Jeannette Sloniowski
“One who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together.” (Genette 1997 [1982]: 399)
“Simultaneously this crosscutting of past and present points in a variety of ways to how this past holds the present captive independently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or repressed.” (Huyssen 126)
Peter Robinson is Canada’s most distinguished crime writer. A prolific and popular author, he has written nineteen Inspector Banks novels. He is also the author of three non-series crime novels and a large number of short stories, and editor of two collections of his own short stories and novellas. Britain’s ITV has recently made DCI Banks (2011–present), a television series based upon the Banks novels that has now finished its second season—certainly an honour for Robinson, a Briton who now lives and works in Toronto. He has received numerous Canadian and international awards for his work (listed at the end of this chapter), including four for his tenth Inspector Banks novel, In A Dry Season (1999), widely considered his breakthrough into the upper ranks of international crime writing.
One of the key questions about Robinson, for the purposes of this book, is how Canadian is his work, given that he mostly sets his novels in Britain and in what could be considered the British tradition: stories set in rural Yorkshire with procedural/village-mystery conventions much in evidence, not, on the surface, unlike Foyle’s War (2002–present) or Midsomer Murders (1997–present). Robinson has rarely set his stories in Canada and belongs to a group of Canadian crime fiction writers that includes Eric Wright, Maureen Jennings, and others, who were not born in Canada but currently live and write here, and, in Robinson’s case, now look back at their homelands through their newly Canadian experience.
An important question to ask of Robinson’s novels might be why a novel like In a Dry Season, although set in Britain, often seems so Canadian? Or does it seem so Canadian only to particular readers or readers of a certain age? Robinson claims that writing his novels about Britain while living in Canada has given him a clearer perspective on his original homeland (“Meet the Author”). I would also argue that In a Dry Season, although set in Britain, has much of interest to many Canadians because the subject matter is largely about day-to-day life while living in Britain during World War II, as many young Canadian soldiers, both male and female, did. The story is not only about the hardships they endured during the war, of which there were many, but also about what it was like for British society to be invaded by throngs of foreign men and women. The story of wartime Britain is retold through the details of hardships from rationing to deadly air raids in the fascinating details of that dramatic historical period. The novel must seem familiar to many Canadians whose parents were in Britain in those times and I think that many readers of this popular novel relive the lives of parents and grandparents by learning from Robinson about what life was like for them.
At the same time the novel is, of course, a meticulously researched fiction and a gripping mystery story of the kind that appeals to many Canadian mystery readers, regardless of their origins. However, the British Isles of In a Dry Season (1999) are literally invaded by an army—albeit friendly—of American and Canadian soldiers, and this is unsettling to the British characters in the novel. This is a note likely to resonate with many Canadian readers, familiar as they are with the invasion of an all-consuming and at times overwhelming American culture in Canada over a lengthy period of time. Robinson, as an immigrant, simultaneously signals invasions of both of his home cultures, those of Canada and England, in this gesture, in effect writing back to Canada through this novel, and indeed his series, set in a fictional Yorkshire dale.
In a Dry Season is a remarkably complex crime story set primarily in Hobb’s End, a fictional Yorkshire village, during World War II, and concurrently in Yorkshire of the present day (1999), with a few pages set in the late sixties and early seventies as well. In its examination of both gender relations and class, the narrative moves fluidly back and forth between eras, demonstrating that both time periods are fraught with painful, if potentially liberating, changes around sexuality and relationships—male and female, husband and wife, father and son. As Robinson deftly moves between eras, he moves between crime sub-genres as well, combining a village mystery, in the form of a diary written by one of the characters, with a police procedural to create an intense and very thoughtful interrogation of the sexual mores and class politics—which are remarkably similar despite a sixty-year gap—of both eras.
Generic hybridity like this is not unusual in modern crime fiction, but for Robinson, who typically writes police procedurals, the village mystery is unusual but ultimately productive territory. The village mystery, mastered by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and other writers of the golden age of crime fiction has, to say the least, an ambiguous status among critics of the genre. Often denigrated as consisting only of conservative potboilers for women (or cat-loving little old ladies) it has been lambasted by critics as trifling, rigidly formulaic rubbish featuring eccentric investigators and mechanical, if cleverly constructed, plots. One of the first to ravage the sub-genre was Raymond Chandler in his important 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” a polemic debunking of the village mystery and other related golden-age sub-genres known collectively as cozies.1 For Chandler, a passionate champion of the new, largely American, violent, and male hard-boiled genre, the cozy was ultimately an “average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction” (3–4) read by “flustered old ladies—of both sexes (or no sex)” (16).
On the whole, the very name “cozy” (used not by Chandler but by many subsequent critics) implies a value judgment about the reader, likely female, who is addicted to fiction that is, in Chandler’s view, trivial and poorly written. This fiction is also reassuring, pleasurable, and perhaps perversely titillating, providing an unseemly, even prurient experience of exotic murders. Chandler deems these stories a time-wasting escape into fantasy, as opposed to his own “realist”2 hard-boiled fiction. He claims Dashiell Hammett and writers like him took the conventional mystery story “out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” where it belonged (14).3 The writer of detective stories, for Chandler, must write about “the authentic flavour of life as it is lived,” not construct a mere “literature of escape” (11). Murder stories should not be written for perverse readers who like “their murders scented with magnolia blossoms” (16).
Some feminist critics (and many readers) have been kinder to the village mystery and the cozy, seeing in them a potentially clever, even potentially subversive, deconstruction of social and domestic relations—particularly the sexual oppression of women, and others, not only in golden-age crime stories, but in subsequent feminist or queer adaptations of the genre. Cora Kaplan usefully discusses the ambivalent nature of the village mystery in “An Unsuitable Genre for a Feminist,” arguing that while the genre has more than a few conservative ideas about gender and “nostalgia for a social system long gone” (213), it can also be a site for the examination of “a microcosm of all social relations, a cultural book of knowledge from which a thousand parables about human nature and motivation can be drawn” (212). Ultimately Kaplan finds that the golden-age writers fall on the side of a conservative view of gender and the containment of female sexuality within “an ordered society and a known-morality” (214), and she questions whether the genre can ever be radicalized enough to be truly liberating or challenging to repressive gender norms without losing its popular appeal.4
Alison Light, however, finds a subversive aspect to Agatha Christie’s world view (and chosen genres) that is subtly revealed in her novels and badly reacted to by critics like the masculinist Chandler. Light argues that Christie’s fiction may be problematic to misogynist critics because her writing and her manipulation of the village mystery
is a disavowal of a romantic masculinity and its heroic performance in the public world of action which seems even now to annoy critics. We can surely detect a faint misogyny in reaction against “the feminization” of the genre and its “spreading hips of coziness”; wounded male pride in the mockery of the fiction which takes it as “emotionally emasculated.” (75)
Chandler, in writing of the “hero” of the golden-age stories, argues that “the English police endure him with their customary stoicism, but I shudder to think what the boys down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him” (8). Clearly “the boys” may deem coziness and its hero to be laughably non-masculine and they would “do” to him, rather than merely “endure” him, a mark of the masculine violence of the hard-boiled.
