Sat 27 Feb 2010
A Review by Ray O’Leary: ANDREW GARVE – A Hole in the Ground.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[13] Comments
ANDREW GARVE – A Hole in the Ground. Dell, paperback reprint D275, 1959; Great Mystery Library #21. UK edition: Collins Crime club, hardcover, 1952. US First Edition: Harper & Brothers, 1952. Also: Pan #343, UK, pb, 1955; Lancer 72-730, US, pb, 1964.
I’d read quite a few of Andrew Garve’s novels, but I never heard of this one until I came across it on a sidewalk table at Barnes and Noble’s.
Laurence Quilter is the Labour Party Member of Parliament for the area around the town of Blean in West Cumbria. He has a wealthy background and a wife named Jane. They have recently donated his family’s large house to the National trust and moved into a cottage on the estate and he is up for re-election. He is bitterly disappointed that he has never been given a position in the ruling Labour Party’s government.
While looking through some old papers from his donated house, he comes across a crude map made by his great grandfather nearly a century before. It seems to indicate that somewhere on his land is the entrance to a large cave his ancestor discovered but didn’t make public.
While his wife is away visiting friends, he discovers the entrance to the cave and decides to contact a young School Master/ spelunker he knows named Peter Antsley. They explore the cave and find an underground river some 200+ feet below ground reached by going down rope ladders.
On their second trip, Quilter takes a nap while Antsley does some exploring on his own. Outside, a storm rages which causes the underground river to flood and when Antsley’s foot gets caught and he calls for help, Quilter is too afraid to help him and Antsley drowns.
Quilter decides to cover up his cowardice and tell no one. He takes his wife on vacation to France but when there is a mining accident in his district, he returns home leaving her. While in France they had meet Ben Traill, an American geologist who works for an oil company.
With Quilter in England, Jane and Ben spend so much time together that they fall in love. Finally, Jane decides to go home to confront her husband and from there, during the last 30 pages or so, the story takes a turn into left field.
You might think that Quilter has been spending his time further covering up Antsley’s death, even though the dead man’s wallet has been found and the police know that Antsley had been in touch with Quilter shortly before he disappeared, but that isn’t the case at all.
Let’s just say there’s an unnamed reference to a well-known British spy case that first hit the headlines circa 1950 and, though Garve didn’t know it at the time, the case would return two more times to the headlines in the ensuing decades.
I don’t know if Garve wrote himself into a corner and came up with this lollapoloosa of an ending to get out or what. All I know is that this is the poorest book by Garve I’ve read. Fortunately, he went on to write much better stuff.
February 27th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Back in 1959, Dell’s Great Mystery series was the best thing in books, as far as I was concerned. I grabbed them up from the spinner rack at the downtown drugstore as soon as they came out.
I remember this one well, and if you’d asked me before I read Ray’s review, I would have told you that I’d read it.
Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Nothing in Ray’s description rang a bell. Not a single twist of the plot fits anything I remember, which now that I’ve put myself on the spot, isn’t very much at all.
Ray, since it sounds as though you’ve read Garve fairly extensively, and I haven’t, is it true that every book he wrote is different from all the others? My general impression about him is that when you start to read one of his books, you don’t know ahead of time what you’re going to get.
And so far as I know, he never had any recurring series characters. He had to build his reputation, which was rather high at the time, the old-fashioned way, one good book at a time.
— Steve
February 27th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Some themes reoccur in Garve’s Paul Winnerton) books, and he often draws on his time as a journalist in the Soviet Union, and small boat sailing figures in many books, but his books do have a great deal of variety, and considering how cinematic they are it’s surprising more weren’t filmed.
Several of his protagonists are reporters like he had been, and he often writes from the point of view of a rogue or even villain. Several of his books were humorous and deal with a caper or as in THE MEGSTONE PLOT a clever con. Echoing his experience as a journalist his stories often exploit the headlines — THE MEGSTONE PLOT inspired by the disappearance of Victoria Cross winning diver Cmdr. Lionel Crabb.
Here Ray leaves out that Laurence Quilter isn’t just a Labour Party MP, but a loony Red who plans to use the cave to blow up a nearby nuclear reactor — the reason he covers up the death. That may be the ‘lollapaloosa of an ending’ Ray mentions, but I didn’t get the feeling that Garve had written himself into a corner, though the surprise may come from left field a bit. I really don’t think that’s a spoiler, but if so I apologize — this isn’t a detective story anyway, but a thriller.
I liked this one better than Ray, but agree with many of his criticisms still. Garve did much better. In fact he is one of the most consistent suspense/adventure/thriller writers of his time and well worth re-discovering.
Anyone interested in Garve should look up these:
TWO IF BY SEA, THE MEGSTONE PLOT, NO TEARS FOR HILDA, THE FAR SANDS, MURDER IN MOSCOW, THE RIDDLE OF SAMSON, THE SEA MONKS, THE LONG SHORT CUT, THE ASHES OF LODA, HIDE AND GO SEEK, and THE CUCKOO LINE AFFAIR.
Steve
Garve had two series characters, both under his other pseudonyms.
As Roger Bax he wrote two books featuring Inspector James, and three as Paul Somers with Hugh Curtis,
Quick Filmography:
TWO IF BY SEA (as NEVER LET ME GO with Clark Gable, Gene Tierney, and Richard Hadyn)
THE MEGSTONE PLOT (as A TOUCH OF LARCENY with James Mason, Vera Miles, and George Sanders)
DEATH AND THE SKY ABOVE (as TWO LETTER ALIBI)
BEGINNERS LUCK (THE DESPERATE MAN)
February 27th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Paul Winterton had been very pro-Soviet before WW2, then became extremely disillusioned with Stalin during the war. That disillusionment is certainly apparent in books like A Hole in the Ground.
