Thomas shot to fame with his debut novel ‘The Virgin Soldiers‘ (1966). I liked this not only because of the interesting historical setting (1940s Malaya during the Emergency), the social history about National Service, the rough working class male subject matter (unusual in the middle-class feminised world of literature) but also because Thomas’s prose style was wildly inventive, with lots of florid phrasing and unexpected metaphors.
Ten years later it feels like he and his style had settled down into a routine. This was his eleventh novel in 10 years, plus a couple of screenplays, and it shows. Page for page, his style is a lot less interesting; the central character (shambling police detective, ridiculed by all his colleagues) and the plot (by chance he stumbles over, and solves, a real murder mystery) both feel over-familiar and tired.
Indeed, its familiarity is indicated by the fact that the Dangerous Davies novels (Thomas eventually wrote 4 of them) were made into ‘a major new ITV drama’ – always a bad sign – in fact into 4 separate series consisting of 17 episodes, starring Peter Davidson (‘Dr Who’, ‘It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet’) as Dangerous, and standup comedian Sean Hughes as his sidekick, Mod Lewis. Neither bit of casting seems appropriate as neither Dangerous nor Mod are particularly attractive characters.
And although it features a fairly large cast of about 20 named characters, and although he tries to give them quirks and foibles, none of them and none of the text has the energy or interest of a novel from even five years earlier, like Tropic of Ruislip. It’s a sad book which left me thoroughly depressed.
Introducing Dangerous Davies
The novel establishes Davies’s shambling character by opening with him on a stakeout at a cemetery which some lunatic has threatened to blow up. To be precise he wakes up on the tomb where he, characteristically, fell asleep on the job. Nobody blew up anything and the tip-off letter later is revealed to have been talking about tombs not ‘bombs’ as the coppers originally thought. I enjoyed his bad-tempered dialogue with the grumpy cemetery keeper, although this turns out to be possibly the funniest scene in the book.
Davies is a tall, shambling middle-aged police detective constable. He’s 33 (p.17). His first name is Peregrine although nobody ever uses it (p.238). He’s gotten the nickname ‘Dangerous’ for two reasons: 1) he is so innocent and trusting that he’s completely harmless but this means that 2) quite regularly he’s sent on genuinely dangerous assignments such as breaking down the door of a West Indian bloke who’s gone mental and is threatening to kill everyone. In the event, Dangerous does bravely break the door in but then pauses to say something just long enough for the black guy to swing a full length mirror at his head, thus sending Davies to Accident and Emergency Department (yet again).
Dangerous doesn’t own a home. He has a room at a shabby boarding house called the ‘Bali Hi’ in Furtman Gardens, run by the bad-tempered Mrs Fulljames. He lives there with his lawful wedded wife, Doris but I think they rent separate rooms, only meeting at dinner time when Mrs Fulljames serves up inedibly disgusting grub to a table full of disgruntled boarders.
These are: Mr Smeeton the Complete Home Entertainer who’s often showing up in fancy dress costume for his work; Miss Minnie Banks, an outstandingly thin infants’ school teacher; and Mr Patel.
But the main one is Mod Lewis, short for Modest, the Russian name of Tchaikovsky’s brother (p.18). In fact Mod is Welsh and fancies himself as a bit of a philosopher not to mention a source of reams of useless information. This he picks up as a result of spending most of every day in the local library, apart from his occasional visits to the job centre where he’s managed to evade getting job for over a decade.
After dinner, Dangerous and Mod usually go off to The Babe in Arms pub to get hammered. One of the pub’s features is a blowsy middle-aged woman who comes in every evening, gets plastered and insists on putting the single ‘Eviva Espana’ on the jukebox and singing, and then dancing, along with it.
Dangerous owns a 1937 Lagonda Tourer (p.17). A long time ago this was a stylish motor but the retractable roof is stuck in the down position so whenever it rains he gets soaked. In the same spirit he owns a big shambling dog, Kitty, which is more likely to attack him (Dangerous) than help him and which lives in the car.
Plot summary
Inspector Yardbird tells Dangerous that a notorious villain responsible for umpteen crimes in the area, one Cecil Ramscar, who had decamped to the States years ago, is rumoured to be back in the neighbourhood and involved in some gang which might be preparing to pull a big job. So Yardbird tasks Dangerous with tracking Ramscar down.
The case of Celia Norris
However, when Dangerous goes through Ramscar’s old files he is sidetracked by the case of a young girl, Celia Norris, who went missing one night (June) in 1951 and whose body was never found. With typical aberrance, Dangerous is hooked by this old, unsolved mystery and decides to solve it. He misleads his boss and other police at the station, neglects his assignment of tracking down Ramscar and instead becomes obsessed with old photos of the missing girl and her sad story.
Almost all the text consists of Dangerous setting out to visit everyone who had any connection with the missing girl, and a sad and sorry bunch they turn out to be, namely:
- Celia’s mother, Elizabeth Norris
- father Albert Norris
- other daughter Josie Norris
- boyfriend William ‘Bill’ Lind
- schoolfriend Ena Brown, who married Bill, thus becoming Ena Lind
- leader of the youth club they belonged to, David Boot
- pervert Andrew Parsons who was found in possession of the missing girl’s clothes
David Boot
Boot is now the owner of a sex emporium named The Garden of Ooo-la-la (p.64). Dangerous has several meetings with him. At the first one he’s told by the gangly youth who minds the store to wait out back where he finds a half-inflated sex doll and can’t resist the temptation to use the attached footpump to blow it up to life-size and then far beyond, till Boot arrives in the storeroom and yells at him to stop before it explodes. Eerie echo of Tom Sharpe’s novel Wilt, in which the hapless anti-hero also has extended adventures with a blow-up sex doll.
