Quote of the Day (Peter Robinson, on ‘Summer Rain’)

“The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot.

“[Detective Inspector Alan] Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

“Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.”—British-Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson (1950-2022), “Summer Rain,” in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories (2004)

Looks like in my part of the Northeast, we’re in for another day or so of “summer rain.” The sky has been darkening and rumbling over the last couple of hours. I will be glad that when it’s all over, the landscape won’t resemble what Inspector Banks encounters…

This Day in Rock History (Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones in a Mysterious “Death by Misadventure”)

July 3, 1969—A midnight swim in the pool on his Sussex, England, estate might have seemed a good idea, but it ended the life of Brian Jones, whose exit from the world proved to be even more messy and controversial than his departure from the rock ‘n’ roll band he founded, The Rolling Stones.

People of impassioned political beliefs entertain all manner of conspiracy theories, most with little relation to reality. In the world of entertainment, however, the death of the 27-year-old guitarist has led to far more justified questioning of the official verdict of what happened on his last fateful night.

The case has figured in any number of TV documentaries and nonfiction accounts. It even inspired one of the plot developments in Peter Robinson’s marvelous murder mystery from a couple of years ago, A Piece of My Heart (which I reviewed here).

What has fascinated me is the official cause of death, made by coroner Angus Sommerville four days after Jones’ demise. “Death by misadventure” sounds like the title of a novel, a description of what happens to little boys when they take childhood fantasy too seriously.

Actually, the phrase is a British legal term for death by accident. In some ways, it seemed more probable than any other coming from a national legal judicial establishment that had been at pains to crack Jones, his former bandmates and their women for open and flagrant drug use.

That never-ceasing substance abuse, the coroner decided—capped on the night of Jones' death with the consumption of several liquor bottles and pills—led the singer to ignore a warning from a nurse friend that hot night that he was in no condition for a dip—and to drown before anyone could reach him.

Many observers had difficulty in accepting this verdict. The most outlandish of the conspiracy theories holds that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, each of whom had supplanted Jones as the prime forces in the band, wanted him done away with once and for all, only three weeks after they had requested his removal from the popular group because of his general unreliability in the studio.

Two of the more popular alternative theories of his death are: a) he got into some horseplay with the construction crew on his estate, Cotchford Farm, which had once belonged to his idol, Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, then died accidentally when the rowdiness got out of hand; and b) he was murdered by the head of this crew, Frank Thorogood, for falling behind on his payments.

Particularly over the last decade, the latter two theories have gained ground, because of the following press reports:

* Thorogood allegedly confessed to his role in the death shortly before his own demise in 1993—though the man to whom he confessed, a Rolling Stones chaffeur, contradicted this account.

* Just before her own death from cancer last year, the nurse friend on the property that night, Janet Lawson, recanted her testimony in an interview with a Daily Mail reporter, revealing two things she had not mentioned at the inquest: that there had already been tension between Jones and Thorogood, and that the look on the builder’s face when he returned from the pool led her to fear instantly that something terrible had happened.

* Jones’ girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, gave her view in a memoir called The Murder of Brian Jones, again tagging Thorogood as the culprit—though she admitted that she was in the kitchen at the time and did not witness the event itself.

* An account by Ernest Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner, citing anonymous sources, offered this scenario: Two members of the work crew, resenting Jones for his wealth and women, decided to have a little fun at his expense in the pool, first preventing him from getting out, then holding him under water until he accidentally drowned. (Suffering from asthma, Jones would have had an already weakened bronchial condition.)

Two days after the death, his stunned former bandmates gave a free concert dedicated in Jones’ honor at Britain’s Hyde Park.

Not all of the Stones showed up at his funeral, though: Jagger and girlfriend Marianne Faithfull were scheduled to shoot a film in location and are believed to have been threatened with legal action if they missed any days. Richards and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, had no public explanation, though their feelings about Jones were likely to have been ambivalent, given that Pallenberg had left Jones for Richards.

Reading the accounts of Jones’ passing, I was struck by the comments of the minister offering the eulogy, Canon Hugh Evan Hopkins: “He had little patience with authority, convention and tradition. In this he was typical of many of his generation who have come to see in the Stones an expression of their whole attitude to life. Much that this ancient church has stood for in 900 years seems totally irrelevant to them.”

It’s inconceivable to me that such a thing would be said today. Not only has the Anglican Church become more liberal, but the Stones themselves are no longer a threat to “authority, convention and tradition.” (Jagger, in fact, was even knighted six years ago.)

Moreover, there would probably be greater speculation about the elements in Jones’ own psychological background that led perhaps the most musically skillful member of the group, a man who could master virtually any instrument he picked up, to embark on a path of self-destruction.

