Death by Sheer Torture (1981)

 

Robert Barnard’s Death by Sheer Torture sat atop a box of other paperbacks outside AA Furniture & Appliances. The title suggests a crime novel, and the domination of the author’s name (half the cover) tells me he has a readership. Nearer the bottom is a still-life of a rope, a belt and a scissors; up top, an ambiguous endorsement from the pre-merger San Diego Union newspaper: “There is no one quite like Robert Barnard.” In other words, If you can’t be great, be … ineffable?

 I am one-third my way through this book and it seems perfect for that “no slackers” Britain Margaret Thatcher promised when elected Prime Minister in 1979. For the elder reaches of the Trethowan Family are, according to Detective Peregrine “Perry” Trethowan, just that: an idle brood of composers, poets, playwrights and painters who have never distinguished themselves in their field, yet have built a brand as self-promoters. This of course was long before the Kardashians came on the scene, but also the very thing Thatcher keyed in on: an electorate that came to loathe excesses at both ends of the class spectrum -- from artistocrats deferring their castle taxes to their disowned teenaged children using fake ID to collect dole from a Brixton squat.

 

All but Perry live in a 19^th century postmodern Northumbrian castle built by a great-grandfather whose accomplishments are vague but involve production on the scale of our Lord Dunsmuir -- if not in coal, then in agriculture. From that batch of work came a series of impurities in the form of Perry’s aunts, uncle and a father whose murder in the clutches of a strappado is currently being investigated and the reason why Perry has been asked by his superior to interpret the behaviour of his relatives for a lead investigating officer who, though competent, is naïve to the ways of the Trethowan. 

 

It is all seems rather improbable to me, but then the same was said of a boys-club Britain that could nominate, then elect a woman as its (Conservative) PM and an America that, a year later, could elect a (Republican) actor for its president. That we are made to feel and indeed sympathize with the pragmatic Perry gives you some indication why this book might have been taken up by Brits who bought and read books back in the day, seeing in the Trethowans those Oliver Reed types who arrogantly showed up drunk on their TV talk shows and, at the same time, those up-too-late children shrieking down the street at 3:00AM on a Monday morning.

 

Below is an excerpt from the “Cristobel” chapter -- Cristobel (Chris) being Perry’s sister, who also lives in the castle:

 

“Chris, what had things been like in the family recently?”

 

Oh, you know, much as usual. We each lived in our own wings, but still -- it wasn’t an easy house to live in, Perry.”

 

“I know,” I said.

 

“But I don’t complain. It’s always the way, isn’t it? The men go off and do the glamourous and exciting jobs and the women get left behind looking after the older generation. It’s always been like that and I suppose it always will be.”

 

Hmmm, well, I thought. I’d been getting stuff like this in letters from my sister recently, showing, I suppose, that this kind of lowest common denominator feminism has at last filtered down into the kind of magazine my sister reads. As the bandwagon slowly grinds to a halt, my sister hears of the movement. Now, the fact of the matter is that my sister stayed home with my father because she had no aptitude for any kind of interesting job and wanted to inherit what was going. Highly sensible reasons, of which I heartily approve, but no basis for a good feminist whine. My great aunts, daughters of the redoubtable Josiah, may not have had much choice, but Chris did, and made it. (55)

Bingo! The word "choice". And what did those who led governments in the U.K., the U.S. and soon to be my country, Canada, encourage us youngsters to be reading in those times-they-are-a-changin'-back 1980s but this piece of crap, death by sheer torture libertarian fantasy: