Crossword book club: Michael Gilbert’s Close Quarters - The Guardian

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Close Quarters was published in 1947. But it ends like this:

He felt an overwhelming desire for a steak – done red – and a pint of milk stout.

Since it was the summer of 1937 he got both without difficulty.

At this point the rations-limited reader of the time could, I hope, taste an earlier era, unimaginably different.

The difference between life before and after the second world war comes up earlier too. A crossword hidden by one of the characters unlocks the identity of the murderer responsible for a strikingly ruthless body count, including a chorister.

Like the maps of a cathedral close that we are given near the beginning, the puzzle takes up most of various pages while a canon and a reverend execute an admirably protracted solve.

Once they become stuck, we get an exchange that takes in vain the name of the Observer’s pioneering setter …

‘It’s not playing the game,’ said Canon Trumpington. ‘Torquemada may indulge in such tricks but the Times has always been a gentleman’s crossword.’

‘Oh, well,’ – such distinctions were above Prynne – ‘I dare say we shall work it out in the end.’

… because the fictional puzzle really is a wild, anarchic set of clues. The author, Michael Gilbert, knows what he is talking about. The eve of the second world war was a pivotal moment for the crossword and for the whodunnit.

At the Observer, Ximenes took over from Torquemada and applied discipline (“playing the game”) to assist the solver. The same year, 1939, is pretty much officially the end of the Golden Age of mystery stories, and the year of publication of The Big Sleep, anyone’s go-to rowdier novel.

Michael Gilbert himself, and Close Quarters in particular, belong to neither the “cosy crime” nor the “hard-boiled” camp. The ecclesiastical setting might make today’s reader expect tweeness – but Gilbert, in his first novel, promptly shares a wryness and droll cynicism. During a car chase, we find a driver has “swung his machine across the bows of a blaspheming Rolls-Royce”; in a misguided attempt at deduction our hero, Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, wonders whether the entire surviving cathedral staff …

… collaborated in murdering the poor old man, having first taken care to provide themselves with carefully interlocking alibis – like a silly novel I once read.

Gilbert’s idiosyncratic style is no surprise, since he was not a full-time writer. A solicitor, he worked at Lincoln’s Inn and enjoyed writing amid the “hustle and bustle” of his commute. He aimed for 500 words a day on the train, devoting the rest of his working day to law (including Raymond Chandler’s will) and evenings and weekends to his family. What an excellent way to do it.

Our next book

Suggestions for future book club reading are very welcome. In the meantime, our next tale is Patrick Hamilton’s Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse.

Other puzzling books

• Missing clues in PG Wodehouse’s Something Fishy …

• … Wodehouse in general, including The Truth about George …

• … and Ben Schott’s Wodehouse revival

• Fun, a graphic novel about crosswords

• Curtain, AKA “Poirot’s last case”

• David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin and more

• Cain’s Jawbone, where you have to work out which order the pages go in

• Genuinely funny legal comedy Uncommon Law

• Have His Carcase and The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will by Dorothy L Sayers

• Alan Plater’s mystery Oliver’s Travels

• Crossword Ends in Violence (5), James Cary’s D-day novel

• The Moment Before Drowning, a crime novel by the setter Picaroon

• Len Deighton’s thriller Horse Under Water

• Nick Hornby’s drama State of the Union

• The 12 Quizzes of Christmas by Frank Paul

• Nonfiction grab bag The Puzzler

• Novel-as-crossword Landscape Painted with Tea

• Marc Breman’s Crossword Chronicles

• and much of Morse

Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com

The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop

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Crossword book club: Michael Gilbert’s Close Quarters - The Guardian
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