Literary Locations #6: Aldwych Tube Station

Former entrances on

The Strand and Surrey Street

London

WC2R 

 

“When the lift goes up and the train leaves,  Aldwych station is as deserted as an ancient mine. You can hear the drip of water and the beat of your heart.”

Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household (Chatto & Windus, 1939) 

 

Upon returning to England the anonymous protagonist of Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller pays a visit to his solicitor Saul in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the Holborn area of London. However, the building is being watched by agents of the unspecified European power (which we assume from its description to be Nazi Germany) from whose clutches he has just escaped. 

 

Upon entering the underground station at Holborn, he discovers he is being followed by his chief pursuer Major Quive-Smith as well as another agent who had previously been spotted feeding the birds outside Saul’s offices. The dramatic plot sequence that follows uses the layout of the tube network as its basis. 

 

At the time Household wrote Rogue Male, a short branch of the Piccadilly line ran from Holborn to its terminus at Aldwych. After attempting to throw off his pursuers inside Holborn station, Household’s hero boards the Aldwych train only to discover that a third agent wearing a black hat and blue flannel suit is waiting for him. Whilst the train is still in the station he then lures “Black Hat” into the tunnel where the agent is electrocuted by the live rail. Now wanted for murder, he is propelled to put the next part of his escape plan into operation and go to ground in rural Dorset.


Entrance to the former Aldwych Station on Surrey Street

Aldwych station was opened as Strand in 1907 and, as Household describes, was served by a train that shuttled back and forth from Holborn. The year after Rogue Male was published the station was temporarily closed and served as an air raid shelter during the war, with its tunnels providing safe storage for items from the British Museum including the Elgin marbles. Although the branch line was the subject of several extension plans, none of these came to fruition and the station was permanently shut in 1994 due to low passenger numbers. The former entrances, which are Grade II listed, are still visible on The Strand and Surrey Street, with the Strand entrance still bearing the station’s original name. 

 

Rating (out of 10): 4

Literary References in Ian Fleming’s James Bond Novels

For most, especially those familiar with him from his screen appearances, James Bond is a man of action – someone who acts rather than thinks. Indeed, Terence Young, who directed three of the first four Bond films once remarked “I have never seen Bond read or go to the theatre, or to a concert. I believe he is mentally weak.”. Similarly, Ian Fleming’s novels, which provided the original source material for the films, have been described by Nicholas Lezard in his introduction to The Blofeld Trilogy as “aggressively anti-literary”. I think this is overstating the case and a close reading of Fleming’s work reveals that Bond is depicted reading a surprising number of times, providing us with further insight into his character. 

Ironically the most iconic fictional secret agent of the twentieth century is regularly shown reading thrillers, with the first reference to this genre appearing in From Russia with Love where we see him reading “The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler” on his flight out to Istanbul. Later on the Orient Express, during his encounter with the Soviet assassin Donovan Grant Bond is still trying to read “his Ambler”. However, he is distracted by Grant’s presence such that “After a few pages he found that his concentration was going.”. Much of the action of The Mask of Dimitrios takes place in Istanbul and, like Bond, Fleming read Ambler’s fifth novel (first published in 1939) on a flight out to the Turkish capital where he attended an international police conference.

 

At the conclusion of Goldfinger, Bond buys “the latest Raymond Chandler” in the bookshop at Idlewild airport whilst waiting for his flight back to England. Goldfinger was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959, which coincidentally was just three days before Chandler’s death. Although it is impossible to be certain, as Fleming would have written his manuscript the previous year he may have been referring to the Chandler’s 1958 Philip Marlowe novel Playback. What is more certain though is that Fleming was a friend of Chandler’s during the latter years of his life and owed at least some of Bond’s popularity in America to an endorsement that Chandler wrote for Live and Let Die in which he stated that ”Ian Fleming is probably the most forceful and driving writer of what I suppose must still be called thrillers in England”. The more prosaic reference in Goldfinger is simply Fleming returning the compliment.  

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond endorses the work of another American thriller writer. He is visiting M’s home – the only time when Fleming allows us  a glimpse into his boss’s domestic life - to discuss what can be done about Blofeld when M asks “What the devil’s the name of that fat American detective who’s always fiddling about with orchids, those obscene hybrids from Venezuela and so forth? Then he comes sweating out of his orchid house, eats a gigantic meal of some foreign muck and solves the murder. What’s he called.”. Bond is evidently a fan of these novels since he responds “Nero Wolfe, sir. They’re written by a chap called Rex Stout. I like them.”. Rex Stout created the character of Nero Wolfe in 1934 and he was to feature in a total of 33 novels over the next 40 years. Wolfe is a man of expensive tastes and, in addition to the fondness for orchids and food which M notes, he also has a strong liking for beer – a drink that seldom passes Bond’s lips!