Josie Norris
Josie Norris with her pinched little face works at Antoinette’s Ladies Hairdressers (p.72). She and Dangerous take sandwiches and walk to the Welsh Harp, the reservoir in Brent, to chat, watching the dinghy sailors. She was born after Celia was killed and is quite clear that her parents regard her as a poor substitute, which explains why she feels sad about her missing sister, but also about herself, and has a tendency just to start crying with the sheer misery of it all.
Albert Norris
He goes to find the dad, Albert Norris, who runs a seedy stripclub (p.83). Norris does a runner and nips into a cinema but Dangerous follows him in and confronts him in his seat. The other patrons, understandably, kick them out. they walk down to the crappy canal. When Dangerous directly asks him whether Ramscar murdered his daughter, Norris says no, that wasn’t his style. It’s on the record that Ramscar sent a wreath to the family. Funny thing to do, why? Norris thinks Ramscar ordered one of his underlings to send flowers as a sign of sympathy and this goon, Ricketts, got drunk and sent a wreath by mistake.
Ena Lind
Dangerous goes to the council flats on Gladstone Heights where Ena Lind, Celia’s teenage friend, lives with husband Bill. In her flat where everything is coloured green, including the cat, and she serves crème de menthe liqueur. He goes over the events leading up to the night of the disappearance, discovering along the way how very unhappy Ena is, how she despises her husband who (improbably) she claims is so fussy that he takes a bath in his swimming trunks. They’re interrupted by the return of her daughter Clare to the flat.
That evening Ena phones Dangerous from a payphone and suggests they meet at the pub. Here they both get really drunk as Ena slips into describing the first time she and her schoolfriend Celia were first seduced by their youth club leader, David Boot. She describes this in great detail, including how both 15 year-old girls strip for him, how he pulls his tracksuit down, how he takes turns with each of them on the club trampoline. Maybe this is meant to be funny but it’s clearly also intended to be titillating and so felt queasy.
In fact it makes you question the entire plot which focuses on a teenage girl and seems to rope in a number of sexual escapades and details…
Anyway, when Dangerous drives (completely drunk?) Ena back to her shabby block of council flats in this drunken miasma of heightened sex talk, it comes as no big surprise when she stops the lift, pens her coat, blouse, unclips her bra, grabs Dangerous’s head and rubs it up and down her enormous cleavage. He fights his way free and they both fall backwards onto the floor where, just as inevitably, she is furious and comes at him with hands and nails. Dangerous finds the Open Door button and stumbles out of the lift but his big dim dog has heard the kerfuffle and now jumps on him, biting him in the arm, till he shakes it off, escapes to his car and roars off down the hill with Ena shouting abuse from her apartment window.
I suppose this is intended as a farcically comic scene.
Getting beaten up
He arrives back at Mrs Fulljames’s dazed and drunk to find a note on the mat. Addressed to him it tells him to be at the canal at 23.45. Now the thing about having an idiot as a hero is he does whatever you want. So Dangerous goes along to the canal without telling anyone and is promptly beaten up. To be precise two unknown assailants throw a dustbin over his head and torso, then smash it with pickaxe hands, hitting his hands and hips too, before pushing him into the canal where the dustbin slowly sinks head first taking unconscious Dangerous with him.
Father Harvey
We met (Catholic) Father Harvey earlier when he’d been down the pub with Dangerous and Mod on one of their drinking sessions when he told them that the confession box in his church had been burned down. Fits with the general air of vandalism, waste and grimness.
Now he hears the racket of the bin being smashed and runs to the rescue, jumping into the filthy canal. But it takes a bloke who’s working late at the nearby allotments to come to the rescue of both of them, pulling first the Father out, then the big body in the dustbin.
Dangerous is taken to Royal Park Hospital where he is laid up for days, with stitches in his face and bruises all over from the severe beating. At one point he is visited by his detached wife, Doris, and Mrs Fulljames who are both distracted by the fact that their popular milkman is in a bed a bit further along the ward and spend more time with him than they do with Dangerous. The milkman ends up eating all the Smarties Doris had brought for him. I suppose this is meant to be funny.
A similar attempt at humour is that he is visited by one of his fellow lodgers, Mr Smeeton the Complete Home Entertainer wearing the front end of a horse’s costume.
Andrew Parsons
Parsons was the only person arrested during the initial investigation. He was caught by the attendant in a public lavatory with his hands full of the missing girl’s clothes. His story was that he discovered them stuffed behind the cistern at the toilets and took them home because, well, he liked girls’ clothes. When the disappearance was reported in the papers he realised it was a serious business and took the clothes back to the toilets with a view to stuffing them back where he found them and that’s when he was collared. the incident was reported in the local papers and it ruined his life although, in the end, the cops never pinned anything on him and he insisted on his life he had nothing to do with the girl’s disappearance.
So Dangerous tracks Parsons down for a chat, discovering that he is now the leader of the pitiful local branch of the Salvation Army. Dangerous watches as half a dozen of them sing sad hymns in the pouring rain before passing round a tattered hat for the collection. This is really, really downbeat and depressing.
What follows is worse. Dangerous bullies Parsons into letting him into his shabby flat where, in line with the universal sense of decay, only one bar of the electric fire works, and they both drip with rainwater, while Parsons repeats the same story he told the cops 25 years ago. Above all he insists that he was a lonely frustrated youth back then and now he is a changed man. Only when Dangerous finally leaves does Parsons take off his dripping clothes and Thomas reveals that underneath his Salvation Army uniform he was wearing…a woman’s bra and panties (p.132).
