I’ve been a voracious reader of early twentieth crime fiction since childhood. Christie was my Blyton. A firm favourite of ten-year-old Natalie was ‘A Pocketful of Rye.’ I’d fallen a little in love with Lance Fortescue – his charm, his sadness – so the abject cruelty and base misogyny of poor Gladys Martin’s murder still haunts me today. There is nothing cosy about Christie. Read between each genteel line and you will see a world riddled with corruption, or to use a word both Marple and Poirot would be comfortable with – evil.
After Christie, came Sayers and another charmer. Lord Peter Wimsey quoted poetry I neither knew nor understood. His speech was affected, and he wore a monocle. However, I liked him. His cleverness, his devotion to, and passion for, Harriet Vane and his war-born vulnerabilities were all fascinating to me.
I was a good way through a Marjory Allingham reading jag when I discovered the Americans. On film, this time, and to be precise through a BBC Humphrey Bogart season. I devoured the great film noirs – The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, In a Lonely Place – and was mesmerised by the lurking psychological shadows of war, trauma and social change expressed in both imagery and narrative. I read Hammett and Chandler voraciously. Finding the sociopathic carapace of Sam Spade and the Continental Op disturbing and wild, I preferred Philip Marlowe, that sardonic white knight with a patter in similes so impressive they’d make a writer kick a hole through a library window. Marlowe was a man a bookish girl could love.
I’d read In a Lonely Place not too long after I’d seen the Nicolas Rey film. It was a disappointment. I wanted a Byronic Dix and a tale of thwarted love. The man who said: ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me’ and meant it. But the teenage me got a psychopathic, serial killer Dix. And, strangely, I would’ve sworn the novel was written in the traditional American first person, hardboiled style. It’s not. It’s in third person close. If this seems like an overly technical point, please bear with me.
I think there is a psychological theory which says we form our cultural tastes in adolescence. The type of music we enjoy, the films we love, the sports teams we support, we cherish and protect these first loves way into adulthood, dragging them about like Sebastian Flyte does Aloysius.
So, thirty years later when I began to write a Needless Alley, my love letter to the crime fiction of the period, I knew I’d write some form of noir. And I knew I needed to write from the point of view of a man. Men own the night. It’s why femme fatales do their violence by proxy. Women have partial access to the shadowy corners of noir, and the back-alley beatings, dive bars and private clubs which define noir’s (mostly) urban settings. Importantly, I wanted my detective to uncover a corruption he contributed to. But, in all honesty, I’m interested in those men I read as a young woman. The troubled men of interwar crime fiction. War-worn men, brutalised, violent or giddy, outsiders, bookish, perhaps, and in the case of the Americans, desperately lonely. They work alone. They are alone. Marlowe has no Bunter. Sam Spade would let Hastings bleed out from a gunshot to the gut.
So, let’s get technical. How does a woman write this kind of man? The answer for any writer is to learn from the best. Therefore, I revisited In a Lonely Place. The teenage me was premature in her assessment of the novel. It is what the great Megan Abbott calls, ‘a dark, cold gem of a book.’ In Steele, Dorothy B. Hughes uses third person close to enter the mind of a violent rapist and killer, but with enough distance to enable the reader to see the power of the surrounding women. The strength of Laurel and Sylvia lies in what Dix instinctively knows. They can see the true Dix. Something Brub, the LA detective and Dix’s best friend, cannot do. Hughes rejects the intrinsic self-absorption of the first person, with its powerful associated male noir gaze, to give full scope to the women in the story.
Needless Alley doesn’t have In a Lonely Place’s icy intensity. I don’t think I have that in me. William Garrett is no hard-boiled hero, and, as much as he is complicit in the exploitation of women, he is no misogynist. He’s soft-boiled. His loneliness, and his disfunction, isn’t a protective carapace, but something he finds painful. And during the novel, something he begins to solve. I suppose I humanised the noir detective, fashioned him to suit my purpose. After all, he is mine. And as William’s inner voice says, ‘He never got the hang of men. He prefers the company of women.’
Birmingham, 1933. Private enquiry agent William Garrett, a man damaged by a dark childhood spent on Birmingham's canals, specialises in facilitating divorces for the city's male elite. With the help of his best friend - charming, out-of-work actor Ronnie Edgerton - William sets up honey traps. But photographing unsuspecting women in flagrante plagues his conscience and William heaves up his guts with remorse after every job. However, William's life changes when he accidentally meets the beautiful Clara Morton and falls in love. Little does he know she is the wife of a client - a leading fascist with a dangerous obsession. And what should have been another straightforward job turns into something far more deadly. Drenched in evocative period atmosphere and starring an unforgettable cast of characters, Needless Alley takes the reader from seedy canal-side pubs, to crumbling Warwickshire manor houses, and into the hidden spaces of Birmingham's Queer, bohemian society.
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