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Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie (1939)

Being a man of many aunts, he was fairly certain that the nice old lady in the corner did not propose to travel in silence to London. He was right.
(The basically comic tone of ‘Murder is Easy’ (and the theme of aunts) established early, on page 3)

Bridget said, ‘You think this man is definitely mad?’
‘Oh, I should say so. A lunatic all right, but a cunning one.’
(The standard claim, made in all her novels, that the killer is a maniac)

‘You don’t think that a murderer can be as sane as you or I?’
‘Not this kind of a murderer. As I see it, this murderer must be crazy.’
(Ditto, Chapter 10)

‘He doesn’t actually think he’s God yet, but he soon will.’
‘Mad?’
‘Oh, unquestionably, I should say.’
(Ditto, Chapter 19)

‘He’s mad, then?’
‘He’s mad, all right, but he’s a cunning devil. You’ll have to go warily.’
(Ditto)

He glanced back down the length of the High Street, and he was assailed by a strong feeling of unreality. He said to himself, ‘These things don’t happen.’
(In every novel, one or more characters comment that the whole situation seems unreal)

Rose said ruefully, ‘That’s the worst of a place like this. Everybody knows everything about everybody else.’
(Village life)

Luke said, with significance, ‘No one human being knows the full truth about another human being. Not even one’s nearest and dearest.’
(What passes for wisdom in books like these, but can also be seen as the kind of tropes and truisms which grease the machinery of the narrative, a fortune cookie motto to distract the mind for a moment while the plot rattles on)

After a long sequence of novels featuring her famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, ‘Murder is Easy’ is an independent or free-standing novel i.e. it features none of her established characters (neither Poirot nor Miss Marple, Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp etc). Instead it introduces completely new characters undertaking a one-off murder mystery investigation.

Setup

Luke Fitzwilliam is a retired colonial policeman, just returned to England from Malaya (his precise beat is said to have been ‘the Mayang Straits’):

Honourably retired on a pension, with some small private means of his own, a gentleman of leisure, come home to England.

By accident Luke ends up on a slow, stopping train to London, in a compartment with a chatty old lady, Miss Fullerton. She tells him that she is on her way to Scotland Yard because there has been a series of mysterious deaths in the little town she comes from, Wychwood under Ashe, which she suspects have all been murders! She reels off a list:

Harry Carter – landlord of the Seven Stars, ‘A drunken ruffian… One of these socialistic, abusive brutes’, drunk and fell in the river
Mrs Rose – the laundress
little Tommy Pierce – ‘a nasty little boy’, fell from a high ledge while cleaning the windows of the old hall, which is now the library
Amy Gibbs – housemaid with Lord Eastacre and then Miss Waynflete, ‘one of the most inefficient housemaids I have ever known’, died by swallowing hat paint instead of cough mixture

Now Miss Fullerton has a presentiment that the town’s old doctor, Dr Humbleby, will be next so that’s why she’s on her way to Scotland Yard, does he (Luke) think it will be open? He (Luke) assures her that it will be open and that, of course, they’ll listen to her, and politely bids her goodbye and good luck at Waterloo, then travels on to stay with his old pal in London, Jimmy Lorrimer.

It’s at Jimmy’s that he reads a small news item in The Times announcing the accidental death of a Mrs Lavinia Fullerton, who was run over by a car in Whitehall, which didn’t stop. He is upset at the thought of this sweet little old lady dying so randomly. But then, a few days, later, Luke (a keen reader of newspapers) comes across another obituary, for a Dr Humbleby of Wychwood under Ashe, and this makes him sit up and think.

He discusses the whole thing with Jimmy, who thinks it sounds like a jolly interesting adventure. Luke settles on a plan of going to Wychwood under Ashe to have a dig around and see if the old lady was onto anything. He is, after all, a policeman and has the technique for interviewing people, making notes, and developing theories.

What he doesn’t have is an excuse or a contact. Jimmy comes up with both. As to cover, he suggests that Luke pretends to be researching a book on folklore and customs, with a particular focus on death and its rituals. As to contact, turns out that (very conveniently) Jimmy has a cousin, Bridget Conway, a native of Wychwood under Ashe, who works as secretary to the local grandee, Lord Easterfield.

So Luke takes the next train to Wychwood while Jimmy sends a message to Bridget to expect him. Let the investigation begin!

The title

Luke said slowly, ‘Just something I remembered my old lady saying to me. I’d said to her that it was a bit thick to do a lot of murders and get away with it, and she answered that I was wrong – that it was very easy to kill.’ He stopped, and then said slowly, ‘I wonder if that’s true. Jimmy? I wonder if it is -‘
‘What?’
‘- easy to kill.’

The mysterious deaths

All the deaths Miss Fullerton mentioned have perfectly reasonable explanations. None of them were regarded as suspicious by the police. So this is another case where the protagonist not only has to catch a murderer, but has to start one step before that, and prove that a, or several murders have taken place at all. Here’s the list and Luke’s suspected real causes of death.

Amy Gibbs – Poisoned
Tommy Pierce – Pushed out of window
Harry Carter – Shoved off footbridge (drunk? drugged?)
Doctor Humbleby – Blood poisoning
Miss Fullerton – Run down by car

At Ashe Manor

So Luke arrives at Wychwood, makes his way to Ashe House (home of Lord Eastwood) and meets Bridget Conway. Far from being a dim gold-digger, she is in fact young (28), attractive and – like so many of Christie’s young women – clever and quick-witted.

He had thought of her – if he had thought of her at all – as a little blond secretary person, astute enough to have captured a rich man’s fancy. Instead she had force, brains, a cool clear intelligence… He thought: ‘She’s not an easy person to deceive.’ (Chapter 4)

Whereas pompous Lord Easterfield is taken in by Luke’s cover story of researching a book about folklore, Bridget doesn’t believe it for a second. By page 60 (Chapter 6) she’s confronted Luke about it, he’s admitted his true purpose (to discover whether old Miss Fullerton’s claim of murders is true and, if so, who the murderer is) and they agree to work together.

Christie’s sleuths always work in pairs, or need sidekicks. Poirot famously needed the rather dim Captain Hastings to bounce ideas off, a dynamic which of course allows Christie to share theories about the murderer with her readers, thus augmenting the narrative with entertaining complications, theories and counter-theories.

Exactly the same happens in these ‘freestanding novels’, whoever begins to suspect a murder or conspiracy always ends up being paired off with an accomplice / sidekick / partner, a basic device which allows them to discuss and interpret their latest at length which is, one of the great pleasures of these novels, watching the characters themselves trying to work out the mystery. It’s particularly enjoyable in the books which feature her fearless, feisty young heroine, Lady Elaine ‘Bundle’ Brent (‘The Secret of Chimneys’ and ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’).

I haven’t mentioned yet that one of the first things Luke discovers after he’s arrived is that the doctor Miss Fullerton told him would be next on the kill list, Dr Humbleby, has indeed died in the interim between Miss Fullerton predicting it and Luke’s arrival. As with all the other deaths, there’s a perfectly natural explanation for it (sepsis deriving from a scratch).

This really hardens Luke’s conviction that foul play is afoot, and so it is that handsome young Luke (a man’s man, burnished by responsibility and experience in the colonies) teams up with free-spirited beautiful young Bridget.

‘It’s dangerous for both of us. I know that. But we’re in it, Luke – we’re in it together!’

Do I hear wedding bells in the offing? The previous couple of Christie novels ended with a flurry of engagements and weddings – will this one, too?

Anyway, in the classic style, Luke sets off to interview as many of the townspeople as he can, ostensibly using his cover of novelist researching local folklore although, to this reader, lots of his questioning very obviously went way beyond that subject and focused very much on the characters of the dead people. But none of the people he talks to seem to notice so why should we care.

