Lionel Davidson

• Born: March 31, 1922
• Birthplace: Hull, Yorkshire, England
• Died: October 21, 2009
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Thriller; historical; police procedural

Contribution

Lionel Davidson’s novels are well-crafted thrillers that vary in setting, point of view, and theme. Davidson skillfully depicted scenes in London, Israel, Germany, and Prague, capturing the idiosyncratic speech in each country. His heroes, often cranky bachelors, enjoy drink and women. Although Davidson coolly poked fun at his heroes and their adventures, some of his novels also consider historical themes and social issues and are suspenseful and humorous. In The Chelsea Murders (1978), he treats the genre of the murder mystery itself with irony. In all of his novels, there is an engaging intellectual component.

Biography

On March 31, 1922, Lionel Davidson was born in Hull, Yorkshire. His father was from Poland and his mother from Russia. When he was two years old, his father died. Four years later, the family relocated to London. When he was fourteen, Davidson had to leave school to seek employment, beginning as an office boy for a shipping firm; he soon found a similar position at The Spectator. When he was fifteen, his first story appeared in that magazine. Later, he wrote for a Fleet Street agency. During World War II, Davidson joined the Royal Navy. Afterward, he became a freelance journalist in Europe. Davidson married Fay Jacobs in 1949.

The publication of Davidson’s first novel, The Night of Wenceslas (1960), was delayed for some time because of a strike. Not knowing of the delay and believing that the book was a failure, he began The Rose of Tibet, which appeared in 1962. Both books proved to be highly successful. The Night of Wenceslas was recognized as both the most promising first novel in 1960, receiving the Author’s Club Silver Quill Award, and the best crime novel of the year, winning the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. Davidson’s work was likened to that of Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis.

In 1965 Davidson published his first book for adolescents, Soldier and Me, under the pseudonym David Line. A year after its American publication, it appeared in England as Run for Your Life. His next novel, A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), published in the United States as The Menorah Men, was written partly in response to his travels in Israel. The novel, a best seller for months, received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year.

Two years later, Davidson published another novel, Making Good Again (1968), a low-key thriller, which deals with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Soon after he completed the novel, Davidson and his family moved to Israel, which was the setting of two later novels, Smith’s Gazelle (1971) and The Sun Chemist (1976). Smith’s Gazelle, lyrical and allegorical, was awarded Israel’s President’s Prize for Literature. In the early 1970’s, Davidson wrote a second book for adolescents, Mike and Me (1974).

After living in Israel for ten years, Davidson returned once again to England. The Chelsea Murders, a bloodcurdling mystery, was set in Chelsea, London. It received the Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year in 1978 and was soon followed by Under Plum Lake (1980), a fanciful children’s allegory. Davidson spent several years revising this short novel. In 1985, he completed another novel for adolescents, Screaming High. In 2001, he was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger award for life achievement. Davidson died at his home in London on October 21, 2009.

Analysis

Lionel Davidson’s fiction is characterized by its wit and ingenuity. The main characters of his thrillers and mystery novels quickly enter a world of circumstance that tests their mental and physical prowess. Many of the novels are propelled forward by, first, the perplexing mysteries and, second, the protagonists’ subsequent action-packed flight from danger. Davidson gracefully fuses an intellectually engaging mystery—which often involves some form of scholarship—with sparkling action. Davidson’s interest in scholarship is also suggested by the fact that his novels are well researched. Finally, humor and irony add another dimension to much of his fiction.

The Night of Wenceslas

The Night of Wenceslas, written from the viewpoint of a self-centered, spoiled young Englishman, Nicholas Whistler, plots his journey to a vividly described Prague and his subsequent flight from the communist secret police. Through a complicated set of circumstances, Whistler is tricked by a man into unwittingly passing or almost passing state secrets. After sleeping with a giant Czech woman with “twin luscious bombs” and being pursued by the Czech police, he manages to enter the British embassy dressed as a milk delivery person.

A Long Way to Shiloh

A Long Way to Shiloh is also written in the first person; the main character, Caspar Laing, who likes to drink, has an affair with a young Yemenite woman who is engaged to someone else. Soon after he meets Shoshana, Laing thinks to himself, “Hadn’t this girl been demonstrating some rather over-matey solidarity with me of late?” Thus Davidson conveys the young Englishman’s carefree attitude through his tone and diction.

