The Village Killings and Other Novellas by Ramsey Campbell -- review and interview

The Village Killings and Other Novellas by Ramsey Campbell

Review and interview by Gary Fry

For many years, the novella hadn’t featured much in Ramsey Campbell’s output, the only exceptions being “Medusa” (1973) and “Needing Ghosts” (1990). Given that many of the field’s finest works have been in this form – “The Colour out of Space”, “The Willows”, and “The White People” to name but three – I for one found this unusual. But more recently, we’ve seen a sudden interest in the novella on the author’s part, starting with 2013’s double treat of “The Last Revelation of Gla’aki” and “The Pretence”, and then “The Booking” in 2016. Last year (2020), we also got to read “The Enigma of the Flat Policeman”, a lengthy piece Campbell had written in his youth and intriguingly annotated by his mature self as an investigation into creative consciousness.

My previous reviews for each of the post-millennium works can be found by clicking the links with which I’ve loaded their titles above. A recent reread of “Needing Ghosts” yielded from me the following comments in social media:

It builds to what is surely one of the grimmest denouements in dark literature, with a killer final five words. I certainly detected the pathos on first reading, but this time the piece struck me as funny in that mordant sense the author will soon develop in all kind of ways. Some of the reflections on creativity are particularly acerbic (e.g. “Genius may be next to madness ... but so is mediocrity and worse ...”) and could sum up quite a few individuals I might name who crop up online these days. The novella’s present-tense narrative also anticipates future Campbellian aesthetics. A critical work in his stylistic development, methinks.

“Medusa” isn’t reprinted in this collection, and so that allows me to focus exclusively here on Campbell’s latest piece, the one original entry in the book: “The Village Killings”.

It opens with a bunch of characters in a large house, bickering about the role and function of crime fiction. They’re all writers, each with at least one novel in print, and have come to attend a seminar course arranged by the most successful of the group. One of the characters, in fact our narrator, is called Christy, and it soon becomes clear whose literary territory Campbell is seeking to occupy.

The author’s regular readers might wonder why he’s suddenly decided to court dear old Agatha. But hold on a moment. In his previous work, I’d suggest there’s a fair number of murders most horrid (e.g. The Last Voice They Hear), certainly a court case or two (e.g. The One Safe Place), and enough Christie-like ingenuity of plotting (e.g. Think Yourself Lucky) to support this excursion into the whodunnit. The real question is, given his extremely idiosyncratic style, what he can bring to the subgenre we haven’t seen before, many times.

The answer is plenty. I’m giving nothing away when I say that during the literary retreat someone dies. This guy is a novelist who writes a pseudonymous newspaper review column in which each of the other writers has been critically mauled in the past. Well, there’s a motive, right there. Indeed, the rest of the novella takes the form of an impromptu investigation carried out by our narrator, which gradually reveals the cause of the death.

Via a series of telephone interviews with all the scribes, and research at libraries and other locations, Christy, doing that namesake proud, begins to unravel the mystery. But this being Campbell, what follows is very different from what fans of the form would expect. And we who like our fiction, shall we say, less cosy can only applaud.

It’s hard to say more about the story without giving away the ending. All the same, I can point out that, as well as typically entertaining the hell out of us, Campbell here explores the relationship between classic crime fiction and real life. The truth is that the likes of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple occupy a hermetically sealed literary universe, full of ticktock human psychology and improbably calibrated events. That has its charms, of course, and I personally wouldn’t be without the tenants of similar unreal fictional territories (Jeeves and Wooster uppermost among them). But it’s essential to ask whether people in the actual world behave this way.

It’s well-documented that Arthur Conan Doyle was writing his Sherlock Holmes stories at a similar time as Sigmund Freud was attempting to identify the wellsprings of human action. Both authors subscribe to a “hydraulic” model of the world, in which behaviour yields to rational analysis, the identification of psychological mechanisms that function like industrial machines. Such is the influence of this manner of thinking that, despite iconoclastic efforts by postmodernists, it remains tempting to view life this way. After all, we need it to make sense. How else can we get by without social chaos?

