MY COPY of The Suburbs of Hell (1984) is a handsome Heinemann first edition salvaged, like so many treasures, from a remainder tray. The dust jacket features a golden hourglass and type on a sky-blue ground: the colours Fra Angelico favoured for the vaults of heaven. A travel card that served as my bookmark is still tucked away in its pages; the date-punch informs me that I first read the book in October 1985.
Whenever I want to re-read the novel I have difficulty locating it. I know the shelf it sits on—not an especially crowded one—but my eye keeps gliding past the book. When I finally isolate it, the glorious blue and gold always brings a little jolt. I’ve been looking for a black jacket, one that matches my recollection of a devastating tale.
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Randolph Stow dedicated his ninth and last novel to William Grono, an old friend from Western Australia, ‘twenty years after “The Nedlands Monster”’. The Nedlands Monster was a serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, who murdered eight people in Perth and attempted to murder many more. In one horrific night in 1963 Cooke shot five people, among them the teen age brother of a friend of Stow’s. Stow was out of the country at the time but returned shortly afterwards to a city gripped by rumour and fear. The Suburbs of Hell bears witness to the hold of these events on the novelist’s imagination, as well as to the imaginative alchemy that has transformed a murder hunt into something far more rich and strange.
The novel updates the action to the early 1980s and replaces Perth with Tornwich, a fictionalised version of Harwich, the Essex port where Stow lived for the last three decades of his life. The small coastal town is quickly but indelibly drawn: its quays and pubs, its mediæval houses ‘crammed cheek-to-cheek’, its numbing cold. Secret passages designed for smugglers conjure a colourful past, fishing boats attest to a pragmatic present, while unemployment and drug dealing suggest the shape of things to come.
Stow’s masterly evocation of place is matched by the brilliant economy of his characterisation. A single example will do: Eddystone Ena, who lives in a disused lighthouse, is ‘a bouncy little woman, bosomed like a bullfinch’. Given the run of a neighbour’s posh kitchen, she is ‘delighted and overawed’: a phrase that conveys Ena’s modest social status, her lack of envy and her endearing readiness to be pleased—all in three words.
Like 1960s Perth, Tornwich is a backwater. In this peaceful place, a man is inexplicably shot and killed in his home one night; other murders, equally baffling, follow. For the reader, Stow’s evocation of the Nedlands Monster has already created the expectation that the familiar gratifications of a murder mystery are in store: the agreeable frisson created by a killer on the loose, the smarty-pants pleasure of trying to guess ‘whodunnit’, and the catharsis of the eventual unmasking, when evil will be vanquished and Eden restored. For readers not conversant with the Nedlands Monster, Stow alludes early on to the Yorkshire Ripper. (The latter, Peter Sutcliffe, was arrested in 1981 after a protracted and highly publicised investigation; that Stow was moved to write The Suburbs of Hell soon after is probably not accidental.)
Certain aspects of the novel reinforce the reader’s expectations by conforming to whodunnit conventions: the closed community; the tight-knit group of suspects; the atmosphere of dread as, one by one, victims are picked off and the noose, as they say, tightens around the rest. Even the mist that reduces streetlamps ‘to dandelion-balls of light’ seems to have strayed from the pages of Conan Doyle.
Gradually, however, the reader will notice an alarming thing: the police have virtually no presence in the novel. The official investigation into the murders exists only as so many noises off: the details of its unfolding, integral to the whodunnit, are suppressed. That absence is an early indication that solving the murders might not be uppermost on this novel’s mind. Taffy Hughes, the sole representative of authority, is not a police officer, but only ‘something quite high up in Customs’. Nor is he that figure beloved of who-dunnits, the amateur sleuth; a pipe is all he has in common with Sherlock Holmes. Harry Ufford, the novel’s central character, comes nearest to fulfilling the role of detective, but it’s a very approximate performance. Readers who stake their interpretative hopes on Harry will be disappointed. He displays little of the puzzle-solving acumen necessary to the part and will fall well short of masterminding a denouement. In fact, the denouement itself will fail to show.
Another break with convention is more striking still. The Suburbs of Hell is interspersed with brief chapters that appear to be narrated by the murderer, a strategy frowned on by whodunnit purists: it risks the untimely revelation of motive and identity, which should be deferred for as long as possible. (The ideal whodunnit is narrated by Scheherazade.) But the really unnerving discovery is that the narrator of these passages is Death itself, who follows close on the heels of the murderer (a nice literalisation, that) and records each victim’s last moments with glacial calm.
