Last night, Chris drew my attention to a wonderful article in the local paper that gave a brief survey, with photographs, of some of the ‘lost pubs’ of Hastings and St Leonards. To me, lost pubs are like the ghost stations of the London underground: fascinating, poignant, sealed time capsules of our recent past. I was shocked and saddened to see how many have gone, but as someone interested in the history of pub names I was amused to see that one of these now defunct was called the Brahms and Liszt.
Of course, where one pub is lost another might conceivably be found. The old West St Leonards Primary School on the Bulverhythe Road between St Leonards and Bexhill was demolished more than a decade ago to make way for a new out-of-town supermarket. The historic school buildings and a number of older private houses were levelled, only for Asda to discover that local people were not as enthusiastic about the project as they might have liked. Planning permission for the store was refused, the project was abandoned, and the site remains uselessly vacant till this day. But I am happy to report that it did eventually became the home of The White Dragon, the pub that features so centrally in Chris’s novel The Extremes….
Speaking of Brahms though, BBC4s current series charting the development of the classical symphony didn’t give me nearly enough of him. For all his Beethoven-envy, Brahms did every bit as much as his hero to develop the harmonic language of symphonic writing, yet the programme designers at the BBC chose to dispense with his achievement in a little under ten minutes. If Beethoven’s music has its architectural equivalent in the soaring spires of Koln cathedral, Brahms’s always sounds to me like a wet November afternoon on Hamburg docks, but that doesn’t mean I love it any the less. Brahms makes me ache. With my Karajan recordings of the Brahms symphonies still stuck in the bottom of a box somewhere, I’ve been listening to Marek Janowski conducting the RLPO in the fourth. My story ‘Chaconne’ (currently available to read at the Featured Story page of this website) was written partly as an appreciation of this symphony.
I’m finally getting around to reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2008. Loving it so far, and especially in the light of the massive disappointment I suffered on Saturday night when I sat down to watch the first episodes of the much-anticipated second series of the Danish detective series The Killing. I’d heard nothing but good things about it. From what I understood, this was a crime series that put the emphasis firmly on character, and 9pm saw me all ready with cup of cocoa in hand and my mind-to-murder sensors fully engaged. As it turned out, I think I would have enjoyed the first series a lot more than this new one. Love Sarah Lund, love the woolly jumper. Love the muted colours and noirish Eurocrime cinematography. But who in God’s name passed the script?? A largely incompetent and totally unconvincing mish-mash of people running around in combat fatigues blathering on about possibly-non-existent terrorist cells, I found this attempt by the writers to make their story ‘current’ by foisting on it the trappings of contemporary news stories not only to be politically simplistic (an understatement) but also to be emotionally unaffecting. It’s all action, no talk, which from my reading and understanding would seem to be the diametric opposite of the first series. The crime writer – indeed any writer – has to make his characters either sympathetic or interesting (preferably both, and this includes murderers); apart from Lund herself the characters in these first two hours of The Killing 2 are neither.
I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going to brave another hour of it next Saturday (I do kind of want to know what Raben is going to do now that he’s escaped from the hospital) but I lament the misguided decisions taken by the scriptwriter and presumably by the programming team in steering the show away from the cerebral and towards the incoherent.
What a relief then to pick up Mr Whicher, and discover in the first two chapters all the fascinating personal minutiae I’d been hoping for in The Killing. Ordinary lives laid bare are always extraordinary (perhaps one of the central tenets of my own writing) and in the story of Constance Kent we have madness, violence, ambiguity, tragedy all within the walls of one family home. What we also have is the story of the birth of detective fiction. Jonathan Whicher, it transpires, was one of the first British detectives as we would today understand the word, and a figure of mystery and glamour. I was intrigued to learn from Kate Summerscale’s introduction to her book that no pictoral record of Whicher survives, that he was elusive to the end and even now.
That’s the kind of story I like. The kind you might chew over at leisure in the old Brahms and Liszt, and no combat gear required.