I thought the cave material was extremely interesting and atmospheric (I read this book about the time the film The Descent was out), but also that the treatment of the villain got rather heavyhanded. Among his anti-left books I much preferred Murder in Moscow. It’s also more of a traditional detective novel, while the author tended to opt for the thriller form in his books.
I might add to the exhaustive list above Disposing of Henry, a hard-hitting inverted tale written under the Roger Bax pseudonym.
Steve, it must have been fun to buy those paperbacks as far back as the 1950s. My earliest mystery paperback memories are of getting my mother to buy Pocket Agatha Christies in a Sanborn’s department store in Mexicio City in 1974.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
I didn’t want to put in my review anything about blowing up a nuclear facility since the whole novel had centered on his covering up an act of cowardice. The spy case reference is to the defections of Burgess and MacLean about the time this novel was written. The later headlines I referred to were about Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.
February 28th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Ray, did you find convincing the way the character spiraled into all that? I know this is a thriller, but it kind of seemed over-the-top to me! Also, it was interesting how the American was portrayed, I thought.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
It’s always difficult to know what to put into a review, and what you should leave out, and especially so for a detective mystery, but even for crime and suspense thrillers.
Ray, I think you were right in not going into detail about A HOLE IN THE GROUND the way you did, for example, but isn’t it frustrating to talk about the merits of a book when you can’t talk about the ending?
That’s why, David, I certainly had no objection to you explaining what it was that Ray left out, and doing so in the comments is a good way to do it.
The story makes more sense now, and I personally have a far better picture of it than I did before, now that both David and Ray have hashed over some of the details.
On the other hand, I have a feeling that I’m also a little less likely to read the book, if by chance my copy of the old Dell paperback finds itself in my hands again. Too much detail can spoil the broth, as my aunt the cook is prone to say.
— Steve
February 28th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Steve
As you said, it was probably wise of Ray to leave the detail out, but I thought anyone interested enough to read the comments might want a fuller explanation. And in this case it isn’t like the reader could have figured it out fair play style. As Ray suggests it comes a bit out of left field, though I think Garve intended it from the beginning rather than writing himself into a corner as Ray suggests. I tend to think of a spoiler as something the reader had half a chance to figure out on his own.
What should be mentioned though is generally Garve is a very readable author whether he is on top of his game or not. And Barzun and Taylor were fairly complimentary about this one in CATALOUGE OF CRIME, though they note it is a thriller and not a detective story.
Although the Philby case was still ahead, Garve likely knew that there was a third man in the Burgess and MacLean case, and was implying it was Quilter. It was a fairly open secret that an ex journalist like Garve would likely have known. Ian Fleming even predicted someone like Philby in one of the Bond novels based on the paranoia after the Burgess and MacLean defections.
The third man was speculated on throughout the fifties, and even much later when Anthony Blunt was revealed as the fourth man it had long been suggested that such a figure existed and was a fairly important person — though most spy writers would have hesitated to make him curator of the Royal art collection. Many of the spy scandals of that era were played out in the headlines of the British press as much as they did in the corridors of power. All four were recruited by Yuri Andropov who later became head of the Soviet Union and mentor of Gorbachev.
As I said above Garve wasn’t averse to calling on the headlines for background, using the Crabb affair for the background of THE MEGSTONE PLOT and George Blake’s escape in another.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Curt, that was my point. The last 30 pages or so was just too unexpected for me. There was no hint that the story would tke the turn it did. As for the American’s portrayal, what it called to mind to me may be a little off the beaten track but there’s a scene in the Billy Wilder comedy SABRINA wherein Humphrey Bogart gives a little speech in defense of Capitalism and I found some of what the American said similar to what Bogart said in the film.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Ray, yeah, I thought the same thing. And that’s a great point about Sabrina. I think that sort of character was very much a product of the 1950s, hard to see that today (he’d definitely be the villain)!
November 23rd, 2010 at 8:58 pm
[…] A Hole in the Ground (reviewed by Ray O’Leary) A Touch of Larceny, a film based on The Megstone Plot (reviewed by David L. Vineyard) […]
March 7th, 2011 at 6:07 am
re Ray OLeary’s review of A HOLE IN THE GROUND
Ray, my Dad put me onto Garve in the 60s, and I now have all of his books, bar RED ESCAPADE. (which i presume is a
thriller set in Russia). I’ve never seen it for sale in nearly 10 years of seaching.
For me his worst book by a mile is A GRAVE CASE OF MURDER, where there seems to be no action at all !
His plots really are most original, and he often uses his obvious knowledge of the Fens, potholing (spelunking), sailing, and mountaineering in his stories.
November 19th, 2012 at 6:15 am
Paul Winterton’s disillusionment with Stalin’s Russia must go back to at least 1940. I have just been reading RED ESCAPADE, published as by Roger Bax in that year. The plot is an early variant of CAME THE DAWN (TWO IF BY SEA), with one stretch that he re-worked in ASHES OF LODA. But much of the book is a set of political arguments in which a naive British communist has his rose-tinted spectacles removed.
April 4th, 2013 at 7:51 pm
I am a great fan of Garve and have read all of his books, most many times.
One of the best of his genre: