Robert Barnard
23 November 1936 - 19 September 2013
Crime writer and 2003 Diamond Dagger recipient ROBERT
BARNARD has died, aged 76, after several months in a nursing home in Leeds.
Shots columnist Mike Ripley, who first met Bob Barnard twenty-five years ago,
reminisces about one of the stalwarts of English crime fiction.
Robert Barnard was one
of a quartet of writers born in 1936 – his contemporaries being Reginald Hill,
Jonathan Gash and Peter Lovesey – who formed a solid backbone for traditional
English crime writing of the highest order in the last quarter of the twentieth
century.
Unlike others of his generation,
Robert Barnard’s zestful and witty novels did not benefit from television
adaptations, nor indeed from large paperback runs in the UK. His books were
often more easily available in America where he was probably better known as an
exponent of the ‘cosy’ school of crime writing – a label he never denied or
disparaged as he felt the main goal of a crime writer was simply ‘to
entertain’. In this he tried to emulate Agatha Christie, for whom he had a
great admiration, describing her as the writer “who has probably given more
sheer pleasure than any other in this century” in his critical study A Talent To Deceive in 1980. He was no
doubt proud of the fact that his first editor at the legendary Collins Crime
Club was Elizabeth Walter, who was also Agatha Christie’s last editor and
Robert was the obvious choice to give the oration at Elizabeth’s funeral in
2006.
One reason often given as to why Bob Barnard
was not the household name he should have been, was that he never had a central
series hero, whereas Hill had Dalziel and Pascoe, Gash had Lovejoy and Lovesey
(initially) had Sergeant Cribb, all characters which attracted the interest of
television producers. In fact, Barnard had several series heroes – among them
policemen Perry Trethowan (perhaps the most successful), Idwal Meredith and
Charlie Peace and, under the pen name Bernard Bastable, even Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart! – but his series were never produced in concentrated bursts, Barnard
preferring to employ a character when a plot or a central theme required it.
His early career was in academia. After
reading English at Oxford and a brief stint working for the Fabian Society, he
left England in 1961 for a lectureship at the University of New England in
Armidale, New South Wales. In Australia he acquired a wife, Louise (they were
married for fifty years), and the inspiration for his first crime novel Death of an Old Goat, which was
published by Collins in 1974. A move to Norway, first as a lecturer at the
University of Bergen and then as Professor (of English Literature) at Tromso,
similarly supplied the background for his 1980 novel Death in a Cold Climate.
He returned to England
in 1984, choosing to live in Leeds – he once said that after years in Norway,
he found the local Leeds accent easier to understand than that of his native
Essex! – becoming an active member of the Crime Writers Association and
particularly its Northern Chapter. It was felt by many members that he was the
‘best Chairman the CWA never had’ and he was later to throw his energies into
The Bronte Society, as vice-chairman then chairman, based around the famous
parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire. His devotion to the Bronte legend resulted
in the illustrated biography Emily Bronte
for The British Library in 2000 and A
Bronte Encyclopedia, written with his wife Louise and published this year,
as well as two crime novels: The Missing
Bronte (1983) and the wonderfully titled The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (1998).
In
all, Robert Barnard produced over 40 crime novels and dozens of short stories
(I even featured, rather unflatteringly, in one and we both contributed to the
Crime Club’s Diamond Jubilee anthology A
Suit of Diamonds) as well as respected critical works on Dickens and Agatha
Christie. He was a popular speaker at conventions and conferences, especially
at Malice Domestic in the USA (where he was Guest of Honour in 1998). On his
return from one trip to North America, he presented me with a paperback crime novel
bought on a whim at the airport. He had,
he told me, read it on the plane and found it ‘boisterous, rather crude and
right up your street’. The book, then unpublished in the UK, was a Canadian
paperback original of Frost At Christmas by
R. D. (Rodney) Wingfield, and for that introduction as well as the pleasure
provided by his own books, I am eternally grateful to Bob.
Whilst his crime writing was firmly of the
traditional British detective story school (he himself often described his
books as ‘deliberately old-fashioned’), his novels all contained a sharp streak
of social satire, the result being on occasion hysterically funny. His targets included
the Church, television soap operas, the class system, academic rivalries and
politics and his aim was never more true than in Posthumous Papers (1979),
Sheer Torture (1981) and Political Suicide (1986), a book still
treasured by political journalists and lobbyists.
Not all his books came off, as he was
usually the first to admit. I once saw him stun an audience of fellow crime
writers into silence by saying he had, for a particular publisher, ‘written
three good books, one so-so one and one bad one’. When I approached him in 2011
about the possibility of reissuing some of his early novels, whilst happy with
the idea in principle, he had specific reservations, saying: ‘I don’t for
example, think reprinting a slightly fusty title like A Little Local Murder is a good idea.’ I know of few (if any) crime
writers who could be as dismissive of their own work as Robert could be when he
felt a book hadn’t quite come together; though in the case of A Little Local Murder, I think he was
wrong.
I met Bob in 1988 at what was my first
meeting of the Crime Writers Association in The Groucho Club, where he as a
member of ‘The Committee’ was acting as a meeter-and-greeter to welcome new
members. To my surprise, and secret pride, he had read my debut novel Just Another Angel (I suspect our mutual
editor Elizabeth Walter had sent him one) and had some frighteningly detailed
questions for me which I doubt I answered to his satisfaction as I was somewhat
in awe of him, having been a fan of his books for the previous decade.
I don’t think I disgraced myself, though, as
we ended up going out to dinner in an Italian restaurant afterwards and I
discovered that where I was a native Yorkshireman (born not far from Leeds) who
had moved to live in Essex, Robert was an Essex boy who had ended up living in
Yorkshire. In fact, he had been brought up in the small fishing port of Brightlingsea
whereas I then lived in neighbouring Wivenhoe, just along the River Colne.
When he returned to Essex to visit his
mother, I would collect him from Colchester station and provide a taxi service
to Brightlingsea, as he did not drive; something which became a bit of a
running joke between us, Bob taking a perverse pride in his ignorance of all
things motoring and car related. He was slightly (only slightly) chastened by
his appearance on the television quiz Mastermind.
His ‘specialist subject’ round (on Mozart I think) went well enough, but when
it came to the general knowledge section he was totally stumped by the very
first question: “When applied to a car, what do the initials GT stand for?”
I don’t remember the subject of cars or
driving ever came up after that…
In 2006 Robert won the CWA Short Story Dagger with his story Sins of Scarlet which was published in the CWA anthology ID: Crimes of Identity.
The year is 1861 and Constable Faro is heading back to Orkney to enjoy some home comforts, armed with a private investigation into the death of champion swimmer Dave Claydon, who drowned in mysterious circumstances. Was this an accident or is there a sinister connection with missing artefacts recovered from an Armada galleon? At Lammastide the legend of the seal king’s annual claim of a human bride becomes reality and Faro’s holiday and his original secret mission turn into a nightmare. With himself as the prime suspect in the girl’s disappearance, he is in deadly danger. The Seal King Murder is by Alanna Knight and is due to be published in January 2011.