The Stars Come Out at Harrogate, Part VI

Lucy Ramsey, Rebecca Jenkins, and Ron Beard at Harrogate.

(Editor’s note: This is the final installment of British correspondent Ali Karim’s report from the recent Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. Previous parts can be read here.)

Our discussion of necrophilia and the appalling things one can do with farmyard fowl was, thankfully, interrupted by our rather unsteady arrival at Harrogate’s Hotel Du Van, site of the Quercus Publishing cocktail party. Greeting us immediately were publicists extraordinaire Lucy Ramsey and Nicci Praça, as well as Jane Wood, who I have known for many years, back to when she was still the publishing director at Orion Publishing. Having drunk a bit too much already that evening, we naturally dove into the food and were appreciative of the chilled wine in large glasses.

Our little group--Roger Jon Ellory, Chris Simms, Steve Mosby, Simon Kernick, my son, Alex, and I--were soon fanning out over the floor. After another brief chat with Thomas H. Cook, who had also found his way from the festival hotel to this fête, I was introduced by Ron Beard, Quercus’ paperback director, to a charming writer named Rebecca Jenkins. A broadcaster and journalist, she has also recently made her debut as a historical mystery novelist with The Duke’s Agent. Over a bit more wine, I asked her what prompted her to pen that new book. Herewith, her explanation:

I fell in love with The Scarlet Pimpernel at the age of 12. It wasn’t just the derring-do and the style and wit of the hero, it was the clothes, the carriages, the streets--the world--that caught my imagination. Baroness [Emma] Orczy’s stories were too few and I began to explore beyond them. I took up fencing, seized by an ambition to master the pris de feu (I executed the move successfully just once, twisting my opponent’s foil out of his hand, but I suspect my teacher let me). I began to frequent secondhand bookshops, hunting out cheap 1920s editions of memoirs from the period. A reprint of a 17th-century herbal, a volume of a Regency courtesan’s recollections, a late-18th-century manual for the correct governance of a duel--my library began to build.

My fascination with the Napoleonic War generation--that pivotal generation in which the Enlightenment met Romanticism, and the Georgian Age gave way to the Victorian--led me to study history at university. But it was my move to Teesdale in the north east of England that brought [my protagonist] Raif Jarrett into being.

“Having once resided in Teesdale,” Richard Garland wrote in 1804 in his published Tour, “I cannot resist an inclination to communicate to others an acquaintance with those delicious scenes.”

Southerners have a tendency to associate County Durham with slag heaps and mining and other ugly things. They haven’t seen the Dales with their big skies and painterly clouds.

Teesdale combines rugged moorland with wooded valleys, cut with gorges and waterfalls that share the picturesque charm of a Swiss mountain scene. It is a landscape sufficiently isolated for the remnants of the past to linger relatively undisturbed. You can find an Iron Age mound in the field behind an inn. The ruins of a medieval abbey perch on a hillside by a country road, while the remains of a Roman fort linger by a ford. J.B.S. Morritt was the Regency owner of the Palladian mansion Rokeby Park that stands near the junction of the rivers Greta and Tees. The scenery, he firmly believed, deserved “to become classic ground.”

Morritt’s hospitality drew several famous artists to the area in the first decade of the 19th century. John Sell Cotman spent the summer of 1805 sketching along the Greta. J.M. Turner was a repeated guest. Engravings of Turner’s paintings of the waterfalls at High Force and Cauldron Snout, and the ruins of Egglestone Abbey, served to popularize these local beauty spots. And when Sir Walter Scott penned his poem, “Rokeby,” in the grounds, he established the area around Greta Bridge as a stage on the Romantic pilgrimage to the Lakes.

One wet autumn day I sat reading through the catalogue of J.B.S. Morritt’s library. In the handwritten lists Jarrett’s world coalesced. A folio containing the latest French archaeological finds from Egypt, another on Russian costume; the march of leather-bound volumes of sermons and Shakespeare plays; the illustrated travels of Marco Polo, military memoirs, herbals and architectural treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, surgery and physic, botany, and the geology of coal mines. This was human knowledge spanned by a gentleman of the Enlightenment, when a rational man’s reason might encompass theology, folklore, magic and art, as well as science and engineering; before the explosion of data made the world too vast and the disciplines were perforce divided.

My Regency detective, Frederick Raphaele “Raif “ Jarrett, combines the rational mind of the Enlightenment with the romantic imagination of an artist. A returning soldier, he comes to Teesdale a good year before Byron is made famous by the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The British have been at war with the French most of his life. He is shipped home wounded from the Peninsular [War], where his talents as an artist led him to serve as an intelligence officer, riding out to bring back maps of enemy dispositions. His aristocratic family connections find him a job overseeing isolated properties, as the agent to the Duke of Penrith. As a newcomer to the community, and an outsider with unusual skills, he finds himself thrust into a series of investigations.