  

Finally, the most dubious example of Bond’s reading material is provided in the short story The Living Daylights. Whilst on an assignment in Berlin which requires him to assassinate a Soviet operative, he kills time by reading a lurid German pulp novel entitled “Verderbt, Verdammt, Verraten” which features “a spectacular jacket of a half-naked girl strapped to a bed”. Fleming informs us that “the prefix “ver” signified that the girl had not only been ruined, damned and betrayed, but that she had suffered these misfortunes most thoroughly.”. The book serves to distract Bond from the task in hand as he temporarily loses himself  “in the tribulations of the heroine, Gräfin Liselotte Muntzenbacher”. 

This is interesting in that it confirms that Bond can speak German – we are told in You Only Live Twice that he learned German and French whilst spending much of his early life abroad on account of his father’s job as a representative of the Vickers armaments company. However, whilst John le Carré’s fictional spy George Smiley uses his knowledge of the language to read obscure German poetry, by contrast Bond’s choice of reading matter is much less erudite. 

For further consideration of the literary references in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, see my recently published e-book The Books of Bond.

The Books of Bond

For a series of books that are usually thought of as being unliterary, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels contain a surprising number of references to other literary sources. Bond himself, generally regarded as a man of action, is frequently depicted reading. Find out more about these references - which range from Eric Ambler to P.G. Wodehouse, taking in Hemingway, Lermontov, Pliny and de Sade along the way - in The Books of Bond, available now as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store.

Literary Locations #5: The College of Arms

The College of Arms

130 Queen Victoria Street

London

EC4V 4BT

 

Website: www.college-of-arms.gov.uk

 

“The College of Arms is in Queen Victoria Street on the fringe of the City. It is a pleasant little Queen Anne backwater in ancient red brick with white sashed windows and a convenient cobbled courtyard, where Bond parked his car.”

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1963)

View of the College from Queen Victoria Street

The College of Arms is a royal corporation which is the official repository of the coats of arms and pedigrees of English, Welsh, Northern Irish and Commonwealth families and their descendants. The officers of the College specialise in genealogical and heraldic work which they undertake for their clients.

 

The first edition of On Her
Majesty's Secret Service

The College and its work features prominently in Ian Fleming’s eleventh James Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service both as a setting and plot device. Having been despatched to the College by M, Bond is initially unaware of the reason for his visit and is quizzed by one of the College officers – who rejoices under the archaic title of Griffon Or – about his own family background. This amusing interchange provides Fleming with the pretext to provide us with some details of Bond’s roots. For instance we learn that he has “no connexion with Peckham” and that his “father was a Scot” who “came from the Highlands, near Glencoe” and that his “mother was Swiss”. Griffon Or believes that Bond will be anxious to establish whether he is related to Sir Thomas Bond, who gave his name to Bond Street in London’s West End and whose family motto is Orbis non sufficit or “the World is not enough”. The Bond coat of arms and motto provided the basis for Richard Chopping's cover design for the book's first edition.

After this initial misunderstanding Bond learns from another of the College’s officers, Sable Basilisk, that his arch enemy Blofeld has designs on the title of “le Comte de Bleuville” and has asked the College to validate his claim. This provides Bond with the opportunity to pose as “Sir Hilary Bray” - an envoy of the College – and thereby gain access to Blofeld’s mountain-top lair Piz Gloria.

The College, which has stood in its present location since 1555, looks very much as it did in Fleming’s day with the most recent addition being the gates which were erected in 1956 - although modern visitors will be unlikely to regard the present day Queen Victoria Street as a “backwater”!

Rating (out of 10): 4

Literary Locations #4: John le Carré’s “Circus”

Trentishoe Mansions

90 Charing Cross Road

London

WC2H 0JE

In John le Carré’s classic trilogy of novels featuring George Smiley as the mild mannered but mentally agile spy, the “circus” is the term used to refer to the British secret intelligence service MI6. The name derives from the proximity of its headquarters to Cambridge Circus, a traffic intersection in central London. However, le Carré provides a number of clues in his novels that enable us to pinpoint the exact building that he had in mind.

The junction of Charing Cross Road
and the former Little Compton Street

"an hexagonal pepper pot overlooking New
Compton street and the Charing Cross Road"

Firstly, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy we are told that Smiley’s colleague Bill Haydon has an office which is “an hexagonal pepper pot overlooking New Compton Street and the Charing Cross Road”. Although today these two roads do not intersect, New Compton Street was once joined with Old Compton Street by Little Compton Street, which has now vanished beneath an office block. In The Honourable Schoolboy, the circus is described as being housed in an “Edwardian mausoleum”. At the junction of Charing Cross Road and what was once Little Compton Street stands an Edwardian block of flats named Trentishoe Mansions and, if you look up to the roof, you can see a small turret resembling the description of Haydon’s lair.