Cast

Luke Fitzwilliam – retired colonial policeman, just returned to England from Malaya, ‘honourably retired on a pension, with some small private means of his own, a gentleman of leisure, come home to England’
Miss Fullerton – old lady Luke meets on the train to London who tells him a murderer is loose in the little English town of Wychwood under Ashe
Jimmy Lorrimer – Luke’s friend who he stays with in London
Bridget Conway – Jimmy’s cousin who lives in Wychwood under Ashe, secretary to Lord Easterfield – ‘Tall, slender, a long delicate face with slightly hollow cheekbones, ironic black brows, black eyes and hair. She was like a delicate etching, he thought – poignant and beautiful’ – ‘she had force, brains, a cool clear intelligence’
Lord Easterfield – ‘owns those nasty little weekly papers… a nasty little man’ – self-made newspaper tycoon who’s returned to his native town (Wychwood under Ashe) – ‘a small man with a semi-bald head. His face was round and ingenuous, with a pouting mouth and boiled gooseberry eyes. He was dressed in careless-looking country clothes. They were unkind to his figure, which ran mostly to stomach’
Mrs Anstruther – Bridget’s aunt, ‘a middle-aged woman with a rather foolish mouth’, keen gardener
Mr Abbot – the solicitor, ‘a big florid man, dressed in tweeds, with a hearty manner and a jovial effusiveness’
young Doctor Geoffrey Thomas – Doctor Humbleby’s partner – ‘thick fair hair. He was a young man whose appearance was deceptive’
Mr Wake – the rector, ‘an old dear and a bit of an antiquary’ – ‘a small stooping old man with very mild blue eyes and an absent-minded but courteous air’
Giles the sexton
Mrs Pierce – mother of the boy Tommy, keeps a tobacco and paper shop in High Street
Rose Humbleby – ‘a very pretty girl’, ‘a remarkably pretty girl, with brown hair curling round her ears and rather timid-looking dark blue eyes’ – fancied by Dr Thomas
Miss Waynflete – ‘completely the country spinster. Her thin form was neatly dressed in a tweed coat and skirt, and she wore a grey silk blouse with a cairngorm brooch. Her hat, a conscientious felt, sat squarely upon her well-shaped head. Her face was pleasant and her eyes, through their pince-nez, decidedly intelligent’
Jim Harvey – mechanic at the local garage, who Amy Gibb was engaged to
Reed – village constable
Mr Ellsworthy – keeps the antique shop – ‘a thin young man dressed in russet brown. He had a long pale face and long black hair’ – according to Bridget, said to dabble in black magic, talk that he held some queer ceremony in the Witches’ Meadow – for a lot of the novel, he is the prime suspect
Major Horton and his bulldogs – ‘a small man with a stiff moustache and protuberant eyes’, the most hen-pecked man in the land until a year ago his wife died
Mr Jones – the bank manager, ‘tall, dark, plump face’
Hetty Jones – daughter of the bank manager, ‘a giggling young woman’
Miss Church – Amy Gibbs’ aunt, ‘an unpleasant woman; her sharp nose, shifty eyes and her voluble tongue all alike filled Luke with nausea’
Miss Lucy Carter – Carter the landlord’s beautiful daughter, ‘The fine-looking girl behind the counter, with her black hair and red cheeks’
Rivers – the chauffeur, sacked by Lord Easterfield when he discovers he’s been taking the car out for his own use (and a bit tipsy into the bargain)
Sir William Ossington – aka Billy Bones, senior London police commissioner
Superintendent Battle – of Scotland Yard, turns up for the last 20 pages – ‘a solid comfortable-looking man with a broad red face and a large handsome moustache’

Magic…

Obviously Miss Fullerton is right, somebody did bump off all these characters, and Luke and Bridget eventually discover who i.e. it’s very much like any other murder mystery.

What’s much more interesting is the book’s deployment of magic. If ‘Appointment with Death’ at moments verged on the genre of psychological horror, this novel very deliberately invokes an atmosphere of magic and the uncanny.

For example, it turns out that the long ridge (Ashe Ridge) which lours over Wychwood, was once the site of Witches’ Sabbaths. Quite quickly Luke becomes aware of an atmosphere of unease and the uncanny in the small town. And much is made of the fact that Bridget doesn’t wear a hat (a fact so notable for the late 1930s that Christie repeatedly comments on it) and so lets her long raven black hair stream in the winds which are always popping up for the purpose. In other words, right from the start, Bridget herself has a distinctly witchy aspect.

He became suddenly conscious of the overlying menace of Ashe Ridge. There was a sudden sharp gust of wind, blowing back the leaves of the trees, and at that moment a girl came round the corner of the castellated mansion. Her black hair was blown up off her head by the sudden gust, and Luke was reminded of a picture he had once seen – Nevinson’s Witch. The long, pale, delicate face, the black hair flying up to the stars. He could see this girl on a broomstick flying up to the moon. (Chapter 3)

Christie’s protagonists are often afflicted by a general sense of the unreality of the situation, and this afflicts Luke, too.

Luke frowned at the opposite bank unseeingly. Once again the dreamlike quality of his mission obsessed him. How much was fact, how much imagination?

He glanced back down the length of the High Street, and he was assailed by a strong feeling of unreality. He said to himself, ‘These things don’t happen.’ (Chapter 9)

But it’s more than that, it’s an active atmosphere of strangeness and enchantment.

It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood… (Chapter 10)

This mood or tone or atmosphere is increasingly emphasised and gives the novel an additional, very enjoyable dimension.

Slowly she raised her face from her hands. Her face troubled him. She looked as though she were returning from some far-off world, as though she had difficulty in adjusting herself to the world of now and here. (Chapter 10)

It was a minute or two before she answered – as though she still had not quite come back from that far-off world that had held her. Luke felt that his words had to travel a long way before they reached her. (Chapter 10)

They looked like two figures out of a dream. One felt that their feet made no sound as they sprang cat-like from tuft to tuft. He saw her black hair stream out behind her, blown by the wind. Again that queer magic of hers held him. ‘Bewitched, that’s what I am – bewitched,’ he said to himself. (Chapter 9)

And, at moments, a real sense of menace.

Then he lifted his eyes to the long frowning line of Ashe Ridge, and at once the unreality passed. Ashe Ridge was real; it knew strange things – witchcraft and cruelty and forgotten blood lusts and evil rites. (Chapter 9)

And:

The sun had come out while he was talking to Rose Humbleby. Now it had gone in again. The sky was dull and menacing, and wind came in sudden erratic little puffs. It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood. He turned a corner and came out on the flat ledge of green grass that had been pointed out to him from below, and which went, he knew, by the name of Witches’ Meadow. It was here, so tradition had it, that the witches had held revelry on Walpurgis Night and Halloween. (Chapter 10)

While at other times the language of magic, witchcraft and spells is deployed rather more light-heartedly in the context of falling in love. Here’s Luke embarrassedly explaining to Bridget that he’s fallen in love with her:

‘I came down here to do a job of work and you came round the corner of that house and – how can I say it? – put a spell on me! That’s what it feels like. You mentioned fairy stories just now. I’m caught up in a fairy story! You’ve bewitched me.’ (Chapter 12)

… or madness

Well before the end, though, the theme of magic and witches and whatnot fades into the background and is eclipsed by the increasingly shrill emphasis on madness, the madness of – first of all, Lord Easterfield who Luke comes to imagine is the murderer – and then of the actual murderer, who really is revealed to be completely insane. Often the insanity thing is just a trope in Christie’s novels: here it is literally true.

And is emphasised in the book’s increasingly hysterical last 40 pages or so, when the protagonist, Luke, running through a succession of possible suspects, slangily wonders whether he’s going mad or not.

Oh, I’m mad. I must be mad. Easterfield’s the criminal. He must be.

My point is that the colourful theme of magic and the occult is only a kind of temporary flavour, colours the first half of the book, maybe, but fades away as the final passages give way to the same kind of focus on madness and a desperate race against time to prevent the final murder, as so many of the others.

In the same way that other ‘themes’ – such as the Riviera or the Orient Express or a Nile steamship or an archaeological dig in Iraq – provide an initial colour and exoticism but don’t really soak the story, aren’t really intrinsic to it. The plots of all those novels could be moved to different locations. The colour is just that, a little local flavour thrown over the same basic scaffold, and which is increasingly discarded and then disappears as the logic of the plot unfolds.

Bookishness

‘There was no suspicion of what they call in books ‘foul play’, at the inquest?’ (Chapter 6)

‘Because of the melodramatic atmosphere in which I’m living at present. It makes me see things out of all proportion. If I lose sight of you for an hour or two, I naturally assume that the next thing will be to find your gory corpse in a ditch. It would be, in a play or a book.’ (Chapter 10)

‘Oh, no, I’m not a plain-clothes dick.’ He added, with a slightly humorous inflection, ‘I’m afraid I’m that well-known character in fiction, the private investigator.’ (Chapter 13)

I feel a lawyer is definitely a suspicious person. Possibly prejudice. His personality, florid, genial, etc., would be definitely suspicious in a book – always suspect bluff genial men. Objection: This is not a book but real life. (Chapter 7)

No, it’s a character in a book insisting that they’re not a character in a book, while the reader smiles, knowing that they are a character in a book.

And there’s the obligatory Sherlock Holmes reference which occurs in nearly every Christie novel, in this instance a joke between Luke and Bridget:

‘Oh, you admit it then.’
‘Obvious, my dear Watson.’
(Chapter 12)

Complexes

From her first novel in 1920, Christie had used the language of psychology and, intermittently, of psychoanalysis, as handy labels to describe her murderers. Nowhere is any of it gone into in great detail, it’s more as if her characters parrot the catchphrases publicised by the popular press and magazines. ‘Complex’ is a handy catch-all idea, the notion that this or that person suffers from this or that complex. Easily written, sounds sophisticated, doesn’t really explain anything.

Luke stood looking after her. A sudden wave of solicitude swept over him. He felt a longing to shield and protect this girl. From what? Asking himself the question, he shook his head with a momentary impatience at himself. It was true that Rose Humbleby had recently lost her father, but she had a mother, and she was engaged to be married, to a decidedly attractive young man who was fully adequate to anything in the protection line. Then why should he, Luke Fitzwilliam, be assailed by this protection complex? (Chapter 10)

But don’t you realize that Gordon Easterfield has a very exalted opinion of himself?’
Bridget said, ‘He pretends to be very wonderful and very important. That’s just inferiority complex, poor lamb!’ (Chapter 21)

Magazine level.

