Endless Night exemplifies every one of Christie’s great strengths: her restraint, her refusal to rely on padding. The book has a small cast and a limited setting. Like Jane Austen, writing on “two inches of ivory,” Christie’s plots are tight, exquisitely oiled mechanisms, a refreshing contrast to the fashion for overblown modern thrillers that push their plots and characters to a pitch of insanity, piling twist upon twist until meaning becomes lost, the story turns back on itself, everything is upended, and nothing matters any longer. Christie, however, is skilled enough to limit herself to one dazzling major twist, a perfect sleight of hand that leaves readers gasping as the rug is pulled out from under their feet . . .
Her fairness in the distribution of her clues. As the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1943 of The Moving Finger: “Anyone ought to be able to read [the author’s] secret with half an eye—if the other one-and-a-half did not get in the way.” The plot of Endless Night stands up to constant rereading. Christie never cheats. Some of her other plots—Evil Under the Sun, Death on the Nile—may depend on the kind of perfectly timed, overelaborate choreography that would be impossible to achieve with any certainty in real life, but Endless Night’s deceptive simplicity doesn’t allow for any dashing across islands, any trips on dahabiyahs, or any lightning-fast costume changes. Consequently, disbelief never has to be suspended. There’s no Hitchcock “icebox” moment when you think: but would that really have worked? Wasn’t it impossible to pull off?
Her concision. Endless Night is a mere two hundred pages. Incredibly, four people die in the span of the novel, and the murders of two others are recounted: it sounds like a ridiculous amount of drama to pack into what can scarcely be seventy thousand words, but Christie could achieve in two hundred pages what other writers can’t in double that number. Other writers, telling the same story, would pile on paragraphs, pages, even chapters of elaborate description, burying the reader under accumulations of words like wool being pulled over our eyes; Christie doesn’t need to do that. Her sparse, simple language is extraordinarily efficient. “One doesn’t realise in one’s life the really important moments—not until it’s too late,” Michael says, watching his wife play the guitar and sing, and even with the benefit of hindsight, even knowing the solution to the mystery, that sentence can be interpreted in at least two different ways.
Her subtlety. Although the book is so short, the pace, nonetheless, is slow and measured as Michael tells us his story: the crescendo builds so gradually that by the time Christie begins to unfold the solution, we have been lulled into submission by the andante of the narrative. The revelation not only takes the reader completely by surprise, but challenges us to believe it. In the space of one and a half short pages, Christie gives two pointers, the second clearer than the first, chords struck with increasing emphasis, and finishes with the third, a paragraph that starts innocuously and concludes with the upending of almost everything that we have taken for granted up till now, and leaves us breathless.
Her ability to chill us to the bone with minimum gore. The moments that the murderers reveal themselves in Sleeping Murder, Murder Is Easy, Death Comes as the End, or Nemesis are genuinely frightening; they linger in the reader’s memory much more deeply than the currently fashionable, gruesomely detailed torture scenes of young nubile women imprisoned in basements by psychotic serial killers. It’s no giveaway to say that Murder Is Easy also features a serial killer; that is made clear right at the start of the novel. But all that the murderer does, like the killers in the other three books cited, is to reveal intent by reaching out, hands outstretched, for the throat of the next victim. That’s all: no blood, no eviscerations, no spiked torture instruments or wicked array of knives. And yet one shivers just remembering the revelation: it’s the betrayal that is so frightening, the reality that one is infinitely more likely to be killed not by a stranger but by someone whom one knows and trusts.
Her poignancy. Endless Night is “serious—a tragedy really,” Christie said in an interview for the Times on its publication, and though Michael’s voice is cheerful, blithe, positive, we feel dark clouds hovering over the narrative from the very beginning. Our hearts break a little for the main victim, but also for the killer; although she’s a writer who is often considered to enforce an old-fashioned, snobbish moral code, Christie is wonderfully good at evoking sympathy for her murderer(s). Look at Death on the Nile, for instance, or Murder at the Vicarage. And she doesn’t neglect the innocents, caught up in crimes that are not of their making. One feels great empathy for Dolly Bantry in The Body in the Library, fretting and worrying about her husband’s emotional decline as he lives under the suspicion of murder, while Ordeal by Innocence hinges almost entirely on the suffering of the Argyle family when a long-past crime is exhumed and they find themselves all suspects once again.