The novel also has an engaging plot. Set in modern Israel, it considers the nation’s preoccupation with its ancient history. Laing is a renowned young scholar employed by an Israeli archaeologist to help locate an ancient menorah—to which a scroll fragment alludes—before the Jordanians find it. After following numerous faulty leads and barely escaping death at the hands of Arabs, Laing concludes that the menorah is likely to be buried in the middle of a construction site for a vast hotel. Because he fails to prevail over the developer, Laing cannot continue the search. Ironically, a council of rabbis concludes that a library should be constructed in the hotel in the exact area in question. Much of the novel is devoted to Laing’s efforts to decipher the fragment and interpret its meaning. Because he cannot pursue his final lead, the novel thereby ends somewhat inconclusively.

The Rose of Tibet

The Rose of Tibet is even more indefinite. By placing the main story within a framing plot, Davidson cleverly renders it suspect. Two stories are presented, one involving high adventure in Tibet and the other—one that is quite rarefied—recounting the story of an editor’s effort to get in touch with an author. Charles Houston, an Englishman, has supposedly written an account of his search for his brother in Tibet, his journey through the Himalayas, his affair with a priestess, his own deification by the people, and his flight from the approaching Chinese army. Because the editor is unable to contact Houston (who has been the subject of several newspaper articles), Davidson’s reader is confronted with the possibility that an elderly Latin teacher—who passed the manuscript to the editor—actually wrote the narrative himself. It may not have been, as he claims, material that was dictated to him by Houston.

The novel opens with a prologue in which Davidson himself appears as an editor of a publishing company. It closes with the editor’s failure to resolve the mystery of Houston’s whereabouts and thus the identity of the manuscript’s author. Between the opening and ending lie pages of thrilling adventure through the Himalayas. In concise prose, somewhat like Ernest Hemingway’s, Davidson describes the inexperienced Houston’s fight for survival. At one point, “he tried to eat wood and leaves. He boiled them to make a soup. The soup was bitter . . . and it merely made him vomit. He had to stop quickly, for he could not afford to waste what he had already eaten.”

The Sun Chemist

A scholar’s work preparing an edition of a famous man’s letters is the modus operandi of The Sun Chemist; Davidson weaves a story around his protagonist’s research on Chaim Weizmann’s letters. While Igor Druyanov, a historian, is editing a volume of Israel’s founder’s letters, his assistant is attacked. In addition, Druyanov soon finds that several scientific notebooks mentioned in the letters are missing. These contain the formula for a fermentation process that converts sweet potatoes into high-octane fuel. Finally, Druyanov’s knowledge of the past places him in the direct line of danger in the present, and he is almost killed by another scientist, who attempts to drown him.

As in the novels mentioned previously, Davidson combines physical adventure and intellectual intrigue. Although The Sun Chemist does not end in Davidson’s typical ambiguity, it is not without his characteristic wit. Ironically, the main clue of the novel is tied to a humorous circumstance. A significant passage in the memoirs was muddied because Weizmann’s transcriptionist misunderstood him when he dictated without his false teeth. Davidson’s well-researched plot, his humor, and his skillful characterization brought the novel almost universal praise.

The Chelsea Murders

The Chelsea Murders, a highly ingenious detective story, also received mostly favorable reviews. A group of murders takes place in Chelsea, London, the home of such famous writers as Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, W. S. Gilbert, and Hilaire Belloc; each victim has the initials of one of these authors. In addition, the murderer tantalizes the police with literary quotations. Most reviewers of the novel commented on Davidson’s inventiveness and character portrayal. Nevertheless, some responded negatively to its conclusion and the inclusion of unresolved leads. An insightful reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement observed that the novel both “acknowledges and flouts the convention of [its] genre.”

Making Good Again

Making Good Again also reveals Davidson’s perspective on mystery and adventure fiction. The central mystery and resultant action skillfully weave a fabric rich in thematic texture. The complex attitudes of postwar Germany toward Jews are presented within the context of a fast-paced plot. Once again, Davidson successfully fuses the concrete and the abstract.

As in so many of Davidson’s novels, the main character—James Raison, an English attorney—drinks heavily and has an affair. Nevertheless, through third-person narration, several other characters are fleshed out, including Heinz Haffner, a German lawyer, and another attorney, Yonah Grunwald, who is a concentration-camp survivor. Davidson considers anti-Semitism and its various manifestations along with the meaning of German reparation.