This, to the modern reader, well to me, has little or no impact – people can wear what they want and modern society is overflowing with gender-bending rhetoric. But I imagine that 50 years ago in 1976 it would have had a dramatic impact. But how, exactly? To me it just feels sad that Parsons has to so pitifully deny who he is to everyone in his culture including himself. But did Thomas put it there as an indication that Parsons is the murderer? It’s so long ago and the semiology of sexuality has changed so much that I found it impossible to read the signs.
Mr Chrust
Mod brings him some unexpected information. Now bear in mind that Mod spends most of his days in the local library. Well, he’s found an interesting fact in an archive copy of the local paper, the Citizen. After a needless escapade late at night outside the pub, where Mod and Dangerous are so pissed they have to hold on to a rainwater downpipe to stand up and grip it so hard that their combined weight rips it free of its moorings and brings the whole thing, plus the guttering, crashing to the ground – on the same drunken night they pay a visit to the offices of the Citizen whose editor, Mr Chrust, living above the newspaper office, they wake up and lets them in.
It’s here, looking at the archive copy of the paper for the night Celia went missing, that Dangerous takes in what Mod had spotted – that on the night Celia disappeared, two coppers who were scheduled to be on patrol in a squad car, PC Frederick Fennell and PC Dudley, testified that they saw nothing untoward. But now, here, in the newspaper, Mod points out an article about a local policeman retiring which lists those in attendance and it includes the names of the two coppers who should have been out in their car. So they can’t have seen anything, their evidence is useless. More, does this duplicity indicate that they were somehow involved?
All the people he visits have quirks or oddities which stick out. Mr Chrust’s is that, when they knock on his front door (late at night) not one bit two sash windows open up and not Mr Chrust but two identical middle-aged women look out and ask who it is. This, Chrust tells them, is because his wife passed away some time ago and her two sisters moved in. Dangerous and Mod exchange looks but it’s not up to them to judge people.
Mrs Fennell
Next on the list is the wife of a copper who was supposed to be out patrolling but wasn’t. It was this sequence which really crystallised for me what a depressed and depressing book this is.
Mrs Edwina Fennell lived in a dying caravan anchored at the centre of a muddy field. (p.163)
She is a rejected-looking woman in her 60s with sunken eyes. She sniffles, crosses her thin arms over a pallid pinafore and can’t raise her eyes to look directly at Dangerous. Inside her caravan it’s as cold as the outside. The fittings are damaged and the plastic furniture unkempt. She tells him her husband went mad and is now housed in a lunatic asylum which is so horrible she can’t bear to visit him any more, holding back the tears. Everything about the scene is shabby and sad. Like everyone else Dangerous visits, though, she has a quirk and he finds Mrs Fennell in the middle of making huge piles of carefully cut sandwiches, three loaves’ worth which she explains she makes ‘for the foxes’, carefully setting them out on plates and loves watching them eat. That’s not how the foxes round me behave…
Mr Fennell at the lunatic asylum
So next on the visiting list is, logically enough, retired copper Fennell himself. This is the location of a series of really odd scenes. First of all Dangerous drives into the obviously extensive asylum grounds and sees a football match going on. Only when he gets chatting to the linesman does he realise he’s mad (he claims it’s a crucial game in the World Cup between England and Brazil). When the striker just pushes the goalkeeper over before scoring in the empty goal, Dangerous unwisely yells Foul and the entire field of 22 men plus officials turn and run towards him, so he quickly drives off.
He parks up and walks to the wall surrounding the main asylum building. There’s a door he goes through into an immaculately maintained garden where he sees a woman bent over the flowers. When he approaches she turns and is holding a gun. She makes him put his hands up and marches him at gunpoint through the garden, into the building, along corridors and to the office of the asylum manager, Dr Longton. nobody they pass like this bats an eyelid.
It’s characteristic of Thomas that I found this bewildering: is it in any way meant to be funny? What it comes over as is a) bewilderingly weird and then b) crushingly sad. The asylum is a sad place full of sad people. And when the director takes him through multiple locked doors to see the subject of his visit, retired police officer Fennell, he turns out to be ‘an ashen-faced, ancient, shaking man’ (p.172). Dangerous presumably gets so little out of him that the chapter ends abruptly at this point.
Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith
Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith claims to be a High Class Gypsy Fortune Teller except, of course, that she isn’t. She was born Beryl Adams and got the idea for a career in fortune telling when she was touched by a real Gypsy Soothsayer at a fair on Hackney Marshes. But, like all the other characters, her initial hopes in life have been slowly crushed and now she expects nothing, making a measly 50p per fortune telling session in her pokey room above a gentleman’s outfitters and spending all day betting heavily on the horses and losing.
Dangerous is visiting her because someone’s told him that the copper who should have been out patrolling that night, Fennell, was having an affair with her and regularly interrupted his rounds for an hour in bed with her (the same cop who is now a decrepit wreck in the lunatic asylum).
She astonishes Dangerous when she reveals that she’s got Celia’s bicycle in her shed. PC Fennell brought it round after discovering it abandoned in front of the cemetery. He thought it had just been dumped, it was only later that it became clear it belonged to the missing girl. At that point he had the bright idea that he’d use it as an alibi if he was every caught bunking off work to go and bonk Madame Tarantella. He would tell his bosses that she had reported finding a bike and turn his skiving into an Official Police Visit. But the years went by, he never reported it then he went mad.
Now Madame Tarantella shows Dangerous the bike buried under loads of junk in her shed, he pulls it out and strokes the handlebars and saddle that the mysterious teenager he’s become obsessed with once touched. When he opens the saddlebag he finds a very withered bunch of flowers. Now, Josie had told him that her mum told her that Celia was always bringing home flowers. the bicycle was found leaning against the cemetery wall. Did she used to break into the cemetery and nick the flowers she gave her mum? In which case, might whatever happened to her have happened in the cemetery.