For me the charm of murder investigation before forensics rest on two things. Firstly they require close observation that identifies disturbances in the regular pattern of everyday life, and secondly, an understanding of human character--the teasing out of motives and secrets. Thus Jarrett’s artist’s eye gives him the advantage of a trained observer, but at the same time his investigations draw the returning soldier into civilian relationships, forcing him to engage in the world he fled as a betrayed and disappointed teenager.

My interesting conversation with Rebecca Jenkins was finally interrupted by a hungry Alex, who reminded me that it was time for us all to head off for a dinner sponsored by Orion Publishing. With Mosby, Ellory, and Simms in tow we thanked our hosts and followed Alex (who had the map) for the elegant Balmoral Hotel. Fortunately, there was no more talk of chicken sex, lest it put Simms off his dinner.

Waiting impatiently inside the hotel were Orion publicity manager Angela McMahon and Robert Crais (Chasing Darkness), who were concerned that we’d all somehow become lost. (Plainly, she wasn’t acquainted with Alex’s superb navigational prowess.) She ushered us in to the hotel restaurant, where we were joined by Crime Squad editor Chris Simmons and his partner, Andrew, David Headley and Daniel Gedeon from London’s Goldsboro Books, and another Orion author, Andrew Pepper (above). In addition to being a historical crime novelist, Pepper is a lecturer in English at Queen’s University in Belfast. His latest book, Kill-Devil and Water, has received some excellent word-of-mouth, so I decided to whip out my tape recorder and ask him to tell me something about it. As we waited for our meals to be served, he said:

Most of the crime novels that interest me deal, on some level or another, with the pressing social and political issues of their particular day, whether state coercion in the 1980s or religious persecution in the 1550s. In my two previous novels, The Last Days of Newgate and The Revenge of Captain Paine, I tried to pursue this kind of writing: thus [protagonist and Bow Street Runner] Pyke grapples with police reform and religious sectarianism in the former, and industrial sabotage, forced labor, and working class protest in the latter. In my new novel, Kill-Devil and Water, I wanted to write about slavery and the aftermath of successful efforts to outlaw slavery and “apprenticeship” in the British colonies in the 1830s.

All crime fiction has to tell these larger social and political stories through the lives and deaths of individual protagonists. Kill-Devil and Water begins with Mary Edgar, a woman of mixed race--or a mulatto, as she would have been called in 1840 when the novel is set--who is murdered and mutilated in the docks area of London’s East End. The task of my investigator, Pyke, is to try and piece together her life and, as he imagines it, to expose the exploitative practices which have resulted in her death. But all is not as it seems and, as Pyke sets off on a path that will take him from the slums of the East End to the crumbling sugar plantations and colonial mansions in Jamaica, he comes to realize that culpability is not easily apportioned.

Writing Kill-Devil and Water threw up all kinds of interesting challenges for me. Was it possible, in 2007 or 2008, to write a novel in which a white man “helps” or even comes to the rescue of former black slaves? If not, how could I write a novel about slavery from a white, British perspective? The Jamaican setting of the middle third of the novel deliberately evokes the Caribbean of Ian Fleming; but if the racial politics of the Bond novels were dubious even in the 1950s, how much more so would they be today? And, if the ex-slaves couldn’t simply be passive victims (and the colonials, of course, heartless oppressors), could I write a crime novel in which the villains are really the victims and the victims the villains? Would the subject and setting allow for such re-imagining without turning into an offensive, right-wing attempts to recuperate Empire?

Like most crime novels, Kill-Devil and Water is more about Pyke and his moral journey through the underworld than the crimes he investigates. But unlike the “man who is not himself mean” perfected by [Raymond] Chandler, I’ve tried to paint Pyke more in the [Dashiell] Hammett mold; as someone who is profoundly influenced and disturbed by what he comes across and who cannot remain separate from the nastiness around him. In this novel, as in the two previous ones, Pyke’s self-interest is countered with his courage and boldness--but he is a few years older and still grieving for his deceased wife. With his son, Felix, to look after, the investigation gives him the chance to pull his life together. His quest to avenge Mary Edgar’s death, meanwhile, forces him to confront his own grief and yearnings--sentiments which blind him to a truth that is staring him in the face.

For me, if the crime novel is the best literary vehicle for social and political commentary, the crimes need to be grounded in social reality. People exploit, and occasionally kill, other people for financial gain and personal advancement. This is the world that Pyke is a part of, a world that has shaped him and a world he must confront. In the end, Pyke comes to understand that while slavery may have been abolished, exploitation continues in different guises. But what was interesting for me in writing the novel was to see whether Pyke could fight these new forms of exploitation, or whether, in spite of his best efforts, he becomes complicit in them.

The dinner proved to be excellent. But Alex and I had only the main course, and needed still to wolf it down, in order to attend that evening’s rare public appearance at the Harrogate festival of soldier-turned-author Andy McNab (Crossfire). Alex has become quite a fan of McNab’s work, and he wasn’t about to miss this engagement. (I, too, have tried reading McNab’s Nick Stone military adventures, but can never manage to get past the first chapter. I can’t love every book that falls into my hands.)