"A dull doorway in the Charing Cross Road"

Further corroboration is provided when, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we are told that the circus’ archives are not accessible from the main entrance but are “reached by a dull doorway in the Charing Cross Road jammed between a picture-framer and an all-day café”. Although the commercial spaces are currently occupied by a musical instruments shop and a West End ticket agency, the doorway is still much as le Carré describes.

However, whilst the building itself exists, its role as a spy headquarters is a fictional construct as MI6 were never based in these residential flats. However, the building does have another literary connection in that it is adjacent to the former site of the antiquarian booksellers Marks & Co which featured in Helene Hanff’s book 84, Charing Cross Road, which documented a twenty year correspondence between Hanff and the shop’s chief buyer Frank Doel. Although Marks & Co has long since closed, the story is commemorated by a circular brass plaque on the wall.

 

Rating (out of 10): 6

Literary Locations #3: The Temple Church

Temple

London

EC4Y 7BB

Website: www.templechurch.com 

Admission charge: £4.00 (£6.00 for Friday lunchtime talks)

“London’s ancient Temple Church was constructed entirely out of Caen stone. A dramatic, circular edifice with a daunting façade, a central turret and a protruding nave off one side, the church looked more like a military stronghold than a place of worship.”

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (Bantam Press, 2003)

The Temple Church was built by the Knight’s Templar, the order of military monks that was created to protect pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades. It’s original design was based around a circular church, rather than the usual cross, which was modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The round church was consecrated in 1185 with the rectangular chancel being a later addition.

The church features in Dan Brown’s best-selling popular novel The Da Vinci Code as one of the locations that its protagonists Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu visit in their search for the Holy Grail. They are led there by a coded riddle that seems to point to the grave of a knight who has been persecuted by the Pope, although upon arriving there they discover that the stone carvings of nine knights that are located in the round church are actually effigies rather than grave markers.

"Lying supine on the floor, the carved, life-sized figures rested in peaceful poses."

The church is open to the public and, provided that a service is not in progress, you are free to wander around inside upon payment of the admission fee. However, it is best to coincide your visit with one of the talks that are given on Fridays during the summertime by the current Master of the Temple, Robin Griffith-Jones. Griffith-Jones gives a lively and engaging account of the origins of the Knights Templar and their persecution in France by Philip IV as well as the history of the church, including its restoration after it was badly damaged by German air raids during the Blitz – the evidence of which is still visible on the effigies of the knights. Whilst Griffith-Jones’ talk touches upon the appearance of the church in the novel, you can consult his book The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple - which can be purchased at the desk just inside the entrance – for a more thorough examination of fact and fiction in Brown’s work.

Rating (out of 10): 6

Literary Locations #2: Platform 9¾, Kings Cross Station



The current site of the platform

Kings Cross Railway Station

Euston Road

London

N1 9AL

Admission charge: Free

“Harry looked behind him and saw a wrought-iron archway where the ticket box had been, with the words Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on it. He had done it”

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. K. Rowling (Bloomsbury, 1997)

Platform 9¾, Kings Cross features in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as the departure point for the Hogwarts Express, the rail service by which Harry and his friends reach Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Although it is invisible to those without magical ability, the platform can be reached by passing through a brick wall barrier located between platforms 9 and 10.

Following the success of the books and subsequent film series, a “Platform 9¾” sign was erected at the station. Below it the rear wheels and handle of a luggage trolley were set into the bricks to give the appearance that it is moving through the wall.

The new concourse at Kings Cross

The sign and trolley were originally located on the wall of a separate annex to Kings Cross which houses the real platforms 9 and 10. However, they can now be found on a wall of the impressive new station concourse – the canopy of which is the largest single span structure in Europe – which was opened on 19 March 2012.

Whilst it’s worth a visit if you happen to be passing through Kings Cross and young children will enjoy the photo opportunity that it provides, it’s not worth making a special trip to see it unless you are a diehard Harry Potter fan.

Rating (out of 10): 3

Literary Locations #1: Dr Johnson’s House

17 Gough Square
London
EC4A 3DE

Website: www.drjohnsonshouse.org 

Admission charge: £4.50 (Adult)

17 Gough Square is the former home of the eighteenth century lexicographer, writer and wit Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) whose best known work was his highly influential A Dictionary of the English Language. Published in 1755, this was the leading English dictionary for almost 130 years until the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in 1884. Johnson, who was commissioned to write the dictionary by a syndicate of London booksellers in 1746, had originally claimed that he would complete the work in three years. In the end this considerable feat of scholarship, which involved writing definitions for over 42,000 words and compiling 114,000 literary quotations to illustrate them, eventually took him nine. Johnson was immortalised by his friend and biographer James Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791.

