Meta books: The Unpublished and the Failed

No 3: Murder on the Crumbles

I have always been fascinated by a certain type of English seaside town, not the ones that have become cognisant of oat milk but the unreconstructed ones, where you hold on to railings as you look out at the flat grey sea, and the ghost of Gorse flickers among the betting-slips in a desolate bandstand.

Eastbourne, the last time I visited, was such a town. I stayed a night at a seafront hotel, glorious of facade and ragged of carpet, where - in the immense bar - a woman played songs like Don’t Stop Me Now with great competence on her harp (I am fascinated too by these kinds of hotels. I am all for decayed splendour, moulded ceilings that reach to the skies and blood-heat Sauvignon, rather than the streamlined, curated, all-from-our-own-vineyard, how-you-doing-there revamp jobs that make places so mysteriously unrelaxing).

I went to Eastbourne - which may now have been regenerated, although a part of me hopes not - for two reasons: first, to meet a woman who had known Lord Lucan. We had tea together, in another hotel, where they served us scones and cakes in proper little towers; the vast window, tear-stained with rain, overlooked the curve of the road that led to the seafront, and somehow that created atmosphere. Melancholic, very English, just a tiny bit thrilling. It is the intimation of the sea that truly stirs: the heady hint of another element, the still line on the horizon, the faintly alarming sense of journey’s end…

The second reason for my visit was connected to a meta-book, rather than one that actually came into being (the Lucan one). This other idea did not really amount to a book - although that is true of many books - but for a while I was obsessed with it, sure that I could make something of it, without ever quite managing to do so. I loved the idea of a book where the location was the main character, in this case Eastbourne in the 1920s. Atmosphere, again; although the relentless conjuring of atmosphere can become quite wearing for readers; all those arduously evocative sentences (Roget-roughaged, as the immortal Martin Amis put it); so much better if it emerges unbidden.

But it was also a rather Patrick Hamilton idea, which made me very keen.

As did the fact that it was a story about murder - in fact two murders - a subject that I find possibly more interesting than any other. Not the act itself, which (most hypocritically) I try to avoid reading about, but all that surrounds and shrouds and informs it - the milieu, the human dynamic, the interplay between facade and what lies beneath. The Macbeth moment, which even Shakespeare doesn’t show, when a chasm is leapt and all changes. I go, and it is done.

However. Compared with the murders that I have written about - the Lucan case, the Thompson-Bywaters case - these Eastbourne crimes are lacking in dimensionality: there is no real element of the unsolved, no firm grasp is possible upon the personalities. But there is atmosphere. The seaside town. Race meetings; pubs; cheap hotels; money dubiously obtained and flashed around; fateful encounters with the opposite sex; sexual encounters fatally sought: pleasures that could barely, in any sense, be afforded and for which a terrible price would be paid. And so on.