So after saying our good-byes to the rest of the party, we walked briskly back to the Crown Hotel, where we found seats in the back of the room while author Laura Wilson (Stratton’s War) interviewed this former SAS man. Unfortunately, I cannot report on the course of their discussion, as between the drink and rushing around, I used the opportunity to catch a little sleep. I won’t call it “rest,” however, as Alex kept nudging me when I began to snore. In short enough order, the interview was done and we scurried off to have Alex’s McNab books signed. Finally reaching the front of the queue, I gestured for Alex to speak with the writer, while I chatted with the semi-mysterious “Brad,” who often escorts Transworld’s many authors--including Lee Child--about the UK during their visits here.

With his signed book in hand, Alex and I headed off to our final obligation of that evening: the famous Harrogate Quiz, which tests the crime-fiction knowledge of festival participants. My team had won last year’s quiz, so the pressure was on. Fortunately, that little nap during McNab’s talk had made me feel alive again.

My team of six, fielded by the online mag Shots, was composed of Transworld’s publishing director, Selina Walker, Crime Squad editor Simmons, author Roger Ellory, a pair of journalists, and myself. Adjacent to us, and taunting us the whole while, as they wished to take our trophy away, was a team comprising writer and journalist Mark Lawson, who also presents BBC Radio 4’s Front Row program, authors Mark Billingham, Robert Crais, Kevin Wignall, and two more journalists. I felt confident of our chances in this contest. But I was a bit concerned from the outset, as quiz masters Simon Kernick and Laura Wilson had informed us that this year’s questions would be “more accessible,” which is to say that they’d be less obscure, with more queries pertaining to television and film. Obscurity is what I do best; I am pretty knowledgeable on films, but I’m not a huge TV viewer. As I looked out at the large audience of writers, editors, publishers, journalists, and others who’d come to see this match-up, I began to realize that we could have my work cut out for us.

Sure enough, as the questions were cannoned our way, there were a few we struggled over, areas that challenged our collective familiarity with this genre. And when the score-marking came, a hush settled prominently over the room. Finally, Kernick and Wilson announced that the winning team was … you could have heard a feather drop at that moment …Mark Lawson’s Radio 4 team. We’d been beaten, but accepted the fact with honor, shaking hands with our opponents before they went onto the stage to accept the Harrogate Trophy. I heard later that Lawson was delighted with this outcome, as he’s been attending the Harrogate festival since its start in 2003, and is a big crime-fiction reader and supporter of the genre. I met up with Lawson after the competition, and he beamed, telling me that the trophy would be shelved at the Front Row studio at BBC’s Broadcasting House in London.

Noticing that Alex was weary (it was close to midnight by now, after all), I escorted him back to our hotel room and then returned for a nightcap. Or two. Or three. By 4 a.m., I was ready for bed myself.

The next morning, our last day at Harrogate, Alex and I decided to ignore the alarm, miss the early panel presentations, and treat ourselves to a lie-in. That was followed by a room-service breakfast with a couple of aspirin. Eventually, we showered and headed off for the festival’s final event: a sold-out interview with American author Tess Gerritsen, who was scheduled to be interviewed by writer, broadcaster, and presenter with Oneword Radio Paul Blezard. However, Blezard didn’t show, so Gerritsen improvised by detailing for the crowd the aspects of her writing life. This was only unfortunate, because I remained hung over from the previous night’s intoxicants. So I am a bit sketchy on all that Gerritsen related. But I do recall she admitted that the first drafts of her books are usually very rough--basically “unreadable”--and after that she gets down to the serious business of rewriting. Her bottom line was that successful writing is actually re-writing.

After having our Gerritsen novels signed, Alex and I picked up coffee and some additional aspirin. Stopping in at the bar, I thanked Harrogate operations director Sharon Canavar, as well as Simon Kernick, who served as this year’s programming chair. No less under the weather than I was, Kernick thanked us both for attending and downplayed his impact on the weekend’s events, saying “The least I do, the better it runs ...” He was joking, of course, since I know that behind the scenes Kernick had worked tirelessly to ensure that the Harrogate festival program was as interesting as it could be. The large attendance this year proved that he’d done his work well. From my perspective, the only problem was that this event had left me with a trunk full of new books. As we prepared to depart for home, Alex and I had to find extra room for our luggage, which by that point we considered less important than our new, signed acquisitions.

Next year’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival is already in the planning, and will feature Laura Wilson as programming committee chair. I am willing to guarantee that it will be a fine event for crime-fiction enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, I’m off next to Bouchercon in Baltimore in mid-October.

READ MORE: “More from the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival,” by Jake Kerridge (The Independent); “We’ll Always Have Harrogate,” by Kevin Wignall (Contemporary Nomad); “Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate: The 2008 Experience,” by Rhian Davies (It’s a Crime! [or a Mystery ...]); “Simon Kernick’s Harrogate Festival Diary” (London Times); “Exclusive Interviews: Talking Criminal Tendencies in Harrogate” (Yorkshire Post).