Henry Green was born in Gloucestershire and lived in Birmingham and London. Living (1929), Loving (1945) and Doting (1952) are some of the best of his elliptical, enigmatic novels.
Age in year of publication: forty-five.
Graham Greene 1904–1991
1978 The Human Factor
It is difficult to decide which of the six wonderful novels that Graham Greene wrote between 1950 and his death is the best: The End of the Affair (1951); The Quiet American (1955); Our Man in Havana (1958); The Comedians (1966); The Honorary Consul (1973) or The Human Factor. There are moments in each of the books which are superb; and there are characters in each book who, in their isolation and shambling struggle with themselves, are among the most memorable in contemporary writing. Greene is certainly the finest English writer of the second half of the century.
The Human Factor, the most perfect and poignant of Greene’s post-1950s novels, deals with the Secret Service; Maurice Castle, in his sixties, is back in London at the Africa desk. He is a mild man who lives quietly, good with files, as one of his superiors says; he is deeply in love with Sarah, his wife, who is a black South African. He has rescued her once and now he seeks to protect her and her son Sam. The novel, as one would expect from Greene, has some marvellous minor shady characters, and deals brilliantly with the chilling, ruthless nature of Castle’s superiors. (It also has the best dog of any novel mentioned in this book; see Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good for the best cat.) But it is Castle himself who emerges most painfully in the noveclass="underline" obsessive, driven, haunted, uneasy.
Graham Greene was born in Hertfordshire and lived for many years in the south of France. He published his first novel in 1929 and his last in 1988. Among his most famous works are Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The End of the Affair (1951) and the film script of The Third Man (1950).
Age in year of publication: seventy-four.
Patrick Hamilton 1904–1962
1951 The West Pier
The West Pier is a study in pure, unmitigated perversity. The novel is set along the seafront and pier in Brighton in the early 1920s; there are only five characters who matter in the plot: three young men who were in school together, and two young women whom they meet on the pier. There are no murders and no violence, and yet there is an atmosphere in the book of constant menace and malevolence.
This book, the first in the Gorse trilogy, explores the mind of one Ernest Ralph Gorse as he takes advantage of one of the young women and makes a fool of her. With all its macabre plots and evil intentions, it has the tone of a very dark psychological thriller. The writing, which is elegant and slightly arch, is also at times world-weary and oddly wise, as though the book were written by the retired headmaster of an old, posh public school. It is full of petty snobberies and dramatic versions of the English class system. Slowly Hamilton allows Gorse to take over the book, and the twisted workings of his agile mind become fascinating; the idea that he wants to cause grief and humiliation and pain for their own sake gives the book a sort of horror that you can only find in other books by Hamilton and certain films by Hitchcock.
Patrick Hamilton was born in Hassocks, Sussex, and lived in London. He is best known for thrillers such as Rope (1929), on which Hitchcock based his film, and Gaslight (1938). He also wrote Hangover Square (1941). The other two books in the Gorse trilogy are Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailants (1955).
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Elizabeth Hardwick 1916–2007
1979 Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick sits at her New York table one June ‘listening to the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street’ and decides to transform memory into fiction. Her ‘clever, critical, bookish’ heroine — herself — remembers episodes from her childhood in West Virginia in the company of her large family whose destinies ‘are linked by a likeness of forehead and nose’. Then there are the bohemian years in New York living at the Hotel Schulyer ‘within walking distance of all those places one never walked to’, playing games of love with a cherished homosexual friend.
This period includes a portrait of Billie Holiday as Hardwick knew her, drenched in music and drugs; and then come years in America and Europe with the shadowy figure of her real husband, the poet Robert Lowell. All this and more is wrapped around the true heroines of her memories, the ‘store clerks and waitresses, those ladies cast off with children to raise’, the Idas and Josettes and Angelas whose small women’s lives allow Hardwick to conjure up large truths. These splinters of memory, confessions of an insomniac, are recalled in words lovingly and precisely chosen. Hardwick has almost created her own literary form to write this novel; its other originalities lie in its zest for life, for epigram — and in the siren voice of its narrator.
Elizabeth Hardwick was born in Kentucky and lived in New York. A founder and advisory editor of the New York Review of Books, she has written other novels and critical works, in particular Seduction and Betrayal (1974).
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
Frank Hardy 1917–1994
1950 Power Without Glory
Frank Hardy, an Australian Communist and gambler, wanted to write a fictional exposé of John Wren, the corrupt business magnate who controlled Melbourne — its sporting, gambling and political life, its police force and its Catholic Church — in the decades before 1950. Hardy spent years collecting material and secretly writing the novel, always one step ahead of Wren’s machine. With no money, no printer, no publisher and a libellous seven-hundred-page manuscript, bit by bit the book became famous by word of mouth, a triumph of self-publishing.
The result was uproar: Hardy was arrested for criminal libel, and so began the most notorious case in Australian history — which Hardy won.
But above all, this is a passionate work of fiction, with a Balzacian vigour fuelled by Hardy’s intense dedication to his epic cause. John Wren — renamed John West — stands before us, rising from his poor Irish immigrant beginnings, discarding family, friends, wife and children — if need be — in his ruthless quest for control of his city. This is not a one-dimensional novel nor is it a political tract. We feel for West: we know what made him what he is, and it is in Hardy’s understanding of the evil grandeur of the man and the tangled forces that explain him and bring him down that the value of this novel lies.
Frank Hardy was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and spent most of his life in Australia. Power Without Glory also became a successful Australian TV series in 1976.
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Thomas Harris 1941–
1981 Red Dragon
Hannibal Lecter, who dominated Harris’s bigger bestseller Silence of the Lambs, began his career in this thriller of masterly horror that quietly refrigerates the blood.