Her flair for the gothic. The fetishizing of Verity’s body by the killer in Nemesis; the baroque sacrifice planned for the end of Hallowe’en Party; the obsession with the gardens in that book, and with the house in Endless Night: all excellent examples of the mid-twentieth-century domestic gothic revival, whose most famous incarnation, of course, is Rebecca. Like Manderley in Rebecca, Endless Night revolves around Michael’s desire for Gipsy’s Acre, his dream house, a desire shared by his wife, Ellie. “I wanted”—he says—“there were the words again, my own particular words—I want, I want—I wanted a wonderful woman and a wonderful house . . . full of wonderful things. Things that belonged to me.” The William Blake poem from which the title derives, sung by Ellie to Michael, emphasizes the gothic theme:
Every night and every morn
Some to Misery are born . . .
Some are born to Sweet Delight
Some are born to Endless Night.
And of course, the final hook: that the end of the book sends the reader right back to the start to begin rereading it, to see how cleverly Christie has woven the net in which she’s caught you. In that way, Endless Night is truly endless, an ouroboros whose head eats its tail in perpetuity. But that observation applies to almost all of Christie’s books. You read them first for the denouement and then you return to them over and over again, for the pure pleasure of watching her lead you down the garden path. To quote the words with which Michael starts and ends the novel:
In my end is my beginning—that’s what people are always saying. But just what does it mean? And just where does my story begin? I must try and think . . . ”
Lauren Henderson was born in London and educated at Cambridge, where she studied English literature. A journalist for newspapers and magazines before she turned her hand to fiction, she published her debut novel, Dead White Female, the first of her Sam Jones mysteries, in 1995. Alongside the Sam Jones novels, Lauren has also written crime titles for young adults, romantic comedies, and a nonfiction title, Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating. Lauren has been described as both the Dorothy Parker and Betty Boop of British crime fiction. Visit her online at www.laurenhenderson.net.
Skin Deep (aka The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest)
by Peter Dickinson (1968)
LAURIE R. KING
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Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson (b. 1927), author and poet, was born in Livingston, northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He was an editor and reviewer for Punch magazine for seventeen years, and has written extensively for both adults and young adults alike. He has twice won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger, as well as Guardian and Whitbread awards for his young-adult fiction.
* * *
The trouble with recommending a writer like Peter Dickinson is: Where to begin? With his anthropological investigation of chimpanzee language, Marsh Arabs, terrorism, and the making of a hero (The Poison Oracle)? His delightfully quirky and all too believable alternative history of the British royal family (King and Joker)? A tense and thoughtful historical novel of politics, class, and romance (A Summer in the Twenties)? Another view of history and politics: the rich and the not
rich, the innocent and the corrupt, the past and its present, a clock and its cessation (The Last Houseparty)? What about the “baroque spoof” (the author’s words) of The Old English Peep Show (A Pride of Heroes) with its crumbling country manor house held up by lions, both feline and hominid? Or his story of Africa and the gender war, another weave of now and then, this time seen through the eyes of an aging journalist who appears to have some power, and his fresh young mother, who appears to have none (Tefuga)? And what of the delicious Perfect Gallows, a famous actor’s slow and unwilling exploration of guilt, an acknowledgment of the dangers in letting a sacrifice go unacknowledged?
Pick up any one of this extraordinarily gifted writer’s adult novels and you’ll find a gem, an alternate universe with larger-than-life characters, a vivid sense of place, and a startling view of how the world actually does work, told in language one can taste on the tongue, and wrapped up in a satisfying and tightly constructed mystery—mystery as intellectual puzzle, and as mysterium, an exploration of the depths of human nature. (He writes brilliant young-adult novels as well, which tend toward fantasy rather than crime.)