The abilities of aunts

Towards the end Luke goes to see young Dr Thomas and gives his theory that the murderer is Ellsworthy the curiosity shop owner. Thomas is sceptical. Unexpectedly, their exchange turns into praise of the acuteness of aunts:

Thomas replied good-humouredly. ‘Give me a few proofs, my dear fellow. That’s all I ask. Not just a long melodramatic rigmarole based on what an old lady fancied she saw.’
‘What old ladies fancy they see is very often right. My Aunt Mildred was positively uncanny! Have you got any aunts yourself, Thomas?’
‘Well – er – no.’
‘A mistake!’ said Luke. ‘Every man should have aunts. They illustrate the triumph of guesswork over logic. It is reserved for aunts to know that Mr. A is a rogue because he looks like a dishonest butler they once had. Other people say, reasonably enough, that a respectable man like Mr A couldn’t be a crook. The old ladies are right every time.’ (Chapter 18)

In fact quite a few aunts feature in the cast list and in conversation. The novel has an aunt complex.

She reminded Luke slightly of one of his aunts, his Aunt Mildred, who had courageously allowed him to keep a grass snake when he was ten years old. Aunt Mildred had been decidedly a good aunt as aunts go. (Chapter 1)

The younger generation

‘I’ve always been respectable and I don’t hold with carryings on! But with what girls are nowadays, it’s no use speaking to them. They go their own way. And often they live to regret it.’ (Working class Miss Church, Chapter 14)

The older generation has always felt this, hasn’t it? I.e. it’s pure cliché. Significant, maybe, that it’s put into the mouth of an uneducated character, as if this is a tired cliché which has percolated down through papers and magazines to people of Miss Church’s class, where it has gathered like water in a puddle, an utterly exhausted, contentless notion.

Pussy

Four times Christie has her character describe old ladies as ‘pussies’. New to me.

Luke grinned. ‘No fear. No, it’s rather queer. Old pussy I travelled up with in the train yesterday got run over.’ (Chapter 2)

Said Luke, ‘They said she was a nice old pussy, but talked a lot…’ (Chapter 3)

Bridget smiled faintly. ‘Oh, no; not in the sense you mean. I mean we haven’t said anything right out. I don’t really know how far the old pussy has gone in her own mind…’ (Chapter 6)

She thought: ‘I’m a match for her anyway. My muscles are pretty tough; she’s a skinny frail old pussy…’ (Chapter 22)

And Major Horton refers to Honoria Waynflete and Lavinia Fullerton as ‘the old tabbies’ (Chapter 11). Obviously closely allied to the use of ‘cat’ meaning gossipy old so-and-so which I’ve come across elsewhere in her works and throughout Noel Coward.

Film language

Luke said, ‘Seriously, Miss Waynflete, do you really think that I am in any danger? Do you think, in film parlance, that Lord Easterfield is really out to get me?’ (Chapter 22)

Credit

‘Murder is Easy’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1939.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1930s reviews

Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard (1996)

‘Leisure societies lie ahead of us…’
(Irving Sanger, p.180)

A poolside thriller

Although it’s longer than almost any of Ballard’s other novels, Cocaine Nights feels like a nice easy read, an airport or poolside thriller with an increasingly psychotic edge.

I found Day of Creation and Rushing to Paradise a struggle to finish because their stories were so preposterous, but Cocaine Nights fits much more easily into the thriller genre and for much of the time was as easy as eating an ice cream at the cinema. It was published 26 long years after Ballard had published the angular, challenging, Atrocity Exhibition and, reading this book, it feels worlds away in size, form and approach…

Cocaine Nights is a confident first-person narrative told by Charles Prentice, a seasoned travel writer who’s knocked about a bit and knows the ways of the world. When he learns that his kid brother Frank has been arrested and will be going on trial in Marbella, in the south of Spain, Charles flies to Gibraltar, hires a car and drives up the Spanish coast.

Frank has been living for the past few years in an exclusive resort named Estrella de Mar where he was manager of the popular Club Nautico, overseeing ‘a familiar world of squash courts, jacuzzis and plunge-pools’.

Charles checks into a nearby hotel, and makes an appointment to meet Frank’s Spanish lawyer. Here, for the first time, he discovers the charges against his brother. A swanky holiday house overlooking the resort was set on fire in an act of deliberate arson, and the retired British couple who lived there, the Hollingers, along with their niece Anne, an au pair and the male secretary, Roger Sansom, were all burned to death in the arson attack.

Frank was discovered by the police a few hours later in possession of molotov cocktails – wine bottles filled with a highly flammable mix of ether and petrol – of the kind which without doubt started the fire. When Charles finally manages to visit Frank at his Spanish prison he discovers, to his bewilderment and consternation, that Frank is going to plead guilty.

Charles spends a week snooping round Estrella, interviewing as many of the inhabitants as he can. On the surface it’s bustling with good, clean, wholesome bourgeois activities, a theatre club putting on plays by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, an arts cinema, pottery classes, tennis lessons, choral societies – it’s Surrey by the sea.

In many ways Estrella de Mar was the halcyon county-town England of the mythical 1930s, brought back to life and moved south into the sun. Here there were no gangs of bored teenagers, no deracinated suburbs where neighbours scarcely knew each other and their only civic loyalties were to the nearest hypermarket and DIY store. As everyone never tired of saying, Estrella de Mar was a true community, with schools for the French and British children, a thriving Anglican church and a local council of elected members which met at the Club Nautico. However modestly, a happier twentieth century had rediscovered itself in this corner of the Costa del Sol…

And:

Purpose-built in the 1970s by a consortium of Anglo-Dutch developers, Estrella de Mar was a residential retreat for the professional classes of northern Europe. The resort had turned its back on mass tourism, and there were none of the skyscraper blocks that rose from the water’s edge at Benalmadena and Torremolinos. The old town by the harbour had been pleasantly bijouized, the fishermen’s cottages converted to wine bars and antique shops. Taking the road that led to the Club Nautico, I passed an elegant tea salon, a bureau de change decorated with Tudor half-timbering, and a boutique whose demure window displayed a solitary but exquisite designer gown. I waited as a van emblazoned with trompe-l’œil traffic scenes reversed into the courtyard of a sculpture studio…

What with this thriving art scene, drama club, art classes, pilates, swimming lessons, sailing, tennis and much, much more, Estrella de Mar seems like paradise:

Secure on their handsome peninsula, the people of the resort were an example of the liberation that follows when continuous sunlight is shone on the British.

But the more ‘amateur sleuthing’ Charles does and the more he finds out, the stranger the place appears.

One night, sitting in his car outside the resort’s main nightclub, the Club Nautico, pondering his next move, he sees what he takes to be a violent rape taking place in a car parked nearby. He runs over to rescue the woman, the man makes a getaway out the other door, but the woman, although obviously assaulted, with her knickers round her ankles and bleeding from the mouth, shrugs him off, pulls herself together and walks away. More disconcerting, as he stands there confused, Charles realises there was an audience watching: there are couples sitting in all the cars facing the one where the assault was taking place. Exasperated, Charles bangs his fists on their windshields:

‘What are you people playing at?’ I shouted. ‘For God’s sake . . .’

But one by one the cars turn on their ignitions, and slowly drive way.

Similarly, Charles notices prostitutes hanging round some of the streets in micro-skirts and boob tubes, mingling with the traffic, waiters, delivery men, shopkeepers and so on of the busy resort. But, on closer examination, he is disconcerted to realise that they are two ‘respectable’ women, wives of two men who run the town’s travel agency. Is it a kind of sex game, played to excite their husbands, or themselves? Or do they need the money?

A similar sense of bafflement surrounds descriptions of the fateful fire which killed the Hollingers. It happened on the Queen’s birthday, 15 June, and wasn’t a secret affair, the opposite. The villa was hosting a big party with everyone who was anyone at the resort invited, and so there was a crowd of over 200 drinking, partying, laughing, around the villa’s massive swimming pool. Hollinger even proposed a loyal toast to the Queen from his balcony, before going back inside (he was, Charles is repeatedly told, patriotic but aloof and rather pompous). Then suddenly the crowd started to realise that the big villa was on fire. Various guests tried to smash in the patio doors or windows, but they were fire-sealed and security-locked. Some guests tried to put ladders up to the first floor balcony and windows but the ladder caught fire.

So a) everyone saw the fire happen happen b) a lot of people tried to intervene but c) the Hollingers didn’t try to open any doors or windows but, apparently, stayed snug inside their separate bedrooms while their villa burned to the ground around them.

Charles visits the scene of the burned-out villa with one of the ex-pats who was there that night and who takes him through the events in detail. He closely questions all the other ex-pats who’ll agree to see him. He has long conversations with Frank himself, on his visits to him in prison, but his brother is infuriatingly vague about what happened or who is to blame. Charles is stunned when Frank’s lawyer tells him Frank is definitely going to please guilty to all five counts of murder.

Why? Why confess to a crime he didn’t commit? What the hell is going on?

To find out Charles decides he has to move into Estrella de Mar itself, so he checks out of the hotel up the coast where he’d been staying (the Los Monteros Hotel) and takes up occupation of Frank’s now-empty apartment, and starts digging deeper into the place and its inhabitants. All this has taken place by about page 70 – chapter 6 of the book’s 28 chapters – and the rest of the novel describes what he finds out.

And he finds out… that there is, as the BBC Sunday night drama has it, Death in Paradise. From the start Ballard had set a tone of aggressive sexuality – Charles has only just got into his hire car at Gibraltar when he spies a sultry woman driver in a nearby car fixing her make-up and has sexual fantasies about her. He is quick to spot the hookers on the streets of Estrella da Mar and quick to embark on a sexual affair with the resort’s troubled doctor, Paula Hamilton, and quickly suspects the bruises around her face are not from some harmless accident, but from the rough sex games, the S&M scene he quickly suspects exists behind closed doors at the resort.