Campbell’s novella wittily dramatizes these ideas. In fact, viewing its episodes with a wide lens, it’s another of his black existential comedies. Close up, however, it becomes as disturbing as anything he’s written without supernatural agents. One scene involving a car couples M R Jamesian suggestiveness in the prose and body horror in the event, a combination that currently burns in my brain. There are also satirical allusions to contemporary culture. I particularly enjoyed the reason why the novelists’ work appeals to fans hungry for their individual brand of wish-fulfilment.

But it is in the narrator that Campbell’s best material can be found. When Christy hears phones ringing, it’s as if they’re in old films, suggesting the character is a living anachronism yearning for premodern culture. The tinkertoy reasoning, where all clues congeal to suggest a conclusion, is worthy of Agatha herself. We have secret phone calls, unwitting confessions, mistaken identities, and more. But come the ending, Campbell pulls the ageing Axminister from under our vintage shoes. It’s a triumph of watchmaker plotting that makes us realise that the story we’ve been reading isn’t the story we thought we’d been reading, after all. It’s uniquely Campbellian, an aesthetic that is of course one of the treasures of all genres.

With this new novella worth the price of admission alone, the collection is another essential buy for fans of a form highly conducive to striking dark fiction. Each can be consumed in a single sitting, preventing the accumulative impact of the work – and who is better than Ramsey Campbell in achieving that? – from dissipating between reading sessions. There are two more pieces here than in TED Klein’s Dark Gods, another landmark collection of such horror material. I’d certainly put The Village Killings and Other Novellas in that class.

 

Available to order now from PS Publishing: BUY HERE

 

An interview with Ramsey Campbell about The Village Killings and Other Novellas

Gary: I suppose what most people would like to know about the new novella in the book is what prompted this somewhat tangential diversion into Agatha Christie territory.

Ramsey: That’s quite an anecdote. In my early teens – maybe even earlier – I read many of her books, since my mother was a fan. I then moved on to John Dickson Carr and his major influence, G. K. Chesterton, and soon Nabokov provided the pleasures of narrative concealment and play. For decades I pretty well forgot her, but was recently tempted by a bunch of Crime Club facsimiles at a very good price in a local shop. There are a couple of Christie denouements that stay in the mind once they’ve been read, but I was pleased to find I’d forgotten most of them. The first I reread confounded me, although when we reached the solution I thought for a moment that she’d cheated along the way, but looking back I realised that she’d simply lured the reader into making an assumption that the text never claimed was the case. Since then I’ve found instance after instance of this kind of ingenuity, both narrative and linguistic. You shouldn’t look to her for great prose, but certainly great dexterity of language, and the overall plainness of her writing helps conceal the tricks she’s playing.

Along with this newfound admiration came an extra sense of her work. Her books are often cited as instances of cosy crime, but I wonder if they could be described as cosy paranoia. All is explained at the end, of course, and usually the culprit is arrested or otherwise neutralised, but by then we’ve spent much of the book (or at least I have) suspecting everyone and scrutinising the most innocent dialogue and actions in case they betray evidence of guilt. Isn’t that very much like how the paranoid interact with the world? Perhaps the tales enable us to share that experience, safely contained.

Gary: In our previous interviews you’ve emphasised how little you pre-plot, but in something as intricately mechanistic as a Christie-esque tale, did your approach differ this time? 

Ramsey: Not significantly. For any tale, especially of this length or longer, I spend quite a time thinking about significant events in the story I’m planning to write, but that doesn’t generally dictate a structure so early in the process, though I may have some grasp of the narrative order they’ll occur in. It’s the actual writing that reveals to me the logic of the continuity and shapes the events more realistically than the sketchy notion I have of them in advance – indeed, I increasingly find that once I start thinking of the day’s work each morning this shows me how it needs to be rethought in terms of realism. Some of the crucial twists in The Village Killings suggested themselves beforehand, but some emerged in the writing process, even in the rewriting. I’m always trying to surprise myself.

