Enemy Within by Roger Cottrell
A couple of months back there was a really interesting article in THE GUARDIAN about Alan Sillitoe’s appointment as visiting lecturer in creative writing at Ruskin College, Oxford. As someone who briefly attended the hsitory workshops at Ruskin, when I was doing my A Levels at Worcester Technical College, I was briefly taken back to the lectures I’d attended by EP Thompson, Ralph Milliband and John Saville, how my history teacher had wanted me to be a Labour MP (he was mayor of Worcester at the time) and how I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party instead. This however is not what I want to write about today.
According to Alan Sillitoe (the founding father of post war realism in the sense that post war realism is about alienation) his only “story” is his own and he still writes most of his stuff from personal experience. This seems to be a characteristic of most kitchen sink writers and I know for a fact that Gary Mitchell from Rathcoole in North Belfast is the same. This is the same Gary Mitchell, by the way, who demolishes the facile view of the Northern Ireland Loyalist working class held by guilt ridden and IRA besotted English liberals and one of the best exponents of kitchen sink today. Trevor Griffiths meantime drew on personal experience for a lot of his stuff as does Shane Meadows, in giving us film masterpieces like THIS IS ENGLAND. In the US, the same would seem to apply to the excellent crime novels of Jason Star, whom I met in Belfast a few years back.
When it comes to generic fiction meantime the story is very different. Attending a signing that Ian Rankin did for his novel A QUESTION OF BLOOD in 2003 at Waterstones in Dublin, I found him saying that he had no experience of law enforcement or crime and had set out rather to “write about what he didn’t know.” Ian was one of the judges who short listed ENEMY WITHIN for the Dundee Book Prize in its first rough draft (written in six weeks before I started my PHD in 2004) and so has a special affection with me. He’s also my favourite MAINSTREAM crime writer (unless you consider Martyn Waits as mainstream since he started the Joe Donovan series). Since I saw and chatted with Ian about my crime movie, REDEMPTION SONGS, in Dublin ahead of the Rolling Stones gigging at the RDS, he did an interesting program on DR. JECKEL< AND MISTER HYDE for BBC4. Here, he points out that Rebus is very much his own alter ego, almost a Dr. Hyde to his Jeckell, and even inhabits the flat opposite where Ian lived as a student.
Some literary critics would say that what Ian Rankin is engaging in here is “ethical distancing” of the type favoured by Brecht. This may be true. Sadly, this kind of Brechtian argument was also used disengenously by the Stalinist cultural critics in publications like SCREEN when they were denouncing Jim Allen’s view of Labour History (in DAYS OF HOPE in 1975) and the whole engagement with alienation as a theme in both kitchen sink and the underworld crime thriller of the 1970s. Of course, what they really meant was that they didn’t like the representation of the working class (and of alienation) in these narraives. Later, they pressed certain kinds of feminism into service to denounce the genre as misogynist or made the valid point that there weren’t many black people in 1970s kitchen sink or underworld crime fiction. Of course, these were the same people who’d never read Clara Zetkin or Rosa Luxembourg on women’s emancipation, who never fought the fascists on the streets and who (like Martin Kettle) ended up advising New Labour to support racist immigration controls as the only way to kerb the rise of the BNP. All of their criticism of kitchen sink were rendered invalid by the fact that their classless efforts to build a broad front against Thatcher led to a pro-Thatcherite agenda within New Labour within 10 years. But I digress.
Should those who use generic fiction to open out the themes of kitchen sink or deal with other issues (like state repression or parapolitics) try to write from personal experience or – like Ian Rankin - create alter egos to distance themselves from their subjects. I think there’s no easy answer to this but that it’s likely to be a bit of both. In my self published novel, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, for example, whose ISBN number is ISBN 978-1-4092-0565-4 and which you can access on http://www.lulu.com/content/2720961 I’m clearly not writing from first hand experience. I wasn’t even born when the 1940s Hollywood sequences happened and was only a small kid when the Cecil King coup plot (the core of the novel) was taking place in 1960s Britain, against Harold Wilson’s government. I was never a member of the American or any Communist Party (too right wing for me!) although some of my description of Communist Party life at the time of McCarthyism is informed by the same experience of British Trotskyism that I use directly in ENEMY WITHIN. My character is based on Dashiel Hammett and my sources included Otto Fredricks CITY OF NETS and James Ellroy. I was assisted by the fact that I’d taught American Crime Fiction and Film Noir at Queens University Belfast.
When it came to the Wilson plots I’d been studying these for some time, mainly mediated through what I’d read in LOBSTER and done a couple of projects for the late great Peter West, my mentor in the British Film buisiness, who tragically died of the MRSA bug in 2005. Himself from a Unionist background in Enniskillen, Northern ireland, Peter had been active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s before serving his film apprenticeship with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. He had been a fellow traveller rather than a member of the WRP and a good friend of the guy with a walking stick who REALLY WAS thrown down the stairs at the Central Committee meeting described in ENEMY WITHIN. It was for Peter that I wrote the five part TV history of Northern Ireland Loyalism that later appeared (in part) in Lobster, a film script about the Moro kidnap and murder and a biopic of Bridget Rose Dugdale. HOLLYWOOD BOWL emerged from my speculation as to what might have happened if the Angry Bruigade had been manipulated as part of a strategy of tension (as in Italy) as part of the Cecil King cop plot, if Bridget Rose Dugdale had joined the Angry Brigade rather than Eddie Gallagher’s crowd and if her father had hired an American private eye (who’d done time in a Kentucky prison for being a Communist) to track her down. In other words, in this case, the creative process wasn’t about my own story (as with Sillitoe) but mediated through my own experience in a number of ways. Ths same applies to ENEMY WITHIN.
My most recently written novel is about football hooliganism, Brit pop and police corruption in 1990s Birmingham. It’s also the sequel to ENEMY WITHIN and features dodgy black cop ALAN KEMP (a minor character in ENEMY WITHN) as a protagonist. Just how much of it derives from personal experience I’ll write about another time. As THE CLASH say, London Calling and I was there too. And you know what they say. Well SOME of it’s true.