In 1911 Johnson's former home was bought by the liberal politician and newspaper magnate Cecil Harmsworth. Since Johnson’s occupancy it had been put to a number of uses including a hotel, printer’s workshop and warehouse space and had fallen into a state of disrepair. Harmsworth spent a considerable amount of his own money conserving and renovating the house, following two rules – that nothing old should be taken out and that nothing new should be brought in – so that a visitor today can form a good impression of how it would have looked in Johnson’s day. Although he received a fee of 1,500 guineas (the equivalent of about £230,000 in today’s money) for his dictionary, Johnson spent much of his life in financial difficulty and this fact is reflected in the simple and modest way in which the house is furnished and decorated.

There are four floors of the house to visit, starting in the entrance hall which doubles as a gift shop selling a range of books as well as paperweights and tea towels. You then work your way up through the living room, library and eventually into the garret in which the work of compiling the dictionary was carried out. During World War 2, members of the Auxiliary Fire Service were allowed to use the house as a social centre and this proved invaluable in saving the building when it was hit by incendiaries and a barrel of burning oil during air raids– events which are still evidenced today by the scorched beams in the roof.

One feature that will enhance your visit to the house is the excellent audio commentary which is provided on a portable handset with headphones. This is well worth the additional £2.00 charge and will enable you to gain a much better appreciation of the features and history of the house as well as Johnson’s life and his circle of friends, including his Jamaican manservant Francis Barber and the actor David Garrick. You should allow about an hour for a self-guided tour around the house with the audio commentary.

Rating (out of 10): 8

Classic Novels #1: Bomber by Len Deighton

First edition: Jonathan Cape, 1970

Current first edition value (in VG condition): £60-£70

After establishing himself as an author during the 1960s with his series of spy novels featuring a laconic, nameless protagonist (who became “Harry Palmer” for the subsequent films starring Michael Caine) Deighton turned to another of his major interests for inspiration – the Second World War.

Bomber - his seventh novel – was his most ambitious work to date and recounts a botched Allied bombing raid on Germany in 1943. Although the personalities involved and the details of the raid are fictitious (the action is said to take place on the non-existent date of 31^st June) it was meticulously researched to ensure that it provided an authentic and gripping portrayal of what it was like to  participate in – and experience the effects of – an air attack. This depth of research is particularly evident in Deighton’s mastery of technical details. Weather patterns, the workings of the German radar defence system and even how many fragments a flak shell might disintegrate into upon exploding are all described with a cool detachment that provides a counterpoint to the intense human drama of the story.

Deighton provides a variety of different viewpoints to recount the action. In addition to the bomber crews themselves the reader sees events unfold from the perspective of German Luftwaffe radar station operatives and night-fighter pilots as well as civilians in the small town of Altgarten that becomes the unintended target of the raid after marker bombs are dropped short of the industrial centre of Krefeld. This narrative technique helps to provide a balanced picture of both the effectiveness and morality of the Allied night bombing strategy – a feature which was unusual in a novel published just 25 years after the end of the conflict. Similarly, Deighton employs light and shade in his portrayal of individual characters with heroes and villain appearing on both sides, from the Luftwaffe pilot who learns of the horrific experiments being carried out within the concentration camps to the RAF ground crew who profit by selling their base’s provisions on the black market.

Bomber is one of Deighton’s most critically-acclaimed works. Kingsley Amis rated it as one of the ten best books of the 20^th century whilst Anthony Burgess included it within his list of the 99 best English novels published since 1939. These factors have helped to make it one of the more collectable of the author’s later works and you can expect to pay upwards of £60 for a copy of the first edition in very good condition in its Ray Hawkey-designed dust-jacket featuring detail from the Turner painting “Fisherman at Sea off the Needles”.

Novel facts:

1.     Bomber provided the inspiration for heavy metal band Motörhead’s album of the same name, which was released in 1979.

2.     In his introduction to the 2009 reissue, Deighton describes how Bomber was the first novel to be written on a word-processor after he was permitted to become the only private owner of an IBM MT 72 computer which was “the size and shape of a small upright piano”!

Collector's Guide to Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon

My collector’s guide to the novels of Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon has just been published as an ebook by Famous Firsts. American Greats provides an assessment of the works of two of America's leading living novelists including V, Gravity's Rainbow, Blood Meridian and The Road together with a complete guide to current first edition prices. It is available as from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Collector's Guide to Poker Books

My collector’s guide to poker books Dealer’s Choice has recently been published as an ebook by Famous Firsts. Looking at titles from the origins of the game up to the present day and featuring a bibliography complete with guide to current first edition prices it is available as from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Collector's Guide to Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler

Part 8 of the Guide to Collecting Modern Books, which looks at the genre of spy fiction, will be coming soon. In the meantime, my collector's guide to the war novels of Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler, Nazis in Fiction, has recently been published by Famous Firsts and is available as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Part 7: Literary prize winners

Introduction

Collecting the first editions of literary prize winners is a popular avenue for a number of book collectors. Not only does the theme provide some guarantee that the books you collect will have some literary merit but a collection of prize-winning titles spanning a number of years can provide a fascinating insight into changing tastes over time. This instalment of the Guide looks at the increasing number of literary prizes on offer and some of the more collectable works within each.