Gary: I greatly enjoyed the way you incorporated Christie tropes – the big house, mistaken identities, covert phone calls, and the like – into a modern setting. Was that something you set out to achieve? 

Ramsey: Very much so. I’d had something of a go when I was fourteen, in Murder by Moonlight, my sally at a country house mystery (included with commentary in the Village Killings omnibus). In a sense “The Will of Stanley Brooke”, one of my early Lovecraftian tales, ventures into that territory too, with a reading of a will at a family gathering that’s invaded by a mysterious stranger. Both of those demonstrate I had little aptitude for portraying characters so artificial, and so I tried to root The Village Killings in people I could believe in. But yes indeed, I wanted to include as many of the conventions of the genre as I could fit in. 

Gary: You and I didn’t get chance to chat about Murder by Moonlight upon release. In my review I tenuously identified some nascent stylistic tropes in the writing. Did you see anything similar while working it up for publication? 

Ramsey: Not until I read your observations, I admit, but I wouldn’t argue with them. I think perhaps we’re seeing my early attempts at effects and bids to grasp notions that I’ll worry in my later prose until I get them in a better shape (especially the business of managing an ensemble scene), just as I’ve gone back to my original Lovecraftian inventions recently and tried to do them more justice.

Gary: Looking back at The Last Revelation of Gla’aki eight years on, do you feel you achieved what you’d hinted at as a youth? 

Ramsey: I’m not sure I hinted at it so much as fell short of it back then. I can’t help regretting that August Derleth wasn’t harsher with the tales I wrote to bring The Inhabitant of the Lake­ up to book length. I imagine Lovecraft would have pointed out how unlikely it was that a city (however alien) and its inhabitants would survive on the surface of a meteor (though the notion did lead to an evocative piece by Thana Niveau). The novella was a bid to fix that kind of thing and to bestow a bit more of the cosmic on the spiny fellow, alongside having a dark kind of fun with the narrative. Is that too much of a mixture of aims? I’m quite fond of the result, but perhaps that’s paternal indulgence. 

Gary: The Pretence was written a fair few years before the world actually stopped functioning. Has the pandemic, having confirmed at least some of your fears, modified your feelings about the nature of social reality?

Ramsey: If anything I’m progressively unnerved by how reality overtakes or subsumes my imaginings. I don’t mind being accurate, but maybe not that much, and I’d rather we didn’t inhabit my fiction in order to find it convincing. 

Gary: Of all your more recent work, the one my mind returns to most often is The Booking, which is rich with interpretive possibilities. One theme certainly relates to the vulnerability of digital text. Coming from a print-only background, how do you feel about being published electronically? 

Ramsey: On balance I’m in favour of any format that makes books more available to an audience, and when I see folk asking whether some title of mine can be had in that form I’d like them to have the option. Perhaps a personal experience has helped change my view – after double cataract surgery I’ve found the ability to enlarge fonts until I get new reading glasses very useful, and so I invested in a Kindle. All this said, I greatly prefer physical books, both aesthetically and because I feel the purely electronic is more at risk of permanent deletion and loss. There’s also the problem of those folk who feel entitled to read books without the author being paid and support piracy to indulge their entitlement. That’s theft, folks, and don’t call it anything else. 

Gary: Finally, on the basis of comments you’ve made elsewhere, I believe that the earliest novella in the collection, Needing Ghosts, is one you consider particularly important in terms of your development as a writer. If that's true, what are your thoughts about the piece 30 years on? 

Ramsey: It was a crucial turning point in my career, I think. Back in 1963 “The Stone on the Island” felt as if reading Nabokov had released my prose from strictures I’d imposed on it or simply acquired as I tried to develop, and a quarter of a century later the adventure of writing my first novella brought about a similar liberation, this time of nightmare comedy and my subconscious, pretty well untrammelled. I read it in proof for the present volume, and I still find that quality of breathless invention that I experienced when writing it. It remains a favourite of my own stuff, and (as Theodore Sturgeon said of “It”) it was very easy and I wish I could do it again.