Peter Robinson’s use of the village mystery layered over and deftly blended with a police procedural, in the form of a literary palimpsest, is well on its way to a further manipulation of the conventions of both the cozy and the procedural, along with an interrogation of romantic, action-oriented masculinity. While not a truly radical novel like Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, In a Dry Season, which covers sixty years of small-town Yorkshire culture, is a challenging and “involuted” read that raises questions about both originating genres as it “palimpsestuously”5 layers and blends one with the other. The novel ends with a very ambivalent resolution to the crime and no resolution for the unhappy pattern of the personal and sexual relationships that are its centre of interest. These troubled relationships arise from conservative class and gender traditions as characters struggle to disengage from the past and cope with present day changes in gender roles and mores.
One of the novel’s main characters, Vivian Elmsley, author of the village mystery/diary section of the story, is a cold and solitary old woman who sits in a Florida hotel room drinking gin and awaiting the execution of serial killer Edgar Koenig, who is paid very little attention in the novel—in fact, the British police never see him or even speak to him, and readers get only second-hand accounts of him and his brutal, sexually motivated crimes. That so little attention is paid to the actual murderer—indeed he is something of a cliché—indicates that the author’s interest lies elsewhere or that the killer is only part of a larger, widespread pattern of sexual dysfunction. The other two major characters, Detective Inspector Banks and his junior officer, Annie Cabot, are unable to solve two other deaths—in fact, they remain unaware that one of the deaths is actually a murder (a mercy killing?) and they only suspect, but cannot prove, that the other is a murder and not a suicide. Their budding love affair seems to be embroiled in the prickly gender sensibilities of a recently—and unhappily—divorced middle-aged man and a vegetarian feminist hippie with a violent sexual assault in her past. Both constitutive sub-genres have common themes and similar—even shared—characters and locations, proving in the end that either genre, cozy or procedural, can delve into serious gender and class issues.
Layering the village plot over the procedural plot produces intriguing ideas about gender and genre throughout the narrative and across time periods, giving the reader an unsettling representation of how vexed gender relations were then, and are now, notwithstanding the characters’ search for sex, love, and a satisfying connection between men and women, or perhaps women and women, since it is implied that at least two characters in the novel might be gay. Robinson has created a serious story, in two equally revealing sub-genres, about sexuality and class; with this palimpsestuous structure, he demonstrates that, despite the greater independence and sexual liberation of women—both during the war, with its absent husbands and fathers but ever-so-present “over sexed, over paid and over here” foreign troops (Robinson 203), and during the “sexual revolution” of the sixties and its aftermath, marked by a far more vigorous eruption of a politicized feminism into patriarchal structures—the same troubled and even violent problems between male and female are still as present now as they were in the forties, and before.
Like many village mysteries, In a Dry Season is concerned with domestic relations, while at the same time, in the procedural section, the spotlight falls on the “real” police, their problems, and their crime-solving procedures. Throughout the procedural section Robinson ironically pokes fun at a major character, diarist and elderly police-procedural author Vivian Elmsley, for getting procedure wrong in a sub-genre that values realism. Banks mocks a passage where a British cop reads a suspect his rights: “‘You have the right to remain silent. If you don’t have a lawyer, one will be provided for you.’ So much for the realistic depiction of police procedures,” he laughs (364). Banks also has Elmsley despise the cozy, an inconsequential form in her view—“The narrator’s tone was light, fluffy, the way so many of the cozy mysteries Vivian detested made light of the real world of murder” (32). Ironically, when Banks reads Elmsley’s Detective Inspector Niven series to better understand the writer, now a murder suspect herself, he finds that she is a far better writer of “psychological suspense than police procedurals” (364). This is particularly ironic because Elmsley is also the author of the diary that makes up half of In a Dry Season, and although the diary is not suspenseful, it is a well-written piece of village-style character psychology. The adroit combination of the two sub-genres, sometimes in a humorous way, is thus powerful and revealing, and not only about gender. The novel is also a tour de force study of how crime genres, even the lowly village mystery, can be woven together to express complex emotions and ideas across various time periods and social classes. Both sub-genres deal with the same subject matter, and both do so very well, demonstrating that the sexual and class tensions that trouble the village of Hobb’s End during the war must continue to trouble the modern Yorkshire police force in 1999. The palimpsest structure, which allows one sub-genre to underlie and push through the other, facilitates a kind of reading experience that might allow readers to usefully connect the past and the present and become more aware of the conventions that underlie our gender roles—indeed, even to see these conventions as conventional behaviours that may be changed is a step in the right direction.
It is necessary at this point to briefly summarize the complex narrative pattern of Robinson’s palimpsest, in an attempt to untangle some of its thoroughly imbricated cross-era and cross-generic themes and structures. One of Robinson’s overall characteristics as a writer is his complex and extensive postmodern use of references to other writers, books, films, and in particular names of songs or musicians to evoke emotions, ideas, or a particular ambiance. For example, as Inspector Banks unhappily lounges on his couch brooding about his failed marriage and downing whisky, he plays Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975), a popular album often thought to be about Dylan’s own marital problems. Investigating Robinson’s numerous references is almost always a revealing exercise, although occasionally a musical or literary reference proves to be particularly hard to evaluate. Untangling Robinson’s palimpsest is thus a difficult undertaking given how thoroughly he integrates dense webs of references, multiple stories, and sub-genres into the novel.
In a Dry Season is set primarily in two time periods: present-day Yorkshire, and 1939–45 in the village of Hobb’s End, spanning the duration of World War II. Hobb’s End is described by a minor character in the novel as a “proper Agatha Christie sort of village” (87) evoking Christie’s picturesque but often unpleasant villages, or her picturesque villages filled with unpleasant people. The name Hobb’s End itself is full of significance as well. The OED recounts a number of meanings for Hobb; notably, “playing hob” is to play the devil or to work mischief. The place name Hobb’s End has also been used in a number of other works: TV serials such as Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), horror films such as In the Mouth of Madness (1995), and several other films and short stories that conjure the sense of an evil place. In the Robinson novel, Hobb’s End, slightly less picturesque than many fictional Yorkshire villages, is filled with sexual tension, suffering, mean-spiritedness, and murder both during and immediately after the war; it also contains the soon-to-be-discovered dirt-encrusted skeleton of the village’s once-beautiful femme fatale, Gloria Stringer Shackelton, in the present day.
Throughout the novel the reader moves back and forth not only between the time periods but also between several different life stories. The village mystery, in diary form and told in the first person, was originally written by Gwen Shackelton, later known as Vivian Elmsley. This diary, which begins the novel as a preface before the procedural, tells the story of Gwen’s young womanhood and is a detailed recounting of her life and her relationship with her family, primarily her arthritic, elderly, and often querulous mother and her favoured and somewhat spoiled brother, Matthew, who is terribly maimed in the war. It also deals with her neighbours in the village—mostly other young women, whose stories resurface in the police procedural section—and with homosexual painter Michael Stanhope, whose two most important works of art symbolically clarify the quality of life in the village and the brazen sexual attractiveness of the femme fatale.