Josie’s striptease
Dangerous goes down the pub with mad to discuss latest developments. On exiting he is accosted by skinny little Josie Norris who gets him to go along with her to the hairdressers where she works. It’s well after closing time but she has a key. On the way she galvanises Dangerous by telling him that Ramscar (who he still hasn’t found) has been threatening her (Josie’s) mum. Why? Because she talked to the cops?
Anyway, once in the deserted hairdressers something unnerving (for Dangerous and the reader) occurs which is that Josie makes Dangerous close his eyes, dims the lighting to just a spotlight, then makes him open them to see her walking into the spotlight dressed in Josie’s old clothes, the dress, the socks etc. the unnerving part is when she lifts up the dress to reveal that she’s wearing no panties.
There felt to me something badly wrong with this. I’ve just reread my review of ‘His Lordship’ (1970) which is about a 30-something man who has sex with the 15 and 16 year-olds at the private school where he teaches. His 1974 novel ‘Tropic of Ruislip’ features a 30-something married man who has an affair with an 18 year-old. Now we read the description of 35-year-old Dangerous Davies weakly protesting as 17-year-old Josie taunts and teases him, flaunting her boyish bum, then coming and sitting on his lap, ‘her hipbones protruding like cowboys’ guns’. It’s not hard to spot the recurrence of plotlines which salivate over schoolgirl porn.
At least they don’t actually have sex. Instead, in line with the general misery of the book, he realises she is sobbing.
This feels like a really unhealthy mixture of titillation (designed, like the soft porn Pan paperback covers, to draw in the middle-aged male commuter) with raw misery, very much like the pall of unhappiness which hung over ‘His Lordship’ despite all the gymslip porn.
Back at the cemetery
Dangerous goes back to the cemetery where he revives his antagonism to the sweary keeper, but he insists he’s on police business and asks to see the old, old burial register, from 1951. He establishes that 8 bodies were buried on 24, 25 and 26 July 1951. That evening in the pub, Mod and he discuss the hypothesis that Celia broke into the cemetery to nick some more flowers, was caught and murdered and the murderer threw her into one of the graves that was already dug for an upcoming funeral, lightly covered in soil, then the next day a casket lowered on top of her and the whole thing buried…
William Lind
Dangerous gets a message that Bill Lind’s at the police station asking for him. He takes him to an interview room (nervously, as this is all off his own bat; he’s not meant to have opened a 25-year-old case; if his boss found out he’d be disciplined). Remember that Bill was Celia’s boyfriend although uneasily aware that she was getting ‘it’ elsewhere (as we know, from Dave Boot the youth club leader).
Bill’s come to hand over Celia’s knickers, the ones that weren’t found with the rest of the clothes which were stuffed behind the cistern of the public lavatories. This allows Dangerous to prompt Bill to remember how all the boys used to like watching Celia’s knickers when she played table tennis at the club and how she liked showing them off – continuing the pervy voyeuristic vibe of the whole story. That’s how he recognised them. How did he come by them? Someone stuffed them in the saddle bag of his bike, he thought as a joke, maybe Celia herself. Then when she went missing, he was too scared to hand them in as they’d incriminate him. You could hang for murder in those days.
But Bill has one more piece of information. Years later is mum was waiting in a bus stop and overheard two local women discussing the case, and one describing how her husband saw Celia walking along the canal on the night in question with a man. The woman talking was a Mrs Whethers. And so the narrative, like a daisy chain, moves onto the next character.
Mrs Whethers
Dangerous tracks Mrs Whethers down to Kensal Rise and she invites him along to her over 60s club where they are having South American ballroom dancing lessons, so the big shambling clumsy smelly Dangerous finds himself having to bend almost double to dance the Tango with a succession of decrepit old ladies. Unfortunately, her husband, the one who claimed to have seen the missing girl walking with a man dressed in black all those years ago, is long dead.
At the library
He goes to meet Mod at the library and they reflect on how much they know. They leave and retrace what must have been the girl’s last steps from the youth club to the cemetery, then on to the pub, then back to Mrs Fulljames’s for a dinner of hot tripe. Then Dangerous goes for another walk to the pub and on his way back is set upon and beaten unconscious by three or four men.
At the hospital
Back at the hospital for the second time, swathed in bandages again. He learns that Albert Norris was beaten up even more badly than him and needed operating on. Josie comes to visit, thin waif, describing her father’s injuries and is astonished when Dangerous reveals that he’s found Josie’s bike and her pants (!).
Suddenly he has a revelation: he knows where the body is buried. He leaps out of bed, stuffs it with pillows to make it look like he’s still there, sneaks into a side room, hurriedly dresses, sneaks out and catches the hospital bus back into town. He walks to Parson’s lodgings where he calls the quivering perve down from his Salvation Army practice and forces him to admit that he did not find Celia’s clothes in a public convenience. He found them abandoned by the canal, at the end of the alleyway down to it which leads past the allotments. The allotments!
Mr Tilth
Right at the start of the story Dangerous had attended court for the case of a man who worked the allotments and had been found pinching plants. Now he wants his expertise, so he goes round and knocks up Mr Chrust and his two sisters-in-law (late at night, again) to check the most recent copy of the Citizen and confirm the allotment man’s name, Mr Tilth, and his address.
So round to his place goes Dangerous, playing up the police card this late at night, invites himself in and cross-questions Tilth about the state of the allotments back in 1951. His dad gardened the allotments before him, they’ve been in the family for over 30 years, so he remembers the fuss when the Home Guard built a blockhouse over part of it way back in 1940. Dangerous is excited till Tilth tells him it was all demolished in 1949 when he becomes deflated. Two years before the murder. Then Tilth casually mentions the basement room.
