Bibliography: Books for Adults

The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

(First published in UK as Skin Deep*)

The first of six novels with James Pibble as detective. Set in Notting Dale, West London; remnant of "primitive" New Guinea tribe living in large town house, and maintaining or adapting their tribal customs amid London life, a process studied and shared by their protector, a female anthropologist. One of their number is killed, and Pibble — intelligent, unassertive, tends to get assigned to off-beat cases that will bring no one any kudos — investigates. CWA Golden Dagger Award for 1968. (1968)

*The Glass-sided Ants' Nest was the working title right up to late proof stage, when an elderly partner at my UK publishers wandered into the editorial offices, picked up a cover proof and said "You know, no woman will buy a book with an insect in the title." Ah well. I reverted as soon as I got the chance.

The Old English Peep-Show

(First published in UK as A Pride of Heroes)

Pibble investigates the apparent suicide of a servant in great English country house being run as a theme park, complete with lions, by two retired WWII heroes. A baroque spoof — I can't imagine how I imagined I could get away with it, but it won the CWA Golden Dagger for 1969. (1969)

The Sinful Stones

(first published in England as The Seals)

Pibble on remote Scottish island to question his long-dead father's ex-employer, semi-senile Nobel Prize-winner, finds himself attempting to extract him from grip of crazed millenarian sect. (1970)

Sleep and his Brother

Pibble, retired, involves himself in home for children suffering from rare disease (symptoms before early death include apparent telepathic powers), lavishly funded for ESP research by Greek tycoon. There's an apparently accidental death in a fire, which Pibble... etc. (1971)

The Lizard in the Cup

I thought this was going to be the last Pibble. Thanassi Thanatos (tycoon from Sleep) invites him to Greek Island hideout to play role of Mafia in war-game style simulation of business opponents' likely actions. Pibble suggests elimination of Thanatos himself and then investigates the possibility for real. (1972)

The Green Gene

An attempt to imagine for the British what Verwoerd-style apartheid would be like if applied here, and people of Celtic origin had green skins. P.P. Humayan, a naive Indian mathematical genius, is hired by UK racial police to do statistical analysis on likely increase of Green population. His hosts are murdered and he is kidnapped by and then becomes involved with a subversive Green movement. (1973)

The Poison Oracle

Oil-rich sheikh funds Morris, a wimpish psycholinguist, to continue his researches into the language abilities of Morris's chimp, Dinah, in his desert palace. The local marsh-people, not Arabs, have a uniquely complex language, which Morris is studying. By custom they provide the sheikh's personal bodyguard. There is oil under the marshes, but its exploitation would break an ancient treaty with the marsh people. The sheikh is murdered, apparently by his bodyguard. Dinah is the only witness. Morris goes into the marshes to discover the truth. (1974)

The Lively Dead

Omni-competent Lydia Timms owns a large house in a once-grand Notting Hill terrace, living in the basement with her family and renting out the rest of the building. She has to cope with a husband recovering from a breakdown, a lively autistic son, dry-rot under the floor-boards, the problems of her tenants, including the government-in-exile of the Baltic state of Livonia on the top two floors, and the recent death of her garrulous and strong-willed cleaner. In the opening sequence she attends the funeral, but then the cleaner's body is discovered under buried in the back garden. (1975)

King and Joker

If Prince Edward hadn't died in 1892 he would have succeeded to the throne of England, instead of his brother George, and reigned as King Victor I, to be succeeded in his turn by his grandson King Victor II, the present monarch. Much would have remained the same, but much would have been very, very different. E.g., as a young man the king had refused to go into the army and insisted on having a medical training. In the same spirit his daughter, the teen-age Princess Louise, from whose point of view the story is seen, attends Holland Park Comprehensive. The palace is troubled by a series of practical jokes, humorous at first, but becoming increasingly unpleasant, until a corpse is discovered on the throne of England. (1976)

Walking Dead

Foxe, a researcher working with laboratory animals, is sent to the Caribbean island of Hog's Key, in the Southward Islands, to work on the effects of an intelligence-enhancing drug in rats. The Islands are ruled by Dr Onesiphorus Trotter, believed by the islanders to have voodoo-like powers (the set-up is a bit exaggerated from that of Haiti under Doc Duvalier.) The discovery of a body in Foxe's laboratory allows Dr. Trotter to have him arrested and sent to his personal prison and there force him to use his fellow prisoners as his experimental animals.(1977)

One Foot in the Grave

A coda to the Pibble series. Pibble is in a nursing home, prematurely feeble and despairing. To put an end to it by dying of hypothermia, he slips out one bitter winter's night and climbs to the top of the water tower, only to find that the place he had chosen is already occupied by the dead body of another. Duty drives him to return and report it, and then, inexorably, he finds himself forced to unravel, from his sick-bed and through the come-and-go of delirium, what happened, and why. (1979)

A Summer in the Twenties

A romantic novel with gender reversal. Who is Miss Right?