Certainly the centre of attention in the diary is the riveting Gloria Stringer, Gwen’s best friend, later her sister-in-law, and seemingly the object of her sexual interest, although this is not directly recorded in the diary and is only revealed at the close of the police procedural section of the novel. The fact that Stringer is the object of Shackelton’s desiring gaze is written somewhat innocently in the diary, in the sense that Gwen often seems unaware of the eroticism of her own gaze, or in fact that her gaze is sexual in nature at all. She only recognizes this in the closing pages of the book as she awaits the execution of Gloria’s killer, PX (a.k.a. Edgar Koenig). The diary also gives a good deal of detail about what it was like to live in a small English village invaded by large numbers of Canadian and American soldiers and airmen, as well as stories about rationing and the general conditions of life in wartime England. This detailed description of daily life gives the diary both depth and realism as we experience the texture of Gwen’s day-to-day existence during the war: from the hardships of rationing, to the men who never returned home or returned maimed and terribly disturbed, to the horrifying destruction in London by German bombers.
Gwen survives the war, makes a “convenient” marriage, and, when she is widowed in middle age, becomes a successful crime writer, renaming herself Vivian Elmsley. Vivian tells us that the final version of the diary is based in part on Gwen Shackelton’s original diary, which she herself rewrote in the 1970s as a practice piece while learning her craft. Although Vivian says that she has done some editing, sections of the diary still seem to have been written by a young, and occasionally naive Gwen, while other parts certainly seem to be written by a more mature, experienced writer, adding to the complications for the reader. For example, the young Gwen shines through in moments of melodramatic emotion, such as when she tells us about the first time she saw Gloria, “In my vision, I could even see our little shop, where I met her for the first time that blustery spring day in 1941. The day it all began” (4). This rather portentous statement is reminiscent of moments in film noir when the hero, about to enter into a flashback, begins to reveal his fascination with the femme fatale. In The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947), for example, Michael O’Hara, the “hero,” recounts his first meeting with the powerfully sexual, but deadly, Elsa Bannister, concluding that, “But once I’d seen her … [pause], once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for quite some time.”
Thirty-eight pages into the novel, after the beginning of the police procedural section, the diary tells us that Gloria “looked like a film star” and a few lines later that Gloria’s beauty immediately made Gwen think of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes and its heroine with “eyes a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface” (42). Later, describing the first meeting between Gloria and her brother Matthew, she sighs, “When he saw her, my brother stopped in his tracks and fell into her eyes so deeply you could hear the splash” (48). Gwen is a melodramatic, bookish young girl who has read about rather than experienced sex or much of life. Loving Gloria will bring her bittersweet experience. The strength of the palimpsest structure in the diary demonstrates that the mature Vivian is still subject to the eruption of Gwen’s memories and feelings from the past, and that as humans we never really lose the intense, if melodramatic, feelings of our youth.6 We are a patchwork of all of our experiences; although this past can perhaps be rewritten, it can never be left behind. In an important passage, Vivian ponders the relationship between past and present: “Looking backward, she began to wonder if perhaps it was all just a story. As the years race inexorably on, and as all the people we know and love die, does the past turn into fiction, an act of the imagination populated by ghosts, scenes and images suspended forever in water-glass?” (450).
Vivian’s sections of the diary, on the other hand are often alarmingly ambiguous. Robinson ironically opens the novel in 1967 with an ambivalent line taken from her diary, “It was the Summer of Love and I had just buried my husband when I first went back to see the reservoir that had flooded my childhood village” (1). This is a typically uncomfortable sentence from the diary which leaves the reader not quite sure how to take the writer’s comment—is she merely marking the time period as the Summer of Love in 1967, or will it be a Summer of Love now that the diarist’s husband is safely in the ground? Certainly the diarist’s purchase, after her bereavement, of “a new Triumph sports car. A red one. With a radio”(1), through the emphatic use of incomplete sentences alone suggests that the grieving widow of the sixties is clearly less stricken than perhaps she should be. The fact that it is a sports car, and a red one at that, seems celebratory, even liberating, and undermines the sadness that an apparently decent man’s death would seem to elicit, particularly since her husband’s death, she tells us, was a mercy killing. In 1999, as the past continues to erupt from her childhood village, it produces disturbing memories in Vivian that not only reveal her past, but also trouble the police investigation and the lives of the modern-day characters as well.
Near the end of the diary, after an older Gwen finds Gloria’s dead body, she begins to consider what will happen to her brother Matthew without Gloria to take care of him. Matthew, who is shell-shocked and mentally unstable as well as physically damaged (including having sustained the loss of his tongue), is a terrible burden to his wife and family and even to himself. Unable to communicate, he spends his time in brooding silence or drinking heavily in the town pub. Even though Gwen has helped considerably with his care, she had not considered what might happen in Gloria’s absence, even though Gloria continues to have a romance with an American serviceman after her maimed husband has returned to Hobb’s End, and had even thought of emigrating to Hollywood with her lover. In another wonderfully ambiguous, but perhaps rather cold-hearted entry in the diary, where Vivian considers the not impossible idea that her brother may have murdered his wife, she says of his potential future, or perhaps of her own, “Matthew might be hanged, or more likely found insane and put in the lunatic asylum for the rest of his days. However difficult his life was right now I knew he wouldn’t be able to bear that; it would be purgatory for him. Or Worse. I would have to care for him from now on” (430). The reader might well ask here what the “Or worse” means in this context. Worse for Matthew than purgatory, or worse for Gwen, young and unmarried, who now must bear the full burden of his care alone, perhaps for many years to come. Given that Gwen does assume care of Matthew but helps him shoot himself a few years later, then marries and helps her cancer stricken husband die as well, readers can well see the ambiguous characterization of this powerful woman, who is now far from the naive young girl evident in other parts of the diary but still subject to her memories and the emotions around them.7 Tortured by the past, Vivian writes that her “deep gnawing guilt … crippled her … and brought on black moods and sleepless nights she sometimes feared would never end” (105).
The diary is filled with complexities of this sort. Even Vivian herself seems unsure what the final “manuscript” means: “As she started to read, she wasn’t sure what it was. A memoir? A novella?… Because she had written it at a time in her life when she had been unclear about the blurred line between autobiography and fiction, she couldn’t be sure which was which” (33–34). One thing that she is sure of is that all of her writing, in both the diary and her crime novels, is filled with “guilt, grief, fear and madness” derived from the past (33). Inspector Banks suspects Gwen/Vivian of killing Gloria (although he is proven wrong), and he also suspects her of either killing her brother or at least helping him kill himself. He is unaware that Gwen has also helped her husband die. At the end of the novel, as Vivian sits drinking in a hotel room in Gainesville, Florida, awaiting the execution of PX, she reminisces over the three deaths, and what is chilling is that she assumes that both Matthew and her husband were suicidal and did not have the courage (which she herself had) to commit suicide. She seems to have little insight into how convenient both of their deaths were for her personally. From her brother’s death she regains her freedom; from her husband’s death she gains release from a marriage that she admits, on the first page of the novel, is purely “one of convenience” (1), and she also inherits a considerable sum of liberating money.