Image supplied by Jonkers Rare Books
http://www.jonkers.co.uk/

The Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize is probably the world’s best known literary award and aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The prize, which was established by international food distribution company Booker McConnell, was launched in 1969 when the inaugural winner was P H Newby’s Something to Answer For. Whilst today the prize has the power to transform an author’s profile and transport them to the top of the bestseller lists, in those days it had a limited influence upon a book’s sales with Newby’s publishers Faber & Faber attributing just 1,800 copies of the novel’s total sales of 6,400 to the award. This relatively low print run means that it is one of the scarcer winning titles and you can now expect to pay between £150 and £200 for a copy of Something to Answer For in very good condition.

The award attracted some controversy, particularly in its early years. For example John Berger (whose novel G was the winner in 1972) used the award ceremony to criticise what he saw as the prize sponsors’ exploitation of foreign workers and gave half of his £5,000 prize money to the Black Panthers. Today the prize is worth ten times this amount. The award of the prize in 1982 to Schindler’s Ark by the Australian author Thomas Keneally was also criticised by some who considered that his narrative of the wartime exploits of industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved over 1,200 Polish Jews from Nazi concentration camps, was more a work of biography or history than fiction. Another controversial winner came in 1994 with How Late it Was, How Late by the Scottish author James Kelman. Written as a stream of conscious narrative in Glaswegian dialect and liberally interspersed with profanities, the work follows the fortunes of ex-convict and shoplifter Sammy. The subject matter and style of Kelman’s work did not prove universally popular with the judging panel with Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatening to resign if it won and branding it a “disgrace”. Kelman has since said that the negative publicity surrounding his win actually made publishers more reluctant to handle his work.

Some authors have been particularly favoured by the prize’s judging panel over the years with both the South African J M Coetzee and Australian Peter Carey winning it twice. Coetzee with Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999 and Carey with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The only other author to have won the prize more than once is J G Farrell, although here the circumstances were somewhat unusual. Farrell won the prize in 1973 with the second book in his Empire Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur. When it was originally launched the Booker was a prize that was awarded retrospectively. However, in 1971 the rules were changed so that it became a prize for the best novel in the year of publication and the award ceremony was moved from April to November. The upshot of this was that much of the fiction published during 1970 was never eligible to be considered. Forty years later, steps were taken to rectify this position and in May 2010 the Lost Man Booker Prize was awarded to the first novel in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, The Troubles. Farrell, who drowned in Bantry Bay in Ireland in 1979, thus became the Prize’s only posthumous winner.

In terms of value the most expensive Booker winners for the collector to obtain are Stanley Middleton’s Holiday (which was co-winner in 1974 along with Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which took the prize in 1981. Very good copies of either are worth between £400 and £600. Whilst Middleton was the author of over 40 well observed and realistic novels, evidence of changing reading tastes is provided by the fact that when the Sunday Times sent the opening chapter of Holiday to 21 leading publishers and literary agents in 2006, all but one of the responses was a rejection. Midnight’s Children on the other hand was also voted as the Best of the Booker in 2008 – a one-off award to celebrate the Prize’s fortieth anniversary.

In addition to collecting the winning titles (a full set of which would cost around £2,500), some try to amass a set of the shortlisted titles as well. The shortlist, which is usually announced in September, has contained some gems over the years with the most valuable shortlisted titles being Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (which lost out to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac in 1984 and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (both of which are worth between £150 and £200).

The Costa Book Awards

The Costa Book Awards (which started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards) are a more populist competitor to the Booker Prize. Awards are given in five categories – best novel, best first novel, children’s book, poetry and biography.

The inaugural novel of the year award was won by Gerda Charles for her fifth and final novel The Destiny Waltz. In 1985 an overall Book of the Year award was introduced, and recent winners of this accolade include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (in 2003) and Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2001).