Next thing he knows Tilth is being dragged along to the allotments in the early hours. Long story, short, he points out the location of the concrete base of the old blockhouse and the trapdoor into the cellar, below the greenhouse of the man who pinched the allotments from him (Tilth) thus giving rise to his revenge, thus giving rise to Tilth’s appearance in court at the start. Anyway, after a lot of effort with a pickaxe, and totally demolishing the greenhouse, they finally scrape the trapdoor open, Dangerous shines a light down into it, and sees a pathetic pile of bones. Celia!
Next day
Dangerous closes the trap door, covers it with detritus, makes Tilth swear to secrecy and creeps back into his hospital bed from where, next morning, he is discharged.
He meets Mod in the library and tells him the massive news. Later he meets up with Josie and they go for a walk towards the canal. They are now an item. She pulls him into a dark alley and asks him to kiss her and then to put his hands inside her dress, which he does. He’s 33, she’s 17, it feels pervy, like the other non-Virgin books.
When they get back to the house she’s staying at she discovers her dad’s had a heart attack so they rush to the hospital. Dangerous waits in the familiar waiting room and, when she comes out, sees she’s been crying. Her dad died. In his last moments he thought she, Josie, was Celia. She’s never been able to escape from the dead girl’s shadow. They catch a taxi back to her place and that’s where she tells him she knows where Ramscar is hiding out, and gives him the address, a place called Bracken Farm.
At Bracken Farm
Dangerous drives the ten miles there, foolishly not telling any colleagues. He sneaks up on the farm, surrounded by cars and farm equipment, surprises the guard standing outside and takes his gun, then barges into the main farm building. Here he surprises Ramscar and half a dozen other crooks. A man runs towards him and Dangerous belts him with the shovel he’s holding, but it’s enough of a distraction for the others to rush him, take him in a rugby scrum, a gun goes off and shoots him in the leg, but then he becomes aware of other voices, faces, police lights, and cops burst in just as he passes out.
In a wheelchair
When Dangerous comes round he’s back in hospital, again. Josie visits. It was she who rang the police after tipping him off, which explains why reinforcements arrived. The last 15 pages move very fast and everything is cleared up suddenly. After a few days Dangerous is allowed out in a wheelchair and Josie takes to pushing him around town, where he is waved at by various citizens who’ve read about him and consider him a hero.
Josie spots that Mrs Whethers had mentioned that a Mr Harkness also knew something about the events of that night but had said he was 75 back then in 1951. Dangerous had assumed that must mean he’s dead but what if he isn’t? They rush round to see Mrs Whethers again, who confirms that Mr Harkness is indeed alive and living in Bristol.
So they get Father Harvey to use the church van to load Dangerous in his wheelchair and Mod and motor down to Bristol. Here they find him being looked after by his daughter in a nice apartment. Long story short, he remembers the night in question. He’d got plastered and fallen into the canal. He had just swum to the edge and was contemplating pulling himself out when he saw them, the copper and the young girl. And he remembers exactly who the copper was, one who was always arresting him for drunkenness. It was Dangerous’s current boss, Inspector Yardbird!
Fennell’s testimony
They talk through the implications on the long journey back from Bristol. When they get into Mrs Fulljames’s, there’s a note waiting for Dangerous from Mr Fennell out in the lunatic asylum. So they drive straight out to see him and Fennell puts the finishing touches to the evidence. Remember he was skiving off his duty in the police van. Well, he was sent signed sealed testimony from his associate, PC Dudley.
With heart trembling Dangerous opens the signed statement in which Dudley says he was feeling so rough after drinking too much rum at the leaving drinks for the retiring copper that he let PC Yardbird drive the van for him to where he was due to rendezvous with Fennell. But when he got to the cemetery the van wasn’t there. So he went looking and found it parked at the end of the lane down to the canal. As he got closer he saw PC Yardbird coming back up the alley, looking pace and sweating and his face scratched.
He thought Yardbird also was drunk but when he got in the van to drive it off to meet Fennell back at the cemetery, he found a girl’s lipstick on the floor. But it was only a month later, as the girl’s disappearance became a story, that he put 2 and 2 together. Dudley’s statement ends there but it’s enough.
Climax
All the coppers from his station and some senior CID officers gather for the ceremony where Dangerous is to be given an award for his bravery in the Ramscar case. Even his wife and Mrs Fulljames show up. Dangerous is tipped off by colleagues that Yardbird is livid because he opened Dangerous’s locker and found all the stuff about the Celia case. He presents Dangerous with his medal in grim silence.
The book ends with Dangerous leaning up and whispering in his ear that he’s like a word with him in private. He is going to tell him he has the evidence and the witnesses to convict him with the rape and murder of Celia Norris, but the narrative cuts off at this ‘dramatic’ moment, leaving us to imagine that scene for ourselves.
Depressing
What is a book like this really for? The back cover carries a review from the Daily Express which describes it as ‘recommended to anyone who enjoys a good detective yarn with plenty of laughs’ which seems wildly, madly off-target. You’ve read my summary, are there plenty of laughs? No. There are some half-hearted attempts at comic scenes, but a vital element of farce is manic energy and the book has very little of that. Instead a thick, heavy gloom hangs over every page. It is more manic depressive than manic farce. The scene when Dangerous and Mod are so drunk they end up pulling the drainpipe off the front of their favourite pub is implausible and sad rather than funny. In fact it’s embarrassing.
As Dangerous makes his way around the various characters involved in the disappearance, a panorama of waste and futility unfolds with grim heaviness. All the characters are desperately sad, everyone is a loser, all of them live blighted shabby lives of failure and loss, and as the book progresses the reader sinks deeper into the mire.
