Death of a Mystery Writer by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER XI

Barabbas

From The Times, obituary page. Monday, 20 June 1977.

OLIVER FAIRLEIGH

The death was announced early yesterday morning of Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, Bart, MBE, better known as Oliver Fairleigh, the mystery writer.

Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs was born on 17 June 1912, the only son of Frederick Fairleigh-Stubbs of Birmingham, a manufacturer of kitchenware. He was brought up in the richly independent atmosphere of a provincial industrial city, and the prosperity of the family firm was greatly augmented when it shifted to war production during the years 1914-1918. However, although his father received a baronetcy in the New Year’s honors list for 1922, the Fairleigh-Stubbs works did not easily weather the transition to peacetime production, and went bankrupt in 1925. It was no doubt due to the economic difficulties of the family that Oliver Fairleigh did not go to university, a loss which he never regretted.

The first years of his working life (1932-1940) were spent in journalism, initially with the Birmingham Post, later on Fleet Street with the Daily Clarion. His politics at this time were the conventional blend of idealism and socialism, and his witty and trenchant reviews in the Clarion won him entry into the circle surrounding Auden and Isherwood. The war, however, led to a change of direction both in his career and in his politics. He served in North Africa and Italy, proving an effective if idiosyncratic soldier. In his spare time he wrote his first detective novel, Murder by Debrett, and the publication of this in November 1945 marked the beginning of a series of highly entertaining stories, distinctive for their narrative pace and their mild and harmless snob appeal.

His politics, in contrast to those of many of his fellow soldiers, had moved sharply to the right. In 1947 he stood as Conservative candidate at a by-election in the Milton Grove constituency of Sheffield, but his personality proved ill-adapted to the democratic give-and-take of the hustings. In later years his pronouncements on political and social matters grew more and more extreme (a much quoted article for the People on the cult of the Angry Young Man was a case in point), but these were part of the elaborate public persona which Oliver Fairleigh (with the delighted cooperation of Fleet Street) built up over the years. By a series of obiter dicta and escapades he impressed himself on the public as a formidable upholder of Victorian attitudes, a country gentleman of the old school who had appointed himself the scourge of modernity in all its forms. The publicity he gained did no harm to the sales of the stream of works which poured from his pen, and at his death he was unquestionably the most popular writer of this kind of fiction in the English-speaking world.

Lacking the literary pretensions of a Sayers, or the ingenuity of a Christie, his stories are notable for their erratic high spirits and unfailing readability. Among the most accomplished, perhaps, are Murder by Degrees, with its unkind if entertaining picture of a Cambridge College, Skirting Death, the first of the Mrs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.