The lawyers hope to discover the fate of Helmut Bamberger—a wealthy German Jew—to determine the status of his fortune, which seems to have been placed in a numbered Swiss bank account. They assume at first that he was one of the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but later they decide that he is still alive. Raison, a calm Englishman, represents Bamberger’s daughter. Haffner, who represents the German government, wishes only to resolve the case. Grunwald, who lives in Israel, hopes to use the estate for charitable purposes. Raison, Grunwald, and an Israeli attorney eventually go to a small German town on the Czechoslovakian border hoping to find news of Bamberger. In a hideous scene in the Bavarian forest, the lawyers are doped and Grunwald is attacked; the old man barely survives.

The novel also addresses more subtle expressions of anti-Semitism. Although Haffner does not consider himself racist and his legal tasks involve providing reparations, he believes that Germany’s Jews who survived the Holocaust did so because they were devious. In addition, he detests his daughter’s Jewish boyfriend. At the end of the novel, he finally confronts some of his prejudices. Although Davidson treats the German attorney with biting irony—Haffner is both impotent and compulsive—Davidson also presents some profound questions concerning the Holocaust. For example, Haffner believes that “there’s no honor anymore. After all, obedience is a part of honor, isn’t it—loyalty? But what’s one to be obedient or loyal to? Such things happened here.” Echoing some of the issues raised by Karl Eichmann’s trial and Hannah Arendt’s book on it, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), Haffner wonders, “how can you prosecute people for crimes under the law that weren’t then crimes under the law?”

Although Making Good Again explores the philosophical and social issues raised by the Holocaust, it also includes comic relief. Haffner’s sister, Magda, who was married to a Nazi and is now widowed, recalls the Nazi period with great nostalgia. A woman of vast appetites, she tries desperately to seduce Raison. Although he keeps her at bay, he tolerates her advances because from her he may learn Bamberger’s fate. Finally, to protect himself, when Magda leaves a second-story bedroom to go down a ladder to the kitchen, Raison closes the trapdoor behind her. The half-drunk Magda smashes her head against it as she ascends the ladder. When she recovers several hours later, she still calls for the Englishman: “I know you’re there. . . . Süsser, what’s the sense in you being there and me here? . . . I want to be with someone.” Despite her pleas, Raison continues to hide in the loft; she violently cleans the house. Ironically, the sex-crazed woman knows more about Bamberger and his money than does anyone else. Her revelations to Raison about her husband’s takeover of a bank put the lawyers onto a path that may lead to the solution of the mystery of Bamberger’s estate. Thus, a scene that seems to function merely as comic relief turns out to be essential to the plot.

Irony has a central role in Making Good Again. The lawyers act against their better judgment and play right into the hands of a former Nazi. In the chapter “The Son of Man and Other Sons,” Grunwald attempts to drape a cloth over a crucifix in his hotel room so he may pray without its presence; as he does so, the cross falls and breaks. Thus, Grunwald unintentionally breaks the symbol for Christianity—the professed religion of the Nazis. Later, while he is attempting to produce some good from evil by claiming Bamberger’s fortune, he is again the victim of violent anti-Semitism.

Davidson’s mysteries and thrillers to varying degrees conform to the conventional treatment of these genres. In Davidson’s fiction, however, mystery and its myriad uncertainties symbolize the human experience, which is in his view rife with ambiguity.

Bibliography

Davidson, Lionel. “A Sudden Smile.” In Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from Friends, collected by Jack Walsdorf and Kathleen Symons. Council Bluffs, Iowa: Yellow Barn Press, 1996. Davidson’s homage to his fellow mystery writer reveals his own investments in the craft of fiction.

James, Michael. “A Writer After a Good Hiding: Lionel Davidson.” The Times, March 12, 1994. Describes Davidson’s background and notes his successful The Night of Wenceslas as bringing gritty new realism to the thriller. His sixteen-year absence from writing ended with the publication of Kolymsky Heights. Davidson said he started two other books during his hiatus but abandoned them because he felt they were not good enough.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Critical study consisting of fifteen overview essays devoted to specific genres or periods within crime fiction. Contains a chapter on thrillers, which sheds light on Davidson’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains chapters on police procedurals and crime thrillers, which help place Davidson’s work in context.