This body of diverse and unforgettable work started with a bang—Dickinson’s first two novels both won the CWA Gold Dagger Award. (The only person other than Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine to win two years running.) His books tend to be short in word count, if long on impact, and his devout insistence on writing what he wants means that many of them are now out of print, since best-seller lists are more often inhabited by stories that resemble those we have heard before.
As a reader, I adore Peter Dickinson: for the unexpectedness of his plots and language, the richness of his internal monologues, the gorgeous peppering of humor and tragedy and absurdity in a crime novel—just what one might expect from a former Punch editor. As a writer, however, I find Dickinson a source of sheer despair, even as I play the How Does He Do That? game and try to pull his books to pieces, mapping out the rhythm of those quick sparks of humor, studying the pace of his writing and how his pagelong paragraphs merge seamlessly with rapid-fire dialogue, noting how he occasionally—only occasionally—gives himself permission to use a sharply unexpected, even deliberately awkward word, for effect:
The air was soggy with burned herbs, through whose haze the homemade candles shone yellowly.
(Yellowly? I would have to battle my editor for that word. And she would be right to remove it, just as Dickinson was right to put it in.
Hence the despair.)
As I say: even as I pick his books to pieces, I am filled as much with wonder as frustration. I will never be able to do this, and yet it can be done.
Still, the point of this essay is not to speak of technical matters. My goal is to praise Peter, not to bury him in analyses, so I shall say merely that, in crime fiction, we look for the same qualities as in other fiction: character, story, ideas that resonate, and the compelling language in which the story is told.
Let us begin with Dickinson’s characters. The opening scene of The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest (also known as Skin Deep) finds Superintendent James Pibble of Scotland Yard on his way through the streets of London to a homicide. He tells his constable driver to slow down, then immediately lapses into a fret about what the man thinks of him, a relatively big fish in the waters of Scotland Yard:
What did the current generation of sprats make of Superintendent Pibble, aging, unglamorous, graying toward retirement? Did they know how much luck had gone into his reputation for having a knack with kooky cases? Probably . . .
Wandering unwary through the jungle of self, Pibble fell into the pit.
First of all, has there ever been such a gloriously perfect name for the antihero of a crime series as Pibble? It cannot be an accident that the mind hears an echo of Lear’s “Pobble who has no toes,” a person (or creature?) who has lost said toes to the fishes (or to mermaids?). James Pibble, Scotland Yard genius of the quirky, has indeed been touched by some daft bit of magic, rendering him a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Buster Keaton: even as a villain trips him down the stairs, his mind is coldly noting the clues.
However Pibble is no buffoon, despite the pratfalls and the serial absurdities of his life. If heroism is defined not as fearlessness, but as soldiering on despite one’s fear, then Pibble is a mighty hero indeed. Mild of temper and apologetic in manner, he has no choice but to trudge implacably toward a solution—even a solution he knows will be ethically wrong and potentially catastrophic. For James Pibble, terror is his common state, if not from actual threat (a bash, a needle, a man-eating lion) then from one of his plentiful debilitating neuroses. Yet on he goes, hunkered down against the psychic onslaught from the kind of assured male who reduces him to a shivering five-year-old; confused and blushing in the presence of an unapproachable female; meekly telephoning home to his comfortable harridan of a wife for talk of chops and curtains and the fickleness of fame.
The appearance in the story of that self-assured male—kryptonite to Pibble’s superpowers—is inevitable:
Without apology, [Caine] laid himself full length in the only chair, a vanquished object with a torn cover . . . He looked as though he and a few friends owned the world. Pibble decided that he would feel less abject perching on the edge of the desk than standing subservient before this arrogant layabout.
The greatest assertion of dignity that Pibble can manage is to perch with his rump on the desk instead of standing, hat in hand, before this latest manifestation of his life’s nemeses.