Nobody has a house. Starting with the antihero himself, people live in shabby boarding houses, rooms over shops, a tatty caravan or a lunatic asylum. Everyone is unhappy.
Venus, the evening whore, waved a customary hand to him from the end of the police station street. She looked lonely, exiled, as only a whore can. (p.194)
I liked that Thomas invented a newspaper seller who has a pitch at the corner of the High Street and every evening, regular as clockwork, as the working day ends, starts waving the evening edition and calling out: ‘Tragedy tonight! Big tragedy!’ And that his name is Job. (p.213) But it’s a grim kind of humour, whistling in the dark.
In this book absolutely everyone is lonely and exiled, especially from their own families. I can’t be bothered to run through them again but you’ve seen from this summary how almost everyone’s marriages are a travesty and a sham, how young girls get exploited, how unhappy every middle-aged woman is, what cramped perverted little lives so many of the men lead. This is much more depressing than Samuel Beckett.
Flashes of the old style
There are occasional flashes of the vivid prose style I liked so much in The Virgin Soldiers, mostly when it comes to describing the thoroughly depressed urban environment of north-west London which Dangerous and all the other characters inhabit, or occasional moments in an exchange or description.
It was a choked place, a great suburb of grit and industrial debasement. Streets spilled into factories and factories leaned over railway yards. A power station, its cooling towers suggesting a touch of Ali Baba, squatted heavily amid the mess like a fat man unable to walk a step further. (p.17)
White astonishment flew into Boot’s face. (p.66)
He managed that most difficult of vocal achievements, a quiet shout. (p.119)
He was a peanut of a man with short bristles protruding from his face and otherwise bald head like the airy white fluff of a dandelion clock. (p.157)
Dr Longton scratched his nose. He was slim and gently bent like a feather. (p.170)
He pushed his hand, white as a bat in the winter darkness, through the bars of the gate. (p.212)
Fortunately he arrived at an explanation before she arrived at a scream. (p.222)
Not many moments like this, though. Not enough to compensate for the strange and depressing atmosphere of most of the book and the pervy vibe it radiates.
Reading one of his little blips of prose amusement (‘the vehicle made off into the latening evening’) it crossed my mind that lots of gags and tricks and flurries like this don’t amount to a worldview. Don’t amount to a considered, coherent and deep consideration of prose narrative and its subtle potentials. The opposite. All fireworks, no foundation.
Audiobook
It’s available as a surprisingly well read audiobook.
Credit
‘Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective’ by Leslie Thomas was published by Eyre Methuen in 1976. References are to the 2001 Arrow Books paperback edition,
Related reviews
- The Virgin Soldiers (1966)
- His Lordship (1970)
- Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971)
- Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
- Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1975)
- Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1976)
Books & Boots 
Only Human by Martin Parr @ the National Portrait Gallery
Born in 1952 in Epsom, Martin Parr has become one of Britain’s most celebrated and successful photographers. He has achieved this by:
Lord Mayor’s Show, City of London, 2013 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
Massive colour prints
In fact, leafing through the many books on sale in the shop, you realise that his early work, for example shooting chapelgoers in Yorkshire, consisted of relatively small, black-and-white prints. It’s only in the past ten years or so that switching to digital cameras has allowed Parr to make much bigger images, with digital clarity and colour.
And it is hosts of these massive, colour prints of hundreds of images of the great British public, caught in casual moments, going about a wide range of odd, quirky and endearing activities, or just being ugly, fat, old, and scruffy – which make up the show.
Nice, France, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Humorous presentation
The exhibition fills the 14 or so rooms of the National Portrait Gallery’s main downstairs gallery space but the first thing to note is how Parr and the curators have made every effort to jazz it up in a humorous if rather downbeat way typical of the man and his love-hate relationship with the fabulous crapness of ordinary, everyday British culture. Thus:
Parr has always been interested in dancing, all kinds of dancing, and the big room devoted to shots of dancers – from punk to Goth, from gay pride to traditional Scottish dancing, to ballroom dancing to mosh pits at a metal concert – the room in which all these are hung is dominated by a slow-turning mirror ball projecting spangly facets on the walls and across the photos.
In the room devoted to beach life one entire wall is completely covered with a vast panorama of a beach absolutely packed with sunbathers in Argentina.
Installation view of the huge photo of Grandé Beach, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. Note the jokey deckchairs in front.
The Martin Parr café
Half way through the exhibition, the Portrait Gallery has turned a whole room into the Martin Parr café, not a stylish French joint with expresso machine, but a down at heel, fly-blown transport caff, with formica tables and those glass cases by the till which display a range of knackered looking Brandenburg cakes.
You really can buy tea and cakes here (two teas and two pieces of cake for a tenner), or a pint of the ‘Only Human’ craft beer which has been created for the show, read a copy of the exhibition catalogue left on each table, or stare at the cheap TV in the corner which is showing a video of the Pet Shop Boys busking at various locations around London (which Parr himself directed), or just sit and chat.
Buy now while stocks last
The gallery shop has similarly had a complete makeover to look like a cluttered, low-budget emporium festooned with big yellow and red placards proclaiming ‘Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap’, and ‘Special offer’, ‘Special sale price’, and they have deliberately created the tackiest merchandise they can imagine, including Martin Parr sandals, deckchairs, tea towels, as well as the usual fridge magnets, lapel badges and loads of books by this most prolific of photographers.
Parraphernalia
The first room, before you’ve even handed over your ticket, is jokily titled Parraphernalia:
As Parr’s fame has grown, interest in the commercialisation of his images, name and likeness has grown exponentially. Parr approaches these opportunities with the same creativity he applies to his photography. Early in his career, Parr experimented with alternative methods for presenting his photographs, such as transferring pictures onto ceramic plates and other everyday objects.