The diary is printed in the book entirely in italics to alert us very clearly to the change of voice. Vivian’s recreation of the diary, which creates a complex palimpsest of its own between Gwen and Vivian’s writing, is a challenge for readers since we are made aware at the book’s beginning that Vivian is an amazingly solitary, pragmatic, and narcissistic woman, responsible, at least in part, by the end of the novel for the deaths of her brother and her husband, and perhaps accidentally contributing to Gloria’s death as well. Much of what she writes in the diary is self-serving; some of what she says is brilliantly ambiguous. Close reading thus becomes essential in reading between the lines of Gwen/Vivian’s story and listening for the voices of the somewhat confused and innocent girl and later the cold and ultimately vengeful woman of the procedural section of the novel. Alone and savouring vengeance at the end of the novel, Vivian recreates for herself, in horrifying terms, what happens to a man during a death by electric chair: “The first shock would boil his brain and turn all the nerve cells to jelly; the second or third shock would stop his heart. His body would jerk and arch against the straps; his muscles would contract sharply, and a few small bones would probably snap. Most likely his fingers, the fingers he had used to strangle Gloria” (491).
The police procedural begins after the diary but is thoroughly imbricated with it. It deals with Inspectors Allan Banks’s and Annie Cabot’s stories, their personal lives, and the investigation of Gloria’s murder, as well as the modern day, non-diary story of Vivian Elmsley’s successful career and bleak old age. The actual murder story begins in the present with the discovery, by local youngster Adam Kelly, of a skeleton buried beneath the ruins in Hobb’s End. We are told of the skeleton’s attempt to return to the world in the horrifying language of a mystery story: “The thing lay against the flagstone in the dim light, fingers hooked over the top, as if it were trying to pull itself out of the grave. It was the skeleton of a hand, the bones crusted with moist dark earth” (9). The England of the novel’s present-day narrative is suffering from a severe drought, and Hobb’s End, covered with water in 1953 to create a reservoir, now resurfaces into the police procedural from under the water because of the drought, bringing the sins of the past into the present. These sins are, in the end, not so different from the sins of the present day, particularly in Gloria’s and Inspector Annie Cabot’s stories. Not surprisingly both Banks and Cabot drag their own troubling memories from the past into the present-day story as well.
The procedural portion of the novel is told by an omniscient narrator from the points of view of the elderly Vivian Elmsely, Allan Banks, and Annie Cabot, with whom Banks has an affair during the investigation surrounding the female skeleton dragged up from the mucky past. The body is found to be that of Gloria Stringer Shackelton, the femme fatale (or liberated woman, depending on who is recounting the story) who was living in Hobb’s End to escape from her past—involving a lower-class lover and their small son who was born out of wedlock in a working-class London slum. Gloria is the centre of the investigation as the police search first for her identity and then her killer. As the procedural moves forward with the investigation, it is interspersed both with the diary and with the present-day Vivian Elmsley story. Vivian, formerly known as Gwen Shackelton, is being stalked by an unknown man as she waits for the police to arrive at her door with questions about Gloria’s murder once the identity of the skeleton is ascertained. The modern story is tied together with the past in several ways: Vivian, formerly Gwen, is and was in love with Gloria, now and in the past, and both Banks and Cabot avidly research Gloria’s life and are obsessed with finding her killer fifty years after her murder. Both read the diary toward the end of the novel. All of the main characters are consistently reminded, in painful ways, of actions and feelings from the past that both depress and terrify them.
Annie Cabot, whose personal story has strong similarities to Gloria’s struggles, also ties the three major characters together in the modern tale. Gloria, the sexually liberated women is, as in many mystery stories, the object of the investigative gaze. Her expression of a vibrant sexuality made her a spectacle in the 1940s, just as Annie’s unconventional upbringing, lifestyle, and attractiveness make her a problem for the police force, and for Banks, in the nineties. Gloria’s sexuality leads to her violent death; Annie is raped by fellow officers before the novel begins. As in any palimpsest, the past returns no matter how hard we try to repress it, and it is inevitably and absolutely part of the present. Structurally the present-day plot is interwoven with, and frequently interrupted by, the insertion of entries, some of them lengthy, from the Shackelton diary. Readers move back and forth between eras, sub-genres, and character stories throughout. Between diary and procedural sections Robinson inserts thematic hooks that connect one to the other in order not to confuse the reader. For example, following the discovery of Gloria’s skeleton, clutching at Adam, the reader is introduced to Banks whistling an aria (the Habanera) from Bizet’s Carmen (“love is like a rebellious bird”), connecting both to Gwen’s melodramatic introduction of Gloria and to the idea of Carmen, Bizet’s famous femme fatale; it also provides a sense of how characters in the novel react to Gloria, and later Annie Cabot, a dangerous woman in her own right.
The late Michael Stanhope contributes two important artworks to the story of Hobb’s End and to the representation of Gloria’s character in the procedural section: a disturbing painting of Hobb’s End as a Bruegelesque village, to be discussed later, and a nude painting of Gloria, entitled Reclining Nude, Gloria, Autumn 1944, which now hangs in the Leeds City Art Gallery. Annie, and later Vivian, sees the painting in the gallery itself; Banks sees a postcard of it. All react differently. Annie, who is herself the artistic daughter of a painter, compares it to Goya’s Naked Maja, a controversial nude like Manet’s Olympia, in which the naked woman (courtesan?) looks directly out of the painting at the artist or the spectator, acknowledging, as many portraits of nude women do not, that the woman is frankly offering herself, or being offered by patriarchal convention, to our gaze. While most nudes are being offered to the spectator, despite conventional biblical titles such as Vanity or Adam and Eve that allow us to believe that looking at such paintings is the equivalent of a moral lesson, the Goya and Manet paintings, and the painting of Gloria, show the subject of the painting as aware of our gaze.8 Instead, the female figure frankly, even brazenly, acknowledges that this picture is about sex, perhaps rendering the nude woman a naked woman, pushing the viewer to acknowledge his/her complicity in the sexual relation between painting and spectator. Annie sees Gloria looking out at the spectator with “some sort of highly charged erotic challenge” (163) and possessed of a “frank eroticism” (163). For Annie, this painting defines Gloria as liberated, a free spirit: “She identified with Gloria. This was a woman who had struggled and dared to be a little different in a time that didn’t tolerate such behaviour” (313).
