Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Ivy and the Grass

by Jeffry Scott

Much as I value his company and expertise, count yourself fortunate if none of your friends is like McKell.

I’m thinking of outspoken cronies with a taste for puncturing self-esteem and demolishing confidence. It’s the paradox of amity: enemies’ jibes may be dismissed as sheer malice, but a friend knows what he is talking about...

Tom McKell wrings boundless and tireless pleasure from teasing me about crime fiction. He loves a good whodunit, he assures me. Whether on the TV screen or in print, they raise his spirits —“However blue I’m feeling, never takes long for me to start chuckling.”

Crime writers are funnier than sitcom scribes, Inspector McKell maintains, cruelly. Less through getting police procedure wrong (though we do, constantly) than by doing grievous bodily harm to way-things-are likelihood, while recycling and perpetuating stereotypes.

Take informers, grasses. Never mind that few criminals talk about grasses and grassing unless their hobby happens to be botany or lawn care. Policemen, too, are less than keen on the slang, finding it passe. That is not the point, however: McKell is tickled by the fact that informers are generally presented as male and unprepossessing. Their shifty eyes have a treacherous gleam, they twitch a lot, they are apt to neglect personal hygiene, and the best-scrubbed grass lives in fear.

All of which is a caricature wrapped up in a cliche, according to the expert. Police informers are as unisex-diverse as the rest of society. They are in it for the money more often than not, but then which of us isn’t? All but a lucky few, the inspector points out dryly.

“That’s all very well,” I objected the last time he was mocking me, “but readers just aren’t going to believe in a gra — an informer who is respectable, attractive, and wears a dress. It’s unexpected and downright unconvincing.”

“A pity, then,” Inspector McKell observed, dryer yet, “because Tania Wark convinced me. And I’ve been accused of any amount of stuff in my time, but seldom gullibility.”

Having gone that far, he agreed to tell me the rest. In confidence, naturally, so I haven’t the slightest hesitation in sharing it, give or take changed names and altered biographies. Since I’ve dreamed up so many villains, they don’t scare me — whereas libel lawyers make my blood run cold.

Tom McKell used to be senior C.I.D. officer at Longdown, effectively the boss, since his supervisor, a detective-superintendent, was based elsewhere.

McKell, no sentimentalist, claims that Longdown had all the shortcomings of a country town (no live theater to speak of, bar Christmas pantomimes; positively no opera or ballet) plus many disadvantages of London. Before the Cold War thawed and peace of a kind broke out, Longdown was awash with money from three different defense factories on its outskirts, and affluence encouraged predators. The place even sheltered a few professional and quite formidable criminals.

“London in microcosm,” McKell comments, “without the fun and glamor, such as there is. Oh yes, and the one-way traffic system was a nightmare, parking unspeakable. Made it very difficult to go shopping in Longdown without getting a ticket.” (Since McKell tends to have reasons for the smallest of talk, I ought to have tucked parking problems away for reference — it would have saved me getting left behind, later on.)

“I suppose,” he muses, “the layout of the place displeased me. There was no there to Long-down, if you get my drift. Travelers tell me Los Angeles has the same quality. Everything is mixed up: the nick I worked out of, Central, was on Castle Hill. The main fire station was next door to us, with some posh department stores over the road.

“So you’d think that was the center of town or at least the administrative and snobby quarter. Except that the council offices were a mile the other side of town, alongside the glitziest boutiques. But most of the cinemas were in another spot, while clubs and discos were in six other directions.

“So it went, little islands with endless houses and workshops and so forth in between. Pig of a manor to get a handle on. Longdown was prosperous but only half awake. Yet as soon as you needed to go anywhere in a hurry, a traffic jam developed. Only good thing about it was that, in one respect, Longdown was exactly like the village where I started the Job. Those little islands made it far smaller than its physical size — everybody knew who I was and what I did. And some of them weren’t backward in coming forward...”