The Wycliffe Companion

Letters from the Sixties

October 1969

WJB from/to B A Pike

London SE14

27.10.69

Dear Mr Burley

After your first and second novels, I looked forward immensely to your third. But 'Death in Willow Pattern1 is ruined for me by the prevalent absence of verbs - what was a minor stylistic irritation in Three-toed Pussy1 has become an engulfing blight in the new book. Please, Mr Burley, write proper sentences all through the next one. The sort of crime writer you are doesn't grow on trees and we can't afford to let you lose yourself in wilful eccentricity. (Kenneth Giles has gone increasingly to pieces because of stylistic idiosyncrasy - I'd hate you to go the same way.)

Yours truly

B. A. Pike

St Patrick's, Hoiywell Newquay, Cornwall.

17th November 1969

Dear Mr Pike

Thank you for your letter and for your helpful criticism. I appreciate and to some extent share your point of view. You may have noticed that it is also shared by Edmund Crispin in the Sunday Times, though not by other critics who speak of 'updating the detective novel'. That is the key to it. Most younger readers look for a more cryptic style and one has to try to give it them or not have them as readers. In Death in Willow Pattern I set out to give them what I believed they wanted and the result was that Gollancz obtained for me my first American contract while the book was in proof. It was an experiment and it worked.

My next book, now in the hands of the publishers, makes much less use of this technique and I shall be interested to hear your opinion of it when it is published next summer. In the book I am writing at the moment I am - with your comments very much in mind - trying to cut it out altogether but we shall see!

This is a purely commercial defence but on aesthetic grounds I think that there is much to be said for trying to communicate with fewer words. That, after all, is the aim of poetry - not that I am suggesting the wholesale massace of verbs! But if the same ideas and emotions can be conveyed I do not think that gammaticar coventions alone should stop a writer from experimenting.

This last paragaph sounds terribly pompous, as though I am claiming literary merit for pandering to immature tastes! That is not what I intended.

With kindest regards and thanks,

Yours sincerely

W J Burley