A new noir crime novel by CS Forester? It's an improbable claim at first glance not only did Forester die in 1966, but in any case he is best known now for his naval and historical novels, particularly the Hornblower series. At the start of his career, however, when he was a struggling young writer, he wrote two crime novels. Payment Deferred (1926) and Plain Murder (1930) weren't the usual whodunits of British crime fiction between the wars, where the corpses never smell, the blood washes out of the drawing-room carpet and deferential policemen remove the murderer before the vicar comes to tea.
Instead, Forester's crime novels are Faustian fables of damnation set among London's lower middle-class. They reveal the temptations, the pinched lives and the shabby contrivances of their characters. The ambience is closer to the fiction of George Orwell and Patrick Hamilton than to the polite and essentially reassuring puzzles of Christie and Sayers, or to the glamorous, gangster-packed novels of Chandler and Hammett.
These two short novels establish Forester as the improbable pioneer of a very English form of noir crime fiction domestic, darkly ironic and as hard as a hanging judge. His criminals aren't professionals but merely weak people who yearn, like all of us, for what they hope is happiness, and are sometimes tempted to take short cuts to obtain it. Penguin Modern Classics has now reissued them and is also publishing for the first time Forester's Pursued, which he wrote in 1935. The manuscript was lost for more than 70 years.
The central character is Marjorie, a suburban housewife who returns home after a decorous evening in town to find Dorothy, her pretty young sister, lying dead with her head in the oven. The two young children upstairs have heard nothing. The police arrive and so does Marjorie's loathsome husband, Ted, returning from a night out of his own. Afterwards, when the body has been taken away, the drama of it all makes him "troublesome", which means he forces sex on her.
Dorothy turns out to have been pregnant, and the death is ascribed to suicide. But her mother, Mrs Clair, a tough-minded woman who lives nearby, is not convinced. Evidence emerges to suggest that Ted was Dorothy's lover and killed her to prevent her from revealing the affair. Soon there's another complication in the form of George, a clerk from the Gas Company showroom where Ted works. George is a gentle, naive young man and, when he becomes Mrs Clair's lodger, he falls passionately in love with Marjorie.
It is, in its own quiet way, a tragedy of character. For much of the narrative, the viewpoint is Marjorie's, itself an interesting challenge for a middle-class male author. The brutal mechanics of her sex with Ted contrast with the breathless excitement of her relationship with George. The novel's impact gains immeasurably from Forester's description of a claustrophobic world where money is always short and crushingly respectable neighbours are constantly on the watch.
Why wasn't the book published in 1935? It's vivid, technically accomplished and compelling. Perhaps the fact that it is so unsettling had something to do with it. By the standards of the time, Forester is extraordinarily frank about sexual behaviour and family life. Nor does he rush to condemn, though every now and then he remembers his likely readership and adds a snooty but unconvincing comment about his characters' lack of education being the cause of their faulty morality. Finally, in the very last sentence, Forester slips in an unobtrusive twist that reminds us that life is essentially amoral and we must make the best of it. If that's not noir, what is?
Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts is published by Penguin.
