Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts and moved to Ireland when she was nine, where she lived in County Meath. She is also the author of two novels, The House in Clewe Street (1945) and Mary O’Grady (1950), and her stories are collected in several volumes. She received many awards, including the Gregory Medal.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
John le Carré 1931–
1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Few writers have used the word ‘cold’ as well as John le Carré. He gives it a hundred meanings, all of them intimating the absence of good, and the presence of evil, which erupts when squalid men play games that are unnecessary and vicious, in pursuit of aims corrupt in themselves, useless if achieved. Such autocrats flourished in the chilling moral vacuum the Cold War created from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Modern espionage became our post-war method of warfare, a bitter stamping ground in which spies were instructed that loyalty often meant betrayal.
Such a one is Leamas, about fifty, head of British Command in Berlin, still divided by the Wall. Not a university man, though his spymasters in London — Control — are just that class of English person: right university, right tie, right clubs. Leamas is a tired man, frozen of heart, a failure. Amid an unnerving atmosphere of conspiracy, Control finds a way to send Leamas back for one last attempt to defend the indefensible. Le Carré is a gripping storyteller — spare, ironic, sinewy. He is a master of atmosphere and those dark places of the heart where treachery and tangled moral ambiguities loiter. In this classic novel, full of icy implications and ambiguous truths, he summed up the social and political conditions of an era.
John le Carré was born in Dorset and lives in Cornwall. Other famous novels include his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Smiley’s People (1980), The Tailor of Panama (1996) and The Constant Gardener (2001), which was made into an award-winning film in 2005. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was also a notable film (1965).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Harper Lee 1926–
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
The voice in this novel belongs to Scout, an immensely intelligent, precocious six-year-old girl. Maycomb, her small town in Alabama in the 1930s, is a stable, conservative place which looks as though it will never change — the blacks live at the edge of town. Scout’s mother is dead; she and her older brother Jem are being brought up by their lawyer father, Atticus, who, along with Calpurnia, the black cook, slowly becomes the moral centre of the book. Both adults are portrayed with great, detailed affection, as pillars of society who do not share society’s prejudices, as figures of authority who often seem wilful and hard to understand for the six-year-old narrator, but yet are still never cruel or distant.
At first the novel focuses on the childish games of Scout and Jem and their friend Dill, but slowly the real theme of the novel, which is racial prejudice in the Southern states, emerges. A white woman has accused a black man of rape; it is clear that he is innocent. Atticus becomes his defence lawyer. In the scenes which deal with the accusation and the trial, and the bitterness in Maycomb, and the plight of the accused, the child’s voice becomes morally powerful, and the narrative, especially in the second half of the book, has a compulsive, thrilling force.
Harper Lee was born in Alabama. To Kill a Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is her only novel. The book was made into a film in 1962.
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
Rosamond Lehmann 1901–1990
1953 The Echoing Grove
There is a triangular love affair at the centre of Rosamond Lehmann’s elegaic novel — but this entanglement conceals much else. Two sisters are in love with the same man. Madeleine is married to Rickie and is the mother of his children. Her sister Dinah is Rickie’s mistress. The place and time are London and southern England in the 1930s and 1940s. Against a backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rosamond Lehmann evokes every nuance of the obsession which devours men and women when they love passionately and when loyalties are divided. Time, and outside events, provide the solutions they cannot find for themselves. Lehmann’s narrative art is at its most interesting when contemplating the predicaments of women — comic, painful or embarrassing. But she is also an adventurous writer in style and content, technically innovative, using memory and perspective to expose the many meanings human beings can extract from the past. In this novel she mingles the intricacies of social life with the influence of class, politics and much else, in ways that are both deft and imaginative. Rosamond Lehmann’s subject was the human heart and the inadequacy of men and women pursuing different goals in the name of love. This haunting novel is a classic exploration of that territory in which self, and love, are always lost, always rediscovered.
Rosamond Lehmann was born in Buckinghamshire and lived in London. Her most famous novels include Dusty Answer (1927), An Invitation to the Waltz (1932) and its sequel The Weather in the Streets (1936).
Age in year of publication: fifty-two.
Elmore Leonard 1925–
1990 Get Shorty
Leonard views his country as doused in greed, peopled with fools pursuing the endless dollar: what can we do but laugh? His speciality is America’s racial mix, mostly drawn from the bottom of the barrel. In Get Shorty, a collection of such persons sashays into Los Angeles, to dabble in the two great American dreams, Hollywood and the Mafia.
There is Chili, hot tempered as a child, coolest of the cool now, debt collector for the Mafia. He encounters the visually challenged film producer Harry Zimm, maker of mutation movies so bad you see ‘better film on teeth’. Then there is Karen the Screamer, Leo the Drycleaner, the Bear, Yayo the Colombian mule, Armani-obsessed Bo Catlett and many others equally lyrically named. Will they achieve their life’s ambition — to get their hands on money (without being killed) by making a movie? This cast of schemeballs entwine the reader in their scams, heists and smart lines.
Though there is a nostalgia here for a time in America when villainy had a sort of innocence, Leonard avoids sentimentality. His genius lies in his idiosyncratic hipster’s prose, amused and inquisitive intelligence and consummate storytelling. This combination makes Leonard an addictive peddler of dreams, a writer whose use of dialogue is unsurpassed, who makes you shake with laughter and suspense, and beg for more.
Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans and lives in Detroit. Among his best novels are Glitz (1985) and Freaky Deaky (1988). Get Shorty was made into a popular movie in 1995 and Rum Punch (1992) became the film Jackie Brown (1997).