The other halfmy first satirical crime novel, satirised a very specific type of privileged Englishman. Boarding school, ancient degrees, Oxbridge less by intellectual ability than by upbringing, emotionally stunted, wealthy, white, heterosexual, male. I wrote it during the pandemic, locked in my flat and unable to leave the building except to go to the supermarket or for a daily hour-long walk. The country was ruled (badly) by Boris Johnson: an old Eton schoolboy, a human Labrador at the worst of inattention, a slacker in chief with unkempt hair, shirts that didn’t tuck into their trousers and a habit of saying Latin now and again so that people would think him clever and not entirely unsuitable for the highest office in the land. In this government, scandals over fast-tracked PPE contracts for fraternities, trips to historic monuments to test eyesight and parties were the order of the day while the rest of us stayed at home, isolated in our homes, and turned out at 6pm every night to applaud the NHS staff who were tirelessly trying to save lives. Sir Rupert Beauchamp was the embodiment of this upper-class bogeyman. A dashing baronet who had everything and yet was broken. He committed atrocities that no one wanted to do anything about.
Article continues after ad
In short, with The other half I have focused on a particular, outrageous stylistic device; The In-Crowd– the second novel in the DI Caius Beauchamp series – I broadened my horizons. A crew of rowers on an outing on the idyllic Thames collide with something. A piece of flotsam? Rubbish thrown into the river? No, they ram the body of a woman. She stays in the morgue for a week. The tragic Thames has seen many poor, unfortunate souls drown because of their misfortune over the millennia. Surely this woman was no different? The police are underfunded and will probably assume that the woman living in poverty nearby in a damp, leaky flat is just another example of a suicidal woman. This case is not investigated further than it is viewed superficially – until a minister summons our hero DI Caius to his Mayfair club – which is full of dubiously acquired artworks and passable port – and insists on it, trading Caius’s involvement in this case for carte blanche to investigate another unsolved case. This case concerns the unexplained disappearance of a student from a run-down boarding school in Cornwall almost fifteen years ago, to which Caius has a vomit-splattered trail.
Britain is an unequal society. Race, religion, gender, sexuality – yes, people are routinely and horribly discriminated against on the basis of these characteristics. But the great ‘ism’, the highway that everyone else crosses, is class. It is incredibly difficult to change social class. It is not a question of wealth. Wealth and class are not the same thing. You could be as rich as Croesus and still be treated condescendingly because of your family, the way you spend your money, the way you dress, the way you furnish your home, the place you holiday and your accent. Money helps, of course, but there is a set of cultural values, a handed-down pronunciation and a whole lifetime of shared experiences like boarding school that one’s income cannot outweigh. As Nancy Mitford was fond of telling the sharp-tongued British middle classes in the 1950s, there is also a very different language.
Much of the thankfully defunct Tory government seemed to be based on a very English kind of class allegiance: cronyism. There was a “VIP lane” for people with links to the Tory party to secure PPE contracts during the pandemic. Tory peer Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman are being investigated by the National Crime Agency on bribery and fraud charges in securing £200m of government contracts for a company called PPE Medprois. The misuse of public funds was so rampant that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is appointing a Covid corruption tsar to recover an estimated staggering £2.6bn lost to waste, fraud and faulty contracts during the pandemic. You get the feeling that a different set of rules applies to one type of person to the rest of us.
Looking for inspiration after trashing an earlier attempt at the dreaded second novel and having to start again with a deadline fast approaching, I trawled BBC iPlayer, hoping the muse would lurk among the last week’s soap operas and sitcoms, and found a documentary: House of Maxwell. Imagine a captain of industry, publisher and later press magnate, taking on Murdoch and buying up one newspaper after another, including the New York Daily News. He’s a decorated war hero. A native of Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis and joined the French Foreign Legion as a teenager. He later joined the British Army, landing on the beaches of Normandy and eventually being awarded the Military Cross for storming a German machine-gun nest. He’s smart, a polyglot with wide-ranging intellectual interests. He’s a former member of Parliament. The British elite, with their old school connections and old boy networks, have welcomed him with open arms. He lives in an idyllic Oxfordshire mansion – which he leases from the local council, no less – where his family live a life of luxury rare among the majority of Britain’s aristocracy, whose inherited properties all have leaky roofs and creaky sofas that almost collapse under the weight of their twelve cocker spaniels. Everyone remotely famous comes to his 65th birthday party. Guess what, he’s a crook too.
November 4, 1991: Robert Maxwell’s yacht Lady Ghislaine – named after his now infamous daughter – is moored off the coast of the Canary Islands. He was travelling alone. His executives, who know something is wrong with the company’s finances, are unable to reach him, and Maxwell knows they know millions are missing because he has been bugging them. A member of the ship’s crew goes to his cabin at 7:15 a.m. to wake him, but he is not there. Maxwell has disappeared. His body was later found floating in the Atlantic and ruled an accidental drowning. The holes in Maxwell’s finances were discovered shortly after his death. His companies were on the verge of collapse. After covering up a series of failed ventures by moving money from one company to another to deceive auditors, he plundered the pension fund of the Mirror Group (a British newspaper group), looting £460 million. What struck me about Robert Maxwell’s pension theft was that while Maxwell was up to no good, the great and the good were making themselves comfortable. He had apparently managed to break through the class ceiling because, although he wasn’t “the real deal,” he was rich, but more importantly, as the owner of a newspaper, he had power.
Power, no matter how dubiously obtained, speaks in a sweeter and more pleasant tone than money. In my opinion, one of the easiest ways to make power taste bitter is to make fun of it. Crime fiction is a satirical genre. It is a wonderful way to examine what is wrong with society. I may be naive, but if I can speak a little truth and get a few laughs along the way, then I consider my job done.
***
