Roy Vickers - two novellas from a lost crime writer

 The Sole Survivor and The Kynsard Affair by Roy Vickers

 published 1952

 

This was a surprise – I would say ‘a turn up for the books’ but it was more that a book turned up…

Roy Vickers is someone I associated solely with the Department  of Dead Ends stories, a collection of which has featured on the blog. Then I came across this book featuring a pair of novellas: The Sole Survivor and The Kynsard Affair (1952). So (finally) looking him up I found out he wrote dozens of novels and dozens of stories. But it seems to me that most people, if they’ve heard of him at all, know only the Department of Dead Ends.

I read this pair, which could hardly be more different from each other.

 

The Sole Survivor is about the aftermath of a shipwreck – the framing device is an investigation into what happened to the men who washed up on an island. Only one survived till help came, and most of the story is taken up with his written testimony.

Now, an action book featuring only men in a fraught situation is something I can very much resist, but bring in the desert island castaways and I can most definitely be reeled in. As I said once before (in a post about – who else? – Robinson Crusoe)  

George Orwell (well ahead of the modern listicle culture) says no-one can resist a list of artefacts with which a character is shipwrecked, and he’s right isn’t he? (I tried to look up the exact Orwell quote, but was confounded by the number of Google entries where people pick Orwell for a desert island book…)

But one of my regular blogfriends, Roger Allen, sent me on the right path in the comments - and when I was searching this time for Crusoe and Orwell, one of the hits was my own blogpost, so rather circular. But - I can now give the quote I meant

A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is probably the surest winner in fiction, surer even than a trial scene.

And The Sole Survivor has both!

Here is a partial list of what they had  (usual bad photography):

The story is tense and worrying, and rather creepy - and you don’t know what to think or what to believe.

The survivor is William Clovering, a history don of 35, and he is fussy, finicky, very class-conscious, and very judge-y about his fellow castaways. The men on the island are being murdered one by one. Perhaps there is an extra, unknown, person on the island? The Wild Man, they postulate. And there is always this:

‘Did you not at any time suspect yourself of homicidal mania?’ The answer is ‘Yes - for a very bad quarter of an hour’.

How did Clovering survive? I did not find the ending of this one satisfactory, but greatly enjoyed the journey.

Obviously it has shades of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and the Hitchcock film Lifeboat, and a novel on similar lines from 2012, also called Lifeboat, by Charlotte Rogan. (It does not resemble at all those other desert island classics, Lord of the Flies and The Coral Island).

The Kynsard Affair

 

Couldn’t be more different, couldn’t be more urban and less castaway. In this short murder story, a woman’s naked body is found in a car in an alley next to a prison where a man has just been executed. Yes, strange.

The crux of the story is this: there is a barrister’s wife who is missing. She had a ‘friend’ who looked very like her, who lived a rather rackety bohemian life. For most of he book it is highly unclear whether there are two women involved here, or a double life for the first one mentioned. It is quite clever how long Vickers keeps this going… it seems very obvious, and then you have to change your mind, and maybe change it again. The whole novella is built round this uncertainty, clues going back and forth, and a lot of detail of what time X saw Y and exactly where. The final solution contained, I thought, one very clever aspect, and one very throwaway one, as well as some strange relationships amongst various pairs.

One of the women  in the book was featured in an advert for lingerie, doing some modelling, ‘An attractive young woman in Titania underwear’ and there was much emphasis on this for no good reason except possible lasciviousness. One of the men involved was determined that the underwear was merely stage clothes. But Vickers proceeds to hammer it home:‘Cami-knicks! Panties! Stepins!’ is an actual quote from the book. Admittedly the blog has an interest in stepins, but this seemed on a different, and quite unnecessary, level. It adds nothing to the story - but there weren't any other clothes to speak of, so that's the illo. 

I think Vickers might have been able to create quite interesting, rounded people, but we didn’t get the chance to appreciate that because everything was subsidiary to the plot points. I wondered also if both of these books had been written to order, to a certain fixed length, because both ended very abruptly, and quite unsatisfactorily, and leaving a few loose ends.

But he was good at creating an atmosphere, and I thought this was a great picture of London at the time, very convincing. (It was probably a very good picture of the desert island in the first book, but I wouldn’t really feel I could judge)

The Sole Survivor picture, from the State Library of Queensland, shows 'Group of men with a captured wild pig on the beach at Moreton Island, ca. 1920', but most certainly has a look of shipwrecked sailors. As I was searching for a photo to use I thought that it was hard to think of the story as taking place around the time of publication: it seemed like something from earlier.

NOTE ON THE BLOG COMMENTS:

There has been a new development in spam: maybe they are being AI-generated? Comments that aaalmost could be real, but have a giveaway link at the end. I am trying to deal with these as they come up, but please don't let that put you off from contributing - I can tell a real comment! And let me know if I seem to have missed one. (I don't want to go for pre-approval of the comments unless I have to, which means I have to pick these off after they are posted) 

Thanks for persevering - the level of discussion at the end of my posts is something I am very proud of.