Thus you’ll find a wall festooned with t-shirts, pyjamas, tote bags, mugs, posters, plates and so on each covered with a characteristic Parr image.
Stone Cross Parade, St George’s Day, West Bromwich, the Black Country, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Fotoescultura
Then there’s a room of fotoescultura. What is fotoescultura? I hear you ask. Well:
In 2009, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide introduced Parr to Bruno Eslava, an eighty-four year old Mexican folk artist, who was one of the last remaining practitioners of the art of fotoescultura (photo sculpture). Hand-carved in wood, and incorporating a photograph transferred onto shaped tin, fotoesculturas are traditionally used to showcase prized portrait photographs in the home, frequently, but not always, of deceased loved ones. Parr commissioned Eslava to produce a series of these playful and affectionate objects to draw attention to the disappearing art of fotoescultura in Mexico.
These take up a wall covered with little ledges on which perch odd-shaped wood carvings with various photos of Parr himself on them.
Installation view of fotoesculturas at Only Human by Martin Parr. Photo by the author
Oneness
And right next to these was a big screen showing the recent set of idents for BBC 1. I had no idea that Parr was involved in making these – although if you read the credit roll at the end you realise the whole thing was researched, produced and directed by quite a huge cast of TV professionals. Presumably he came up with the basic idea and researched the organisations.
In 2016, BBC Creative commissioned Parr to create a series of idents for BBC One – short films between programmes that identify the broadcaster – on the subject of British ‘oneness’. He subsequently travelled throughout England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales photographing volunteer organisations and sport and hobby clubs, which he felt exemplified this quality. Parr’s evolving portrait of modern Britain shows people united by shared interests and passions, and reflects the diversity of communities living in the UK today.
For each subject, both a 30-second film and a still photograph were made. The films were all produced in the same format: participants start by being engaged in their activity seemingly unaware of the camera, pause briefly to face the camera, then return to the activity as if nothing ever happened.
You can watch them on Parr’s website.
Full list of rooms and themes
The rooms are divided by theme, namely:
The Queen visiting the Livery Hall of the Drapers’ Livery Company for their 650th Anniversary, the City of London, London, England, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Identity
Regular readers of this blog will know that, although I welcome the weird and wonderful in art (and music and literature) – in fact, on the whole, I am more disposed to 20th and 21st century art than to classical (Renaissance to Victorian) art – nonetheless I am powerfully allergic to a lot of modern art curation, commentary and scholarly artspeak.
This is because I find it so limiting. Whereas the world is big and wide and weird, full of seven and a half billion squabbling, squealing, shagging, dying, fighting, working human beings – artspeak tends to reduce all artworks to the same three or four monotonously similar ‘issues’, namely:
It’s rare than any exhibition of a modern artist manages not to get trapped and wrapped, cribbed, cabined and confined, prepackaged and predigested, into one or other of these tidy, limiting and deadly dull categories.
Many modern artists go along with this handful of ‘ideas’ for the simple reason that they were educated at the same art schools as the art curators, and that this simple bundle of ideas appears to be all they were taught about the world.
About accounting, agriculture, applied mathematics, aquatic sciences, astronomy & planetary science, biochemistry, biology, business & commercial law, business management, chemistry, communication technologies, computing & IT, and a hundred and one other weird and wonderful subjects which the inhabitants of this crowded planet spend their time practicing and studying, they appear to know nothing.
No. Gender, diversity and identity appear to be the only ideas modern art is capable of ‘addressing’ and ‘interrogating’.
Unfortunately, Parr plays right into the hands of curators like this. Because he has spent so many years travelling round Britain photographing people in classic ‘British’ activities (pottering in allotments, dancing, at the beach, at sports tournaments or drinking at street parties), many of them with Union Jacks hanging in the background or round their necks – Parr’s entire oeuvre can, without so much as flexing a brain cell, be described as ‘an investigation into British identity in the age of Brexit’ or ‘an analysis of British identity in the era of multiculturalism’.
And the tired visitor consumes these exhausted truisms and clichés without missing a beat, without breaking a sweat, without the flicker of an idea troubling their minds. For example, see how this photo of bhangra dancers ‘raises questions of British identity.’
Bhangra dancers, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017, commissioned by BBC One. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
The introduction and wall labels certainly don’t hold back:
This exhibition of new work, made in the UK and around the world, is a collection of individual portraits and Parr’s picture of our times. It is about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raises complex questions around both national and self-identity.
The portraits used were drawn from Parr’s Autoportraits series, also on view in this gallery. By transforming these pictures into shrine-like objects, Parr pokes fun at his own identity. At the
same time, he raises questions about the nature of photography, identity and memory.
Parr’s Autoportraits reflect his long-standing interest in travel and tourism, and highlight a rarely acknowledged niche in professional photography. As Parr moves from one absurd situation to the next, his pictures echo the ideals and aesthetics of the countries through which he moves, while inviting questions. If all photographs are illusions, can any portrait convey a sense of true identity?
Parr shows that our identities are revealed in part by how we spend our leisure time – the sports we watch, the players or teams we support, the way we celebrate victories or commiserate defeat.
These pictures might be called ‘environmental portraits’, images in which the identities of person and place intertwine. Do the clothes we wear, the groups we join, the careers we choose, or the hobbies we enthusiastically pursue, express our personality? Or is the converse true – does our participation in such things shape and define us?
The way we play, celebrate and enjoy our leisure time can reveal a lot about our identities. Questions of social status often sneak into the frame. Whether a glorious opportunity to put on your top hat and tails, or simply an excuse to have a flutter on the horses, this ‘sport of kings’ brings together people from many different walks of life.
