Jonathan Gash

• Born: September 30, 1933
• Place of Birth: Bolton, Lancashire, England

TYPE OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Lovejoy, 1977-; Dr. Clare Burtonall, 1997-

Contribution

Jonathan Gash’s popularity as a writer of detective fiction rests primarily with the series of novels featuring the antique dealer Lovejoy. Plots for the Lovejoy novels usually center on deception, fakery, theft, and murder in the antique trade, but the particular appeal of the series lies in the charm of their narrator, Lovejoy, and his mine of information about antiques from every period and country. Moreover, he is always willing to interrupt the thread of his narrative to offer a brief lecture on antique dueling pistols, Elizabethan flea-and-louse boxes, or how to recognize a genuine antique chair owned by the poet William Wordsworth. He is also informative about creating antique forgeries, probably because he has created many. Lovejoy delivers all this information with an appealing combination of technical terminology and dealers’ slang.

Lovejoy’s attitude toward the wheeling and dealing of the antique world is cheerfully amoral, as is his attitude toward the numerous women who find their way to his bed during the series. Flippant, cynical, cowardly, defensive, and always in need of money, Lovejoy, the complete antihero, is willing to do almost anything to possess a valuable antique, provided it sets off the bell in his midsection that is triggered by finding a genuine article. Nevertheless, he is fond of birds and children. The popularity of his novels led to the creation of a British television series during the 1980s and early 1990s, but television tamed the Lovejoy character and diluted his gamey vigor. Over his career, he published over seventy books under the names John Grant, Jonathan Gash, and Graham Gaunt.

Biography

Jonathan Gash was born John Grant in Bolton, Lancastershire, England, on September 30, 1933. His parents were both mill workers. In 1955, he married Pamela Richard, a nurse. He was educated at the University of London, where he received two bachelor’s degrees in 1958 and went on to the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians. He was licensed as a physician, became a member of the International College of Surgeons, and did further specialized study in pathology and tropical medicine. As a medical student, Gash supported himself by working in several of London’s antique markets, where he learned a great deal about antiques, including how to tell the forgeries from genuine articles. This knowledge became the core of the Lovejoy mysteries. Meanwhile, Gash’s medical career flourished; he practiced medicine and pathology in London from 1958 to 1962 and clinical pathology in Germany from 1962 to 1965. After three years in the British army’s medical corps, he moved to Hong Kong, where he headed the clinical pathology department at Queen Mary Hospital and taught on the medical faculty for the University of Hong Kong. He came to love the city and schooled himself in Chinese language and art—interests that crop up periodically in his detective fiction (each of the Lovejoy novels is dedicated to a Chinese god or ancient such as the god Wei Tuo, who protects “books against fire, pillaging, decay, and dishonest borrowers” according to Gash’s dedication in The Judas Pair, 1977).

Gash began writing the Lovejoy novels to find some relief from his medical career, writing by hand on a commuter train as he traveled to and from work. His first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair, won the John Creasey Award for a first crime novel from the Crime Writers’ Association. By the late 1980s, the series was so popular that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) offered him a contract to allow the network to use the Lovejoy novels as the basis for a television series. Busy with the demands of medicine, Gash signed the contract but later found himself unhappy with the television transformation of Lovejoy from the impoverished and amoral antique dealer and womanizer into a much more respectable character. Nevertheless, the series, which starred Ian McShane, was very popular and ran over eighty episodes, first on BBC and later in the United States on the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) television network.

In addition to his mystery fiction, Gash has written other works. He wrote a trilogy of novels—The Shores of Sealandings (1991), Storms at Sealandings (1992), Mehala, Lady of Sealandings (1994), Bring Flowers of the Fairest (2012), and Velvet Walks (2012)—under the name Jonathan Grant. The Year of the Woman (2004) is set in Hong Kong just before the return of the Crown Colony to the People’s Republic of China. In it, Gash indulges his love for the city and his passion for Chinese culture by using dialogues between the central character, a homeless squatter, and the ghost of her great-great-grandmother (she admits that she does not know exactly how many “greats” ago the ghost woman lived), who drills the woman on traditional Chinese beliefs and customs. Gash’s fascination with language is also shown by his essay “The Trouble with Dialect,” published in the Journal of the Lancashire Dialect Society in September 1989.

After retiring from medicine, Gash introduced the Clare Burtonall series, allowing him to consider medical issues in his fiction. This series includes The Year of the Woman (2004), Finding Davey (2005), Bad Girl Magdalene (2007), and Preddy Boy (2013). Gash lives with his wife in Colchester, Essex. He has negotiated with a British network for a new Lovejoy series, one in which he would have more control over the way Lovejoy is portrayed to capture the qualities—both positive and negative—with which he invested his most notable character.

Analysis

Although the plot may be a primary concern in most detective fiction, it is probably not the main appeal of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy novels. Like other mystery writers, Gash introduces crimes, usually crimes involving the theft or forgery of valuable antiques. Those crimes then lead to one or more murders, which are then solved by Lovejoy, often more by chance than by actual detective work. Reviewers have often noted that Gash’s plots are sometimes convoluted and even outlandish and that his solutions are less than believable. However, readers of the series are fans of the character of Lovejoy, a rogue hero given to lying, theft, forgery, and an insatiable fondness for any available women (married or not) with whom he can, in his words, “make smiles.” This antihero is always out of money and in debt, lives in squalor (often without electricity when he has been too broke to pay the light bill) and dislikes the countryside. He drives a ridiculously ancient and unreliable car (like his Austin Ruby) when he has a car and abandons his lovers whenever he must choose between romance and an antique. Lovejoy has a satiric eye for society’s shortcomings (but a complete blindness to his own faults).

