Stories: All-New Tales

creative-writing degree and a few sales to the American crime and sci-fi digests, to be disgusted by our rates, even lower than the U.S., but delighted when we bought whatever he wrote, at whatever length he did it. When we met we were both twenty-five. Literary powers like Julie Mistral had already called him the James M. Cain of his generation. Angus Wilson had compared me to Gerald Kersh and Arnold Bennett.

The “digests” were the pulps’ attempts to look more sophisticated, with abstract expressionist covers and cooler titles, but I had grown up reading the real pulps with their powerful pictures and raving shout lines (Donna was a dame who dared to be different-Kelly was a cop who craved to kill!). The quality of the fiction didn’t alter, just the presentation.

I found it hard to come in at the end of that era, working on the Falcon and Sexton Blake Library, but it had proved one thing to me. There were no such things as pulp writers. Bad writers like Carroll John Daly and brilliant ones like Dashiell Hammett just happened to write for the pulps. Mostly their reputation had to do with context. Jack Trevor Story would write a novel for Sexton Blake then, with minor modifications, turn it into a novel for Secker and Warburg.

By the time I took it over, Hank Janson’s Mystery Magazine was about the last of the UK thriller digests and I had some crackbrained notion to lift it away from genre altogether and make it into something addressing the widest possible readership. By 1964 there were few short story mags left and most of those were generic. They ran romances, military adventures, mysteries and sci-fi. To get published and paid you had to adapt your work, usually by inserting a clunky rationalised plot. That way you earned a bit as you learned a bit. We didn’t want to write what we called Englit-fic: the styles and themes of which came out of universities in sad imitation of the great modernists. We wanted to write something that had the vitality of good commercial fiction and the subtle ambition of good literary fiction, reflecting the sensibilities and events of our times: stuff that would get us high with the sense of enthusiasm and engagement of Proust or Faulkner but with the disciplined vitality of genre fiction pulsing from every page.

A few of us talked about a “two-way street” to reunite junk, middle-brow and highbrow fiction. Some people out there had to be as frustrated as us, dissatisfied by pretty much everything on offer, literary or commercial. For ages people had discussed the “two cultures.” We might just be the guys to unite them: writing for a reader who knew a bit about poetry, painting and physics, enjoyed Gerald Kersh, Elizabeth Bowen and Mervyn Peake, merging realism with grotesquerie and doing it elegantly, eloquently. By 1963 we were publishing a few examples in the digests and with Billy Allard and Harry Hayley, my two closest writer friends; we made plans for a “slick” quarto magazine bringing together designers, artists, scientists, poets, but of course the cost of the art paper alone made publishers shake their heads.

Then Len Haynes, the decent old drunk who ran it forever, proposed that I take over Janson’s when he retired to live with his daughter in Majorca.

Married less than a year, Helena Denham and I lived in Colville Terrace, still Rackman’s Notting Hill fiefdom. We’d had our first daughter, Sara, and Helena, beautiful as ever with her pageboy chestnut hair framing a heart- shaped face, was furiously pregnant with Cass, our second. I’d been fired from Liberal Topics, the party magazine whose wages I’d taken in spite of promising Winston Churchill, when I was eleven, never to become a Liberal. So I needed Janson’s money. More important, it would be a chance to do what we’d been saying we should do for so long. I talked it over with Helena and the others.

When I went back to Dave and Howard Vasserman, the publishers, I made only three conditions: that I decide policy, that they let me change the title gradually and if our circulation went up they give me the paper and size I wanted. I would help them get mainstream distribution with their more upmarket titles. I convinced them I could make their imprint respectable enough to be taken on by the high-street retailers. Then I got my friends busy. We lacked a decent designer but I did my best. Our first issue would not merely offer a manifesto, we would attempt to demonstrate policy-and we’d have a lot of illustrations, one of the secrets, in my experience, of a successful periodical. They were Jack Hawthorn’s job.

Hayley started finishing a novella he’d been talking about, a weird thing in which the detective’s dreams informed his case. Allard began writing us a new serial, full of brooding metaphysical imagery borrowed from Dali and Ernst. Helena finished her alternate-world Nazi creeper. I drafted my editorial about pulp influences on William Burroughs, and Burroughs gave us a chapter from his new book. American beats and British pop artists had something in common with noir movies, our other great enthusiasm. Allard produced a guest editorial arguing that “the space age” needed a new lexicon, new literary ideas. I did a short under a regular pseudonym and the rest came from Janson’s stable of favourites.