The 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union is not only one of the biggest socio-political events of our time, it is also a curious manifestation of British identity. Politicians on both sides of the debate used the referendum to debate immigration and its impact on British society and culture. At times, this degenerated into a nationalistic argument for resisting change, rejecting the European way of doing things and returning to a more purely ‘British’ culture, however that might be defined.
But for me, somehow, the more this ‘issue’ of identity is mentioned, the more meaningless it becomes. Repeating a word over and over again doesn’t give it depth. As various philosophers and writers have pointed out, repetition tends to have the opposite effect and empty a word or phrase of all meaning.
The commentary claims that Parr’s photographs are ‘about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raise complex questions around both national and self-identity.’
But do they? Do they really? Is a photo of some ordinary people standing at random on a beach ‘raising complex questions around both national and self-identity?’
Porthcurno, Cornwall, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Or a photo of Grayson Perry, or Vivienne Westwood, or five black women sitting on the pavement at the Notting Hill carnival, or two blokes who work in a chain factory, or a couple of fisherman on a Cornish quayside, or toned and gorgeous men dancing at a gay nightclub, or a bunch of students at an Oxford party, or a photo of the Lady Mayoress of London, or of a bloke bending down to roll a bowls ball.
The Perry Family – daughter Florence, Philippa and Grayson, London, England, 2012. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
Does this photo ‘raise complex questions around both national and self-identity?’
I just didn’t think see it. So there’s a lot of black people at the Notting Hill carnival, so Indians like dancing to bhangra music, so posh people go to private schools, so Parliament and the City of London still have loads of quaint ceremonies where people dress up in silly costumes.
And so Parr takes wonderfully off-kilter, unflattering and informal photos of all these things. But I don’t think his photos raise any questions at all. They just record things.
Take his photos of the British at the seaside, an extremely threadbare, hoary old cliché of a subject which has been covered by socially -minded photographers since at least the 1930s. Parr’s photos record the fact that British seaside resorts are often seedy, depressing places, the sea is freezing cold, it’s windy and sometimes rainy, and to compensate for the general air of failure, people wear silly hats, buy candy floss, and eat revolting Mr Whippy ice creams.
None of this raises any ‘complex questions’ at all. It seems to me to state the bleedin’ obvious.
Same goes for the last room in the show which ‘addresses’ ‘the Establishment’ and ‘interrogates’ notions of ‘privilege’ by taking photos of Oxford students, public school children and the Queen.
In all seriousness, can you think of a more tired and predictable, boring and clapped-out, old subject? Kids who go to private school are privileged? Oxford is full of braying public school toffs? As any kind of sociological ‘analysis’ or even journalistic statement, isn’t this the acme of obviousness?
Magdelene Ball, Cambridge, England, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
In other words, although curators and critics and Parr himself try to inject ‘questions’ and ‘issues’ into his photos, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.
Photographic beauty
And by doing so they also divert attention from any appreciation of the formal qualities of his photographs, Parr’s skill at capturing candid moments, his uncanny ability to create a composition out of nothing, the strange balances and symmetries which emerge in ordinary workaday life without anyone trying. The oddity of the everyday, the odd beauty of the everyday, the everyday beauty of oddness.
Preparing lobster pots, Newlyn Harbour, Cornwall, England, 2018. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
I don’t think Parr’s work has anything to do with ‘issues of Britishness’ and ‘questions of identity’. This kind of talk may be the kind of thing which gets publishers and art galleries excited, and lead to photo projects, commissions and exhibitions. In other words, which makes money.
But the actual pictures are about something else entirely. What makes (most of) them special is not their ‘incisive sociological analysis’ but their wonderfully skilful visual qualities. Their photographic qualities. The works here demonstrate Parr’s astonishing ability to capture, again and again, a particular kind of everyday surrealism. They are something to do with the banality of life which he pushes so far into Banality that they come back out the other end as the genuinely weird and strange.
He manages a consistent capturing of the routine oddity of loads of stuff which is going on around us, but which we rarely notice.
The British are ugly
Lastly, and most obvious of all – Parr shows how ugly, scruffy, pimply, fat, tattooed, tasteless and badly dressed the British are. This is probably the most striking and consistent aspect of Parr’s photos: the repeated evidence showing what a sorry sight we Brits present to the world.
It’s not just the parade of tattooed, Union Jack-draped chavs in the ‘Brexit’ room. Just as ugly are the posh geeks he photographed at Oxford or the grinning berks and their spotty partners he snapped at the Highland dances. By far the most blindingly obvious feature of Parr’s photographic oeuvre is how staggeringly ugly, badly dressed and graceless the British mostly are.
His subjects’ sheer lumpen plainness is emphasised by Parr’s:
And the consistently raw bluntness of his photos makes you realise how highly posed, polished and post-produced to plastic perfection almost are all the other images we see around us are – from adverts to film stills, posters and billboards, and the thousands of shiny images of smiling perfection we consume on the internet every day.
Compared to all those digitally-enhanced images, Parr has for some time now made his name by producing glaringly unvarnished, untouched-up, unimproved images, showing the British reflections of themselves in all their ghastly, grisly grottiness.
New Model Army playing the Spa Pavilion at the Whitby Goth Weekend, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery
But this is a genuinely transgressive thought – something which the polite and respectable curators – who prefer to expatiate at length on the socially acceptable themes of identity and gender and race – dare not mention.
This is the truth that dare not speak its name and which Martin Parr’s photographs ram home time after time. We Brits look awful.
Video
Video review of the exhibition by Visiting London Guide.
Related links
More National Portrait Gallery reviews
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Posted by Simon on May 12, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/only-human-martin-parr-national-portrait-gallery/