The whodunnit is anchored in realism (usually, realism of the puréed, easily digestible kind, but in a way that’s the point—it can be taken for granted). Stow’s human characters, like their setting, are presented with realist precision; his verist rendering of the local idiom is exemplary. The introduction of an allegorical figure—as with the absence of an authoritative investigator—muddies the novel’s generic identity, causing a familiar narrative type to turn slippery and weird. The disquiet this arouses in the reader mirrors the consternation of the characters as their known world grows terrifyingly strange. Like the Tornwich Monster, whose familiar face masks a killer, The Suburbs of Hell has an uncanny ability to shift shape.
Nicholas Jose, a superbly insightful reader of Stow, has pointed out that his realism is always shot through with the numinous. In Stow, the divergent impulses of scientist and shaman converge (he was, after all, a poet: by definition at odds with common sense). Novels like Visitants and Tourmaline yoke a compulsion to depict the world accurately to a conviction that the world is not as it seems. The literary novel, a lively and elastic thing, can accommodate bizarre shacklings of this sort. What transfixes in The Suburbs of Hell is Stow’s grafting of the visionary onto the calcified form of the whodunnit. That both the detective and the mystic seek the truth behind appearances seems self-evident only when it’s pointed out. Fuelling Stow’s imaginative leap is the kind of creative je m’en foutisme that Edward Said identified as characteristic of late style: counter-intuitive, intransigent, unafraid.
The title of the novel and its epigraphs come from plays by John Webster. Stow, like Webster, was ‘much possessed by death’, and this wasn’t the first time he had turned to the playwright for an epigraph. Like the reference to the Nedlands Monster, the quotations from Webster are ominous, and prepare the reader familiar with the Jacobean stage for a proliferation of corpses.
The Duchess of Malfi provides Stow’s title: ‘Security some men call the suburbs of hell, / Only a dead wall between.’ Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Perth killings was that most of them took place in the victims’ homes in quiet, well-to-do suburbs. People who had answered a knock at the door after dark were shot at close range; others were murdered in their beds. The Tornwich Monster, too, uses this modus operandi, one that guarantees psychosocial panic. ‘Safe as houses’, we say; but the security of houses is deceptive. Ena makes the point: ‘When you think of your house, normally, you think of doors and windows that lock and walls that are solid. But suddenly you find yourself thinking about windowpanes that break and bolts that don’t hold and smugglers’ tunnels into the cellar.’
All this ratchets up suspense, in keeping with the novel’s whodunnit mode. But Webster borrowed his line from Thomas Adams, a London clergyman who in 1610 preached a sermon that warned, ‘Securitie is the very suburbs of Hell.’ Adams’ message is direct and uncompromising: wealth paves the way to damnation and death is always close at hand. It’s not surprising that this sentiment resonated with Stow, a communing Anglican with a strong interest in Taoism. The Suburbs of Hell opens with Death quoting the Bible: ‘Behold, I come as a thief’ and—a verse I found terrifying as a child—‘Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ These warnings have a worldly application in the whodunnit, but their metaphysical significance is more chilling and more profound.
Allegory, no matter what it points to, has a tendency to disturb. A refracted mode, it treats the world as a sign, always gesturing beyond the tangible. While realism deals in solid projections, allegory is hollowed out, an eyeless socket. Walter Benjamin likened it to a ruin, and allegory can feel as desolate as glassless windows and roofless walls. The events narrated in The Suburbs of Hell are only one source of the novel’s wintry bleakness; its cold is formal and ingrained, a zero at the bone.
The novel’s web of literary allusion is apparent in its liberal use of quotation. There’s nothing necessarily sinister about that. But, each time I re-read The Suburbs of Hell, I find the presence of those quotations creepier: they eat into the body of the text like worms. If that’s fanciful, it also testifies to the pervasive sense of menace generated by Stow’s poetics of dread.
Stow drew attention to the novel’s intertextuality by describing it as a reworking of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’. Chaucer’s Pardoner, an itinerant clergyman and audacious con artist, models his tale on a mediæval sermon. It was customary to enliven sermons with moral anecdotes, and the Pardoner illustrates his message that greed is the root of all evil with a story about the falling out of three ‘rioters’ that has fatal consequences for all three. This parable can be traced back to the Vedabbha Jataka, a collection of ancient Buddhist tales. Variants of the story exist in many cultures; all of them concern characters who kill each other in their lust for material gain, leaving death in sole possession of the scene.