So far so BDSM, so Crash, so porny. But if you park the porn – and Charless quick realisation that a certain amount of drugs is being consumed at the resort, mainly speed and cocaine – if you put all this modish window dressing to one side, the basic structure of the story is the same as a hundred Agatha Christie novels, and a thousand sleepy, Sunday night BBC ‘dramas’, the same basic structure:

at an idyllic country community / stately home / happy family
a mysterious death occurs
an outsider comes in to investigate (Poirot, Miss Marple, Charles Prentice)
who conducts a series of interviews with half a dozen key players
which slowly reveal that any one of half a dozen characters might have had motives to carry out the murder(s)
in which he or she uncovers clues carefully placed by the writer to keep us guessing
so that the outsider/investigator slowly discovers that the idyllic community / stately home / happy family has dark (and hopefully depraved) secrets
until by a process of induction, or through further incriminating events, the outsider/investigator finally discovers ‘the truth’

Thus, although the sex and drugs elements are fashionably depraved, and some of the details are quirky (like when Charles is buzz-bombed by a man-powered glider, which is a throwback to his weirder sci-fi stories) on the whole the narrative unfolds with the utter predictability of a 1930s murder mystery.

As you might have predicted, ‘shadowy figures’ try to warn Charles off, starting with a half-hearted attempt to strangle him on the balcony of Frank’s apartment, which is arranged to frighten him but not to actually hurt him.

As you might expect, Charles accompanies the Spanish detective in charge of the investigation on an extended tour of the burned-out villa as they retrace the stages of the crime, step by gruesome step, lingering over each room in which one or more of the victims were found burned or asphyxiated to death.

As you might expect, the detective reveals some unusual facts, such as that old Hollinger died in the house jacuzzi (good idea) but not with his wife, with young Anna the au pair. And that Anna was pregnant – but with whose child? Tut tut. And that Mrs Hollinger wasn’t in her room but in bed with the male secretary, Sansom. Saucy goings-on. ‘Lawks a-mercy, Monsieur Poirot, whoever would have thought it!’

As you might expect, Charles discovers a videotape in the melted VHS player of the burned-out villa – which the police have somehow overlooked – and takes it back to Frank’s apartment to view. It is, to no-one’s surprise, a porno, an amateur hand-held affair which starts with a standard lesbian romp, but turns nasty when some tough young men enter and appear to genuinely rape the tearful central figure. Yes, Estrella de Mar has a darker side, which grows a lot darker when Charles discovers it was his new girlfriend, Dr Paula Hamilton, who filmed the whole event.

As you might expect, there is a morose outsider, who has his own secrets to hide. In a Christie novel it’s often the gamekeeper or family retainer who turns out to have his own secrets. In this book it is the gloomy Swede Andersson, who maintains high powered speedboats which – on investigation – defy the Spanish navy to import hashish and heroin from North Africa. Drug smuggling.

Stuff happens. Someone sets fire to a stolen speedboat in the harbour. Someone sets fire to Prentice’s hire car. Someone dive bombs him with a hang glider when he climbs to the lemon grove above the Hollingers’ burned-out villa looking for evidence.

He feels himself settling into this world of casual crime, drug-taking and porn film-making, a ‘hidden Estrella de Mar, a shadow world of backstreet bars, hard-core video-stores and fringe pharmacies’, his brother Frank, stuck in gaol, becoming an ever more notional figure. Sanger the resort psychiatrist says he’s beginning to resemble his brother.

The Bobby Crawford effect

Bobby Crawford, the resort’s energetic tennis coach, was drifting down the coast from one sleepy resort to the next. When he arrived at Estrella da Mar he found it as torpid and somnolent as all the others he’d been at. But party by accident he was involved in some petty crimes and observed that it pepped the victims up no end. Experimentally, he embarked on a one-man crime wave, breaking into the luxury villas, nicking video players, pouring wine on precious carpets, spraying graffiti on garage doors, vandalising cars.

The effect is dramatic. People come out of their TV-induced coma to come to the resort offices to complain. They set up neighbourhood watch schemes. Having met each other they have parties to discuss latest developments, discover they have a taste for amateur dramatics or sports. People started turning up at what had previously been Crawford’s moribund tennis club.

I understood how [Frank] had fallen under Crawford’s spell, accepting the irresistible logic that had revived the Club Nautico and the moribund town around it. Crime would always be rife, but Crawford had put vice and prostitution and drug-dealing to positive social ends. Estrella de Mar had rediscovered itself.

The owners and investors – notably the shark-like Betty Shand – in the resort observe all this. They egg Crawford on. Encouraged he explores how far he can take the notion of energising crime. Some of the members of the newly founded film club are encouraged to make saucy films. A handful of the tougher sports club members are recruited into Crawford’s gang which carries out random attacks or thefts.

Ballard’s thesis

So bit by bit, Ballard’s thesis is at first hinted at by various characters, and then finally explained at length by Crawford in what might as well be a Shakespearian soliloquy addressed directly to the audience. The thesis is that society is sinking into a profound slump of boredom and accidie, addicted to TV while its mind vegetates. But people need excitement and an environment of petty crime energises and enlivens entire communities.

What they need, though they refuse to accept it, is a certain amount of amoral crime. And the person who supplies it, the impresario of crime, is the unacknowledged saviour of moribund communities. In the right time and place, the psychopath can be a saint.

‘The psychopath plays a vital role. He meets the needs of the hour, touches our graceless lives with the only magic we know…’ (Bobby Crawford explaining to Charles)

Put to the test – the Residencia Costasol

And all this is put to the test, when the likeable energetic Crawford recruits Charles in him and his rich sponsors’ next project which is to move on to the next sleepy ex-pat resort down the coast, the Residencia Costasol.

Half-reluctant but intrigued, Charles allows himself to be persuaded to become the manager of the main nightclub in the resort down the road. It is dead in the water, an utterly moribund community of numbed zombies who stay indoors all day watching TV. Charles watches how just a few incidents of petty crime begin to waken the dead. Crawford takes him on a car tour of the empty, perfectly manicured streets, with Crawford stopping every so often to break into an empty villa and steal a video recorder, or some jewellery, to spraypaint a garage door or vandalise a slumbering Porsche.

Charles is initially sceptical but then amazed when people start visiting the resort offices to complain, stop to buy some stuff, go into the bars for a drink, a few of them sign up with Crawford’s tennis club, some of them ask about entertainment at Charles’s nightclub.

Charles finds himself sucked into the scheme and becoming compliant to ever greater scandals. When a luxury yacht is burned down in the marina, it not only shocks the inhabitants, it reminds everyone that they own yachts, and soon the yacht club is booming. And so is Charles’s nightclub, doing a roaring trade, with people staying up late partying to the dance music. Which of course attracts drug dealers who Crawford, we find out, is managing and running. Similarly, some prostitutes arrive but Charles is stunned when he realises some of the women tottering in high heels, micro-skirts and boob tubes are wives of well-to-do residents. The Crawford Effect works. Residencia Costasol is becoming another Estrella da Mar.

Charles turns into his brother

All this has taken some months and Charles changes. He had rushed out to Spain on the first flight to help his brother and pestered his lawyers and the police for his first few weeks. Then, as he uncovers more about Estrella’s secret sub-culture, he put off seeing his brother until he understands more. And this quest to understand takes him down the road we’ve described, until he realises he has become his brother – performing exactly the role in the Residencia Costasol that Frank played in Estrella, a lynchpin in the resort’s social life, turning a blind eye to activities which skirt illegality and, increasingly, veer into outright immorality, but not taking an active part so much as trying to restrain or channel Bobby Crawford’s boyish, unstoppable, amoral appetite for stirring things up.

And so it is that Charles puts off opportunities to visit his brother for months on end, and slowly comes to the realisation that he doesn’t want to or need to. When Paul Hamilton tells him that Frank’s much-delayed trial is about to start the next day, Charles brushes it off. His metamorphosis into his amoral brother is complete.

Whodunnit

Eventually we get to the payoff, which comes as little or no surprise. Who set fire to the Hollingers’ villa? They all did or, to be more precise, all the main characters Charles has met played a part. There wasn’t really a central mastermind or fixed plan, but some of the people he’s met got hold of petrol and ether, others filled the villa’s air conditioning with this flammable mix. Each individual told themselves they were preparing a prank, a practical joke, a bit extreme maybe, but essentially harmless. In an act of collective psychosis none of them acknowledged what they were doing, until it began to happen and then it was too late – the fire spread too fast and aggressively for anyone to stop it or the villa’s inhabitants to escape.

And then the collective act had performed its function. The entire community felt bound together by collective guilt, like members of some primitive tribe who kill, cook and eat their chief. They have all partaken of the blood sacrifice. They are bound more closely than ever together.

‘He [Bobby Crawford] stumbled on the first and last truth about the leisure society, and perhaps all societies. Crime and creativity go together, and always have done. The greater the sense of crime, the greater the civic awareness and richer the civilization. Nothing else binds a community together. It’s a strange paradox.’ (Paula Hamilton explaining to Charles)

And in fact, to his dismay, his lover Paul Hamilton who finally reveals all this to him, also reveals that Frank did in fact play a key role in the arson. And that’s why he has decided to plead guilty. By pleading guilty he saves the others, saves the community.

Novel or fable?