Tom, an Oxford student from the traditional landed classes, already in love with the feather-headed Judy, drives a train in the General Strike of 1926. His train is ambushed by strikers and rescued by a gang of armed proto-fascists, some of whom are his fellow students. Attempting to investigate what seems to be a communist cell among the dockers in Hull he is strongly attracted by the dynamic agitator Kate, and for the first time aware of the world and values of the labouring classes, and realises that this too must be incorporated into his vision of England. He discovers that somebody is attempting to foment further trouble between these two worlds. After further derring-do on the railways he discovers who it is, achieves a minor reconciliation in the bitter politics of the docks, and resolves the conflict in his love-life. {1981}

The Last Houseparty

Set in a large country house on the Thames, in alternating chapters, one loosely based on the "Cliveden set" of the 1930s, and the other with the house now open to the public. In the former Zena, Countess of Snailwood, holds one of her notorious political house-parties, bringing influential people together in the direction of appeasement. The party culminates in a large dance, in the course of which a seven-year-old girl is assaulted in her room. The fantastic clock that dominates the castle courtyard is severely damaged by fire and one of the two potential heirs to the castle disappears.

In the modern sections the present owner, in fact the child who was assaulted on the night of the house-party, accepts an offer from a retired craftsman to repair the clock. The process that takes several months, in the course of which she comes to suspect that he is in fact the missing heir, and then, appallingly, to discover who it was that attacked her. (1982)

Hindsight

Alternating chapters again. Paul Rogers, a crime novelist, gets a letter from the biographer Simon Dobbs, asking why the boys of St Aidan's Preparatory School referred to Molly Benison and "Mad Molly." Dobbs is writing a life of Isidore Steen and Molly, one of the rackety beauties of the period between the wars, had played some part in the great man's life. Rogers had witnessed the event that led to the nickname, but to give the full flavour of it he finds it easiest to write about his younger self in the third person, as if it were a chapter of a novel. Dobbs, who had also been at St Aidan's, but had left before the Molly incident, accepts this, asks further questions, and in return tells Rogers details about the school staff.

Rogers continues the novel, increasingly uncertain whether he is actually recovering buried memories or imaginatively creating incidents. At the fall of France St Aidan's has been evacuated to a large house in Devon, surrounded by a deer park. Paul becomes obsessed by the deer, and trying to stalk them meets Molly, who tells him that his dead father had been a very good friend of hers, and invites him to her Sunday teas. By an apparent coincidence a temporary teacher turns out to have been of major importance to Dobbs's biography. With inexplicable excitement Rogers ploughs on with the novel, despite being unable to invent a traditional murder puzzle round which to centre his material, only to find that one is waiting for him in the murk at the bottom of the pool of memory. (l983)

Death of a Unicorn

Mabs Millett is the reluctant heiress to Cheadle Abbey, one of Vanbrugh's monstrous piles. At a deb dance in the early 'fifties meets a financier who offers her a job on a magazine he has just bought, a cross between Punch and The Tatle, as an assistant to the editor of the social diary. She writes an account of a deb dance from the viewpoint of a feather-headed deb, which becomes a weekly feature in the magazine, and eventually a best-selling book, anticipating the U and non-U furore of a few years later. Meanwhile she has become the financier's mistress, deeply in love with him and with her work. After ten month's of happiness her world falls apart with his gunning down in a street in Buenos Aires.