Equally complex is the scene where Pibble is interviewing the wife of this dread enemy in her kitchen, and drops an unexpected question. In a few lines, Dickinson draws a clear portrait both of Mrs. Caine’s nature and of Pibble’s own marriage, while slipping in a clue or two as well:
“Sit in the armchair and I shan’t fall over you.”
Small chance of that, thought Pibble, watching her do her cooking trick; she hardly moved a step to get kettle and milk onto the gas, then mugs, spoons, tea, Nescafé, milk, sugar, teapot, and biscuits onto the table. Accustomed to Mrs. Pibble’s flurried dashes to unrelated cupboards, he found the process fascinating. Often she did not have to look before reaching the right container off a shelf.
The effect [of Pibble’s question] was like hail at a garden fête, prattle and parasols one moment and a scurry for shelter the next. Mrs. Caine’s small features, animated so far like those of a little girl in her granny’s feather hat, became pinched and suspicious.
As for compelling language (“prattle and parasols”), Dickinson’s compact, note-perfect style packs an entire graduate course into these 186 pages. His use of language is distinctive, a rich texture of sound and precision rarely achieved by the most highbrow of fiction, delivered here in a self-deprecating manner so appropriate for a story about an inspector named Pibble. Throwaway genius abounds:
Supper was a misery, stale fish in an ectoplasm sauce, and a lonely silence.
Or when Pibble comes across some paintings, done in a New Guinean style that is “naïve but not childlike”:
There was a heron with a fish in its stomach. There was a European businessman with bowler, brolly, and blue pin-stripe; you could see both his wallet and his esophagus. Pibble nearly laughed aloud with pleasure.
In a discussion of rock climbing and the vast, high face of a grand Victorian house:
Pibble tried to imagine himself spread-eagled and hurrying across that ornate façade. A chill center of nerves twitched to life in his palms.
Or in describing the wooden owl that has been used as the murder weapon:
There was a little dried blood and a few white hairs behind its right ear. Almost as though some enemy had waited for it in the dark and coshed it savagely with a human.
Some of us writers would give parts of our anatomy to be able to summon a wooden owl coshed savagely with a human.
The third element of Dickinson’s fiction—the plot—may on occasion sound as unlikely as a news headline (fiction being in general required to
be more realistic than life), but in structure, his plots are tight enough to satisfy the most attentive of readers. He has a knack (How does he do that?) for appearing to lose control of his story, allowing the plotline to sag, then meander, only to give a tiny twitch to the controls and have the whole thing snap into place, taut as a sail under wind.
Complex character, satisfying language, well-built plot: yes, all those. But if I had one thing to point to that sets a Dickinson novel apart, it would be that ineffable sense of “otherness” at their core.
The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest (written in the 1960s) concerns a Stone Age (and possibly cannibalistic) New Guinean tribe, the Ku. These middle-aged men and women, survivors of a Japanese attack during the closing years of World War II, now live in a huge old boardinghouse in London, which they have remade into a slice of their native land. For years they have gone their way, aging in their urban backwater, preserving much of their way of life thanks to one of their number, an anthropologist who has been a member of the tribe since the days of the attack.
Odd? Yes. But there is more. The anthropologist is Dr. Eve Ku, a British woman who, when forced to flee into the jungle with the others nearly two decades before, assumed the symbolic identity of a man. Symbol became reality, however, so that now even her husband, born to that tribe, refers to her as male: “Eve has gone for a walk. He is upset.”
And yes, in the eyes of the tribe, theirs is a gay marriage.
But this gay/heterosexual man/woman anthropologist/tribal (wo)man is just one character in the cast, and his/her status is only one of the minor human puzzles in the story. There is the youngest member of the tribe, who decides that being a shamanic drummer is the same as being Ringo. There is an apparent sidetrack (one of those nonmeandering story lines) involving a local criminal syndicate; there is a lover from the past; there are key architectural oddities in the Victorian building that shelters a New Guinean village (“Neither taste nor wealth could assail its inherent dreadfulness.”); there is . . .