The Enigma of the Flat Policeman by Ramsey Campbell -- a review

The Enigma of the Flat Policeman (Little Green Book of Grins and Gravity) by Ramsey Campbell

Review by Gary Fry

I was recently honoured to have a book dedicated to me by my favourite artist (it’s neck and neck between him and Martin Amis, but for sheer volume of quality, Campbell has the edge). The author described me as an “excellent exegete”, and now, while reviewing the tome in question, I have the rather daunting task of living up to that description.

Except that, in the case of this book, the true exegete is the author himself. The Enigma of the Flat Policeman is a short multi-character, murder mystery novel set in an old house, written and subsequently aborted by Campbell when he was just 14 years old. The justification for publishing such juvenilia is, to my mind, twofold: first, as a fascinating glimpse into the nascent psyche of one of our finest living writers; and second, to allow Campbell to annotate the manuscript, speculatively identifying events and psychological states that may have informed the construction of the (incomplete) book.

I say “speculatively” because nobody is ever in full command of their subconscious mind, often least of all a creative artist, who will, while plying their craft, invariably rely on instinct. Nevertheless, now that so much time has passed – a good 60 years, with all peripheral detail cleared, leaving only major memories – it can be argued that the author might make a legitimate attempt to explore the wellsprings of his early creativity and the unusual – that is to say, genuinely disturbing – circumstances from which it arose.

Dedicated fans of Campbell will know much of this personal history. He’s written often about his childhood in a number of commendably honest and troubling essays: the schizophrenic mother, distant father, social isolation, precocious reading, etc. What we’ve had less of is how this familial situation – what Stephen King has called the perfect “petri dish” in which to grow a horror writer – informs the interiority of Campbell’s work.

The novel itself is – understandably of course, given the age of its creator – structurally chaotic. Characters are introduced willy-nilly; plot developments occur with seemingly random haste, as if the author had been eager to advance to the next “intriguing” bit; and the prose lurches from the aspirationally poetic (“Crystal-frozen stars wheeled everlastingly in their paths …”) to the unintentionally comic (“For some minutes the only sign of life was the heaving of the pile of snow, reminiscent of a bad sleeper after a cheese supper …”). All the same, I found myself, as a seasoned Campbell reader, smiling semi-knowingly in various places, as characteristics of the mature author’s style seemed to appear in rudimentary form.

The early chapter in which many of the book’s characters come together in the house put me in mind of the utterly magnificent one – arguably my favourite passage from all Campbell’s work – in The House on Nazareth Hill. There’s also a preoccupation with facial composition and expressions which (possibly) anticipates the mature author’s approach to character delineation. Then we have mere moments that feel uniquely Campbellian – for instance, “There might be a face pressed against the window, whitely.” The addition of that adverb, dangling off the end of the sentence, will disappear in later work, but it was very much a feature of the early adult stuff: one stylistic trademark among many others. And what to make of the following passage?

Steve was almost at the gates of Hilltop House. He drove in his sports model, under the cold stars, glinting down from across untold distances of the black void between worlds. The moon rode swollen over the fields, white and skull-like. The trees, rising above the level white expanse like so many twisted gravestones in some infinite graveyard, clawed at the slate sky with snow-burdened fingernails.

A sense of the novel’s events taking place in a cosmic context will be intriguingly hinted at several times (and also commented upon by the older, annotating Campbell), but that isn’t the bit I’d ask you to focus on here. This passage, strikingly evocative (if rather gasping for attention) for any 14 year old, already appears to contain strands of the author’s signature perceptions of the world: the moon “rode” (might a more conventional author had written the predictable “rose”?) over the fields and trees “clawed” at the sky, as if both natural phenomena are sentient.

Very occasionally the young Campbell will get something just right. Consider the following description:

… that street of tall, decaying houses and shops, which seemed to lean drunkenly over him and the red-brick-bordered street lawns, all covered with soft-crystallising snow, which now and then toppled off the roofs like blankets from a bed.

Simple, evocative and alive, this wouldn’t be out of place in many a well-written popular novel. In other places, Campbell will write something so strange (if not yet wholly elegant) that we’re forced to wonder whether we’re already in the presence of a strikingly peculiar mind, one instinctively drawn to leftfield expression. Consider this example: “… the sky was now a dark pit into which you hung on this pitiful trapeze, the earth.” Clumsy as it is, that has no business at all appearing in a detective story. And yet it does.

Finally, we find in this early novel dealings with a staple component of much later Campbell work: the human body. A mannequin dummy appears in an effectively grotesque set-piece, showing how inert facsimiles can unsettle as much as their active counterparts. Elsewhere, there is a tendency to compare body parts to what is inherently repulsive (“His hands writhed like some ghastly pale hairless spider …”). Although the author doesn’t specifically address this issue in his annotations, there’s always been a sense in his work of the terror induced by the human form, as well as its eminent corruptibility.

All of which brings us back to the book’s principal reason for existence: the author’s speculations on his youthful worldview and the degree to which this informed his early fiction. Well, only he can determine how accurate the reflexive perceptions included here might be. In my exegesis of his exegesis, I’d suggest that instinct has guided his interpretations, much the way he claims that it determines how his fiction develops. In the realm of the past, that’s perhaps all we ultimately have: if it feels right, it probably is right. And much of the commentary does indeed feel right.

One last note: referring to his younger self in the third person (“John”) may reflect the great distance Campbell now experiences from his early years, as if he’s examining them with empirical objectivity (King’s petri-dish metaphor never more apt). He might even feel relieved that he survived that complex upbringing and prefer to look back as if it all happened to someone from whom he now feels psychologically detached … but who knows? When it comes to human experience, we’re perhaps all just exegetes with speculative annotations at our disposal.

At any rate, this book is a fascinating case study in how life and art (might) intertwine, how the DNA of a creative mind (possibly) adapts to and reflects experience. It is as pleasingly strange as anything Campbell has written.