It went on in this vein for some four hundred and twenty pages. I’m afraid I was skim-reading after the first chapter and picking out only the odd sentence after that. The novel seemed to be an attempt at satire, a grotesque fantasy about the British aristocracy. The plot, in so far as it had one, concerned Lord Trump’s bankruptcy and his attempts to turn his crumbling stately home into a tourist attraction by lying about its history, inventing a ghost and transferring the elderly and largely docile animals from a local zoo to wander in his grounds. The slide of the title was intended to be the centrepiece in an adventure playground, which he had constructed, although clearly it also referred – portentously – to the state of the nation. It was revealing that when the first visitors arrive – ‘the women in nylon puff jackets, fat, thick, ugly, whining slags with nicotine-stained nails, their brain-dead sons trailing wires from their ears, with branded boxer shorts rising over the belts of their sagging, unfit jeans’ – they are treated with the same contempt as the Trumps themselves.
The Slide worried me for all sorts of reasons. How could a man who had written nine hugely popular and entertaining novels – the Atticus Pünd series – have come up with something that was, at the end of the day, quite so hateful? It was almost like discovering that Enid Blyton, in her spare time, had turned to pornography. The style was painfully derivative; it reminded me of another writer but at the moment I wasn’t quite sure who. It seemed obvious to me that Conway was labouring for effect with every sentence, with every ugly metaphor. Worse still, this wasn’t early work, juvenilia written before he had found his voice. The reference to Islamic fundamentalism proved that. He had been tinkering with it recently and had mentioned it in his final letter, asking Charles to take a second look. It had still mattered to him. Did it represent his world view? Did he really think it was any good?
I didn’t sleep well that night. I’m used to bad writing. I’ve looked at plenty of novels that have no hope of being published. But I’d known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn’t want to hear.
Orford, Suffolk
Magpie Murders is set in a fictitious village in Somerset. Most of the stories take place in villages that Alan has made up and even the two London-based novels (No Rest for the Wicked and Gin & Cyanide) use false names for anything that might be recognisable: hotels and restaurants, museums, hospitals and theatres. It’s as if the author is afraid of exposing his fantasy characters to the real world, even with the protection of a 1950s setting. Pünd is only comfortable when he’s strolling on the village green or drinking in the local pub. Murders take place during cricket and croquet matches. The sun always shines. Given that he had named his house after a Sherlock Holmes short story, it’s possible that Alan was inspired by Holmes’s famous dictum: ‘The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’
Why do English villages lend themselves so well to murder? I used to wonder about this but got the answer when I made the mistake of renting a cottage in a village near Chichester. Charles had advised against it but at the time I’d thought how nice it would be to get away now and then for the weekend. He was right. I couldn’t wait to get back. I soon discovered that every time I made one friend I made three enemies and that arguments about such issues as car parking, the church bells, dog waste and hanging flower baskets dominated daily life to such an extent that everyone was permanently at each other’s throats. That’s the truth of it. Emotions, which are quickly lost in the noise and chaos of the city, fester around the village square, driving people to psychosis and violence. It’s a gift to the whodunnit writer. There’s also the advantage of connectivity. Cities are anonymous but in a small, rural community everyone knows everyone, making it so much easier to create suspects and, for that matter, people to suspect them.
It was obvious to me that Alan had Orford in mind when he created Saxby-on-Avon. It wasn’t in Avon and there were no ‘Georgian constructions made of Bath stone with handsome porticos and gardens rising up in terraces’ but as soon as I passed the fire station with its bright yellow training tower and entered the village square, I knew exactly where I was. The church was called St Bartholemew’s not St Botolph’s, but it was in the right place and even had a few broken stone arches attached. There was a pub looking out over the graveyard. The Queen’s Arms, where Pünd had stayed, was actually called the King’s Head. The village noticeboard where Joy had posted her notice of infidelity was on one side of the square. The village shop and the bakery – it was called the Pump House – was on the other. The castle, which cast a shadow over Dr Redwing’s house, and which must have been built around the same time as the one I had seen in Framlingham, was a short distance away. There was even a Daphne Road. In the book it had been Neville Brent’s address but in the real world it was Alan’s sister who lived there. The house was very much as he had described it. I wondered what this meant.
Claire Jenkins had been unable to see me the day before but had agreed to meet me at lunchtime. I got there early and strolled around the village, following the main road all the way down to the River Alde. The river doesn’t exist in Alan’s book – it’s been replaced by the main road to Bath. Pye Hall is somewhere over to the left, which would in reality place it on land belonging to the Orford Yacht Club. I still had time in hand so I had a coffee at a second pub, the Jolly Sailor. In the book, it’s called the Ferryman although both names reference boats. I also walked past a wild meadow which had to have been the inspiration for Dingle Dell, although there was no vicarage that I could see, and only a small patch of woodland.
I was beginning to get an idea of the way Alan’s mind worked. He had taken his own house – Abbey Grange – and placed it, complete with lake and trees – in the village where he had lived until his divorce. Then he had taken the entire construction and transported it to Somerset – which was also, incidentally, where his ex-wife and son now lived. It was evident that he used everyone and everything around him. Charles Clover’s golden retriever, Bella, had made it into the narrative. James Taylor had a supporting role. And I had little doubt that Alan’s sister, Claire, would turn out to be recast as Clarissa.
Which made Alan Conway the real-life Magnus Pye. It was interesting that he identified with the main character of his book: an obnoxious and arrogant landowner. Did he know something I didn’t?