The Orange Prize for Fiction

A relatively new addition to the plethora of literary prizes is the Orange Prize for Fiction, which was launched in 1996. The prize differs from the others considered here in that it is only open to female authors. Although the author can be of any nationality, their work must have been published in English in the United Kingdom within the preceding year. The award was a response to the view amongst some women writers that their work was being overlooked by the other major literary awards, a belief that was prompted in part by the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Booker Prize. However, the rationale for the prize has not been without its critics.  The 1990 Booker winner AS Byatt has described it as a “sexist prize” whilst Germaine Greer complained that soon there would be a prize for writers with red hair. Nevertheless, the prize can have a significant impact upon a book’s sales. Sales of Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter quadrupled after winning the inaugural prize whilst Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which won in 2004, sold over 1 million copies, outstripping the Booker Prize winner that year (Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty). Small Island was also named the “Orange of Oranges” in 2005, as being the best novel of the first decade of the prize and, with it having formed the basis of a BBC drama in 2009, copies in fine condition are now worth upwards of £50.

The Pulitzer Prize

The leading American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, was established by Joseph Pulitzer the Hungarian émigré journalist and publisher of The St Louis Post Dispatch and New York World newspapers. Following his death in 1911, Pulitzer left $2 million in his will to Columbia University and part of this was used to set up the prize fund, which the university administers. Whilst the majority of prizes are awarded for excellence in newspaper journalism, the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948) is awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.

The prize was first awarded in 1918 to His Family by Ernest Poole. The following year the winner was The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, which is probably better known today as the basis for Orson Welles’ 1942 film. Tarkington was to win the prize a second time in 1922 for Alice Adams, which is a distinction he shares with William Faulkner (a winner in 1955 for A Fable and in 1963 for his final novel The Reivers) and John Updike (for the third and fourth novels in his Rabbit series Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest). Other well-known winners include Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in 1921 and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in 1937.

National Book Award

Another leading American literary prize is the National Book Award, which was established in 1950 by a consortium of book publishing groups with the aims of enhancing the public’s awareness of exceptional books written by American authors and increasing the popularity of reading in general. Awards are given in four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s fiction. The inaugural winner of the fiction award was Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (which formed the basis of the 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra). Saul Bellow has won the award an unrivalled three times in three different decades in 1954 (The Adventures of Augie March), 1965 (Herzog) and 1971 (Mr Sammler’s Planet).

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are Britain’s oldest literary prizes, dating back to 1919. They were founded in memory of James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house A&C Black, and are administered by the University of Edinburgh. Unlike other prizes, which tend to have a sponsor and a panel of celebrity judges, the winners are chosen by the university’s Professor of English Literature, who is assisted in the shortlisting stage by PhD students. This method seems to have proved a successful formula over the years with the list of previous winners containing classics of English literature such as EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms rubbing shoulders with popular genre works such as CS Foresters’ second Hornblower novel A Ship of the Line and John le Carré’s George Smiley novel The Honourable Schoolboy and edgier recent works such as David Peace’s GB84.

The CWA Gold Dagger

Whilst the awards we have considered so far are primarily given to works of literary fiction, some leading prizes are reserved for genre works. For example, the Crime Writers’ Association bestows its Gold Dagger Award on the best crime novel of the year. This award was launched in 1955, two years after the CWA was founded by John Creasey, and for the first five years of its existence the prize rejoiced under the title of the Crossed Red Herring Award. The first winner was Winston Graham’s The Little Walls. Some notable winners over the years have included Colin Dexter (for The Wench is Dead in 1989 and The Way Through the Woods in 1992), Dick Francis (for Whip Hand in 1979) and John le Carré (for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 and The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977).

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards, named after the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories Hugo Gernsback, are presented for the best science fiction or fantasy work of the previous year. The awards have been presented in a number of categories since 1953 with the results being decided by a vote of members of the World Science Fiction Society. The winner of the inaugural Hugo for best novel was The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Robert A Heinlein has received the most Hugos for best novel with five wins (which included Starship Troopers in 1960) whilst other winners which may be familiar to the wider reading public include  Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle in 1963 (an alternate history envisaging a world where the Axis forces have won the Second World War), William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1985 and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2001.

Part 8: Spy Fiction

Part 6: Contemporary fiction 1975 - present

Introduction

Whereas the majority of titles that we have looked at in the preceding instalments of this guide have established their place in the literary canon through a combination of critical consensus and enduring popularity, the situation is less certain when we come to contemporary fiction. New authors can rapidly attract the attentions of collectors on the back of an acclaimed debut but, if subsequent efforts fail to satisfy the expectations that have been built up, then the value of the preceding works may well be reassessed. As a recent example Adam Thirlwell was included in Granta’s 2003 list of young British novelists on the strength of his debut work Politics, published later that year, which was generally well-received. However his non-fiction follow up, Miss Herbert, received something of a savaging at the hands of the critics (most notably in The Observer and The Times). Whilst many of the works featured here represent the efforts of well-regarded novelists writing at the peak of their powers, it’s impossible to say with any certainty that they will be as well thought of or influential 25 or 50 years from now.