In the end, the death of Brian Jones seems like a real-life counterpart to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1965 film Blow-Up, with the blond, hedonistic, swinging (five children born out of wedlock, none that he supported) Jones at the heart of an inexplicable mystery. The dark energies symbolized by his demise would echo later in the year, in the band’s fateful concert at Altamont Speedway in December.

Book Review: “Piece of My Heart,” by Peter Robinson

Piece of My Heart: A Novel of Suspense, by Peter Robinson (paperback)

Have you ever bought a book as a present for a friend, then become so fascinated by it that you decided to buy a copy for yourself? That happened with me in this instance—though, as sometimes occurs, I put it aside until I had the time and motivation to read it. Both arrived around the new year. 

 At the time, I had nothing else pressing to write, and, while contemplating what to read next, I noticed an obituary in The New York Times for Arabella Spencer-Churchill, granddaughter of the British Prime Minister, who carved out her own niche by establishing the Glastonbury rock festival in the 1970s. That reminded me of the Robinson book and its treatment of the rock music scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies, as did Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll. I picked up Robinson’s mystery with renewed interest at that point, and did not want to put it down again until I finished. 

I was surprised to discover, from Robinson’s Web site, that he hails from Canada rather than the England that forms the heart of so many of his novels. So atmospheric and textured are his tales that, I assumed, they could only have been written by someone intimate with these places—a lifelong native, actually. 

Though plot is inevitably at the heart of a mystery’s appeal, many readers of the Banks series such as myself are also quite taken with his musical tastes. Several delighted reviewers have even gone so far as to suggest that you can create a very fine iPod program through the songs he mentions during the book. 

Like Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (which, come to think of it, has one of the first fictional detectives, Inspector Bucket), this “braided narrative” intertwines two plot lines, seemingly unconnected at first, but which, we gradually learn, bear on each other. One involves a beautiful young woman found dead at a British music festival in 1969; the other, a freelance male journalist found dead 36 years later, bludgeoned to death, in the same Yorkshire region as the earlier crime. 

The detective in each case—Stanley Chadwick, a Scottish WWII vet horrified by the excesses of ‘60s youth (including his own teenage daughter), and Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Alan Banks nearly two generations later—puts together the clues, revealing his own failings as well as the facts in the investigation. 

Pulling off these constant shifts in time and plot is devilishly hard, but Robinson has created an artistically brilliant structure of such suspense that it leaves an increasing knot in the reader’s stomach. The first of his police procedurals that I’ve read, it also left me eager to read more. 

The protagonist in more than a dozen of Robinson’s novels, DCI Banks possesses his full complement of personal difficulties. (This particular installment in the series hints at prior problems involving his brother, as well as an intimate relationship with subordinate Annie Cabbot that has subsided to a bantering friendship.) 

Maybe it’s because Robinson has devoted so much attention before to Banks, or maybe because I am so interested in the 1960s background of the first murder (my childhood occurred during that decade, and like many other people those are among my most vivid memories). 

But DCI Chadwick comes across as a more compelling character than Banks—prickly and out of step with the psychedelic milieu he must investigate. The younger generation disgusts him with their pacifism and drug abuse. At best, they leave him cold; at worst, they raise his ire to the point where he can barely control it, and is even prepared to exceed the limits of his stern moral code to build a case against one of them. 

(Chadwick is very close to my age now, and while I don’t share his conservatism and rock-ribbed Presbyterianism, I’m inclined to agree with him more than I might have done at the time that ‘60s youth could be awfully self-congratulatory and smug about how they were going to change the world.) 

Part of the fun in the novel lies in its roman a clef (i.e., “novel with a key”) element—you’re continually reminded of real-life counterparts to fictional situations. The group at the heart of the Sixties mystery is the Mad Hatters, a name not only unmistakably reminiscent of one of the major literary influences of the age, Alice in Wonderland (see Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”), but also suggestive of the insanity that swept through the entertainment industry of the time and the larger world that embraced its radical experimentations in musical form and expanded consciousness. 

Other real-life elements echoed here are a mysterious death in a swimming pool (a la the still-unexplained demise of Rolling Stone Brian Jones) and the madness of one of the Hatters, a musician who will bring to mind for many readers such people as Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. (The latter is also memorably evoked in Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll). 

What makes this novel so suspenseful is Chadwick’s personal stake in the outcome. From the first, we sense that his daughter Yvonne is too close to the crime scene for his comfort—in age and looks, she almost resembles the victim—and as the plot continues, her ties to the events only strengthen. 

Like so much else in the novel, even its title has a double element. Fans of ‘60s music will recall the Janis Joplin hit of this name. However, the title also refers to a grisly piece of forensic evidence at the heart of this unusually thoughtful, compelling mystery.