Andrew Garve

• Born: February 12, 1908
• Birthplace: Leicester, England
• Died: January 8, 2001
• Place of death: Surrey, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted; espionage; psychological; thriller

Principal Series: Inspector James, 1948-1951; Hugh Curtis, 1958-1961

Contribution

In a long career, Andrew Garve produced more than forty books of mystery, detection, thrills, and romance. Difficult to categorize under one heading, he was known not only for his productivity but also for the variety of his themes and settings and his ingenious plots. It has been suggested that he never wrote the same book twice, and although he repeated some of his characters, he never developed the series pattern carried out by many of his fellow writers in this genre. Each of his stories appears to have developed naturally out of its context and the personalities of its characters.

Although Garve uses police characters involved in classic tales of detection, more frequently his hero is a dedicated amateur. The reader identifies with these likable protagonists, sharing in their initial bafflement and participating in their solution of the mystery. A number of Garve’s novels were adapted for radio or television, both in the United States and Great Britain, and two were the basis for popular films. Garve died in January, 2001, in Surrey, England.

Biography

Andrew Garve was born Paul Winterton in Leicester, England, on February 12, 1908. His father was a journalist and, for a time, a member of Parliament. Winterton was educated in a number of schools, including Purley County School in Surrey, before going to the London School of Economics. In 1928, he received a bachelor of science degree in political science and economics; soon after, he joined the staff of The Economist. After several years, he moved to the News Chronicle, a London daily. For thirteen years he served as reporter, editorial writer, and foreign correspondent, spending the years 1942-1945 in Moscow.

Winterton had first visited Russia following his graduation, spending the winter of 1928-1929 there. He recounted this experience in his first book, A Student in Russia (1931). Later, having been an eyewitness on the Soviet front during World War II, he wrote Report on Russia (1945) and Inquest on an Ally (1948), the latter a discussion of Soviet foreign policy. His book Mending Minds: The Truth About Our Mental Hospitals (1938) dealt with mental hospitals in England.

In 1938, Winterton wrote his first mystery story, Death Beneath Jerusalem, under the pseudonym Roger Bax. Well received, it launched his career as a writer of crime and mystery fiction. He found a ready public for his efforts in this field, and after the late 1940’s he wrote only fiction. He first used the pseudonym Andrew Garve, under which most of his novels have been published, in 1950.

Analysis

The distinguishing mark of Andrew Garve’s fiction is its variety. Some of his novels are tales of high adventure with no crime and no real detection. Some are inverted mysteries, told in the first person by a narrator who turns out to be the criminal. Many involve police officers, but not all of these are police procedurals strictly speaking. While many of Garve’s novels are not classic mysteries, he proved himself quite adept at the genre. Frame-Up (1964), for example, which concerns an artist’s murder and the work of the police in unraveling the crime, is a pure representative of the classic detective story, and has been praised by a number of critics as a flawless specimen of the grand old form. Most of his novels, however, include elements of several plot types, woven together in masterful fashion. With the exception of the short-lived Inspector James and Hugh Curtis series, each of his books stands alone, and even in the three Curtis books there is little carryover beyond the identity of the protagonist.

The settings of Garve’s novels are quite as varied as his forms, ranging from London and provincial England to Russia, the Scilly Isles, Africa, Australia, France, the Baltic Sea, the West Indies, Palestine, and the Gulf of Finland. Some of these areas are well known to him through his travels, while in other cases he has relied at least in part on research. Whatever their source, his descriptions are always persuasive and evocative.

In addition to descriptions of exotic locales, Garve’s novels often feature informative disquisitions on nautical lore, mountaineering, archaeology, finance, and other favorite topics. Garve is particularly fond of and knowledgeable about the sea, and many of his books reflect that lifelong attachment. In The Sea Monks (1963), vicious young thugs invade a lighthouse and are pitted against its keepers while a hurricane rages outside. A Hero for Leanda (1959) affords greater opportunity for the author to display his knowledge of sailing, with the introduction of a central character who wins his lady by virtue of his navigational expertise. Inland rivers and canals in England also provide settings for Garve novels. The Narrow Search (1957) is the story of a father who kidnaps his daughter from his estranged wife and the new man she has found. The couple’s search through the waterways for the missing child is compellingly told, with the drama of the narrative complemented by the unusual setting.

The Riddle of Samson

Despite the variety of his settings and types of plot, Garve’s fiction is strongly formulaic. His novel The Riddle of Samson (1954) provides an excellent introduction to his work; it is typical not only of Garve’s novels but also of the mystery and detective genre as a whole in its reliance on prefabricated materials.

