–The New Statesman has an article about the crime novels of James Lee Burke. This is by Michael Henderson who describes the Louisiana setting of the novels featuring the characters of Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcel. Here’s an excerpt with a reference to Waugh:
…It is Robicheaux and Purcel contra mundum. “The Bobbsey twins from Homicide”, Purcel calls them, referring to their early days in the New Orleans Police Department. Robicheaux, frustrated by official corruption, slides into a detective’s job in the New Iberia sheriff’s office after that first novel, running a bait shop on the side. Purcel, booted out of the Crescent City when superiors tired of his direct methods, becomes a private investigator and bail bondsman.
They could easily have been crusty bores. Wounded by broken childhoods, blasted by the horrors of Vietnam, they are troubled souls with a thirst for “the full-tilt boogie”. Nothing new there. Yet, from this unpromising clay, Burke has moulded men who achieve an Arthurian nobility.
Evil does not have to triumph, he reminds us, because it shouts louder. Goodness abides in unlikely places, and all souls are susceptible to that “twitch upon the thread” Evelyn Waugh wrote about in Brideshead Revisited. As Purcel frequently says, his words tolling like the Angelus: “noble mon, everything’s copacetic”…
The full article is linked here.
–Waugh also features briefly in another New Statesman article. This is a list of books nominated as book of the year by various New Statesman contributors:
Brendan Simms
I very much enjoyed John O’Beirne Ranelagh’s The Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1914-1924 (Irish Academic Press). The author is the son of a legendary member of the “Old IRA”, and interviewed many surviving members during the 1970s. He evokes a world gone by with empathy but without sentimentality, unsure whether the killing and the suffering was really worth it.
I was also completely absorbed by Dodie Smith’s 1948 novel I Capture the Castle (Vintage), which oddly I had never read before. It is an Edith Wharton meets Evelyn Waugh story about American money and English breeding with some surprises. The 2003 film version, with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy, is pretty good too.
Here’s a link to the entire list.
–A podcast of possible interest has been posted on the website podtail.com. Here’s a description:
Join Dr. Peter Sinclair, Professor and Chair of Languages and Literature at Sacred Heart University and Dr. William Baker, Distinguished Professor of media & entertainment at IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain, and President Emeritus of WNET-Thirteen, New York’s public television station, for a conversation on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.The Literary Catholic is a program dedicated to exploring life-changing stories from centuries of Catholic literature, a collaboration with The Guild of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Sacred Heart University, and the John Paul II Center for Evangelizing Communications, Diocese of Bridgeport.
–A website called keepingupwiththe penguins.com has posted a recommendation for reading a Penguin edition of Scoop that contains several amusing and interesting comments. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:
Evelyn Waugh was the second son of Arthur Waugh, celebrated publisher-slash-literary critic, and also the brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. I can only imagine the weight of family expectation on his shoulders, and the snippy conversations they had over Christmas dinners. Luckily, it would seem that Evelyn managed to out-write and out-last them both. He’s better known for his book Brideshead Revisited, but somehow Scoop, his satirical novel about sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents, is the one that ended up on my reading list.
It’s kind of funny, really, to read a book about journalists and newspapers written before the News Of The World scandal. Scoop reads like a time capsule of the by-gone “heyday” of newspaper journalism. The protagonist is the humble (read: poor) William Boot, who lives on the very-very outskirts of London and regularly contributes over-written nature columns to The Daily Beast, a newspaper owned by the terrifying and powerful Lord Copper.
Evelyn did outlast his father but died in 1966 well before Alec, who survived his brother by more that 15 years, managing to write 7 books after Evelyn’s death.
