Some Lie and Some Die (1973) by Ruth Rendell

As I commented on a earlier publish, Ruth Rendell when she was publicizing certainly one of her last novels, The Kid’s Youngster (2012), divulged that she had had a homosexual cousin who died in 1989 from AIDS issues, to whom she had been very shut.  He was put by aversion remedy within the Nineteen Seventies, she instructed an interviewer, “and it was so horrible he ran away….In fact I knew he was homosexual.  We had been nice pals in addition to cousins.“

Effectively, you recognize me, I discovered myself questioning, who was this individual, this cousin of Ruth Rendell’s who suffered so tragically from the warped attitudes of a bygone period (or maybe not so bygone)?  I feel the reply lies in two e-book dedications.  In 1970 Rendell devoted her Wexford detective novel A Responsible Factor Stunned “for Michael Richards, my cousin, with love.”  Three years later Michael shared the dedication of one other Wexford thriller, Some Lie and Some Die, with the creator’s personal son Simon:  

To my son, Simon Rendell, who goes to festivals, and my cousin, Michael Richards, who wrote the tune, this e-book is devoted with love and gratitude.

The festivals to which Rendell refers had been “pop festivals” (or rock festivals as Individuals would say), the place tens and even lots of of hundreds of followers (together with occasional Maoists and Hell’s Angels) would collect in fields to listen to their favourite bands play stay.  Rendell revealed the novel in 1973, simply 4 years after Woodstock in america and three years after the 1970 Isle of Wight Pop Competition in England, of which it’s claimed that there was a good greater attendance than Woodstock (supposedly some 600,000 folks, although newspaper accounts on the time had it at extra like 250,000).  

the magical thriller tour is  dying to take you away

Singers and bands on the Isle of Wight Competition included Chicago, The Doorways, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Sly & the Household Stone, Emerson, Lake and Palmer,  Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Jethro Tull, Donovan, Leonard Cohen and The Moody Blues.  A proper good lineup, is not it?    

They even had Tiny Tim together with his ukulele singing There Will At all times Be an England and Land of Hope and Glory (a lot for Communism).  Mild Tim defended the hippies, telling reporters: “They’re such form folks, I simply love them.  They’ve their very own lifestyle and I see no purpose why they should not lead it.”  Ah, tolerance, it was a beautiful idea whereas it lasted.  

Conservative locals on the Isle of Wight, who had been anxious about Communists, bikers, druggos and hippies, had been lower than enthralled with the approaching of the rockers, nonetheless.  The island’s conservative MP Mark Woodnutt spent months futilely making an attempt to thwart the competition from alighting on his isle’s shores. 

the Honorable Mark Woodnutt (regrettably not in his hippy outfit)

When the dreaded factor did come off regardless of him, Woodnutt, then 51, himself attended the competition, as he put it, “incognito in my hippy outfit“; and he later declared disgustedly to parliament that “the scene…was certainly one of indescribable squalor and filth.”  

Afterward McNutt was capable of induce Parliament to move an Act permitting the Isle of Wight’s county council to have approval over native festivals numbering over 5000 folks.  They promptly gave thumbs right down to a competition the subsequent 12 months.  Not stunning with council members with names like Sinclair Glossop and William Rees-Millington!  One other pop competition was not held on the island for 32 years.  

Pop festivals continued in different components of England, nonetheless, scary extra conservative consternation.  At an occasion the subsequent 12 months at Weeley in Essex (nearer to Rendell’s house turf), a number of Hell’s Angels instigated “shows of public savagery,” leading to arrests and parliamentary condemnations.  