Vivian at first sees only Gloria’s face (from the painting) on television when Inspector Banks asks for the public’s help in solving the murder. Her reaction is angry as she gazes, after many, many years, upon the face of the women she has loved: “All she could see was Gloria’s face; Stanhope’s vision of Gloria’s face, with that cunning blend of naivete and wantonness, that come-hither smile and its promise of secret delights. It both was and wasn’t Gloria” (193). Vivian’s reaction seems one of frustrated desire and even jealousy. While Annie looks at Gloria as a free spirit, even a kindred spirit, Vivian sees her as a seductress who remains beyond her love, who gave more to Stanhope than to her. Banks, ever the dispassionate police officer, sees her as “beautiful, erotic, sensual, playful, but also challenging, mocking, as if she knows some sort of secret about the artist, or shared one with him” (169). But instead of feeling aroused, Banks, in a cooler manner, is moved to think of bringing Gloria’s murderer to justice. His gaze at the postcard is immediately followed by the arrival of the coroner, who describes the brutality of her murder—stabbed “viciously” (170) fourteen or fifteen times, with signs of manual strangulation—hardly a pretty picture. But while Banks’s gaze has sexual elements, and even an appreciation of both the painting and the woman, it is more dispassionate and professional than the gaze of either woman. Annie is a partisan in the debate about women’s rights, Vivian is a disappointed lover, and Banks is the objective representative of the law.
On the whole the procedural section is fairly conventional, with Banks and Annie looking at forensic clues (one of which, a rusted military button clasped in the skeleton’s hand, helps to solve the mystery), interviewing suspects, and connecting with other police forces and the American army. Throughout the procedural, as in most modern police stories, we are introduced to the problems endured by police officers: long hours and intense, sometimes dangerous working conditions leading to marital breakdown; serious discrimination and violence against female officers; and conflict between the working police and ambitious, politically motivated superior officers looking for promotions and even celebrity. The central problems in the novel are, however, not problems of police procedure but are driven by gender in both sub-genres: the breakdown of Banks’s marriage and his falling out with his adult son, a rape perpetrated on Annie by her fellow officers (a few years before Banks and Annie meet), leading to her “exile” in Yorkshire, and Banks’s fragile love affair with her. All of these present-day gender and family difficulties connect with similar problems in the past, giving the novel coherence despite the frequent movement back and forth between time periods, characters, and places. Although moving from story to story is sometimes taxing, Robinson works the transitions between the various stories very deftly throughout the novel.
One of the key moments with respect to gender in the procedural that connects the everyday sexism/classism of the modern story with similar feelings in the diary is a very odd encounter with a forensic doctor who has examined Gloria’s skeleton for clues to her killer. From the moment Banks and Annie meet Dr. Ioan Williams, they dislike him. Banks thinks of him as upper class: “He sounded pure Home Counties to Banks, or Oxbridge. Posh, at any rate, as Banks’s mother would say” (72). Banks also finds himself puzzled by the juxtaposition of posters of Pam Anderson in her Baywatch (1989–2001) swimsuit and a poster of a skeleton in William’s office. Annie finds herself horrified as Williams, examining the skeleton, “hooked his finger in the sciatic notch, then looked at DS Cabot again as he caressed the skeleton’s pelvic area. Annie kept her head down” (75). Later Annie refers to him as a “skeleton-groper” (83). These kinds of moments, we later find out, are common in the life of an attractive female police officer. In the end, Banks concludes that sexism is so ingrained in Williams that “he didn’t even know he was doing it” (76)—a condition from which Banks himself is just painfully emerging as he is now a single man and is both amused and distressed by the changes in dating “rules” after many years as a married man.
Yet another set of stories about Gloria, Gwen, and Hobb’s End, told by three other women (Ruby Kettering, Alice Poole, and Elizabeth Goodall), who lived in the village during the war, emerges from the past and resurfaces when they are interrogated in the procedural as part of the murder investigation. All of these women appear in the diary but are just part of Gwen and Gloria’s group or are neighbours. They have little to say in the diary. Their stories, as they appear in the procedural, say much about life, love, and morality in the village. Ruby Kettering’s memories of Hobb’s End itself are vague, but she does bring one of two important symbols into the narrative. Hanging in her house is a powerful Bruegelesque painting of the village and its people by Michael Stanhope, the talented outsider thought by many to be gay. Disliked by most in the village, and also heartily disliking most of the villagers himself, Stanhope becomes friends with Gloria (another outsider). Stanhope is taken with Gloria’s beauty and her brash behaviour—she smokes openly in the streets, something that respectable women did not often do at that time. Stanhope admires Gloria for offending the very ugly, prudish, and mean-spirited people who appear in his Hobb’s End painting. The painting, in Annie’s view, depicts
“Normal Life” but there was something sinister about it. Partly it was the facial expressions. Annie could detect either the smug, supercilious smiles of moral rectitude or the malicious grins of sadism on the faces of so many people. And Stanhope had included so much detail that the effect must have been deliberate. How he must have hated them.” (90)
This painting sets the table for our understanding of the morality of the villagers, and although Kettering does not agree with Stanhope’s assessment of them, she is the character who calls Hobb’s End an Agatha Christie kind of place, implying that all was not well in the village.
The Bruegelian nature of the village is well demonstrated by Elizabeth Goodall, who is interviewed by Inspector Banks. Mrs. Goodall, whose name signifies all, has been a member in good standing of the Women’s Institute and Missionary society and feels that it is her Christian duty in her “capacity as a member of the Church of England” (201) to scold Gloria for her profligate ways. She is described by Banks as “a short, stout woman, dressed in a grey tweed skirt, white blouse and a navy blue cardigan, despite the heat.” Physically “her recently permed hair was almost white, and its waves looked frozen, razor-sharp to the touch, Margaret Thatcher style.… She had a prissy slit of a mouth that seemed painted on with red lipstick” (198). Looking as though she has just swallowed a “mouthful of vinegar” she describes Gloria as “a brazen hussy,” “a painted strumpet,” and “no true Christian woman.” She sees Gloria as a social climber filled with “airs and graces,” “insolent,” and “like a cheap American film star” (199–201). It is Elizabeth Goodall who expresses the class bias in the village, referring to Gloria as one of the “lower elements” who has attempted to raise her social class by dropping her lower-class accent and marrying up—to a man Goodall has fancied herself. Goodall also repeats a conversation with Gloria where the two spar over a rude reference to “the missionary position” (201). Goodall sees both Gloria and Michael Stanhope as “debauched and perverted. I could go on. Birds of a feather him and Gloria Shackelton” (205). Prudish and prissy, Goodall is part of the ugly side of Hobb’s End that treated an emancipated woman and a gay artist with contempt. Through Goodall, the reader can also understand the ugly, sexist treatment of Annie, another liberated woman, many years later.
Alice Poole, interviewed by Annie, is the last of the Hobb’s End survivors interviewed about Gloria. Alice, who seems like a former hippie to Annie, has the most positive and kindly view of the dead woman. Unlike Elizabeth Goodall, she admires the “free-thinking” woman (227) and considers her “a good sort. Cheerful. Fun to be with. Generous” (227–28). She also has serious reservations about the morality of Hobb’s End in the past, and describes the villagers in much the same way that Michael Stanhope painted them: “They call them the good old days, but I’m not so sure. There was a lot of hypocrisy and intolerance. Snobbery too”(225). While considering Gloria a bit “impulsive,” “spontaneous,” and “cheeky” (224–25), she admired her great beauty and her talent as a seamstress. She is the only character from the past, except for Stanhope, who understood Gloria’s romantic nature and her indulgence in fantasy—fantasies that the working-class Cockney felt would be fulfilled by the handsome Matthew Shackleton and his grand dreams, and later by Brad, an American soldier from her beloved dreamland, Hollywood.