Eighties Excess

The promotion of free market values by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and America during the 1980s helped to foster a more materialistic culture with the focus being much more on individual gain rather than the common good. Two novels which encapsulate (or rather satirise) the values of this period are Martin Amis’ Money and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Money, published by Cape in 1984, is the story of John Self (who, as a director of television commercials, holds a quintessentially 1980s position) and his attempts to get his first feature film off the ground. Self is the embodiment of consumerism and hedonism – constantly smoking (“Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette”), drinking and eating to excess and spending copious amounts on prostitutes and pornography. Spending just under 400 pages in the company of the boorish and violent Self ought not to be an enjoyable or engaging experience but, thanks to the exuberance and outrageous humour of Amis’ prose, together with Self’s undeluded recognition of his multitude of faults, it is. Copies of the first edition are usually priced between £30 and £40.

The protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities – Sherman McCoy – is also an embodiment of the ideals of the time. McCoy is a millionaire bond trader who regards himself as a “Master of the Universe”. However, despite his wealth and privileged position, an encounter with two young black men, after taking a wrong turn into the Bronx whilst driving into Manhattan with his mistress, sows the seeds of his downfall. Whilst Wolfe had written a series of highly regarded non-fiction works based upon his journalism, The Bonfire of the Vanities was his first novel. It was originally serialised in 27 instalments in Rolling Stone magazine, starting in 1984 before being heavily revised for publication in novel form in 1987 becoming an instant bestseller.

Religious Fundamentalism

Whilst a number of works in the immediate post-war period (such as Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited) were written from an expressly Catholic standpoint, novels with an overtly religious theme are much less common today. However, this is not to say that authors do not continue to explore the influence of religion in today’s more secular society.

One example is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in the near future it depicts a totalitarian state, the Republic of Gilead, which has been established following the overthrow of the United States government in a military coup. The theocratic dictatorship demands adherence to a strict set of rules drawn from the Old Testament with harsh punishments for anyone who transgresses. Dwindling birth rates and the high incidence of birth deformities (caused by disease, radiation and pollution) mean that children are a prized rarity. In response to this, a class of fertile women (termed the “handmaids”) has been created whose sole purpose is to serve as concubines to the members of the male ruling elite (the “commanders”) and bear them children. This practice takes its authority from the story of Rachel and Leah in the book of Genesis and The Handmaid’s Tale generally is a warning of the loss of individual freedom that can result from a fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts. The Handmaid’s Tale was awarded the 1986 Booker Prize and the true first edition (published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart) is worth up to £40.

The most notorious example of religious debate engendered by a work of fiction in recent years has to be that generated by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. Rushdie’s inclusion of some fictionalised references to Islamic history in the book (the title of which refers to some apparently pagan verses from the Qu’ran alleged by some to have been uttered by the prophet Muhammad) was regarded by many Muslims as blasphemous. The ensuing furore led to the book being banned in Muslim countries and burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. The most extreme reaction came from Iran whose leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers - a move which resulted in Rushdie being placed under police protection and going into hiding.  The controversy highlighted the contrast between the Western value of freedom of expression and the Muslim belief that no-one should disparage the founder of Islam.

Death

Benjamin Franklin famously classed death (along with taxes) as being one of the certainties of life. Whilst the latter has formed the basis of few notable novels, death has certainly provided the inspiration for many authors throughout literary history.

Ian McEwan is a significant author of the contemporary period whose novels – particularly his earlier works - focus heavily on death. The Cement Garden, published in 1978, looks at the coping mechanisms that four children employ to come to terms with the deaths of first their father (who suffers a heart attack whilst attempting to concrete over the garden of the family home) and then their bedridden mother. Either through an inability to confront the situation or to avoid being taken into care, they bury the mother in a trunk in the cellar and encase her body with the remaining concrete. As the school holidays start they begin to exhibit increasingly strange and dark behaviours in their isolation from the rest of the world. With The Cement Garden being McEwan’s debut novel, you would need to part with between £200 and £300 to obtain a copy in its dustjacket depicting weeds growing through cracked cement.

The two central characters of Don DeLillo’s White Noise – Jack Gladney and his wife Babette – are preoccupied with the thought of death, each having a horror of dying before the other and being left alone. Whilst both are in healthy middle age at the outset of the novel, Gladney’s exposure to a “toxic airborne event” following a chemical spill at the nearby railway freight depot leaves him feeling that he is living under a death sentence whilst Babette resorts to participating in trials for an experimental drug that has been developed to reduce the fear of dying. White Noise was DeLillo’s eighth novel and the one that brought him to the attention of a wider audience. In part it is a contemplation of modern society’s fear of death despite of our increasing longevity. It is also an effective satire on other contemporary phenomena, including consumerism (DeLillo originally intended to call the book “Panasonic”) and academic life (Gladney has established the field of “Hitler studies” although suffers insecurities over his inability to speak German).