All three of us were English but had known little conventional upbringing. Hayley had been orphaned by a buzz bomb, taken a job on a local paper before being conscripted into the RAF, studied metaphysics at Oxford where he’d met Allard who’d been raised in occupied France with an Anglo-Jewish mother who’d been on one of the last transports to Auschwitz, worked for the Resistance as a kid then come home not to prewar Mayfair fantasy but despairing suburban austerity, the world Orwell captured. After his conscription served in the RAF, he did physics at Oxford, where he met Harry. They both dropped out after a few terms, writing features and noirish sci-fi stories for mags like Authentic or Vargo Statten’s. Allard was qualified to fly obsolete prop planes, Hayley was a qualified radio operator and I’d done a couple of miserable ATC years before they abolished conscription about a nanosecond before I was due to be drafted, edited juvenile story papers, trade mags and Sexton Blake, so I had loads of editorial experience but little formal education.

We’d spent half our lives in the pub discussing why modern fiction was crap and why it needed an infusion of the methods and concerns of popular fiction, all of us having sold a bit to the surviving thriller and science fantasy pulps. I think we felt we knew what we were talking about, having been raised in the social margins, thanks to one trick of fate or another, and loved surrealism, absurdism, French new wave movies as well as Pound, Eliot, Proust and the rest. In common with a few other restless autodidacts of our day we loved anything containing Gabin’s smoking.38, Mitchum’s barking.45 or Widmark’s glittering knives, all mixed up with Brecht and Weill, Camus’ Fascist Caligula screaming “I’m still alive” and the black bars crossing the faces of Sartre’s Huis Clos, emphasizing the prisons in which we place ourselves. Into that mix we threw James Mason in Odd Man Out, Harry Lime, Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City, Bester’s Demolished Man, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Household’s Rogue Male, Lodwick’s Brother Death. We’d met the likes of Francis Bacon, Somerset Maugham and Maurice Richardson at the Colony, read Beckett, Miller and Durrell in Olympia Press and generally got our education from the best novelists, journalists and artists of our day. Allard liked Melville more than I did, Hayley preferred Kafka and I loved Meredith. We were agreed that their lessons needed to be brought back into contemporary culture via the popular arts. Borges, too, though his stuff was only just being done into English via Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press. We also thought that fiction should be able to carry as many narratives per paragraph as possible, using techniques borrowed from absurdism, futurism and combined with new ideas of our own. We’d thought there were hundreds of writers dying for the chance to do the same as us, but though a lot more readers welcomed what we made of Mysterious, contributors were slow in coming.

By 1965 we’d at least laid the foundations of the two-way street. Pop art came one way, pulp the other. The Beatles and Dylan were doing the sound track. They broke new ground and got paid for it, but most people had no real idea what we meant when we talked about combining “high” and “low” arts, in spite of the two cultures being as popular a subject in features pages as the big bang and planet-size computers. We wanted to rid pop fiction of its literalism, taking exaggeration for granted in ambitious work, but were only slowly developing a critical vocabulary, trying to bring a deeper seriousness to the novel, but were still frustrated, reckoning we were still missing a piece in the equation. Whittling the title slowly down to one word hadn’t been enough. We needed writers desiring to emulate modern classicism to help build a genuine bridge able to take the weight of our two-way traffic.

It took Rex turning up in 1965 to show us what we needed to convince readers and writers of our authority. Like Allard or Hayley, he wrote better than any other contemporary I knew. His sardonic style was deceptively simple. He, too, was a Balzac fan with a special love of Jacques Collin/Vautrin. We were almost exactly the same age. Like me, he’d supported himself since the age of sixteen. He’d climbed out of a family of father-dominated German Catholic drunks, dropping out of the University of Texas after selling a few stories to the digests which got him a couple of book contracts to fund the trip to Europe he felt was the next rung on his career ladder, which he planned with his friend Jake Slade, a fellow Texan Catholic and a master ironist.