JUNE 2008
Tim's blog has been a regular feature since May 2003...
Where did the years all go? . . .
As every schoolboy know the Glorious First of June was the description
of a naval battle fought between the French and English Fleets in
1794. It took place in the Atlantic several hundred miles west of
Ushant and was considered a success by both sides. The French call it
le Combat de Prairial.
For me, however, it is the day in 1957 when Randall Hoyle, headmaster
of Connaught House School near Bishops Lydeard, Somerset, came into my
dormitory early in the morning and said, rubbing his hands and
beaming, “Well it certainly is the Glorious First of June. Heald has
won the Tabb exhibition at Sherborne.” Or words to that effect. The
Exhibition was for English. I don’t know who Tabb is or was. The award
no longer exists. I tried Google and got nothing but “tabs” and Tara
Palmer-Tomkinson (once of Sherborne School for Girls). However I think
the Tabb Exhibition went quite a long way towards defining my life and
was instrumental in my becoming a hack. Bad move, financially, but
completely wonderful in every other way. Thank you Sherborne; thank
you Mr. Tabb whoever you were.
It’s also almost forty years since I first saw the QE2 as she steamed
into New York. I was on top of the Empire State Building where I had
arrived as the Daily Express contestant in the Daily Mail’s
air race staged to commemorate the first ever transatlantic flight,
from Newfoundland to the West of Ireland, by Alcock and Brown in a
Vickers Vimy bomber. The other day the Queen and Baroness Thatcher
went for a farewell lunch on board the ship which was moored at
Southampton before some time towards the end of the year heading off
for retirement as a luxury floating hotel in Dubai. Towards the end of
the 20th century I crossed the Atlantic as a guest lecturer – sharing
the bill with Sheridan Morley and acting as a sort of sub for Harold
Pinter – now there’s posh. I made several voyages aboard the old girl
but all good things seem to come to an end and so I noted the occasion
by writing a valedictory piece for the Daily Mail.
I mention this mainly to mourn or at any rate note the passing of time
and the loss of one’s own youth but one small point in the exercise
really did give me pause for thought. This was when the nice,
efficient commissioning editor at the Mail wanted to know what
the 'Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race' was. On being told he did the
modern equivalent of sucking the end of his pencil and then said that
no-one would know what the race was about, that it would take too long
to explain and as it wasn’t strictly speaking relevant couldn’t we
just drop it. We did but I was a bit depressed. At the time, not so
very long ago, it seemed so important. The air correspondent of the
paper even got an entire book out of it. I beat a chimpanzee. Clement
Freud (who he?) was alleged to have bent the rules at a pedestrian
crossing. Anyway I found the whole business ageing and oddly
depressing.
There has been a lot else in similar vein. There is nothing like
saying a few words from the pulpit at one’s godmother’s farewell
service in a small crowded church on the edge of Dartmoor to make one
brutally aware of one’s own mortality and of other people’s attention
span. And there was Alan’s funeral and a looming memorial for Miles
Kington. We saw the men from the bank and one became painfully aware
that one could only qualify for the briefest possible mortgage and was
unlikely to qualify for any form of life insurance except on the most
financially prohibitive terms. What happened to all that promise?
Where did the years all go?
With this in mind I thought I’d spend the rest of this blog devoted to
AIEP. You haven’t heard of AIEP?! I’m not surprised. But listen up.
It’s interesting, I think, and people should know more about it.
It stands for something along the lines of Associacion International
Escritores Policier which is roughly and not sufficiently often
translated as the World Association of Crime Writers. It’s Spanish
which in a world dominated by the English language is not exactly a
help. It was also what accounted for its foundation sometime in the
eighties. I am writing this, by the way, in blog-style which means
that I am relying on my own prejudices, knowledge and prejudices
without benefit of serious research and/or independent editing. I
stand ready to be corrected over points of detail but I’m pretty
certain of my facts in broad outline and my prejudices are my own.
The founders of AIEP were a successful crime writer called Paco
Ignacio Taibo who “divided his time”, in that enviable phrase between
Spain and Mexico; an apparently successful Russian crime writer, now
deceased, by the name of Julian Semionov. These two and a Cuban writer
about whom I know absolutely nothing, decided that the world of crime
writing was unfairly dominated by those who wrote in English, most
notably the English and Americans. In order to combat this hegemony
they decided to form an Association. Or to be more precise an
Associacion.
Maybe the premise was wrong. Georges Simenon had proved that if your
books were good enough – or popular enough they could be translated
and achieve huge commercial success. Much more recently the Swedish
crime writer Henning Mankel had demonstrated the same thing. If
“foreign” writers wanted to compete with their Anglo-writing
counterparts the solution was simply for them to write better books.
Not so, argued the onelie begetters of AIEP. The domination of world
crime writing by the English language was unfair, unreasonable and
should be diminished. There would therefore be an Associacion of
predominantly non-English writing crime writers. The Associacion would
meet annually, discuss matters, have a jolly time and change the
world.
So for twenty years or so, it has proved. Except that the world of
crime writing has remained essentially the same and if it has changed
at all it has little or nothing to do with AIEP. I attended my first
meeting in the late eighties in Gijon, Spain, where Paco Taibo spent
much of his life and presided over a Semana Negre. I remember being
part of a disastrously somnolent panel consisting of myself, Susan
Moody and the late Michael Dibdin; I remember Dibdin meeting and later
marrying an American writer called K.K. Beck; I recall going to a Bob
Dylan Concert in the bull-ring; dancing in a conga to promote world
peace and holding hands with Jim Madison Davis, Professor of English
at the University of Oklahoma; I seem to recall bearded Bulgarians;
much eating and drinking; heated discussions about Mahler;
ill-suppressed fury about agents and publishers and penury. In other
words it was much like an international conference of any group of
more or less like-minded people anywhere.
I dropped out of AIEP for some years, partly because I slightly
dropped out of crime writing but in recent years I have attended their
conferences in Varna, the Bulgarian Black Sea resort; Zaragoza in
Spain; and Berlin. Next stop Frontignan in France where we are
supposed to be having a thoroughly good look at ourselves and come up
with solutions to the basic question which is, I think, why haven’t we
changed the world?
The conference is scheduled for the end of the month and Penny and I
have booked train tickets from St.Pancras to Sete. Piet Tiegeler, the
Felmish writer, now living in Alicante, who is the present Chairman is
raring to go. Likewise the Icleandic delegate. Britain’s own Bob
Cornwell (yes we do have reps from the UK and USA) has submitted a
cogent report and we should have a day or so of really serious
supercharged debate.
I would love to be able to predict that as a result we will really be
able to make a big difference to people who are writing crime novels
in languages other than English – including French, Spanish and even
Cantonese. I have an uneasy feeling, however, that whatever we do we
are going to make little or no difference where it really matters
which is in a handful of offices in London and New York City. I wish
it were otherwise but I fear life is neither fair nor just in this or
most other respects. I expect it to be a great pleasure to see
crime-writing friends from all over the world and I anticipate having
a lot of fun. But, alas, I don’t really expect to make a huge
difference. Let us just hope that I am proved wrong.
Oh, incidentally, Pemy and I flew by Ryanair from Newquay to Girona
for her birthday the other day and had dinner at a swagger restaurant
on the city’s outskirts. Apart from the horrors of Newquay Airport we
had a lot of fun. Didn’t change the world I’m afraid, but you can’t
have everything.
Tim Heald