Thirty years later she is a hugely successful romantic novelist, exploiting her fan-base to attract tourists to Cheadle. An old colleague from the magazine asks to see her. Her dynamic niece comes from a visit. Details emerge that cast fresh light on her lover's mysterious death, and eventually reshape her world. (1984)

Tefuga

Nigel Jackland is in Northern Nigeria, filming the events related in his mother's 1923 diary, sections of which alternate with chapters of the modern story. On leave in England, Ted Jackland, District Officer in the Emirate of Kiti, has met and married Betty, eager, naïve, and considerable younger than he is. Despite the discomforts she feels happy and liberated, and fascinated by the life of the local tribe, the Kitawa. She discovers herself as a water-colourist of some talent. She is introduced to the Emir, or Sarkin of Kiti, and trying to find out what has happened to the sister of their houseboy, Elongo, gets permission to go visit the Emir's wives. She is outraged by their oppression, and her unconscious encouragement of them precipitates the disastrous Tefuga incident.

In the modern story Elongo is now Sarkin of Kiti, helpful and friendly towards Jackland. As the filming proceeds he casts fresh light on the events in the diary, and when there is a military coup Jackland helps him escape arrest on charges of corruption. Finally Jackland and the actress who played his mother watch the tape of the finished film and he tells her what he now thinks lay beneath the surface of events. (1986)

Skeleton-in-Waiting

A sequel to King and Joker. Princess Louise, now married and the unwilling darling of the nation, becomes involved with a mysterious old woman living in a grace-and-favour apartment in Hampton Court, unaware that her baby son is the target of an IRA kidnap plot. (1987)

Perfect Gallows

In 1875 Arnold Wragge left the back streets of Portsmouth for the diamond fields of South Africa. Twenty years later he returned a millionaire, built himself a mansion in the Downs, and sired two daughters and a son. When the son is missing, presumed killed, in the Allied invasion of Italy, he sends for his great-great-nephew Andrew, to come from the same back streets and be inspected as a potential heir.

Andrew isn't interested. He is set on a career on the stage. But his cousin Elspeth, equally stage-struck in her time, persuades him to take part in her proposed amateur production of The Tempest. The park is full of American soldiers, preparing for the invasion of Normandy. In the middle of all the activity a stranger appears, claiming to be the missing heir.

Forty years later Andrew, now the famous Adrian Waring, tells the story to his partner and explains his own part in the tragedy that followed. (1988)

Play Dead

Poppy Tasker, divorced and lonely, child-minds her small grandson Toby. She regularly takes him to the play-group in a West London park and gets to know and like the group of nannies who bring their charges there. One day a strange man is watching the park, seeming to take a particular interest in Toby. He tries to follow her home, but she shakes him off. Next day his body is found, strangely decorated, in the play-group's hut. (1991)

The Yellow Room Conspiracy

Two ex-lovers, he merely getting old, she already slowly dying, hear a radio quiz programme about a political/financial/sexual scandal in which they were both involved at the time of the Suez Crisis. At the end of the first chapter she asks him to tell her how he killed Gerry Grantworth. He replies that he'd always imagined she had done it. Who then did?

Her illness means that is no longer up to prolonged serious discussion, so he starts to write out his memories of the time for her to read, and she responds with taped recordings of how she saw the same events. In this manner they re-tread the maze of high politics, espionage and shady property deals and find the answer. (1992)

Some Deaths Before Dying

Rachel is bed-ridden, paralysed, barely able to speak. Only her mind and will remain. Watching The Antiques Roadshow she sees a young woman bring a duelling pistol to be valued, and recognises it for one of a unique pair that she had once given her husband. She asks the nurse to open a secret compartment in her bureau. The box is still where she put it, but one pistol is missing. How? Why?

Viewpoints shift: Rachel's nurse, who does the legwork on her days off; the young working wife who brought the pistol top the show; and Rachel herself, mining back through her immense collection of photographs to stimulate her memory and recover the true past that led to this present. (1999)

Note

I haven't commented on the individual adult books, as I did on the books for younger readers. I have always taken both genres equally seriously, but my relationship with these is different, more willed, less "given". There are of course repetitive themes. My children say that my definitive novel will be about a chimpanzee trying to support a great country house by writing best-sellers.

I was brought up as one of the impoverished gentry, but despite a patrician accent and manner have never felt confident that I belonged in my supposed class; and I spent formative parts of my adolescence in a big Georgian house where my two old cousins were struggling on inadequate funds to keep things going in order to be able to hand it on to the heir to whom it was entailed.