Ruth Rendell, being the fashionable girl she was and solely a smidge over forty, determined in 1972 that she would use such a competition because the backdrop for the homicide in her subsequent Wexford novel.  As she stated in her dedication, her college-age son, who turned nineteen in 1972, was a daily competition attendee, so she in all probability realized an excellent bit about festivals from him immediately and did not have simply to examine them within the newspapers.  I would not be shocked if Simon had been at Weeley, at least.  

not precisely flower energy

Then there was Ruth’s cousin Michael Richards.  How previous was he?  Michael was the son of Rendell’s aunt Ethel Margaret “Margot” Grasemann, who was fifteen years youthful than her sole brother, Rendell’s father Arthur Grasemann.  Margot Grasemann at age 23 married Reginald Richards in 1938, however I do not know when Michael was born to the couple: it may have been any time from 1940 to 1950 or perhaps a little later.  Briefly he might need been ten or twenty years youthful than his Cousin Ruth, who was born in 1930.  

Within the latter case he would have been a recent of Ruth’s son (Ruth married younger), somewhat than Ruth, which might accord with somebody being subjected to aversion remedy within the Nineteen Seventies on the behest of involved mother and father.  In fact we do not know that Michael was Rendell’s beloved homosexual cousin, however the e-book dedications and Michael’s participation within the composition of the tune in Some Lie and Some Die actually are suggestive.

Rendell later devoted Shake Fingers Endlessly (1975) to her 4 Grasemann aunts, together with Margot, however in 2012 in The Kid’s Youngster, which pulls on her schoolmaster father’s household historical past, she names the worst of the homosexual schoolmaster protagonist’s sisters Ethel, which was Margot’s first title.  Margot had died at age 93 in 2008.  Was this Ruth’s posthumous revenge on her aunt for her cousin’s aversion remedy (i.e., diabolical electroshock torture)?  

the hills are alive with the sound of music

The tune which Margot’s son Michael Richards wrote for the novel known as “Let-Me-Consider,” and the whole lyrics are given simply after the dedication and simply earlier than a frontispiece map of the competition grounds.  The refrain runs 

So come by, come nigh,

come try to inform why

some sigh, some cry,

some lie and a few die.

The tune, just like the map, is within the e-book for a purpose, you might ensure, which means it’s pertinent to the story.  Now, what’s the story, you might be asking, feeling the urge, Monty Python like, to say to me get on with it!  Effectively, let me let you know.  

American first version of a novel reprinted many instances and nonetheless in print right this moment

When the novel opens, a pop competition is coming to Kingsmarkham, nonetheless policed by the redoubtable group of Chief Inspector Wexford and Inspector Burden on this, their eighth detective novel.  

Mike Burden, now an overprotective single father and nonetheless a conservative blockhead, is frankly hostile to the competition, carping about his fifteen-year-old son John’s intense devotion to rock star Zeno Vedast, the competition’s famous person headliner.

“I simply do not perceive this craze for pop music,” rages Mike lengthy after the began.  (Speak about shutting the barn door.)  “Why cannot John play classical data?”  Oh expensive.  Reg Wexford, the voice of mainstream liberalism, “tolerant of all the things however intolerance,” scoffs at this, as you may effectively think about.  

“They’re solely a bunch of children come to take pleasure in themselves,” Reg amiably pronounces, including “I would wish to be certainly one of them…off to the pop competition.”  Wexford even strikes up a pleasant acquaintance with a younger Marxist African prince (!) attending the competition, although he makes clear that he himself just isn’t in sync with Marxism.  

One English reviewer of the novel carped that Wexford was turning into one thing of an all-knowing gasbag.  There could also be some fact to this, however I would nonetheless somewhat spend the course of the investigation with him than the considerably aptly-named Burden.  

They’re coming!