By this stage you can see how the book has ceased to be a realistic novel or thriller. It is making a case. It is what the French call a roman à thèse – a novel which is didactic or which expounds a theory. Humans are animals. Despite all propaganda to the opposite, they need excitement and thrills. The person who provides this excitement – the psychopath as saint – is reviled but secretly welcomed. The sequence of petty crimes leads inexorably to a great act of collective murder which binds the community in collective guilt.

By this point the book has ceased being a realistic novel and become a kind of elaboration of Sigmund Freud’s highly questionable anthropological theories. In his later writings Freud speculated that early human societies were bound together through the ritual murder of The Father, and claimed to have found evidence for this in ancient mythology, from the Greeks to the ancient Israelites.

If you buy into this logic, or if you are now reading the book more as a Freudian fable than as a Christie-style whodunnit, the final section comes as no surprise, but has a pleasing inevitability about it. Things are thriving at the Residencia Costasol but Charles picks up more and more signals that another extreme event is in the offing, though he can’t discover what it is, and for a while the reader is alarmed that he himself might be the target, or his erstwhile lover, Paul Hamilton.

Or, in a big red herring, maybe the target will be Dr Irwin Sanger, the resident psychotherapist at Estrella de Mar who, we come to learn, has a fetish for under-age girls, and is more or less driven out of Estralla, taking refuge in a villa he’s bought at the Residencia Costasol, close to the one Charles is living in. Is a gang of vigilantes going to attack the increasingly fragile old man and torch his villa?

In the event it is Bobby Crawford. He’d made an appointment to meet Charles, but as Charles approaches the tennis court where Bobby spends all his time between supervising the community’s criminal activities, he finds Crawford lying on the court, shot through the heart. Charles stoops and picks up the small handgun which killed him, moves Bobby’s head, gets blood all over his shirt and hands… just as he hears the siren of the police car, looks up to see Inspector Cabrera, who had investigated the original arson attack, who had quizzed him at length about his brother, who had watched his character slowly transform… Inspector Cabrera walks towards him across the court and in the last sentences Charles realises that he, Charles Prentice, will take the blame, take the rap, plead guilty of Bobby’s murder… for the greater good of the community.

And the novel ends on this Grand Guignol, Edgar Allen Poe moment.

Characters

An indication of its difference from previous novels is the sheer number of characters. A novel like The Crystal World had about eight named characters, Concrete Island only about four, whereas Cocaine Nights feels has the extended cast of Eastenders.

The narrator

Charles Prentice, travel writer and older brother of Frank
Frank Prentice, long term inhabitant of Estrella de Mar, accused of the murder by arson of the Hollingers

The ex pats

David Hennessy, retired Lloyd’s underwriter, now doddery the treasurer of the Club Nautico
Bobby Crawford, Club Nautico’s tennis professional and impresario of crime and transgressive behaviour
Dr Paula Hamilton, physician at the Princess Margaret Clinic, formerly Frank’s girlfriend
Sonny Gardner, barman and crew member on Frank’s thirty-foot yacht
Elizabeth Shand, Estrella de Mar’s most successful businesswoman, a former partner of Hollinger’s
Dr Irwin Sanger, Bibi’s psychiatrist
Anthony Bevis, owner of the Cabo D’Ora Gallery
Colin Dewhurst, manager of a bookshop in the Plaza Iglesias
Blanche and Marion Keswick, two jaunty Englishwomen who ran the Restaurant du Cap, an elegant brasserie by the harbour
Gunnar Andersson, a young Swede who tuned speedboat engines at the marina, boyfriend of Bibi
a retired Bournemouth accountant and his sharp-eyed wife who runs a video-rental store in the Avenida Ortega
the Reverend Davis, the pale and earnest vicar of the Anglican church (officiates at one of the funerals of the arson victims)

The five arson victims

the Hollingers – he a retired British film producer, she (Alice) one of the last of the Rank Charm School starlets
Anne, their niece
Bibi Jansen, the Swedish au pair who died in the fire
the gay male secretary, Roger Sansom

The Spanish authorities

Senor Danvila – Frank’s lawyer
Inspector Cabrera, detective investigating the arson case

Rodney Lewis, Charles’s agent in London

Strengths

Ballard writes so vividly. Almost every paragraph has a phrase which scintillates with linguistic charge. There is a wonderful clarity and precision to his vision.

The pool terrace was deserted, the choppy water settling itself for the night
I walked into the dining room, listening to my footsteps as they dogged me across the parquet flooring
[after the fire] The remote-control unit lay on the bedside table, melted like black chocolate
Shreds of burnt chintz clung to the walls, and the dressing room resembled a coal scuttle in a rage
Dominating all the other craft in the yard was a fibre-glass powerboat almost forty feet long, three immense outboards at its stern like the genitalia of a giant aquatic machine

He’s not always on song. Sometimes the rhetoric can become overwrought, almost always when he lapses into cliché, into the expected:

The faint scent of bath gel still clung to my skin, the perfume of my own strangulation that embraced me like a forbidden memory

And so part of the pleasure of reading the book comes from watching Ballard navigate the fine line between acuity and pretentiousness, between vivid originality and something a little more clumsy. For example, which side of the line is this?

He left the boatyard and led me along the walkway between the moored yachts and cabin-cruisers. The white-hulled craft seemed almost spectral in the dusk, a fleet waiting to sail on a phantom wind.

That’s a little over-ripe for me, a bit too self-consciously Gothic. A phrase like this overlays the scene with a forced or pretentious comparison. It moves from the specific outwards to the general and so diffuses the effect. I prefer descriptions which travel in the opposite direction, which zero in, which make you sit up and pay closer attention to the thing itself:

Andersson stopped at the end of the quay, where a small sloop rode at anchor. Beneath the Club Nautico pennant at the stern was its name: Halcyon. Police exclusion tapes looped along its rails, falling into the water where they drifted like streamers from a forgotten party.

This acuteness also applies to his perceptions of people.

As his eyes searched the sky over the town I noticed that he was looking everywhere but at the Hollinger house. His natural aloofness shaded into some unhappy emotion that I could only glimpse around the bony corners of his face.

That feels acute to me, and original. Very simple vocabulary, but conveying a way of perceiving new to most of us. Only prose fiction can do this, surprise us in this way.

Ballard’s sardonic vision of ex-pat communities

The whole narrative is premised on the idea that the ex-pat communities along the Mediterranean have a special atmosphere of zombified inanition. Sometimes Ballard describes this with the seriousness that the premise of a fable requires, but other times he is wonderfully acute and funny at describing the strange limbo world of these kind of over-heated ex-pat resorts. He doesn’t hold back:

While a young Frenchwoman topped up my tank I strolled past the supermarket that shared the forecourt, where elderly women in fluffy towelling suits drifted like clouds along the lines of ice-cold merchandise. I climbed a pathway of blue tiles to a grass knoll and looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools. Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds -British, Dutch and German – were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated these émigré populations…

The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake. As always, when I drove along the coast to Marbella, I seemed to be moving through a zone that was fully accessible only to a neuroscientist, and scarcely at all to a travel writer. The white facades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallised beside the road. Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves…

Estrella de Mar seemed a place without shadows, its charms worn as openly as the bare breasts of the women of all ages who sunbathed at the Club Nautico. Secure on their handsome peninsula, the people of the resort were an example of the liberation that follows when continuous sunlight is shone on the British.

Via his characters, Ballard can be even more forthright in his opinions:

‘Have you seen the pueblos along the coast? Zombieland. Fifty thousand Brits, one huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic. Embalming fluid piped door to door…’

Charles is more detached and analytical – he is, after all, a writer by profession – but is given the same point of view:

Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilised the nervous system; the almost Africanised aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools…

Empty pools and full pools

One symbolic way of indicating the difference between Ballard’s pre-Empire of the Sun fiction and the novels he wrote after that catharsis is that, in all his pre-Empire stories and novels, the swimming pools are drained and empty; in all the post-Empire stories, the swimming pools are filled to the brim, reflecting the bright blue Mediterranean sky, and denoting a world of timeless, affectless plenty.

Weaknesses

It’s hard not to notice Ballard’s use of a deliberately limited descriptive vocabulary, a very restricted number of moods or gestures which all the characters display, as if they are androids with about five settings. This lexical narrowness bespeaks, indicates and enacts a sort of emotional and cognitive narrowness in his characters.

People are always needing to be ‘calmed’, because something is ‘unsettling’ or over-exciting them; many of the characters or situations are described almost from the start as ‘deranged’ or ‘demented’; the narrator does no end of ‘sensing’, ‘sensing’ that people know more than they let on, ‘sensing’ that he is unwelcome, ‘sensing’ that characters really mean this or that secret motive.

Calm

Paula tried to calm me, sitting me in the leather armchair and putting a cushion behind my head…
Cabrera watched me from the door, restraining Paula when she tried to calm me…
She turned to face me, and touched my forehead with a calming hand…
Before I could remonstrate with her she turned to face me, and touched my forehead with a calming hand…
‘Now, sit down and try to calm yourself,’ Sanger steered me from the garden door, whose handle I was trying to turn, concerned for my overexcited state…
One of them touched my cheek, as if calming a child…
Trying to calm myself, I sipped Frank’s whisky and listened to the shrieks and laughter as the sun came up over the sea…
I put my hands on her shoulders to calm her.