With all his failings, however, Lovejoy has several very appealing qualities. One is his inerrant ability to recognize a true antique: That ability, which makes him a “divvie,” sets off a chime in his midsection whenever he is near a true example of a Chippendale chair or a piece of genuine jade or a miner’s brooch or any one of the myriad other items an antique dealer might want to own. Beyond that, Lovejoy is vastly knowledgeable about antiques and history, and he never minds interrupting his narrative to offer the reader some amusing information about dealers’ pricing codes or the ratio of fakes to genuine antiques (5:1 in East Anglia, he says) or the history of the art of enameling. Lovejoy’s information extends to the criminal world as well, and he is equally informative about how to insert a lead cylinder into a chair leg to give it weight that would suggest that it is made of rare woods or how long the smell of linseed oil will linger and give away the true age of a forged painting. The key to Lovejoy’s likability is his genuine love for the beautiful things humans can create. That is why he prefers towns to the countryside and has a deep respect for even the smallest artifacts of the past (and a contempt for the mass-produced plastics of today). It is the cause of his satiric wit, which targets the social pretensions of some of his clients. Something of that same love informs his passion for women; all of them, he says, have some element of beauty in them, even Chemise, the ugly girlfriend of his old friend Tryer, who runs a mobile sex museum. Lovejoy also likes babies and faithfully feeds the birds around his cottage. If Lovejoy is violent, he is also very funny.

Lovejoy’s contradictory qualities cement each novel in the series. Gash also offers his readers an array of other characters, such as Tinker Dill, Lovejoy’s scout who finds antiques for him. Perpetually unwashed and ragged, motivated only by his desire for a pound or two to spend on beer, Dill makes Lovejoy look almost respectable. Other notable characters appear in the ranks of antique dealers, including the gay couple Cyril and Keyveen (“our town’s most flamboyant flamers”), the former dressed like a cross between a drum major and a Hussar, and Three-Wheel Archie, who deals in engines and watches and rides a tricycle. Typical of Lovejoy is that he generally accepts others’ foibles as long as they do not damage the antiques.

The Judas Pair

Gash’s first Lovejoy novel, The Judas Pair (1977), begins when Lovejoy’s lovemaking is interrupted by a phone call from Tinker Dill. Responding to his suspicion that some lucrative deal is in the offing, Lovejoy pushes his current girlfriend, Shiela, into the bathroom (in later novels, he is a bit more gentle with women) and listens to Tinker’s story about a buyer for some flintlock dueling pistols. When Lovejoy releases Shiela from the bath, he is puzzled at her anger at being thrown over for a buyer: “Women can be very insensitive to the real problems of existence,” he says. The customer wants Lovejoy to find a special pair of pistols, the thirteenth pair that may (or may not) have been made by the famous eighteenth-century pistol maker Durs Egg. Lovejoy tells the reader about this after several pages of amusing background on the history of such weapons. From there on, he focuses on his search, during which Shiela is murdered. As he continues to search for the pistols as well as to find a way to avenge Shiela’s death, Lovejoy is nearly a victim himself, caught in his own burning cottage. However, in the end, he solves the several crimes his search has uncovered, and both find the pistols and manage to steal them for himself.

The Grail Tree

The Grail Tree (1979), the third Lovejoy mystery, begins with Lovejoy’s noting that “Antiques, women and survival are my only interests. It sounds simple, but you just try putting them in the right order.” Like The Judas Pair, it opens with Lovejoy’s lovemaking, this time, in a tent at a village fair, being interrupted by Tinker Dill, who thinks he has found an antique sword. Following the trail of the sword leads Lovejoy to the Reverend Henry Swan, who believes he has the Holy Grail in his possession. Though Lovejoy has doubts, he likes the older man, and when Henry is murdered, Lovejoy is once again thrust into the investigation, this time with an assistant in training. As in the first novel, he works by luck and intuition and, in the end, is caught in serious violence from which he manages to escape as he begins an affair with his assistant, who has phoned her mother to reassure her with a lie about going to the Channel Isles. Lovejoy summarizes: “You can’t beat a woman for trickery. I don’t think they’ll ever learn to be honest and fair-minded, like me.”

Lovejoy’s best investigations occur in his East Anglia and London, the sources of his lively slang and powerful sense of place. When he ventures to the United States, some of his vigor seems to evaporate, but at home, where he can mock the airs of would-be aristocrats and the errors of know-nothing dealers (and buyers), his divvie’s bell seems to chime out of his own heart—his passion for passion, whether it creates love affairs or art.

Principal Series Characters:

• Lovejoy (his full name is never given) is an antiques dealer in East Anglia who divides his time unequally between his love for antiques of all descriptions and his love of women. Lovejoy has an unerring ability to recognize genuine antiques; nevertheless, he is usually broke. His charm lies in his fund of knowledge about the artifacts of history, his blithe amorality in matters of antique dealing and romance, and his quick wit.
• Dr. Clare Burtonall is the investigator in a darker, more hard-boiled series that deals with medical themes and urban settings. She is a physician who joins forces with her lover, the head of an escort agency, to investigate crime.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Connie. Review of Ten Word Game, by Jonathan Gash. Booklist 100, no. 8 (15 Dec. 2003): 729.

Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Herbert, Rosemary. The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994.

Hubin, Allen J. “Patterns in Mystery Fiction: The Durable Series Character.” In The Mystery Story, edited by John Ball. Del Mar, Calif.: Publisher’s, 1976.

"Jonathan Gash." IMDB, www.imdb.com/name/nm1006263. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Oleksin, Susan. A Reader’s Guide to the Classic British Mystery. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.

Ott, Bill. Review of A Rag, A Bone, and a Hank of Hair, by Jonathan Gash. Booklist 96, no. 12 (15 Feb. 15, 2000): 1088.

Winks, Robin W., ed. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.