got left. Now, we all know the game was up in 1947, but the outlook in the late 1930s didn’t look like that. The British journalist in the story then suggests that Britain could possibly hang on until 1984 – ‘If we play our cards right.’

Playing our cards right included decades of policies which deliberately sought to divide Hindu and Muslim opinion, to play one set of communities off against another. This ultimately led to the appalling massacres of partition in 1947 when up to two million were killed and 14 million people displaced. As the late historian Norman Stone remarked, when empires fail, bad things happen. But in this case the British were complicit – unwittingly or otherwise.

During one argument in the book, Drabble – who is a good old fashioned leftie and very much the voice of today – asks Harris, a dyed in the wool imperialist, how far he would be prepared to go to maintain British rule in India? Would he shoot people?

The moment he’s confronted with this Harris knows the game is up – he’s not going to pull the trigger. But it takes something else to happen to him before he can admit it to himself because, after all, he’s been indoctrinated with the racial superiority nonsense.

But admit it he does. And in the same way I tend to agree with those who say that Britain still has some way to go before it admits to itself properly that what was done by our forefathers in India was wrong. Even if many of them were thoroughly decent people, just like you and me. 

Enemy of the Raj by Alec Marsh is published by Headline Accent priced £9.99 in original paperback and available as an ebook

India, 1937. Intrepid reporter Sir Percival Harris is hunting tigers with his friend, Professor Ernest Drabble. Harris soon bags a man-eater - but later finds himself caught up in a hunt of a different kind... Harris is due to interview the Maharaja of Bikaner, a friend to the Raj, for his London newspaper - and he and Drabble soon find themselves accompanied by a local journalist, Miss Heinz. But is the lady all she seems? And the Maharaja himself is proving elusive... Meanwhile, the movement for Indian independence is becoming stronger, and Drabble and Harris witness some of the conflict first-hand. But even more drama comes on arrival at Bikaner when the friends find themselves confined to their quarters... and embroiled in an assassination plot! Just who is the enemy in the Maharaja's palace? What is the connection to a mysterious man Drabble meets in Delhi? And what secret plans do the British colonial officers have up their sleeves?