The Schoolgirl Murder Case - Colin Wilson

 When I was around 18 I loved Colin Wilson.   He seemed to be interested in everything I was, and even came from near where I lived (and still lived).   He was always on TV, the Common Man's polymath.   I read everything by him that I could find: The Occult, God of the Labyrinth, Ritual in the Dark.   A couple of years later I gave up on him completely.   His interest in murder seemed morbid, his interest in the occult slightly outdated.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year I became interested in him again.   Where once you could buy his books in any decent bookshop, now you can't find them for love nor money.   So I bought a whole bunch of them online.   I'm currently reading his 'reappraisal' of George Bernard Shaw, which I don't like at all but hoping to like better when he finally gets on to the plays, and just finished The Schoolgirl Murder Case, which I liked a whole lot more.

The title seems deliberately prurient.   It was probably a lot more so when the novel was written in 1974.   I should note that this was just before Wilson started publishing his true crime murder books.   In fact the victim is an adult woman who prostitutes herself to punters with a penchant for schoolgirls.   She is found in the front garden of a Hampstead house.   When Scotland Yard finally get permission to enter the house, they find the body of the owner's nephew, who was almost certainly the girl's client.

The dead man was a debauched dilletante with interests in the occult.  This leads Chief Inspector Saltfleet into an unfamiliar world of escoteric bookshops, occult artists and modern day witches.   Greg Saltfleet makes the book work by being resolutely normal, middleaged, happily married, good at his job and popular with his underlings.  The solution is perfectly reasonable and satisfactory.   I also liked the realism with which Wilson conveys the real nitty gritty of policing.   So many crime novelists find ways to get their cop out of the office and out of day-to-day policing.   Not Wilson; Saltfleet is a line manager with lots of cases to keep an eye on; Saltfleet also has higher-ups to inform and answer to.

Overall, very satisfactory.   I think I might try The Mind Parasites (not one of my recent purchases) next.   Either that or re-read Ritual in the Dark...  

A Man of Parts - David Lodge

I have developed a liking for Lodge's fiction over the last decade.  The British Museum is Falling Down is one of those novels that is somehow forever with you; the university novels are uniformly amusing.  Being a H G Wells buff, I couldn't wait to get this book home.  I wish I had.

It is not a bad book.  It is some way from being a good book and - hard as it is to believe it when it's a biographical novel about someone so active, in all senses, as Wells - it is dull, dull, dull.

When Lodge realises his text is tending towards the industrial and/or superficial, he introduces an imaginary interlocutor who interviews Well about his actions and emotions.  This is a cracking idea and does renew interest for a while.  But everything else is so thoroughly quotidian...  Wells had an olympic sex life but do we ever learn anything about emotion or sensation while he's at it?  Wells was involved with all the great writers of his age - Henry James, Conrad, Shaw, Bennett - but on this account they were even duller than he was.

The experience of reading this book won't put me off Lodge's work - it was a mistake, David, please don't repeat it - and it has certainly had one of the desired effects on me.  It's sent me off in search of more Wells books - and something by Rebecca West, who was definitely more interesting that the talented but demanding flibbertigibbet depicted here.