'Of Kings and Jesters': An Unusual Dornford Yates Fantasy

  

Dornford Yates was a reliable purveyor of interwar thrillers and romances. He knew exactly what readers wanted and he provided it in lavish dishes: handsome, rugged heroes; beautiful, plucky heroines; sleek cars smoothly speeding through lonely landscapes; rough, thuggish villains; Ruritanian conspiracies; fisticuffs, chases, kidnaps, secret treasures. There is no subtlety or ambiguity about his work: his heroes look, speak and act like his ideal of English gentlemen, whereas his villains are ugly customers with coarse speech, clothes and manners. There is none of the atmospheric shading of a Graham Greene or Eric Ambler thriller.

The great success of his novels can be gauged in any second-hand bookshop that stocks vintage fiction: at the alphabetical end of the shelves there will often be a dozen or so of Yates keeping strange company with the Francis Brett Youngs. At the same time as this commercial allure, his prose was often thought of as distinguished, admired by literary eminences such as Cyril Connolly. It has the exactitude, formal quality and occasionally archaic phraseology that might be expected from Yates’ profession as a barrister.  He also wrote light romantic comedies featuring his urbane man-about-town Berry, which equally had keen enthusiasts. 

The Stolen March, which celebrates its centenary this month, has many of the thriller ingredients listed above, but unusually for Yates it also has a more bizarre dimension, and becomes in fact a remarkable alternate-world fantasy. A young couple on a freewheeling holiday on the Continent fall in with a young woman who has become embroiled with jewellery thieves and international criminals, and (separately) an archaeologist writing a study of The Saracen in France, a nice addition to the library of imaginary books. The young couple have heard stories of  Etchechuria. ‘the Lost Country’, an enclave between France and Spain, that may or may not exist: “fabulous only because it could not be found. And it was never found because it was believed to be fabulous.” It is not shown on maps, and yet there is a discrepancy in the French and Spanish borders which seems to leave a piece of country belonging to neither. The title is a pun on the word ‘march’ meaning a border country, as in the Welsh Marches.

Clearly, one model is Andorra, the Pyrenean republic which has dual administration between the French government and a Spanish bishop. But Yates’ country is by no means a direct fictional version of Andorra, and is not quite in the same location, to the extent that it is anywhere in this world. Toying with the reader's expectations, Yates approaches the strange domain gradually, so that at first we simply seem to be in a picturesque back-of-beyond place. 

But soon his depiction of Etchechria becomes highly fanciful. From the moment they cross an unseen border his characters are in an Alice-in-Wonderland world with peculiar laws and customs, full of curious figures, often with grandiose titles, who talk in paradox and metaphor. The effect is quite Chestertonian, with a dash of William Morris.This is a beguiling idea and it offers a completely different dimension to what would otherwise be a fairly routine thriller.

Yates writes quite a lot of banter between the four main characters, and between them and and the eccentric courtiers they meet, which is presented as being very funny: his heroines are often described as in tears of laughter.  I’m not sure it’s a good tactic, when you are being facetious, to keep nudging the reader in this way, particularly when it goes on a bit. Badinage can help to season prose if it is brief and zestful, as Wodehouse knew, but Yates gives entire chapters of it. Even so, the absurd and Humpty-Dumptyish dialogue is certainly inventive. 

His protagonists do not quite know whether they are in some fantasy world, or caught up in some elaborate hoax, or visiting some particularly quaint and forgotten corner of Europe: “It’s all been a dream . . .,” says one, “It must have. Damn it, the thing’s impossible. We’ve been asleep or something, We’ve dreamed of Kings and Jesters and Invisible Cloaks. We’ve walked with spirits—our minds have been possessed.” Certainly, Yates does not stint the fantasy elements, and the book would not have been entirely out of place in the Pan Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, alongside Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-a-Mist, with which it has some affinities in tone. This is a most unusual departure for the author, not at all like his typical purposeful, plot-driven thrillers. I had a sense he was enjoying unfurling a previously unsuspected fantastical side of his imagination.

My copy has a pencilled note at the end of the novel, on the foot of the last page: “A sequel entitled ‘The Tempered Wind’ was begun but not finished and never published”, with a reference to Yates’ autobiography, B-Berry and I Look Back (1958). As far as I know, this has still not been published.

(Mark Valentine)

 

The Lost Planet Libraries

As well as their textual content, I often find a delight in the incidentals of second-hand books, including not only ownership signatures, inscriptions and marginalia, but the chance workings of time and wear, the preserved signs of the volume’s history. Here is a book, for example, which has been stamped on its top page edges with the legend ‘PLANET LIBRARIES/STREATHAM HILL’ .

This name is at once alluring. You imagine one library for each of the luminaries in the solar system, perhaps even themed for their tutelary deities. Looking for romance? Troll along to the Venus Library. Want a war book? Off to Mars. In the mood for melancholy? Riffle the shelves at Saturn. After the uncanny? Make your way to the Pluto Institute. I picture Streatham Hill harbouring within its purlieus all these edifices in suitably arcane architecture, embellished with astrological signs, the sort of peculiar temple some Machenesque wanderer might encounter. 

Possibly the residues of Planet Libraries on and in this book are one of the few surviving souvenirs of its existence. Alas, at some point its label has been inexpertly torn out, and the stock transferred, it would appear from rubber stamp imprints, to the more prosaically named Link Libraries Ltd of Epsom and Surbiton in Surrey. Even so, the result of this banishing of the planetary influences has created, on the fixed front endpaper, a remarkable work of abstract art, looking like some burst of exotic blooms. 