Between the three women, Michael Stanhope’s painting, and Gwen’s diary, Robinson paints a picture for us of a free-thinking, fun-loving young woman who seeks to escape the drudgery and brutality she saw in her own mother’s life, and, indeed in her own future if she cannot escape from her working-class roots and pursue a fanciful Hollywood-style future. Sadly, her striking looks and free and easy manner arouse the fury of an unattractive, sexually stunted serial killer, whose gifts she accepts but whose advances she rejects. This rejection ultimately leads to her brutal murder at his hands. Like Annie, she pays for being an attractive woman and a free spirit. Both eras and both sub-genres are filled with the results of misogynist violence against women who are believed to live outside of the rules of proper gender and class decorum. The novel’s palimpsestuous structure clearly lays bare the dangers of living beyond the pale in the past as well as the present.
Just as the narratives in the novel layer plots and sub-genres over one another to recreate the complexity of the past and its relationship to the present, so too does the characterization of the major characters, whose past lives continue to trouble the present and will continue to do so into subsequent novels in the case of the continuing characters, Banks and Annie.
Gwen Shackelton/Vivian Elmsley is the most fully realized female character in the novel. Banks describes her physically as “tall and slim, standing ramrod straight, her grey hair fastened in a bun. She had high cheekbones, a straight slightly hooked nose and a small thin mouth.” She is an intimidatingly disciplined woman who lives in a “Spartan” flat (367). She is the only major character to appear in both halves of the novel as we read about her youth and old age. When we are introduced to Vivian in 1967 in the novel’s first pages, we learn a great deal about her in a very few words. She has just returned to England after several years abroad with her now deceased diplomat husband. She speaks no endearments about her husband but refers to him as “my passport to flight and escape” (1), although escape from what, she does not tell us at this time. She seems a cold and pragmatic woman who tells us that her husband was “a decent man … quite willing to accept that our marriage was one of convenience.” She sees herself as “presentable and intelligent, in addition to being an exceptionally good dancer” (1). Her visit to the Hobb’s End reservoir in her red Triumph sports car, bought with her late husband’s investments, fills her with despair as she longs “to be young again: young without the complications of my own youth; young without the war; young without the heartbreak; young without the terror and the blood” (2). The reader might assume that the heartbreak, terror, and blood relate to the war alone, but what Vivian does not reveal at the time is that the body of the only person who she has been able to love or desire in any physical way lies buried under the water in the ruins of the village—and that she is the only one who knows it, having buried the body herself to protect her mentally ill brother from suspicion. Vivian is not guilty of murder, but she bears the guilt for hiding the murder and having hidden a gun from Gloria that might have saved her from the serial killer who murdered her. She is also guilty of helping her maimed brother and cancer-ridden husband to commit suicide, and she has to live with the guilt for all of these past sins. In a very disturbing postmodern way, Vivian seems to believe that she has no core character, but has merely played several roles (Gwen Shackelton, Vivian Elmsley, the dutiful daughter, the diplomat’s wife, the crime writer, and so forth) situationally throughout her life:
At every stage she had to reinvent herself; the selfless carer; the diplomat’s wife; the ever-so-slightly “with it” young widow with the red sports car; the struggling writer; the public figure with the splinter of ice in her heart. Would that be the last? Which was the real one? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if there was a real one. (252)
That she sees herself as at least partly fictional has disturbing implications for her morality—she acts in every moment of her life in a calculated way, putting her best interest first, connected to no overall moral position, unlike Banks, who has a clear moral philosophy.
Throughout the novel Gwen/Vivian is sexless. As a young girl, she is fascinated by Gloria but is unaware that this fascination is also heavily tinged with sexual desire. It is only at the end of the novel, when most of the truth is revealed, that she recognizes her long-suppressed desire, the only desire she has ever known. Looking at the nude painting of Gloria earlier in the story, she says that what disturbed her most about the painting was “the pang of desire…. She had thought herself long past such feelings, if she had in fact ever, indeed, experienced them at all … but she had never admitted to herself, had never even realized that she might have loved her in that way” (457). As she stands before the painting she tells us that she feels like a “pervert,” not because the painting is pornographic but because of “her own thoughts and feelings attached to it” (458).
Vivian punishes herself through her life for her sins, and the visible symbol of her punishment is the tortured Francis Henderson, Gloria’s illegitimate child, now an unhappy adult, who stalks her looking for revenge, believing that Vivian had something to do with his mother’s abandonment of him and ultimately her death. In the end Vivian is alone, reliving all the pain of the past and weeping for the first time in many years as she awaits a killer’s execution. Her character, largely forged by her passion for Gloria and her indifference to men, is marked by a cold, passionless “iron discipline” (191) that allows her to endure her solitary loveless, sexless life. One of Robinson’s key outside references to Vivian’s character is her pleasure in reading Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, about which Flaubert himself said, “It’s a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive” (quoted in Wall). Vivian is a passionate soul who, for most of her life, is passionless—until the end of the novel, when she weeps for the sorrows of the past and a life without love.
Gloria Stringer, femme fatale/victim, enters the novel as a “Land Girl,” or girl of odd jobs who has been assigned to work for a farmer in Hobb’s End for the duration of the war; since most of the young men had gone off to war, young women took their places on the farm to help provide the food the country needed. Alice Poole believes that during Gloria’s time in Hobb’s End Gloria had to endure the sexual advances of her elderly employer, Farmer Kilnsey, whom Alice calls a “lecherous old sod” (224). Gloria comes from a poor, rough, Cockney family in which her mother suffered abuse from a drunken father; Gloria says of her, “She didn’t have much of a life. I don’t remember ever seeing her smile” (396). After giving birth to an out-of-wedlock child at the age of sixteen, Gloria cannot bear the idea of marrying the father because she “really believed that it was just a matter of time before he would start beating me, looking upon me as his slave” (396). In Gloria’s mind this is often the fate of poor, working-class women trapped into matrimony because of an unplanned pregnancy or because it is expected of them. Gloria has ambitions and dreams and tries to better herself by working on getting rid of her Cockney accent, something that causes resentment (getting above yourself) in Elizabeth Goodall, and others, in Hobb’s End. Gloria’s working-class past will not be covered up for many in the village. Most of her romantic dreams and fantasies are derived from her obsessive consumption of glamorous Hollywood films—ever a haven for poor young dreamers.