The case is an fascinating one, far more so than the one detailed just a few years earlier in A Responsible Factor Stunned.  That was a rustic home thriller, very conventional for 1970 and never very convincing.  Some Lie and Some Die truly is a rustic home thriller as effectively, I suppose, in that the rock competition takes place on the grounds of a diminished nation home property referred to as Sundays.  Its proprietor, Martin Silk, is Wexford’s age (sixty, we’re instructed), however, not like Wexford, he isn’t tolerant of youth, he is hooked on it–“a kind of individuals who can’t bear to relinquish their youth.”  

bobbies versus bikers at Weeley

Silk thinks that the younger folks can do no fallacious.  He is internet hosting the competition, he tells Wexford, “as a result of I really like younger folks.  I really like their music.  They have been hounded out of the Isle of Wight.  No needs them.  I do.“

Wexford speaks to the group, urging them to behave, and will get roundly booed off the stage as “fuzz.”  All of it goes off fairly effectively, nonetheless, with the creator particularly approving of the environmentalist ballads (particularly the one in regards to the disappearing butterflies) of Betti Ho, “a bit Chinese language woman, as fairly and delicate and clear as a flower.”  (One thing just like the Asian Joan Baez, I collect.)  

There’s additionally a gaggle referred to as The Verb To Be, which made me giggle, this might be a rock group in a criminal offense novel by grammar pedant Rendell, naturally.  However the huge draw, after all, is Zeno together with his tremendous cool smash hit rock ballad “Let-Me-Consider.”  

However this being a homicide thriller novel, it is not lengthy earlier than a pair having intercourse within the deserted quarry on the Sundays property discovers the brutally crushed physique of a lifeless girl and goes screaming for assist to Wexford who’s one the scene doing live performance obligation.  Nonetheless, it seems that the woman–a sure London males’s membership cocktail waitress named Daybreak Stonor who initially hailed from Kingsmarkham–was truly killed just a few days’ earlier than the competition.  

Does this let the rock stars and their followers off the hook?  What in regards to the denizens of the 5 not too long ago constructed bungalows overlooking the quarry?  Wexford’s investigation turns up some extraordinary info certainly earlier than an previous picture lastly permits him to pin culpability on the responsible. 

In A Catalogue of Crime Jacques Barzun referred to as Some Lie and Some Die an excellent illustration of the “good steadiness between police process and psychology that marks this creator’s finest work,” concluding: “The neatly restricted locale, small variety of suspects in a brutal killing, and robust ending make this a traditional story.“

I agree that this can be a sturdy detective story.  The issue is an fascinating one, the characterization good and colourful and the denouement–a variant on the traditional drawing room lecture–effective, with the creator’s signature lecture on homicide psychology from Wexford.  Why would the police want precise psychiatrists once they have Wexford?  I knew the issues within the novel that had been essential, however I by no means fairly pinpointed the proper sequence of occasions till Reg defined all of it to me.  

Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast  in Some Lie and Some Die

Ruth Rendell has at all times been extra standard within the UK than the US (not like her gal pal PD James, who achieved bestseller standing within the States), and within the UK there was a Wexford tv collection (a part of the bigger Ruth Rendell Mysteries collection) which ran for 13 seasons, from 1987 to 2000.  I do not imagine this collection ever ran within the US and, fact be instructed, it appears somewhat dreary to me, with out the panache of the Inspector Morse collection which ran over the very same time span and the compelling presences of John Thaw and Kevin Whately as Morse and Sergeant Lewis.  Wexford and Burden appear like determined also-rans compared, at the very least on tv.  (On paper I personally a lot want Rendell to Morse creator Colin Dexter.)

Some Lie and Some Die was tailored in 1990 and options former Physician Who actor Peter Capaldi as Zeno Vedast.  I really feel certain I’ve seen him in various issues, however in the meanwhile I am unable to recall them.  Nonetheless I can say he’s well-cast as Zeno.  He even sings a model of “Let-Me-Consider” within the episode.  To be trustworthy it appears like pale Pink Floyd, however he is a really credible performer.  Nonetheless, the episode appears dully filmed on the entire.  Somebody enterprising individual on British tv ought to give Ruth Rendell’s books renewed appears, they provide good homicide materials certainly upon which to construct a collection.  

Now, let’s look again on the Isle of Wight, 1970.