Demented/deranged

I remembered the disagreeable Guardia Civil at Gibraltar and speculated that the fire had been started by a deranged Spanish policeman protesting at Britain’s occupation of the Rock.
Andersson stood astride the grave, spade held across his chest like a jousting pole, glaring in a deranged way at the psychiatrist.
Repeated cleanings had blurred the pigments, and the triptych of garage, windows and door resembled the self-accusing effort of a deranged Expressionist painter
The bedrooms were daubed with graffiti, a riot of black and silver whorls, a demented EEG trace searching for a brain
As Laurie Fox screamed in her demented way, spitting out the blood she had sucked into her mouth, Sanger seized her around the waist.
In the soil scattered from the plant tubs a demented geometer had set out the diagram of a bizarre dance of death…

Unsettled

‘You’ve unsettled a great many people since you arrived, understandably so…’
His talk of re-opening the case unsettled me…
The frankness of her erotic response, the unashamed way in which she used her sex, seemed to unsettle Crawford..
I fingered the plastic sachet, tempted to help myself to this forgotten cache, but I was too unsettled by the visit to the Hollinger house
The testy humour, and the edgy manner of someone unsettled by standing more than a few seconds in front of a mirror, would have appealed to Frank…
Cabrera hesitated before getting into his car, unsettled by my change of tack
Crawford sat forward, speaking quietly as if not wanting to unsettle the silence.

Sensed

He uses the phrase ‘Already I…’ to convey the sense that something is creeping up on the narrator, that things are overtaking him, that things are moving at pace…

Already I sensed that she was looking on me with more favour, for whatever reasons of her own…
Already I sensed that I was being kept under surveillance…
Already I could sense the freedom that this intimate world would have given to Alice Hollinger…

Narrowness and repetition

Obviously we all have restricted vocabularies, our own idiolects (‘the speech habits peculiar to a particular person’) and Ballard is a very clever, self-aware writer.

Sol much so that I wonder whether the repetition of actions, of moods and of the relatively small range of words that he uses to describe them is deliberate – that he accepts the same narrow set of words which suggest themselves as he writes, because doing this adds to the stylisation of the text. That the repetitions not only of plot, but of specific words and phrases, adds to the sense of stylisation which accompanied, in the old days, coronations and religious rituals, and in our media age, define the camera angles and gestures of movie actors.

So that when the any of the other characters tell Charles to ‘calm’ himself, we remember Jim in Empire of the Sun continually being told by the adults to calm down. When the narrator remembers his father sparring with the Saudi police and so ‘unsettling’ his mother, we remember all the other Ballard characters who have been ‘unsettled’ by a drowned world, crystallising forests, the inhabitants of high rises killing each other, and so on.

This narrowness of plotting, and the narrowness of vocabulary, are central issues in critiquing Ballard’s work.

Running Wild is about a luxury gated community for top professionals which is the scene of a massacre and turns out, on investigation by an outsider, to conceal very dark depths.

Cocaine Nights is about a luxury ex-pat community for top professionals which is the scene of a massacre and turns out, on investigation by an outsider, to conceal very dark depths.

Super-Cannes is about a luxury business park for top professionals which is the scene of a massacre and turns out, on investigation by an outsider, to conceal very dark depths.

Is the repetition of the same basic plot, told in prose which heavily features the same stylised attitudes and words (unsettle, calm, deranged) a bad thing or a good thing? Does the repetition of ideas and phrases cumulatively build up a powerful vision of the world?

Or feel like the repetition of a writer who’s lost inspiration? I think it’s more the former, that the hammering away of the same vocabulary is like a miner hammering away at a coal seam underground, relentlessly chipping away at the same pressure point to try and achieve a breakthrough into a new way of seeing.

Ballard’s improbable dialogue

Dialogue in thrillers is always pat, neat and snappy. Think of any of the classic American writers, Dashiel Hammett or Raymond Chandler. By this late stage in his career Ballard had evolved his own version of this stagey dialogue in which characters don’t speak like hard-boiled gangsters but like lecturers in media studies, all very savvy and smart about Freud and Fellini. Here’s Crawford the tennis coach talking to Charles the narrator about his brother, Frank:

He stared at the air with his arms raised to the sky, as if waiting for a sympathetic genie to materialize out of the spiralling dust.
‘Charles, I know. What’s going on? This is Kafka re-shot in the style of Psycho. You’ve talked to him?’
‘Of course. He insists he’s guilty. Why?’
‘No one knows. We’re all racking our brains. I think it’s Frank playing his strange games again, like those peculiar chess problems he’s always making up. King to move and mate in one, though this time there are no other pieces on the board and he has to mate himself.’

‘This is Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho‘ and then moving on to make comparisons with chess games. Do you think anyone, anywhere has ever spoken like that, let alone a professional tennis coach?

Here’s Charles sparring with nervous Dr Paul Hamilton.

‘Besides, my patients need me. Someone has to wean them off the Valium and Mogadon, teach them how to face the day without a bottle and a half of vodka.’
‘So what Joan of Arc was to the English soldiery you are to the pharmaceutical industry?’

Has anyone ever said something is sharp and snappy as that to you? Here’s Charles talking to Inspector Cabrera:

‘Inspector, when I meet Frank I’ll say that I’ve seen the house. If he knows I’ve been here he’ll realize how absurd his confession is. The idea that he’s guilty is preposterous.’
Cabrera seemed disappointed in me. ‘It’s possible, Mr Prentice. Guilt is so flexible, it’s a currency that changes hands . . . each time losing a little value.’

Ah, the literary policeman as philosopher. Here’s Charles with Dr Hamilton, again:

‘Who is he exactly?’
‘Not even Bobby Crawford knows that. He’s three different people before breakfast. Every morning he takes his personalities out of the wardrobe and decides which one he’ll wear for the day.’

Snappy. Or:

As we stood together I placed my hand on her breast, my index finger following the blue vein that rose to the surface of her sunburnt skin before descending into the warm deeps below her nipple. She watched me uncritically, curious to see what I would do next. Without moving my hand from her breast, she said: ‘Charles, this is your doctor speaking. You’ve had enough stress for one day.’
‘Would making love to you be very stressful?’
‘Making love to me is always stressful. Quite a few men in Estrella de Mar would confirm that. I don’t want to visit the cemetery again.’
‘Next time I’m there I’ll read the epitaphs. Is it full of your lovers, Paula?’
‘One or two. As they say, doctors can bury their mistakes.’

Boom boom, as artful as Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton. Here’s Charles interviewing Andersson the boat repair man:

‘You don’t like looking at the Hollinger house, do you?’
‘I don’t like looking at anything, Mr Prentice. I dream in Braille.’

It’s all as slick and stylised as the dialogue in a Noel Coward play, mingled with a pleasant stream of sub-Wildean paradoxes.

‘Money, sex, drugs. What else is there these days? Outside Estrella de Mar no one gives a damn about the arts. The only real philosophers left are the police.’ (Dr Hammond)

‘Selfish men make the best lovers. They’re prepared to invest in the woman’s pleasure so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.’ (Dr Hammond)

‘The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.’ (Dr Sanger)

This whip-smart repartee mixes oddly with Ballard’s very limited set of emotional responses, and then again with the off-hand references to hard drugs or kiddie-porn or BDSM sex. It’s an odd combination.

Ballard’s erroneous futurology

‘Everything comes sooner these days. The future rushes towards us like a tennis player charging the net.’ (The psychiatrist Irwin Sanger)

Ballard is routinely trotted out as a ‘prophet’ or ‘futurologist’, but this strikes me as plain wrong.

Cocaine Nights obsessively repeats the idea that the enclaves of bored wealthy ex-pats along the Costa del Sol somehow indicate what the future will be like:

Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools…
‘Frank always claimed that Estrella de Mar is what the future will be like…’
‘In Estrella de Mar, like everywhere in the future, crimes have no motives…’
‘I talked to Sanger the other day – he thinks we’re the prototype of all the leisure communities of the future…’
‘Charles, this is the way the world is going. You’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work or play. The Costasols of this planet are spreading outwards. I’ve toured them in Florida and New Mexico. You should visit the Fontainebleau Sud complex outside Paris – it’s a replica of this, ten times the size. The Residencia Costasol wasn’t thrown together by some gimcrack developer; it was carefully planned to give people the chance of a better life. And what have they got? Brain-death…’
‘It’s Europe‘s future. Everywhere will be like this soon…’

At its bluntest, here is Dr Sanger lecturing Charles:

‘Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. People will still work – or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them.’
‘A billion balconies facing the sun. Still, it means a final goodbye to wars and ideologies.’

Has anything more inaccurate and misleading ever been written? This is spectacularly wrong, isn’t it? Ballard was reading from a script first devised in the 1970s, which looked forward to a utopian leisure society in which we’d all struggle to fill our countless hours of pampered idleness. Is that what happened? No. The exact opposite has happened:

Money-rich, time-poor is an expression which arose in Britain at the end of the 20th century to describe groups of people who, whilst having a high disposable income through well-paid employment, have relatively little leisure time as a result. Time poverty has also been coined as a noun for the phenomenon. (Wikipedia)

Spending day after day with nothing to do is not really an accurate portrait of Britain in 2020. Do you feel like you live in ‘a leisure-dominated future’? Plus, this whole discussion only takes place among the moneyed bourgeoisie. Most normal people are having to work harder than ever to make ends meet.

