YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD of Elizabeth George; nor had I, but like so many
writers who steam along below the literary radar, she turns out to be a
bestselling author with a worldwide following - the Germans particularly
adore her. Her books have made her a wealthy woman and she has just built an
ocean-front dream house on the proceeds .
George is an Anglophile crime writer from California; Thomas Lynley,her
detective hero, is an English aristocrat with posh friends and a titled wife
whom the author killed off in the 13th book to cries of anguish and outrage
from her readers. Her stories are all set in regionally distinctive bits of
Britain such as Yorkshire or Cornwall and drenched in vernacular
verisimilitude (apologies for this last phrase but I have been reading
George non-stop for the past three days and have started writing like her).
She works hard on research, she tells me, tramping streets with her tape
recorder and camera, chatting up the locals, and doesn't like to waste any
of it, though she does make the occasional howler, as the Times crime critic
Marcel Berlins has pointed out several times.
He is a fan of her ingenious plotting but says: “She is an exasperating
writer, insists on perpetuating a police procedure that hasn't existed for
decades, is not good on social mores and her dialogue often reveals a tin
ear.” George was apparently furious about this at the time but when I quote
Berlins to her over tea in a London hotel, she asks with impressive
innocence: “Who is he?”
George dismisses the quibble about police procedure: “It's best to know as
little as possible, otherwise you'd have a cast of thousands and it would be
dreadfully dull.” Thus Inspector Lynley is generally to be found motoring in
to some far-flung bit of England to solve a crime that the local police are
too stupid to sort out for themselves. Like many books of the genre, hers
contain a large and bewildering cast of potential suspects with dark secrets
and names such as Selevan Penrule and Madlyn Angarrack, in case you had
forgotten that you were in Cornwall.
She was an English teacher for many years and tends to show off a bit: Lynley
watches a lone surfer from a cliff and recognises “a fellow cenobite”. A
policeman's cigar launches an “olfactory assault”. She also has a fondness
for a startling simile: a character's hair is “straight as the route of a
martyr's path to Heaven”. The question she is always asked is: why English
crime fiction? Because it gives her a structure, she says. “You can hang
anything you want on it and you don't have characters in search of a plot” -
and because she has always enjoyed visiting England. “It keeps giving me
more and more material. I go somewhere and the place itself will suggest a
story.”
And why the titled hero? “I was fascinated that British people could have more
than one name - like Lord Byron also being George Gordon - and I thought it
would be fun to make him rich.” Then she adds with disarming candour: “I
could do anything, you see, because when I started I never thought it would
be published.”
She began writing at the age of 7; the family were “quite poor” and not well
educated, but her mother gave her an old Remington typewriter. She got
herself to university and into the teaching profession, producing three
crime novels before she was accepted for publication.
After signing her second two-book contract, she quit teaching and has written
steadily since then, producing several drafts of each of her books and
collecting a shelf full of prizes: her debut novel won France's Grand Prix
de Littérature Policière, and the Inspector Lynley mysteries have been made
into a BBC television series.
She married her first husband, an academic, at 21 but they had no children: “I
am not mother material. Ours was the first generation which could make that
choice.” The couple separated amicably after 24 years and he is still her
business manager. “I married young with the unrealistic expectation that one
person could supply all my needs,” she says.
Like most Californians, she had therapy. “Happiness is an inside job - it
takes a long time to learn that. I was pretty frightened to strike out on my
own, but it shouldn't be such a big deal.” She was single for four years
before meeting her current partner, a retired firefighter. “Between husbands
I discovered that I quite enjoyed my own company.”
She has recently moved into the rather gorgeous house built for her on an
island off Seattle overlooking the Saratoga Passage. There is an English
garden and ten acres of forest that she is restoring. “I've planted
thousands of bulbs, lots of bluebells and we're taking out non-native and
invasive species. I chip away at it every afternoon after I've finished
writing for the day. It is perfectly quiet - just the birds and the deer.”
This is a woman at the height of her powers, confident of herself and her
devoted readership, with whom she shares an intimate and slightly teacherly
website. Over our second pot of tea, I confess that the book I enjoyed most
was not an Inspector Lynley mystery but What Came Before He Shot Her, the
story of Joel, a 13-year-old accused of murdering Lynley's wife Helen.
An endearing, tragic figure, Joel struggles to survive in the black gang
culture of West London. “Joel's back story lured me,” explains George. “I
wanted to put the reader in the position of caring as much about him as they
did about Helen; that was the challenge.” She haunted Ladbroke Grove and the
notorious Mozart Estate in the company of the young black writer Courttia
Newland: “He gave me a real sense of the area: so many children living lives
of quiet desperation.”
Careless in Red by Elizabeth George
Hodder, £17.99; 544pp Buy the book here
Writing abroad
Other crime authors who created foreign heroes
Michael Dibdin Aurelio Zen, a cynical Italian policeman, tackles crime
and corruption from Venice to Naples - a fair hike from Dibdin's native
Wolverhampton.
Lee Child Jack Reacher, former military policeman, is an A-grade
American drifter; his creator Child is from Coventry.
Martin Cruz Smith The Pennsylvania-born writer assumed the voice of
Ukrainian detective Arkady Renko for the Moscow-set Gorky Park and five
other novels.
John Burdett A British lawyer is behind Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the Thai
Buddhist cop.