When Gloria falls into a severe postpartum depression after the birth of her son, Frances Henderson, she eventually abandons the baby and his father and moves to Hobb’s End to start a new life—a life filled with movies and “exotic” American servicemen and her then young, promising new husband. She suffers from considerable guilt for abandoning the boy, particularly when he and his father occasionally resurface in Hobb’s End as distressing apparitions from a dark past. As Gloria confesses her secret past to Gwen, it is clear that what she sees as the sins of the past still trouble her, and although she appears fun-loving and gregarious, she is still not secure with the free and easy behaviour that many of the villagers consider immoral, and in the end that she herself feels is immoral. The painful results of her choices are given clear expression by her troubled son as he holds Vivian captive in the ruins of Hobb’s End: “But I hated her for leaving us. For depriving us of all that beauty. Why couldn’t she share it with us. Why couldn’t we be part of her dreams. We were never good enough for her. I hated her and I loved her. All my life blighted by a mother I never even knew” (474).
After her husband, Matthew, returns from the war terribly maimed, and as she broods on her abandonment of her child, Gloria decides, in an agony of guilt, to devote her life to her husband’s care: “I was selfish; I was a coward. I’m not going to be a coward again. This is my punishment, Gwen. Don’t you see? Matt is my penance” (396). This is the guilt-ridden self-punishment of a woman in those times who has lived outside of conventional gender rules for the time, has rejected motherhood and traditional domesticity. Despite her seemingly liberated behaviour, she still has within her those traditional values from the past that held her mother in servitude, and as In a Dry Season demonstrates, escaping the past and its suffering is no easy task. Banks, whose obsession is to seek justice for Gloria, comes to understand her plight: “Poor Gloria. She saw Matthew as her penance. Somehow that told Banks more about her than anything else” (447). As with Banks himself, the past will just not let Gloria go, nor will the memory of her give Vivian or her abandoned son any peace.
Annie Cabot, considered a “Hippie Cop” (416), is a modern, liberated woman. Like Gloria, she is also uneasy about her own place in the world. She is a confident, decently employed feminist, with a non-traditional upbringing in an artist’s colony, who also had dreams of getting ahead in the world. She endures a brutal rape by three of her fellow officers in what they call “initiation ceremonies” (413). The novel implies that Annie has been somewhat naive in assuming that women would be treated as equals in a largely male profession; many male officers resent the influx of women into their territory. Annie, who still carries with her the grief and humiliation of the assault, says that she “always wanted to be one of the boys” (413)—that is, she wanted what was impossible for Gloria many years before, equality with men. The violence that continues in the aftermath of the rape results in the accidental castration of one of the rapists. The consequence for Annie, now considered “a ballbusting lesbian bitch” (418) by her fellow officers, is a closing of the ranks against her in the force and exile to a small detachment in Yorkshire where she withers away investigating minor crimes until she meets Banks, also in exile for some anti-establishment sins such as punching a much-disliked superior officer.
The consequence of the assault on Annie not only drives her into exile literally, but she also exiles herself from relationships with both men and women. All that Annie now wants is “a so simple, no-strings relationship, but there were already too many complications…. She didn’t think she could face all of the emotional detritus of someone else’s life impinging on her own” (466). She lives a spartan, friendless existence at the centre of what Banks calls a labyrinth, in a small housing development where she is very hard to find: “I get by. I have my nice, safe little life at the centre of the labyrinth, as you so astutely pointed out. I have few possessions. I go to work, I do my job, and then I come home. No social life, no friends” (419). Although she claims not to be troubled by the past, her bitterness and vexed personal relationship with Banks shows clearly through her continuing rage with the men who raped her. Speaking of the castrated officer she rages, “I was the one he raped. And I was the one who saw his face while he was doing it. He deserved all he got. The only real shame is that I didn’t get the chance to do it to the other two as well” (419). Memories of the brutality and degradation trouble her present and her relationships with everyone, including Banks.
Inspector Banks is a complex character whose personal qualities are developed over the course of nineteen novels. He is a loner who left a promising police position in London in a fruitless attempt to save his marriage and avoid burnout. He is not well liked by many on the police force, and despite his skill at catching criminals he is variously described by other police officers as “a loner, a skiver, and a Bolshie bastard” (62). He drags many miseries from the past and present around with him—his distant and unhappy relationship with his parents and older brother; his divorce from Sandra, his wife of many years and mother of his two children; and his rancorous relationship with his son, not unlike his unhappy relationship with his own parents. But Banks is, for the most part, a good man whose police work is motivated by his hatred for bullies and his need to bring justice to victims of violent crime. He is not exactly the “man of action” that Christie rejected in her fiction, but he is a powerful, mostly non-violent and thoughtful male protagonist whom Robinson frequently holds up to criticism.
Banks is often selfish and sometimes unpleasant, and he is obsessed with control, to the detriment of his relationships. His greatest flaw is his traditional, conservative view of marriage and relationships with women. He has unthinkingly, like his parents before him, lived as though it is the natural order for men to work very long hours and for wives to take care of homes and raise children, making allowances for often absent, disinterested, or difficult husbands. Predictably, his marriage fails. His view of the “natural order” is clearly described: “Mostly, though, he needed to be in control, with his feet on the pedals, his hands on the steering wheel. He also liked to control the music. It had always angered Sandra, the way he put on whatever he wanted to listen to, or turned on the television to a programme he wanted to watch” (276). The italicized he is a clear indication of a character flaw that will continue to disturb his relationships with women in future. His saving grace is that the failure of his marriage and his falling-out with his son force him to confront these gender issues in a more thoughtful way.
Banks is troubled throughout the series by his parent’s disappointment in him. As working-class people with a very strong sense of social class, they had expected their youngest son to graduate from university and make a lucrative career for himself. His father, in particular, despises police officers for class reasons and is terribly disappointed that his son, even though he has done well on the force, has not done better. Banks broods over this, as he recognizes that his progress in the force is stymied by his lack of higher education. When his son, Brian, does poorly in school and plans a career in a rock ’n’ roll band, Banks explodes with anger, mirroring his own father. After an ugly confrontation with Brian, “Banks couldn’t believe he had said those things. Not because he thought that money was everything, but because that was exactly what his parents had said to him…. It frightened him how deeply instinctive his whole response to Brian was—as if someone else—his parents—had spoken the words and he was only the ventriloquist’s dummy” (13–14). Banks is appalled that he is so much like his father and that he has learned little from his own experience. The past is, in the novel, inescapable, but at least Banks has begun to ruminate on past behaviour with a view to making things up with his son. In a recent novel, Bad Boy (2010), Brian has become a famous rock star.
The past is also inescapable in Banks’s relationship with Annie. He is very attracted to her but dismayed that she does not show him the traditional deference that should be accorded to an officer of his rank, for there was “no hint of apology or deference in her tone” when she mistakes him for a tourist on their first meeting (27). Alone and adrift after the shocking and unexpected—at least to him—breakup of his marriage, he is often bitter and filled with self-pity, frustrated because he does not know how to survive without a wife/caretaker. He cannot even cook for himself, and he finds himself at sea about how to relate to women as a newly single man, particularly to a young feminist like Annie. Out of step with the social customs and dating scene of the late nineties, he fumes over the “health fascists” (110) who try to prevent him from smoking and enjoying his fat-laden pub food. He also is very unsettled by dating: “He was too old to go out on dates and worry about whether a goodnight kiss would be welcome. Or a nightcap. Or an invitation to stay the night. Or who should take care of the condoms. The whole idea made him seem nervous and awkward” (112). In short, he is a man out of time and out of sync with the 1990s. Traditional in his view and habits, he is uncomfortable with modern, liberated women, but he does think about gender and family relations despite his apparent failures with Sandra and Annie and Brian. If there is any hope of leaving the past behind in the novel, it is in Banks’s new-found awareness of how trapped he is in dated views of male behaviour and parental responsibility. That changing these is painful and difficult is clearly demonstrated in the descriptions of his often uncomfortable ruminations on the past.