Brits on brink of burnout and work is the main contributor

More women are in the workforce not because of abstract principles of ‘equality’ but because they’ve been forced to go to work to supplement their husband’s wages. More people than ever before are working on zero hours contracts. All the articles I read are about how work has invaded people’s ‘leisure’ hours, their evenings and weekends because work emails, texts and documents are now sent to people’s personal devices 24/7. And that’s before you get to the dire condition of the underclass, which I was reading about recently.

Left Behind by Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books

A few numbers: In 2014 the officially registered population of British nationals in Spain was 236,669, let’s call it 240,000. In 2014 the UK population numbered about 65 million. So British ex-pats in Spain make up less than 0.4% of the UK population. Hardly at the cutting edge of British social trends.

And even more obviously, this kind of thing is highly Eurocentric – it describes a world of overwhelmingly white chaps and chapesses from the professional classes who are all very comfortably off, thank you very much – Estrella de Mar is full of retired bank managers and accountants and doctors and property developers. What has come to be referred to by their impoverished children as the ‘boomers’.

As a vision of the future of the entire world it is obviously flawed for the simple reason that it totally omits, not only most of the population of European countries, but the whole of the rest of the world. A moment’s reflection on the condition of the population of either China or India (combined populations 2.75 billion people) suggests that the future of the planet is not one of luxury resorts offering a wide range of sports activities…

Ballard’s view of the future. My view of the present

Ballard’s vision of an affluent society where the well-off retire at 30 and have so much time on their hands that they take to drugs and murder to spice up their lives is plausible enough when you read it, as is much science fiction or genre fiction.

But the moment you start seriously thinking about it, you realise it is a ludicrously out-of-touch fantasy. The kind of thing only a writer – a person who spends almost all their time at home, staring out of windows, or meeting other like-minded middle class types – could conceive of, and that only academics who’ve spent a lifetime reading about transgressive sex and literary tropes, but who have precious little knowledge of international affairs, geopolitics, environmental or population trends, could take seriously.

This is a clever, very educated and very literary book, with an enormous amount of pleasure to be had from Ballard’s often inspired way with language and his endless stream of acute insights and vivid turns of phrase.

And yet the social vision at the heart of the narrative felt to me curiously dated, remote and out of touch with the actual world the rest of us live in, and are going to live in.

Credit

‘Cocaine Nights’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Flamingo in 1996. Page references are to the 1997 Flamingo paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard (1980)

The first seven stories were published by Panther as ‘The Overloaded Man’ in 1967. The collection was updated with the three last stories and new title in 1980

1. Now: Zero (1959)

Zero is Ballard’s favourite number, denoting the full stop of time and space and energy and human endeavour. Mind you, he was merely adopting a term already fraught with symbolism from his era’s key event:

The origins of the term “ground zero” began with the Trinity test in Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of the atomic attacks, released in June 1946, used the term liberally, defining it as: “For convenience, the term ‘ground zero’ will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation.”‘

This is a very early work, told in an arch Gothic style, which could almost be Edgar Allen Poe. The narrator is the overlooked and humiliated middle-manager at an insurance company who describes in prissy mannered prose how he kept a feverish, self-justifying diary recording every petty grievance he bore against his manager, Rankin, till one day in a fit of exasperation he wrote in his diary that the manager died, falling to his death from the seventh floor stairway. And next day he did.

Instead of stepping into his shoes as he hoped, the narrator is overlooked and a younger man, Carter, is promoted who quickly puts him in his place. After a few weeks of humiliation, the narrator writes in his diary that Carter dies, run over in the street the following day. And he is.

He reads about a man who’s been acquitted for a murder he obviously committed and writes in his diary that this man, Frank Taylor, will die next day in prison. And he does.

Getting to grips with his power he describes the deaths of four of the company’s directors, with the aim of being himself promoted to director and then using the same method to gain promotion to the parent company and on to world domination. The four directors die, sure enough, but the company goes into liquidation and, like everyone else, he is laid off. The predictable irony of this feels like a much older type of story, like Poe.

He experiments with the limits of the power, writing in his diary that the entire population of the miserable town where he grew up, Stretchford, will die. They don’t. Aha. The power obviously has limits, the limits of feasibility. Returning home the landlady confronts him with nagging demands for his back-rent and so she very satisfactorily dies the next day.

At this point he begins to notice that people are looking at him in the street. The landlady’s replacement is seen in conversation with the local copper, tapping her head. He thinks they are admiring his confidence and power. The reader is tipped off that people think he’s bonkers. His final plan has a garish, comedy-Gothic feel. He tells us he will publish a story in a magazine, which completely reveals his power, but that the person he has scheduled for death… is the reader!!! That means you!!! and the story counts down to the final sentences and words, at which you, the reader will expire!

Three… two… one… Now! Zero!

Is he mad? Just before the end he refers to ‘the victims of this extraordinary plague’; so is it working, have hundreds of readers of the story already dropped dead? Or is it all a delusion?

2. The Time-Tombs (1963)

Set some time in the future and on another planet, a group of four men are scraping a living as scavengers of the time tombs. These are buried in the dust of the planet but when they come to light, tomb robbers like themselves break in and steal the tapes on which the long-dead occupants have recorded images of themselves which are projected as 3-D holograms.

The story depicts the uneasy dynamic between a young-ish new recruit to the gang, Shepley, supported by the easy-going Old Man, and the leader of the robbers, Traxel, and his thuggish sidekick Bridges.

Shepley and the Old Man find a new set of tombs in a previously unexplored quadrant of the sea of dust, what’s more they’re priceless Tenth Dynasty tapes. But the second one they come to depicts a hauntingly beautiful princess with an extravagant hairdo and wings. Shepley can’t bring himself to take her tapes, and next day Traxel and Bridges find them at this tomb, Bridges thuggishly kicking his way through the door, ripping out the tapes, only to discover they are almost empty. She was dead when she was buried (the precise working of the technology is hinted at and not properly explained).

Traxel and Bridges make their escape as the Tomb Police come trundling up on a massive sand-rider and Shepley is so distraught at their vandalism of the princess’s tomb that he lets himself be arrested.

3. Track 12 (1958)

Ballard’s sixth story and a very short one (5 pages). Sheringham, professor of biochemistry ‘at the university’, has invited round for drinks Maxted ‘a run-down athlete with a bad degree… acting as torpedo man for a company marketing electron microscopes’. Sheringham is ostensibly wanted to play him some of the LPs recording the microsonics experiments he’s been doing. He makes Maxted put on headphones and then listen to the weird sounds generated by recording in super high detail a variety of physical mechanisms. He’s listened to the sound of a plant cell dividing, and then an animal cell dividing and the story opens as he’s listening to the sound of iron filings going down a funnel which turns out to be the sound a pin dropping through a long tube lined with microphones makes.

(It may be worth remembering that experimenting with metal tape recordings was a new technology in the 1950s, prompting an explosion of experimental music recording by the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.)

All the time Maxted is despising this prissy, fussy academic, lounging back on the chair he’s offered and guzzling down the whiskey and thinking about Sheringham’s wife, who he’s having an affair with.

Until, that is, he starts to feel shivery cold. Really cold. He reaches for his glass but knocks it out of reach. He feels his heart fibrillate. Sheringham is standing in front of him and calmly explains that he spiked his (Maxted’s) drink with chromium cyanate which is making all his cells lose control of their water content. He is going to drown inside.

But not before Sheringham has the time to play him one last recording. As his body collapses, his identity melts, the last thing Maxted hears is the enormously amplified and slowed-down grotesque rhythmic spasms of… a kiss, a kiss between him and Sheringham which the vengeful professor spent months rigging up secret microphones all over the patio to record. And which is now the last sound Maxted hears before he dies.

4. Passport to Eternity (1961)

Straightaway I notice that the bickering married couple, Margot and Clifford Gorrell, own some kind of sound device, a sound-sweeper, which projects the mood of their conversations as coloured tones across their walls, splashes of colours which leave residues which takes days to drain, and/or can drown out sound. This immediately reminded me of The Sound Sweep a story from a few years earlier. Obviously a very resonant idea.

Oh and they live on Mars. Not the real Mars but the Mars which is depicted as a kind of 1950s American suburb in The Martian Chronicles of Ray Bradbury, or the American cartoon The Jetsons, a Mars which is full of bored wives who refuse to go on another love cruise of Venus or a a stag weekend to the moons of Saturn. A cartoon Mars.

The story is a comedy played for broad laughs as the overworked husband is henpecked into booking a real holiday for his wife, and they dispatch their personal assistant, Tony Harcourt, to make the rounds of inter-galactic travel agencies, which all come off as spoofs and parodies from a Douglas Adams novel.

Two days later Tony returns with a pile of outlandish brochures, but he has been followed by numerous of the travel agencies who begin to stage samples of their vacations in and around the Gorrells’ house, most notably the one which offers ringside seats at a galactic war

In the middle of it all reality shimmers and slides, and they wake up attached to tubes on beds in a room which looks like theirs but is revealed, with a swish of the curtains, to be some kind of spaceship setting off on a non-stop journey into deep space. A ten-page prime exhibit of why science fiction was not, in Ballard’s day, considered serious literature. This story is barely even serious science fiction.