Even as a post-graduate, working abortively for a Ph.D., I soon realised that I have no talent for research. In my first two books, despite their winning prizes, the police work is complete nonsense. You'd never get away with it now. After that I started to set my stories in contexts where police-work doesn't operate. I used to say that I write the book first and do the research afterwards, when I know what I want to know. I prefer to imagine a place rather than visit it, notebook in hand. I had never been to Greece when I wrote The Lizard in the Cup, but a travel supplement suggested it for background reading. (Admittedly my sister-in-law, who lived partly on Skiathos, read it in manuscript for me.) When this works it works fine. The imaginative process transfers itself to the reader. When it doesn't, it's a disaster, even in minor details. (As when an actor shuts a door too hard, the flats quiver, and the solid walls dissolve into paint and canvas.)

The pattern of most of the later books, with past events being re-interpreted one way or another from the present, has been more or less forced on me. Both from circumstances and from temperament I have tended to live less and less in the world around me. I am nearly eighty. For me, the young are another country, the past somehow less so, even when I step outside my natural milieu. In order to write about these books I've had to re-read them. I can't have looked at A Summer in the Twenties almost since it was published. It is set even longer ago, the year before I was born, but the scenes among the strikers in Hull strike me as tolerably convincing. Perhaps this is merely that distance blurs the tell-tale details, but certainly I wouldn't dare set such a scene in the present.

The later books also moved nearer to the mainstream novel, though not often reviewed as such. The walls of literary ghettos are remarkably impermeable. But when The Last House-Party was specially well reviewed in the US a journalist called me from New York to ask me what I was going to do now people were taking me seriously as a writer. I couldn't think of an answer. Almost all my books have the solution of a murder puzzle as a resolving element in the plot, but in the earlier ones the rest of the book is only the context that allows the puzzle to be set and resolved, whereas in the later ones the puzzle is a mechanism that allows the book as a whole to come into existence.

Of course I've used bits and bobs of my own experience here and there, though I've seldom based my characters on people I've known. Hindsight and Perfect Gallows are more autobiographical. My prep school was evacuated to a house very much like that in the book, and its staff were as described (I regret this. Though they must have all been dead, people who remembered them minded, I'm told.) Paul Rogers is based on myself, both as a child and adult. The events and characters involved in the whodunit element of the story are of course inventions. I thought of book at the time as an amusing box of tricks, but re-reading I was surprised to find an unpleasant gynaecophobic streak in it. Surprised because on the whole I think I've got a good record here, in both genres, to the extent that a well-regarded novelist, reviewing The Lively Dead on the radio, said she assumed that Peter Dickinson was a pseudonym for a woman.

Though the house in Perfect Gallows was designed by Lutyens, it and its setting, including the dovecote, are otherwise very like the Georgian house where I spent some of my adolescence. In appearance too, but not in character, its inhabitants, apart from the black butler, are modelled on those I knew. My cousin Lucy believed that she might have had a career in the London theatre, and I took part in several of the performances she staged. There was an American camp in the park, preparing for D-day, with officers billeted in the house. Andrew/Adrian, I hasten to say, is nothing like me. I've never believed that any artist, however great, is entitled to sacrifice other people to his art, even when they themselves think the sacrifice worth while.

From the very first I have written my books, in both genres, starting on page one with no more than an idea - an interesting milieu or set-up, a feeling that "there's a book there." The Glass-sided Ants'-nest began with a waking vision of an elderly man, dressed in pyjamas and with tribal scars on his cheeks, lying on bare boards in what I knew to be a London house, with an oil lamp burning at his feet and his tribe, in European clothes, kneeling around him.

My last-but-one started when I was in Maine, helping my fiancée pack up her house so that she could come and live with me in England. There came a morning when there was nothing much for me to do except wait around to let someone into the house, so I fed a sheet of paper into a borrowed typewriter and started. Shortly before I'd left England Id been working in a sunlit flower-border, listening a a "humorous quiz about the Profumo scandal, and wondering how it must feel to any still-living participants to hear their old shames and agonies so pawed over so I began there. When Robin returned from whatever she'd been doing I showed her the resulting chapter, ending as described above. "Wow!" she said, or words to that effect. "What's going to happen?" I told her I had no idea.

I call Some Deaths before Dying my last adult novel advisedly. It was published without trouble in America, well reviewed, and sold enough to keep everyone happy. In the UK it was rejected by all the mainstream publishers, usually with comments to the effect that it was beautifully written but too old-fashioned. A small edition was eventually published by a library supplier, and barely reviewed at all. I doubt I've enough time left to me to spend any of it trying again.

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