Like many mystery novels, The Riddle of Samson offers readers a literary allusion in its title. Samson is one of the Scilly Isles, where the story is set; the “riddle” is the mystery to be solved in the course of the novel. Yet the title also alludes to the biblical Samson, who posed the Philistines a riddle so difficult that they could solve it only by coercing his new bride to pry the answer from him. In one sense, the allusion is pointless—as it turns out, there is no connection between the biblical story and the plot of the novel—but it nevertheless serves a function: The mystery novel is a kind of game, and part of the game is the contriving of allusive titles. The reader is immediately on familiar ground.

With his opening sentence Garve sets the tone of his tale: “The day I crossed to Scilly the islanders had just learned that for the first time in their history they were going to have to pay income tax.” This is a textbook example of an effective narrative hook: The action is under way, the setting is established, and the reader’s curiosity is aroused. The lightly humorous tone suggests that, while the narrative that follows may include crime and violent death, the overall mood of the book will not be somber.

By the second paragraph of the novel, Garve’s first-person narrator has acquired an easy familiarity with the reader: “In case you don’t know the Isles of Scilly—the ’Fortunate Isles,’ as the guidebooks like to call them—they’re a cluster of five inhabited islands . . .” What follows is virtually a guidebook summary—location, population, climate, principal products—supplemented a few pages later by a map. Not every reader finds such mini-lectures to his taste, but Garve is only one of many mystery writers who lightly flavor their books with information about all manner of things.

More such information is dispensed as the character of the narrator and protagonist is sketched. He is John Lavery, a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor and university lecturer with a passionate interest in archaeology. As the story begins, he is coming to the Scillies on vacation to do some digging on Samson; a friend is scheduled to join him. While working on Samson he becomes acquainted with a beautiful young woman, Olivia Kendrick, whom he had noticed earlier in the company of her husband, Ronnie, an obnoxious, alcoholic journalist some years older than she. Missing the boat back to the main island, Olivia spends a (chaste) night with John in his tent on Samson. Learning of this, the jealous Ronnie later confronts Olivia and John near a cliff’s edge. In a drunken rage, Ronnie strikes John, then staggers and falls to the waves and rocks below—apparently to his death, though his body cannot be found.

The question of what happened to Ronnie is the central “riddle” of Samson, though a secondary mystery is introduced later in the narrative. The police inspector who comes to the island speculates that John and Olivia conspired in the murder of Ronnie. John’s friend George, when he arrives, makes a forceful case that Olivia and Ronnie were in league in a scheme to collect on a large insurance policy that he had recently taken out. John must free himself from suspicion; at the same time, he recognizes that he is in love with Olivia and must struggle against George’s damning hypothesis.

As noted above, it is characteristic of Garve to combine in one novel elements of several genres or subgenres. The Riddle of Samson features some amateur detection of the classic variety—particularly in John and George’s attempt to reconstruct the “crime” through pure ratiocination. The novel also makes substantial use of the conventions of romantic fiction of a type usually associated with female writers: John’s immediate attraction to Olivia, his struggle against accepting what seems to be her guilt, their temporary estrangement and ultimate reconciliation—all this is straight from the paperback romance, with the usual gender roles reversed. In addition, The Riddle of Samson, like many of Garve’s books, includes an exciting action sequence—this one set in an underwater cave. Such passages show Garve at his most convincing; they have a plausibility that the bits of detection and romance clearly lack.

Garve himself, no doubt, would be quick to acknowledge that much in The Riddle of Samson is implausible if judged by the canons of realism, yet he might add that such criteria are irrelevant to a work that promises no more—and no less—than a deft recycling of familiar conventions.

Principal Series Character:

• Hugh Curtis , a young journalist, is the protagonist in several lighthearted novels under the Paul Somers pseudonym. In competition with a more experienced female reporter on a rival newspaper, he is engaged in some detective work, but his adventures are more noteworthy for their thrills and suspense than for the process of amassing and making deductions from clues.

Bibliography

Adrian, Jack. “Obituary: Andrew Garve.” The Independent, March 8, 2001, p. 6. Obituary of Garve notes his several pseudonyms and his leftist leanings. Describes his works as suspenseful and diverse in plot and locale.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. “Preface to No Tears for Hilda.” In A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950. New York: Garland, 1976. Preface by two preeminent scholars of mystery and detective fiction, arguing for the novel’s place in the annals of the genre.

Becker, Mary Helen. “Andrew Garve.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Compares Garve to other practitioners of the mystery genre and discusses their unique contributions.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Very useful overview of the history and parameters of the crime-fiction genre; helps place Garve’s work within that genre.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Garve’s entry in this dictionary of mystery fiction, plays, and cinema includes details of both his literary works and their adaptations to other media.