Stow’s revisioning of this classic tale is plain in the latter part of the novel, which revolves around the local drug pushers, Dave Sutton and Frank De Vere. When Harry discovers their dealing, Frank wants him out of the way. As Frank’s paranoia flares, he persuades himself that Harry is the killer, a view he communicates to Dave. Whether or not Dave acts on this theory is left unresolved, but Frank later comes to believe that the killer is actually Dave. This proves to be the undoing of both men.
William Grono has said that Stow was distressed by the atmosphere of suspicion in Perth in the months leading up to Eric Edgar Cooke’s arrest, and The Suburbs of Hell is, among other things, a study in the corrosive effect of rumour. By the end of the novel, the murderer’s victims are outnumbered by those whom suspicion has killed. (Possibly not outnumbered: the score might be a draw, depending on whether one of the deaths is accidental or not.) But whatever the cause of individual deaths, Death itself carries the day.
The metaphoric import of Stow’s first epigraph, taken from The White Devil, now becomes clear. The Tornwich killings, too, are mere ‘flea-bitings’ in the comprehensive triumph of Death.
While the whodunnit flourished in the interwar period, Stow composed his novel in the nuclear age, and at a time when the nature and spread of HIV was just starting to emerge in the public consciousness. Whodunnits typically offer the reassuring fiction that there is an end to killing when the murderer is caught, but in Stow’s novel the killing goes on. The Suburbs of Hell concludes with newspaper headlines that announce untimely deaths from around the world. The narrator of The Waste Land famously shored fragments against his ruin; the collapse into fragments of Stow’s narrative foreshadows only all-encompassing destruction. The last page of the novel features a Tarot card that represents Death—the sole image reproduced in the book.
Under that image Stow places a couplet from Fasciculus Morum, a mediæval preacher’s handbook, where it concludes a catalogue of the physical symptoms of death: ‘All too late, all too late, / when the bier is at the gate.’ The doleful acknowledgment that our spiritual house is never in sufficient order echoes Adams’ sermon and emphasises the moral underpinning of the novel.
Where does that leave the murder mystery? There are readers who decide that the Tornwich Monster is Death. If that solution feels inherently unsatisfying, it’s because it belongs to the metaphysical order of the novel rather than to the whodunnit; it’s the coexistence, not the blending, of those orders that constitutes the genius of The Suburbs of Hell.
Other readers buy the proposal, put forward by a child called Killer, that the murderer is Dave. But ‘country boy’ Dave’s bewilderment when the murder weapon is discovered seems genuine, as does his instant if fleeting assumption that Frank is the Monster. Besides, Stow is mounting an ethical argument about the destructiveness of ‘lethal tongues’ and ‘condemning eyes’, and his case is lost if Killer is right. Furthermore, the coroner finds that Frank’s death wasn’t due to poison, but to the inhalation of his vomit. If Stow goes to the trouble of providing this information, it’s surely to demonstrate that Killer’s theory was only a deadly guess.
As a whodunnit addict, I can’t resist coming up with a theory of my own. I think the killer is Killer: I like the narrative cheek of hiding ‘whodunnit’ in plain view. Here is a child who roams the town after dark, a knowing child who propagates lethal gossip, a child who, qua child, embodies innocence and thereby fulfils the time-honoured requirement of the whodunnit that the murderer must turn out to be the least likely suspect. It’s a solution I find nifty, plausible, satisfying and laughable. The thing is, there’s no solution to the identity of the Tornwich Monster: the heart of darkness contains only the absence that signifies oblivion. Stow’s intelligence is remorseless here. The novel’s central blank is an invitation to fill in the murderer’s name. It’s also a moral trap. The demonstration of our readiness to speculate and point is a form of authorial rebuke.
The Suburbs of Hell constructs a narrative as starkly simple as an image from the Tarot and as endlessly open to interpretation. Like Killer’s name, it can be read literally or as a trope. But if Stow had written a conventional whodunnit that also functioned as a morality tale, his achievement would have been merely great. The Suburbs of Hell goes further. It subverts an impeccably contrived murder mystery, tantalising us with a question—whodunnit?—that it dismisses as trivial, a ‘flea-biting’. Auden described the whodunnit as ‘a dialectic between innocence and guilt’, where the revelation of the murderer secures our disassociation from guilt. By contrast, the only ‘securitie’ Stow offers is none at all: the grave reminder that death will come as surely as night. One of the names given to Cooke was the Night Caller.