Rhyme Rhymes With Crime

(and Something More)

H R F Keating

As the last Inspector Ghote book is published, I find myself going back to his genesis. After having written fiction ever since 1959 (or earlier with, still preserved if unfinished, my first story typed out at age eight), I have discovered, with a new millennium, a new way of doing it. And one which, with reservations, I recommend to my fellow novelists as having some unexpected advantages. It is the novel in verse.

I was led to it because my interest in Inspector Ghote's India drew me to a book, The Golden Gate, written by Vikram Seth before he went on to produce that wonderful and wonderfully readable story of love, politics and poetry, A Suitable Boy. In fact I had my doubts about The Golden Gate, not because I knew it was not about India - it depicts the pleasure-loving life of San Francisco - but because it was written in verse. Knowing this about it was nearly enough to make me keep my pennies in my pocket in the bookshop. But I plunged. And discovered that writing in verse, far from being an obstacle to easy reading, is a positive inducement to continue turning the pages.

So I said to myself, "If Vikram Seth can write an attractive novel in verse, could I possibly write a crime novel in the same way?" I knew, if I tried, it would be a tough task. The Golden Gate, I believe, owes much of its success to being written in a complicated verse-form taken from Charles Johnston's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It is in stanzas of fourteen lines in what is technically known as tetrameter, that is with four feet to each line rather than the five of most metrical poetry in English. But Pushkin, Charles Johnston and Vikram Seth also used a quite complicated rhyme scheme, one best described as ABAB CCDD EFFE GG. Trouble ahead. However, the pattern of the verse, I found, is what keeps you subconsciously head-down in the story while avoiding the monotony that is the danger of rhymed couplets. The shortness of the lines, too, makes them extremely swift moving, and so, as I discovered, swift reading.

I thought therefore that I should use the same metre, the same rhyme scheme. Or try to. I began with almost trembling caution, picking my way with a single test stanza describing the form of the classical detective story which I then saw my book as being. "Snow", I wrote. And then, bit by bit, the words came.

Snow, a carpet of pure white
with every little footmark showing.
The mystery story at its height
could count on every reader knowing...

It was, if not a doddle, at least something that could be done. What you need is a reasonably large vocabulary, a willingness to try every variation of grammar and syntax and a rhyming dictionary for when things get temporarily difficult. No need to be ashamed of the rhyming aid, although it must be an advantage to be like Vikram Seth and in his English-speaking household to have started to spout rhymes - cat, mat, sat - at the age of three. But the thing to remember is that what one is writing is not poetry, the delving of the imagination: it is verse, the use of a different type of language.

And, curiously enough, those moments of obstruction, when it seems to be impossible to find the right rhyme or the right metrical pattern for what you want to say, can be turned to good account. As long ago as 1602 Thomas Campion wrote of a fault in rhyming which he said was "almost intolerable", that "it enforceth a man oftentimes to abjure his matter and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of art; for in the quatorzains, methinks, the poet handles his subject as tyrannically as Procrustes the thief his prisoners [...] too short [...] he would stretch them longer, if too long, he would cut them shorter." All true enough. But, I came to learn, in the stretching (the working round to setting down your original thought by putting another in first) you sometimes drag up from the subconscious something that adds materially to what you think you are saying. In this way you often find you have dug that much deeper, hit on a new, unexpected and revealing truth. Or, in other words, you have written a better novel. In my case, this turned out to mean I produced, instead of the say-little Agatha Christie-type detective story, what you might call a detective novel.

Of course, there is one sort of reader that refuses to believe that Thomas Campion was not right, and this despite such fine examples of verse novels from the past as Byron's Don Juan or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. These doubting Thomases tend to lurk in publishers' sales departments. "Can't be read: won't sell: don't publish." So I was lucky that my book eventually came into the hands of a two-person firm of daring called the Flambard Press (mercifully, computer-connected to almost every bookshop in the land). So in September Jack, the Lady Killer is coming out from them, and in America from another small publisher, the Poisoned Pen Press. However, if some of you out there take up the line that has run from Pushkin through the translator Charles Johnston, through Vikram Seth and at last to me, then perhaps more people in publishing will be ready to acknowledge the novel in verse as still having distinct and useful advantages. Let's see.

There is yet one other bonus to verse, besides that unearthing of thoughts you never supposed you had had and finding out that our chosen form is, oddly enough, every bit as readable as prose fiction. It is this: that a thought or an idea, which in a straightforward novel would seem absurdly banal, put into verse takes on a more emphatic, weightier meaning without, I like to think, seeming portentous. I offer, with diffidence, as an example the last two lines of 'Jack, the Lady Killer', a book which came to tell eventually of the moral development of a young man arriving in the British Raj of the 1930s. I don't think I would have ever dared to write them as the final words of a straight crime story. But I like to think that as the last lines of a detective novel in verse they have a true reverberation they would not otherwise have possessed:

Jack Steele, a boy a week ago,
is now a man. Thus do we grow.