Long-playing novelists

Recently I was on two very long flights, around 15 hours in the air all told with four-hour breaks inbetween. So I took along the two latest books by my favourite authors — Jeffery Archer and John le Carre.

Both write the good versus evil sort of fiction. But while Mr Archer writes simple stories — upper-end Mills and Boon, if you like — Mr Le Carre’s stories are very complex. It’s only because they both write so well that they stand out from the crowd.

So I was hugely looking forward to reading their new books. I started with Mr le Carre because it was a morning flight and you need all your wits about to read him. Reading him is like listening to good blues.

Mr Archer, on the other hand, is like what they call easy listenin’. So I kept his book for the return leg most of which was through the night. You can read him with several whiskeys inside you, with headphones on.

Well, folks, both disappointed, Mr Archer more than Mr le Carre. Mr Archer has a weird story about the same person in two different bodies. One is located in London and the other in New York.

The story hops along in the usual Archer way and by the time you are halfway through you are wondering how he is going to end it. I am sure he was also wondering about the same thing because when the book finally becomes untenable, he kills one of them off. Very Hindi movie-like.

The le Carre denouement has been building up ever since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics crashed out. It’s not that the spies business has died out; it’s just that Mr le Carre, always deeply suspicious of the system, has turned even more deeply so.

There has been only exception to this urge to write and write and write: J D Salinger. He wrote just one highly successful novel, The Catcher in the Rye

But this one is completely atypical, just as another one — The Naïve and Sentimental Lover — was. It’s not quite a rant as Rudrangshu Mukherjee suggested in these columns a few weeks ago but it’s, well, not quite what one expects of Mr le Carre.

The languid upper class British style is there as also the intricate writing. But Brexit isn’t worth the great man, even given its sordid provenance and progress.

By the time I had landed back, I was thinking about other major story tellers who have or had lost the skills and after how many books they begin losing them. It also occurred to me that this happens only to those who write in one genre, whatever it might be.

For example, Anthony Burgess, one of the great but unsung English writers was best known for his worst novel, The

Clockwork Orange because Stanley Kubrick made a film out of it with a lot of full frontal female nudity.

He almost never wrote in the same genre twice. The exceptions were the two trilogies or six novels out of 40-odd. But then he was also a critic, music composer and playwright.

I suppose one can say the same thing about Graham Greene as well. He too wrote about very different things.

Of more recent vintage are John Grisham and Daniel Silva. Grisham started to dip around 2002 and Mr Silva, who writes about an Israeli James Bond in the le Carre style, around 2013. On balance, Mr Grisham became worse as he went along.

There are many others who have suffered this fate. Dick Francis who wrote those wonderful racing crime thrillers and Sidney Sheldon are good examples.

Francis towards the end of his life was writing along with his son Felix who now writes his own. Sheldon has been “covered” by Tilly Bagshawe who has resurrected the Sheldon genre of rich and ruthless women.

Then there was Earle Stanley Gardner of the Perry Mason fame who wrote 103 novels. It was rumoured that he employed writers to churn these out.

But there’s no need to go that far. There was Edgar Wallace, the man who created King Kong. Legend has it that he would lock himself in a room over the weekend and emerge with a novel. Good stuff to start with but going downhill after the first 40 or so. He wrote around 175 novels plus over 900 short stories and 20 or so plays.

Closer home — dare I say it — there was R K Narayan. Same story. Excellent stuff to start with but that contrived simplicity began to grate later on.

There has been only exception to this urge to write and write and write: J D Salinger. He wrote just one highly successful novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

A close second was Joseph Heller who wrote two. One of them was Catch 22.