In a Dry Season is thus a serious genre novel about the hold that the past has over the present and the enormous difficulty that men and women have in growing into new gender and class roles despite the liberating (and frightening) pressure of the women’s movement and changed ideas about divorce and parent–child relationships. Each character in the novel struggles to understand his or her feelings about lovers and relatives. One character cannot love or feel desire; another is wounded by a violent attack upon her by her “friends” and colleagues in the past; yet another struggles with his feelings about a failed marriage, the needs of his adult children, and his attempts to be a newly single man. All are marked by their pasts and by past gender expectations—one wants to be liberated and equal to the men around her, another wants his seemingly stable family to remain together, and one comes to understand, and grieve for, the love and desire that she has felt for a long-dead woman.
The palimpsest structure that Robinson has chosen for this novel constantly forces the past into the present, showing how characters become entrapped by conventional roles and feelings. These feelings prove very difficult to escape, and even intelligent characters such as Banks unthinkingly revert to dated patriarchal patterns of relating to their children and lovers almost automatically when they are threatened or feel that gender norms, to which they have devoted considerable emotional energy, have been violated. Robinson cleverly demonstrates how the lives and relationships of the ordinary people he creates are driven by cultural traditions that refuse to die or that change very slowly despite considerable social pressure for change. Using two layered crime sub-genres, with very little concentration on the criminal himself, allows Robinson to flesh out a complex, character-driven examination of how men and women relate in a world that is still misogynistic and filled with gender stereotypes.
1 The cozy is a large genre of genteel crime stories with several sub-genres such as the village mystery, the locked room mystery, and so on.
2 The status of the hard-boiled as realist fiction is highly overrated by Chandler. While “The Simple Art of Murder” is a wonderfully written dramatic polemic, it is often difficult to see Chandler’s own fiction as realistic even though much of it is set in the mean streets and makes use of street language. Chandler’s literary “improvements” on the language of the streets is quite remarkable and often quite amusing. Hard-boiled slang has become an art form in many subsequent novels and films with hard-boiled heroes. A fine dictionary of hard-boiled slang can be found at “Twists, Slug and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang,” http://www.miskatonic.org/slang.html.
3 I attended a meeting of the Bloody Words conference, held by the Crime Writers of Canada, some years ago, where a panel of crime writers, including Peter Robinson, discussed why they write the kind of crime stories that they do. Not surprisingly the women on the panel wrote—and had to vigorously defend—village mysteries/cozies, and the men tended toward the hard-boiled or the police procedural. The discussion was sometimes heated as the women were consistently on the defensive about their “unrealistic” sub-genre. The terms of the discussion differed little from what Chandler had written sixty years earlier.
4 In Canadian crime fiction, a sub-genre that Lou Allin, author of the Belle Palmer mystery series, refers to as “the Bush Cozy” is, perhaps, a Canadian version of the village mystery. Writers such as Allin, R. J. Harlich, H. Mel Malton, and Nadine Doolittle use the village mystery as a microscope to examine the lives of middle-aged women who choose to live in the Canadian North (however that is defined). Often these women are trying to escape from abusive relationships or failures of some kind in southern Canada, and the novels concentrate on the difficulties of life in small Northern towns.
5 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a palimpsest literally as “a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for a second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.” It is important to note that the earlier writing is only partially effaced, showing through at opportune moments in a literary work. Literary critics such as Sarah Dillon use the term “palimpsestuous” to define many postmodern works: “where ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure with which one is presented as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script.” For Dillon, “‘involuted’ describes the relationship between the texts that inhabit the palimpsest as a result of the process of palimpsesting and subsequent textual reappearance” (245).
6 Sarah Dillon argues that a palimpsest might be seen as similar to the structure of the human mind itself with experience layered upon experience. In his description of the skeleton with its hooked fingers, attempting to crawl out of the grave (the past), perhaps Robinson describes a structure somewhat similar to the unconscious mind/return of the repressed. Dillon notes that some authors such as De Quincey have seen the palimpsest in terms of the return of old experience surging to the surface when the mind is provoked.
7 The ending of the novel is very reminiscent of the original ending of Fritz Lang’s powerful film noir Scarlet Street (1945). In the original film, which was re-edited because the ending was considered too harsh and even laughable, Chris Cross, the half-mad hero, awaits the execution of the femme fatale’s sleazy, dishonest lover—who is in fact innocent of her murder. In the sequence excised from the film, Lang shows Cross travelling to the prison where the execution is to take place and climbing the hydro pole, trying to feel the moment when the electrical current diminishes and thus indicates that the power is blasting into the electric chair, killing the lover. For a complete description of this, see Lotte Eisner’s Fritz Lang (264–65).
8 See John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for a clear discussion of the ideological aspects of the nude in European visual art.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” The Simple Art of Murder. Ed. Raymond Chandler. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. 1–18.
Dillon, Sarah. “Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies.” Textual Practice 19.3 (2005): 243–63.
Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo Books, 1986.
———. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969.
Flaubert, Gustave. Sentimental Education. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Kaplan, Cora. “An Unsuitable Genre for a Feminist.” Popular Narrative: A Sourcebook. Ed. Bob Ashley. London: Leicester Press, 1997. 211–14.
The Lady from Shanghai. Dir. Orson Welles. Columbia, 1947.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
“Meet the Author.” Interview with Peter Robinson. n.d. http://www.mysterynet.com/robinson/author.shtml.
Robinson, Peter. In a Dry Season. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1999.
Wall, Geoffrey. Introduction. Sentimental Education. By Gustave Flaubert. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin, 2004.
1990 |
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story – “Innocence” |
1991 |
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel – Past Reason Hated |
1994 |
TORGI Talking Book Award – Past Reason Hated |
1995 |
Author’s Award, Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters – Final Account |
1996 |
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel – Innocent Graves |
1998 |
Macavity Award for Best Short Story – “The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” |
1999 |
Anthony Award for Best Novel – In a Dry Season |
1999 |
Barry Award for Best Novel – In a Dry Season |
2000 |
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel – Cold Is the Grave |
2000 |
Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story – “Murder in Utopia” |
2000 |
Edgar Award for Best Short Story – “Missing in Action” |
2001 |
Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France) – In a Dry Season |
2002 |
Martin Beck Award (Sweden) – In a Dry Season |
2002 |
CWA (UK) Dagger in The Library Award |
2003 |
Spoken Word Bronze Award – The Hanging Valley |
2006 |
Palle Rosenkrantz Award (Denmark) – Cold Is the Grave |
2008 |
Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award |
2011 |