An Author of the Old School

There’s some sad news today coming from Britain’s Guardian: “The novelist Julian Rathbone died last Thursday, aged 73, it was confirmed today, after a career distinguished by two Booker prize nominations and a fluency across many different genres, including crime thrillers and historical novels.”

Among Rathbone’s most notable protagonists in the crime-fiction category were the incorruptible and conservative Inspector Jan Argand (The Euro-Killers, Watching the Detectives), Renata Fechter, head of a German squad of Eco-police (Accidents Will Happen, Brandenburg Concerto), and Chris Shovelin, his Bournemouth-based private eye (Homage, As Bad As It Gets). Recently, Rathbone had been concentrating on historical yarns, such as The Last English King (1997), A Very English Agent (2002), and The Mutiny (2007), which takes as its backdrop the Indian uprising of 1857 and was recently released in paperback.

I like the description of Rathbone (who, by the way, was from the same family that produced actor and Sherlock Holmes portrayer Basil Rathbone) in another obituary from today’s Guardian, so shall simply reproduce it here:

Rathbone was an old-school lefty. He said so himself. His detestation of privilege and the structures which maintain it was profound. His contempt for them was expressed by turn frighteningly, wittily and sexily, and often all at once, but never, ever dully or merely rhetorically. There are crime novels in his canon and there are thrillers, but he was by no means a genre writer. Rather, he deployed a rampant imagination to conceive of worlds he might intrude on to get to what he needed to say. He would not have been grossly offended to be described as having 19th-century ideas about how to write novels. Nevertheless, James Joyce was a lifelong passion, but his most obvious and frequently acknowledged influence was Graham Greene, to whom Rathbone was moved to send a copy of his Lying in State in 1985, “as a way of acknowledging that what was good in [it] ... was good because, in part, of what I had got from him, and I wanted to thank him.” Greene wrote back from Antibes: “I think your book a good one!” Rathbone had the letter framed in his study in the small rose-gated house he lived in with Laney and their two children in the New Forest on the Hampshire-Dorset border.

For more on this author, I recommend reading Bob Cornwell’s excellent interview from 2003, in which Rathbone talked about the tricky business of writing historical fiction, the “rampant capitalists” hanging from his family tree, and his interest in ecological thrillers. You will find that full piece here.

(Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)