5. Escapement (1956)

Ballard’s second published story and, tellingly, it’s about distortions in time. A boring suburban couple are having an evening in with the telly on, him doing a crossword, her darning a nightie when he realises the play on TV has slipped a reel and gone back to a scene fifteen minutes earlier. It happens again. He points it out to his wife. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It happens again. He phones a friend, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Beginning to panic, the narrator realises he is caught in a loop of time fifteen minutes long which keeps jumping back fifteen minutes, trucking through the same period, then jumping back to 9pm. Then he realises the period of time between the leaps is diminishing – he is caught in a time trap! Steadily it decreases till the loops is only a few seconds long and then… he wakes up with a bad headache. His wife tells him he had some kind of convulsion. The time loop has stopped.

It’s very much like an episode of The Outer Limits (which was broadcast, incidentally, from 1963 to 1965). As he panics and switches channels, the narrator comes across a news programme where a scientist is explaining that these gas clouds released by the sun might not only distort light but time. Aha.

The notion of astronomical phenomenon affecting time here on earth will be recycled as the explanation for the crystallising process in The Crystal World.

6. Time of Passage (1961)

The story of a man, James Falkman, told in reverse, as the mourners leave the cemetery, the gravediggers dig up his coffin, put it into the hearse which drives back to his grand house, where he breathes his first breath and slowly improves in health, under the tender care of his sister.

His entire life experiences are lived in reverse, all the way through to his return to his mother’s womb and then, nine months earlier, his parents going to a hotel on their honeymoon.

It mirrors or prefigures the really haunting tale, Mr F is Mr F, where a married man shrinks back to a teenager, then a boy, then a baby, then returns through her vagina into his mother’s womb.

Again, it is well done but feels a bit cheap like a cheesy episode of The Outer Limits. The bit I liked was where, at the beginning, both he and his sister euphemistically refer to the place they came from, but how they’re ‘in the world now’ and how they’ll forget, how everyone forgets. Presumably they mean, forget heaven, where they came from.

7. The Venus Hunters (1963)

At 30 pages, by far the longest story in the collection and the most enjoyable. Dr Ward has just arrived at Mount Vernon Observatory. His new boss Cameron takes him for coffee at a cafe in the town at the bottom of the hill, and introduces him to the tall, bearded, muttering man, Charles Kandinski, a former psychology professor, who claims to have been at a picnic with friends in the desert, gone for a pee and bumped into a creature from Venus by its spaceship, who gave him a tablet and a warning that man must not intrude into outer space.

Kandinski was staggered, tried to contact everyone in authority to pass on the warning, writes a book about it and delivers hesitant lectures… but no-one cares, everyone thinks he’s mad. Cameron jokes that, of course, he believes him. Ward starts off by being utterly sceptical, but over repeated meetings now and then at the cafe, and at a lecture Kandinski delivers to the members of a local astronomy club, he slowly becomes impressed by Kandinski’s sincerity.

At the climax of the story we follow Kandinski cycling off into the desert at dusk, seeing a strange light, clambering up the side of a dune and seeing another circular space ship hovering in the desert. He stumbles back to the nearest farmhouse, begs to use the phone, rings Ward who is at a big conference being hosted by his employer, the 23rd Congress of the International Geophysical Association at Mount Vernon Observatory. Ward is just about to be called to make an opening speech when the call comes through and, despite his boss Cameron clinging on to his arm, he insists on driving off to help Kandinski.

He drives out to the desert, finds the farmhouse as Kandinski instructed him, goes on a bit, sees Kandinski’s bicycle, parks and clambers up the sand dune to the top of the low ridge, finds Kandinski feverishly over-excited, looks down into the shallow bowl between dunes and sees… nothing.

The story jumps to a few days later and we learn that Ward, nonetheless, took part in publishing a statement about the aliens to the New York Times, and has, as a result, been so thoroughly ridiculed that he has been asked to leave the Observatory and is leaving town to go back to university and teach freshman physics.

I didn’t understand. Was Kandinski just deluded? Like tens of thousands of other Americans who, in the decades since have come forward to claim they were abducted and experimented on by aliens? Is it that simple?

You could see the story as a fictional equivalent of the famous statement Ballard made in a 1962 interview that henceforward science fiction (by which he meant, his science fiction) would be concerned with inner space not with outer space. So this is a story in which the entire paraphernalia of outer space (flying saucers, aliens) turns out to be a product of the much-more interesting and fruitful area of inner space i.e. obsessions and delusions.

More tangibly, in structural or thematic terms, the image of driving out into the desert is interesting because it recurs in The Voices of Time; and when Ward sees the strange mandala-like shape Kandinski has marked out at the site of what he claims was the original landing, I was of course reminded of the mandala the dead biologist Whitby has carved into the bottom of the drained swimming pool in Voices and which Powers goes on to build in concrete on a much larger scale out in the desert.

And, of course, drifting sand-dunes haunt no end of Ballard short stories.

*********************************

So the first seven stories in this collection are right from the start of Ballard’s writing career. The remaining three were not published in The Overloaded Man collection and two are from nearly 20 years later.

8. The Killing Ground (1969)

A brutal satire on the Vietnam set thirty years in the future and which foresees the whole world invaded by America and rebel or nationalist forces, just like the Viet Cong, struggling with old weapons and living in holes, against the vastly superior technology of the Yanks whose attacks are computer-guides.

‘The globe was now a huge insurrectionary torch, a world Viet Nam’ and the story concerns a ragtag bunch of insurgents literally holed up in tunnels dug into a hillside overlooking a river over which fly American helicopters strafing the countryside in what, we are told, with a shock, and with blunt satirical irony, is the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede on the banks of the River Thames, near where I went to school, and which I’ve photographed and mapped on my walking blog.

We get to know Major Pearson, leader of the little troop of guerrillas just long enough to be fed all the lines about America’s war against the world, before they saddle up to make an attack across the flat meadow towards the river (I know it well), coldly killing the three American prisoners they’ve taken, before they in turn are mown down by American machinegun fire.

9. One Afternoon at Utah Beach (1978)

Nearly but not quite successful story about a married couple who are flown to a holiday cottage on Utah beach by a friendly private pilot. During the week they stay there the husband, Ogden, realises the pilot, Foster, and his wife Angela are having an affair.

One afternoon he visits the derelict concrete blockhouse built by the Germans on the beach and is astonished to discover a 19-year-old wounded Wehrmacht soldier nursing a machine gun on a tripod. Taking this in his stride, over the next few days Ogden brings the soldier food and medicine. His wife and boyfriend have taken to going to a wooden shack on the beach to make love in the afternoons. Ogden conceives the idea of getting the German to point his machine gun in that direction and shoot them as they emerge.

On the day in question Ogden takes his own shotgun and, as the adulterous couple emerge, inexplicably fires a warning flare, allowing the pilot to run forward into the long grass as the Wehrmacht soldier finally fires off his machine gun. Ogden stands up in clear sight at his moment of triumph and Foster rises from the dune grass and shoots him dead.

Exploring the blockhouse, Foster and Angela are puzzled why her husband had dressed in a Second World War Wehrmacht uniform.

10. The 60-Minute Zoom (1976)

The deranged soliloquy of a voyeuristic psychopath who knows his wife is serially unfaithful with strangers at all the resorts they visit, and has now set up a camera with an amazing Nikon long-distance zoom lens in a rented apartment across from the posh hotel he and she are staying in somewhere on the Spanish coast.

The idea is that the zoom of the camera starts off capturing the entire facade of the hotel and them moves in, very very slowly, allowing the narrator to describe the overall scene, comment on particular guests visible in the rooms above and below his, and then as the lens zooms in on their room, recording the entrance of her lover, they strip off and make love as the lens moves in closer, capturing their slow orgasms, ten minutes later he has gone and the camera doesn’t even cover her whole body but a portion of her chest, and, in the creepy final paragraph, who enters the frame, but the narrator and cameraman himself, only seen as a shadow and fragments of clothing above her body in tight close up and then… the shot goes vivid spurting red!

These last two stories have stopped being science fiction and are something else – tales of the macabre and the gruesome, heavily laced with pornography and perversion, which remind me of the grown-up stories of Roald Dahl which I read not so long ago – and somehow dated in the same nice-middle-class-man-goes-mad sort of way.

Credit

The first seven stories were published by Panther as ‘The Overloaded Man’ in 1967. The collection was updated with the three last stories and new title in 1980. Page references are to the 1988 Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie (1939)

Setup

The title

The mysterious deaths

At Ashe Manor

Cast

Magic…

… or madness

Bookishness

Complexes

The abilities of aunts

The younger generation

Pussy

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Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard (1996)

A poolside thriller

The Bobby Crawford effect

Ballard’s thesis

Put to the test – the Residencia Costasol

Charles turns into his brother

Whodunnit

Novel or fable?

Characters

The narrator

The ex pats

The five arson victims

The Spanish authorities

Strengths

Ballard’s sardonic vision of ex-pat communities

Empty pools and full pools

Weaknesses

Calm

Demented/deranged

Unsettled

Sensed

Narrowness and repetition

Ballard’s improbable dialogue

Ballard’s erroneous futurology

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The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard (1980)

1. Now: Zero (1959)

2. The Time-Tombs (1963)

3. Track 12 (1958)

4. Passport to Eternity (1961)

5. Escapement (1956)

6. Time of Passage (1961)

7. The Venus Hunters (1963)

8. The Killing Ground (1969)

9. One Afternoon at Utah Beach (1978)

10. The 60-Minute Zoom (1976)

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