Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it – the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around – and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds – a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!” with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he revelled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them. Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it. But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired.

Richard Yates never wrote anything as fine as Gatsby, but then again, he was more consistent than Scott-Fitzgerald, and in several of his novels and stories he came within a whisker of eclipsing America’s finest exponent of modernist fiction. His subject was always the American Dream and its casualties, the continuing inability of his twentieth century characters to truly live together.

Revolutionary Road is recognised as one of the greatest novels of urban America. The Easter Parade, which chronicles the lives of two sisters searching for happiness in different pockets of the ‘dream’ is always touching, subtle and poignant, brave and beautiful and true. In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates gives us exactly that, eleven stories, each of them dealing with the loneliness of an individual. The self-destructive Vincent Sabella, who had spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage. Sergeant Reece, the tyrannical Tennessean soldier who insists on doing his job. And Bob Prentice, the mediocre writer who sees himself as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott-Fitzgerald, but who in reality is not much good at anything. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is not Dubliners, but each of the stories is a gem, giving us insight into the emptiness of our own lives and people close to us and those we love. Richard Yates spares us nothing. He is a brave and truthful writer and in order to stay with him as a reader, you have to be prepared for the worst.

‘You must take the word “reactionary” literally these days. A reactionary is a citizen who reacts when the age-long standards of the South are threatened. When States’ rights are trampled on by the Federal Government, then the Southern patriot is duty-bound to react. Otherwise the noble standards of the South will be betrayed.’

‘What noble standards?’ Jester asked.

‘Why boy, use your head. The noble standards of our way of life, the traditional institutions of the South.’

Jester did not say anything but his eyes were sceptical and the old Judge, sensitive to all his grandson’s reactions, noticed this.

‘The Federal Government is trying to question the legality of the Democratic Primary so that the whole balance of Southern civilization will be jeopardized.’

Jester asked, ‘How?’

‘Why, boy, I’m referring to segregation itself.’

‘Why are you always harping on segregation?’

‘Why, Jester, you’re joking.’

Jester was suddenly serious. ‘No, I’m not.’

The Judge was baffled. ‘The time may come in your generation – I hope I won’t be here – when the educational system itself is mixed – with no colour line. How would you like that?’

Jester did not answer.

‘How would you like to see a hulking Nigra boy sharing a desk with a delicate little white girl?’
The Judge could not believe in the possibility of this; he wanted to shock Jester to the gravity of the situation. His eyes challenged his grandson to react in the spirit of Southern gentlemen.

‘How about a hulking white girl sharing a desk with a delicate little Negro boy?’

‘What?’

Jester did not repeat his words, nor did the old Judge want to hear again the words that so alarmed him. It was as though his grandson had committed some act of incipient lunacy, and it is fearful to acknowledge the approach of madness in a beloved. It is so fearful that the old Judge preferred to distrust his own hearing, although the sound of Jester’s voice still throbbed against his eardrums. He tried to twist the words to his own reason.

‘You’re right, Lambones, whenever I read such communist ideas I realize how unthinkable the notions are. Certain things are just too preposterous to consider.’

The novel was first published in 1961 and, like McCullers’ previous work, is concerned with man’s spiritual isolation, his loneliness. But it is set in a small Georgian town at a time when the struggles of the civil rights movement were coming to fruition, and when the old south is stubornly refusing to believe that an ancient and cherished lifestyle is fated to end for ever.

Part of the narrative is seen through the eyes of JT Malone, a local pharmacist who is dying of leukemia. We watch him in denial of his disease, he changes doctors and refuses to face the reality, and eventually spends much of his time with the old Judge who tells him what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, the Judge has hired a young black man as his amanuensis, an engaging and intelligent youth, to help him fight the Federal government and gain reparations for the South.

McCullers, of course, is reminiscent of Faulkner, and her landscapes are drenched in memory and longing, but Clock Without Hands made me think more of Tennessee Williams in its depiction of how past traumatic and familial events often lead to grotesque results in seemingly normal citizens.

McCullers hand, however, seems to have less compassion than her contemporaries as she observes her characters’ inability to fully live their lives and an awareness of love which is riddled with flaws. Clock Without Hands is a thoughtful and poetic novel of race, class, and justice.

I’ll be with Andrew Duggan who will also read from his novel, Scars Beneath the Skin.

We shall also sign books and be available for questions.

Finally got around to reading Winged with Death. Took it to the south coast with me, read it there, overlooking the Romney Marsh and the Channel. Peaceful place. Quintessentially English, steeped with ghosts in mist, the Kentish Downs shrouded in tall trees, a bleak damp depth of history about all that flatland before the sea comes paddling in onto the scalloped shores. Could’ve been any time in the last hundred years really. A slowness of time there, adrift.

So I’d been wondering about the new novel, the change in direction (if it is a change; I’m not so sure; more a natural progression from where you’ve been before). How would your characteristic voice translate into a non-crime scenario? Would the voice hold up, be an entity of its own, or would the habitual John Baker-isms from the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis books slip in, feel like wry intruders smirking as they wandered through an unfamiliar landscape?

What can I say? The voice held, the truths and lies of the narrator were there on the page. (Maybe one or two John Baker-ism’s did slip in, but I think they were few and very far between, and quite possibly as much my manufacture from reading your blog as they were yours.)

But the prose is almost uniformly a dream, and I loved it.

I think Winged with Death is an achingly good book. At times simply beautiful. The descriptions and ruminations on the passage of time chocked me with emotion. There’s a sense of depth there, a real sense of deep and leviathan-like mystery – but not the mystery of the crime novel; more the true dictionary definition, of vast questions, relating to who we are, and what we are, and all those other things we hurt our heads and strain our hearts with.

Before I’d started the book, I’d been expecting the theme to be of motion, but of course time’s impossible to disentangle from the dance of movement. It all tied in so wonderfully well with the central metaphor of the tango, a dance like so many others I’d only known performed by folk with painted shark grins and eyes dazzling like splintered marbles on COME DANCING. The sense of leading a dance and being led in one was a wonderful metaphor for the whole of the book. It’s a fleet narrative, the steps falling into place seemingly effortlessly; and the descriptions of the dance moves, all so wonderful — at times I’d to read them twice, forcing myself away from the narrative, just so I could enjoy the felicity and economy in the writing.

There’s far too much in this deceptively shy little book to go into here. But I was especially struck by the narrator’s commentary about home being somewhere out there in the world, that learning the world is your home is a part of the human experience and an aspect of growing up we come to learn. It chimes with my own rather less well-formed thoughts on a similar subject. I’ve always thought we’re refugees of our childhood (and I think that’s true of artists and creatives especially), but now, having read Raymond’s thoughts, I’m wondering if that’s me looking at the same notion from a different angle. With a bit more thinking on my part, maybe I’d probably have come to his conclusions. I hope so, I think. I’m still pondering what it might mean.

I’ll stop here. There’s only so many compliments a guy can pass to another guy without it becoming embarrassing. And it’d be churlish to start looking for bugs in the book to swat your way in the interest of balance. Screw that. You’ve a real talent, John. I’m deeply envious. Please continue to use it.

Thanks for the read.