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, deals with death on a much bigger scale depicting a post-apocalyptic America, which has been reduced to a burnt-out wasteland by some unspecified disaster. Two characters - an unnamed man and his young son - travel on foot towards the coast in search of the remnants of humanity, surviving by scavenging for tinned food and avoiding those other survivors who have reverted to a feral state and turned to enslaving and eating those who are weaker. Although the novel highlight’s man’s dogged attempts to survive even the most hostile environments, it offers a bleak and harrowing vision of the future of humanity. 

The “Great American Novel”

Whilst it is an overused term, a number of major novels published during the contemporary period can lay claim to falling into this category through capturing something of the American Zeitgeist with two particularly worthy candidates being Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

Published in 1985, Blood Meridian is based upon historical events which took place between 1848-51 and follows the fortunes of “the Kid” a 14-year old Tennessean who has run away from home. In search of adventure, he falls in with a band of mercenaries led by Captain White who are seeking to continue the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. After surviving the slaughter of White’s group by Comanche the Kid joins the Glanton Gang, a notorious group of scalp hunters who are hired by the Mexican authorities to clear the border area of Indians. As the novel progresses, the gang turns from the officially sanctioned slaughter of Indians to the killing of Mexicans, and the narrative becomes an unflinching account of the gang’s descent into increasing violence and depravity, the hellish quality of which is enhanced by McCarthy’s poetic use of language. Essentially the novel provides a nihilistic alternative to the usual heroic vision of the birth of the American West.

Although it attracted little attention at the time of publication, Blood Meridian’s critical reputation has increased significantly in the intervening years and in 2006 it was placed third in a poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest novels of the previous 25 years. Today you could expect to pay over £1,000 for a copy of the American first edition in very good condition.

American Pastoral is set in the much more recent past, spanning the social and political upheaval of the late sixties, through Watergate up until the 1990s. Narrated by Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, the novel follows the fortunes of successful high school athlete and businessman Seymour “Swede” Levov whose comfortable existence is thrown into turmoil after his daughter becomes radicalised by the Vietnam war and plants a bomb in a local post office. The novel, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, draws parallels between the manner in which a comfortable, successful life can be ruined with the evaporation of America’s post war optimism.

Multiculturalism

Another significant theme of the contemporary British novel is the exploration of the increasing diversity of our society. Whereas in a previous era, novelists such as EM Forster wrote about our attitudes towards the colonies, now a number of leading novelists write about the experiences of immigrants and their descendants in this country. A notable example of this is Zadie Smith’s White Teeth which depicts characters from a range of cultures (including Jamaican, Bangladeshi and white British) and religions (including Jewish, Islamic and Jehovah’s Witness). Rather than resorting to stereotypical portraits, the novel presents the qualities and negative aspects of the various cultures as well as the conflict that immigrants experience between preserving their traditions and assimilating into the new society. 

CONTEMPORARY FICTION: 1975-present – SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A guide to current values of first editions in Very Good condition (with dustjackets).

McEwan, Ian: THE CEMENT GARDEN

            (Jonathan Cape, 1978)......................................................£20-£40 (£200-£300)

Amis, Martin: MONEY

            (Jonathan Cape, 1984).............................................................£6-£8 (£30-£40)

Atwood, Margaret: THE HANDMAID’S TALE

(McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1985)…...….……....................£8-£10 (£30-£40)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1986)…………….....................................£3-£5 (£20-£25)

DeLillo, Don: WHITE NOISE

(Viking, US, 1985)…….…………………...….………................£12-£15 (£70-£80)

Ditto (Picador, 1985)….………………....................................£10-£12 (£50-£60)

McCarthy, Cormac: BLOOD MERIDIAN

(Random House, US, 1985).………...........................£150-£200 (£1,000-£1,100)

Ditto (Picador, 1989)……..……..........................................£25-£30 (£200-£225)

Wolfe, Tom: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, US, 1987)…...………........................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1987)….……….......................................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

Rushdie, Salman: THE SATANIC VERSES

            (Viking, 1988)......................................................................£10-£12 (£40-£50)

Roth, Philip: AMERICAN PASTORAL

(Houghton Mifflin, US, 1997).……….........................................£8-£10 (£30-£40)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1997)………..........................................£8-£10 (£20-£25)

Smith, Zadie: WHITE TEETH

            (Hamish Hamilton, 2000)..........................................................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

McCarthy, Cormac: THE ROAD

(Knopf, US, 2006)..…..….……….............................................£8-£10 (£20-£25)

Ditto (Picador, 2006)……………............................................£12-£15 (£75-£80)

Part 7: Literary prize winners