The book in question is Goring’s First Case (1936) by Peter Kippax, a decent enough Golden Age detective yarn set in Norwich, and in particular around the Cathedral Close. The character of the city is conveyed well. The author’s name sounds vaguely Wellsian, as if he might indeed be an interplanetary emissary. But in fact Kippax was one of the pen-names of W.F. Morris, later the author of the First World War thriller Bretherton (1938), and similar imaginative yarns featuring questions of identity and allegiance. It is quite a scarce title and I would want it even if it was in impeccable condition, but all these markings greatly add to my pleasure in this particular copy of the book.

The Planet (and Link) Libraries are examples of the many private lending libraries which flourished in Britain particularly in the interwar period. Most settlements of any size had at least one, even moderate-sized villages. Golden Age crime fiction novels, and tales of village life, occasionally feature characters changing their books. There is an aside in a Saki story, though I forget which, where his peevish female protagonist is irritated because her page has brought back from the lending library, not the racy and somewhat scandalous latest novel en mode, but a much worthier and duller book of a similar title.

Despite the advent of public libraries and of mass-produced, and cheaper, paperbacks, some of these private circulating libraries were still in business in the Nineteen Sixties and even into the Seventies. I have another book with a label from the New Era (Fiction) Libraries, which has its first issue date in 1967 and the last that is clearly identifiable in 1970.

As far as I know, these provincial and suburban libraries have never been fully studied, but they are an interesting aspect of social, cultural and commercial history. There were big chain store libraries too, but probably the majority were these much smaller affairs, run by a sole proprietor, with occasional assistance. Fiction and the Reading Public by Q.D. Leavis (1932) discusses the reading tastes of those who use such libraries, in a rather haughty fashion, but is not directly about the actual purveyors.  As well as providing a rapid flow of literature, particularly novels, they were also a meeting place and gossip corner. It would be an enjoyable if elusive pastime to track down their histories, and locate their premises, or whatever is left of those.

(Mark Valentine)

Finding Foreign Stations

When I found the battered olive green book in the miscellaneous shelves of The Children’s Society charity bookshop in the Victorian model village of Saltaire,  I was at once intrigued. I thought it sounded like a spy-catcher’s guide, some manual for a secret counter-espionage department out of an Eric Ambler or Graham Greene thriller. Finding Foreign Stations it was called, by R.W. Hallows M.A. (Cantab), who sounded like he ought to be a county parson with antiquarian interests, not a chap involved in sinister clandestine operations. Perhaps, though, English parsons often being keen train buffs, it was about a tour of overseas railway stations? The sub-title, Long-Distance Wireless Secrets, gave some of the game away, while still promising a certain element of mystery and adventure.

In fact, the 1932 book was a practical guide for Thirties radio hams seeking out signals from overseas wireless broadcasts. A former owner had annotated the endpapers with notes of places to get equipment. Britannia Works (Dept W) of 25-21 St Pancras Way London N.W.1 could supply Flexible Remote Control outfits. The Ever Ready Company (GB) Ltd Sales Dept (Technical) of London N7 offered a Comprehensive List of their Power Pack Range. Hivac Ltd of Stonefield Way South Ruislip Middlesex were the place to go for DC Subminiature Valves. These could of course all be code names, or their recondite equipment might prove to have murky uses.

I liked the photographs of European wireless stations and their transmitters, nearly all of them modern and art deco in style, pleasingly angular and streamlined in form. At the same time, there was a sort of grey melancholy about the monochrome images. I hope at least some of these structures have been preserved.

R.W. Hallows turned out in the library catalogues to be Ralph Watson Hallows. He was born in Doncaster on 12 June 1885 and died in Suffolk on 16 August 1962. He also wrote books on radar and atomic energy, so was evidently a well-informed scholar at the cutting edge of the most contemporary developments in science and technology.

Much of the book comprises the sort of technical detail that has me scratching my head and murmuring “Hmmm, yes, is that so?”, but on the other hand there are some splendidly weird diagrams and jargon and there is no mistaking the earnest enthusiasm to reach out to overseas transmissions to hear what the rest of the world is saying, in a highly cosmopolitan, League-of-Nations sort of way. ”It has often seemed to me,” says Hallows, “that foreign listening should be warmly encouraged by those responsible for broadcasting in this country, since it provides the owner of a receiving set with a ‘change of station’ which is just as valuable in its way as the change of air that we enjoy when taking a holiday.” Furthermore, “there are times when the home station is silent” (the BBC usually closed for the night around midnight) and “many foreign stations are ready to fill the gap.”

In an illustration at Figure 1, the author gives “An Evening’s Wireless Tour of Europe.” At 7.30, his intrepid listener can tune in to ‘Viola d’amore. Recital’ at Oslo; at 7.45 they may skip across to ‘Viennese Folk Music’ at Frankfurt-am-Main, at 8 o’clock the restless digits find an Orchestral Concert at Langenberg (Germany), but do not pause too long with the Mendelssohn etc before flitting at 8.30 to a Singing Programme at Berlin, at 9 o’clock to an opera in Milan and finally, in this sortie, to ‘Dance Music and Light Music’ at 10.30 from Warsaw, where we may leave them foxtrotting and tangoing away into the rapidly darkening hours.

(Mark Valentine)