Stub It Out!

Many of us have on our shelves the trusty book Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. In fact, I read recently (in an excellent interview by John Connolly) that Stephen King now rations himself to three smokes a day. Then a friend of mine in California telephoned me at the weekend, and in the course of our chat, he told me that he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. If that wasn’t bad enough news, it was followed by word that the great Allen Carr had passed away--ironically, from lung cancer, as well. He was 72 years old.

In what was to be his final interview, the great anti-smoking guru told the London Observer’s Jasper Gerard that he didn’t consider his illness a cruel twist of fate, but instead a useful aid in spreading his message. Writes Gerard:

Last week Allen Carr, the world’s leading anti-smoking Svengali, died of lung cancer. Colleagues blamed years of passive smoking while helping folk stub out the evil weed. I was probably the last journalist to meet Carr, at his Surrey home a few months before his death. For a man of his wealth--clinics in 30 countries, books translated into 45 languages--he hardly whooped it up in a fug of luxury. His modest terrace house sat primly in a drab estate. As his wife served biscuits on a doily, the man who claimed to have helped 10 million smokers give up wheezed in.

He was one of the world’s bestselling authors, but this bespectacled figure looked like the accountant he was when, on 15 July 1983--‘independence day’--the 100-a-day puffer hit on a method to give up. Actually it is more mantra than ‘method’: cigarettes are not a positive, so their absence should not be mourned. It sounds simple--banal, even--yet Carr could talk comfortably for four hours about his theory. One woman he helped quit sighs: ‘He bored me into giving up.’ Boring works: Carr claimed that over half who visited his clinics were cured (including Sir Richard Branson and Sir Anthony Hopkins).

Many European readers and writers (myself included) continue to risk our lives every day by puffing away at the damned weed that Sir Walter Raleigh brought back from America. And, of course, smoking is commonplace in crime fiction, at least in older works. Detective Sam Spade fired up “coffin nails” while contemplating crime scenes, as did Mike Hammer, James Bond, Nick Charles, Ellery Queen, John Shaft, and the aristocratic Philo Vance. Philip Marlowe was a smoker, though it didn’t always give him pleasure. (“My stomach burned from the last drink,” he muses at one point in Farewell, My Lovely. “I wasn’t hungry. I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief.”) Dime-novel dick Nick Carter preferred expensive cigars, and both Sherlock Holmes and Jules Maigret opted for pipes.

But Allen Carr’s fate might make all of us think twice about this damn addiction of ours.