The Knox Brothers - Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was the daughter of the eldest Knox brother and therefore niece of the other three.  This fourfold biography was her first book, published in 1977 when she was sixty years old.

The writing is elegant, the elegiac tone maintained throughout.  The problem is, for all their widely touted brilliance, the brothers were peripheral players.  Fitzgerald's father Edmund rose be to editor of Punch, Wilfred and Ronald were noted but not spectacularly distinguished churchmen.  Ronald, the youngest, famously turned Catholic as a young man (newsworthy at the time because his father was Anglican bishop of Manchester) whereas Wilfred was extremely left wing politically
 and absolutely conservative in (Anglican) religion.  The only brother who contributed significantly to wider society was the academic Dillwyn, whose abstruse talents as a classicist were turned to code-breaking in both World Wars.  He is credited with the insight that finally broke the German Enigma code.

The priestly brothers never married.  Edmund and Dillwyn both did but their wives are non-entities in Fitzgerald's account and the book suffers in consequence.  The only woman who figures is the stepmother, who took on the Knox brood (and the elderly, slightly dotty bishop) when the first Mrs Knox died young.  The redoubtable Ethel Knox seems to me worthy of a biography of her own.

Because the Knoxes are chiefly noteworthy for their association with greater events and greater men there is insufficient space in this four-hander joint biography to satisfy whichever interest is yours.  Ronald Knox is my particular interest, not because he translated the Bible but because he wrote Golden Age detective novels - and formulated the rules of the genre - and because he made a notorious radio broadcast just before the General Strike.  His famous friend was Evelyn Waugh, who scarcely figures here.  Waugh wrote a much better biography of Ronnie which was far more useful to me as only Waugh guides us to the actual script of the broadcast.  Father Thomas Corbishley, for those who are interested in such things, wrote a life of him from the religious standpoint, which is better than Fitzgerald on the decision to convert and his life at Oxford but, oddly, less insightful on the semi-authorised translation which occupied the Monsignor in later life.

One other point: if you are going to write a life of one who is dead, you really ought to cover the death.  Dillwyn's premature death is sketchily covered here, Wilfred and Ronnie more hinted at than described, and Edmund - Fitzgerald's father - not at all.

In summary, readable, enjoyable, but not sufficiently instructive for me.  I much prefer Fitzgerald's fiction.  There is a review of her wartime novel Human Voices over on my media and culture blog.

The Three Taps - Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was an Anglican priest who became a Catholic, justly esteemed for his translation of the Vulgate and briefly notorious for his 1926 radio spoof Broadcasting from the Barricades, which claimed to be describing insurrection in central London and which a lot more listeners believed then ever really believed Orson Welles' remarkable similar War of the Worlds.  He has been remarkably well-served biographically, first by his friend and executor Evelyn Waugh, and later by his neice, the novelist Penelope FitzGerald, whose Human Voices I have written about over on my media and culture blog.

Knox is completely forgotten as a practitioner of English Golden Age detective fiction.  Actually, he formulated the classic rules of the form and was part of "the Detection Club".  He wrote six detective stories of his own, five of which feature the Insurance Company Investigator Miles Bredon, of which this is the first, from 1927.  A Midlands industrialist is found dead in a village pub where he's been on a fishing holiday.  The cause of death is asphyxiation from gas.  Is it murder or suicide?  A walloping great insurance payout hangs on the outcome.

Bredon and his wife Angela are something of an English Nick and Nora Charles (Dashiell Hammett's Thin Man novel and several movie sequels): they wisecrack, they mock one another, they do not seem to have a sex life.  Otherwise the dramatis personae are largely eccentric bachelors of middle age.  The plot is clever (extremely), the writing sparkling throughout.  In short, great fun.  A recommended read.

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Incidentally, Knox's Ten Commandments or Decalogue, compiled in 1929, are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Wonder why no chinaman?