#6Degrees Freestyle

The November #6degrees is freestyle. Instead of everyone starting in the same place with the same book, each participant starts with the last book on a previous chain or – if a newcomer – with the last book they read. #6degrees is the book version of Six Degrees of Separation. It usually starts with a book suggested by Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest on the first Saturday of the month. It’s a fun idea to play with. Here’s my chain of books: 

Press Play to see the line up of novels.

So my end book in October was Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thriller Strangers on a Train. 

It about two men who meet on a train in Texas and who agree to commit murder. Fictional journeys and meeting strangers on trains has so many possibilities from Agatha Christie and John Buchan to Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene and beyond.

But I’m going with the idea of the death pact. In this instance not strangers and murder but friends and euthanasia: Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. The story opens with a gloomy winter funeral in London. Molly Lane has died from a rapid onset debilitating disease that left her in the clutches of her husband George. 

Two of her former lovers agree to help each other avoid such a fate should they become helpless and incapacitated. What the author unfolds about what happens next – and how it all ends – is the reason the novel won the Booker prize in 1998.

The funeral in Len Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin  (1964) is a charade – a mock event devised to help a Cold War defection of a Soviet scientist. It’s a spy thriller with all the classic elements – an international cast of espionage agents all busy trying to out-deceive each other. It’s a mix of plots and sub-plots, dead ends, and competing forces that force the reader to question the very nature and purpose of the enterprise. Who is playing on whose side and for or against whom?

Each chapter is heading with an epigram taking from the rules of chess or tips for the game. And that takes us back a couple of decades to a foggy wartime London.

Checkmate to Murder (E.C.R. Lorac 1944) is a classic crime story. Miserly Mr. Folliner is shot and a special constable captures a young soldier fleeing the scene. Meanwhile, in the house next door among the suspects are two men playing chess. All is not as it first appears. Which of course is how it should be in a good mystery.  The London blackout setting is Hampstead which is thick with literary lives and associations. I’m going with Evelyn Waugh (1902-1966).

Waugh was born at 11, Hillfield Road in West Hampstead.  In 1907 the family moved to Underhill, a property on North End Road built by his father. The novel I’m choosing is The Ordeal of Gordon Pinfold (1957) – a painfully comic, fictionalized account of his episode with mental illness.

In 1954, his doctors advised that he needed a change of scene and Waugh took a ship bound for Ceylon. His letters home from the ship alarmed his friends and family. He was hearing voices and fellow passengers were whispering about him, he reported. He soon felt that he was possessed by the devil.

Waugh used this experience to great comic effect in the novel which he wrote when he had recovered from these hallucinations. A medical examination determined that he had been suffering from bromide poisoning from his heavy drug regimen and, when his medications changed, he recovered. 

In Diary of a Mad Housewife  (Sue Kaufman 1967) we have another fictional character who feels she is being driven crazy. It’s one of those popular novels that everyone seemed to be reading and talking about for a while back in the Betty Friedan/ Feminine Mystique day.

Affluent Tina Balser lives on Central Park West in Manhattan and appears to have the perfect life. She starts secretly scribbling the fact that she is debilitated by anxiety and silently going quite mad.

Just north of the Balser apartment, English professor Kate Fansler is confronted by the death of one of her students. 

Janet Harrison had asked Fansler for a therapy recommendation and Fansler suggests her friend and former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Some weeks later Janet is found stabbed to death on Bauer’s couch and the evidence looks bad for him.

This is the first of the Kate Fansler detective novels written by Amanda Cross. The author’s real name was  Carolyn Heilbrun – a highly regarded literary scholar. She follows in a tradition of academics who were also successful crime writers – Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes among them.

So in the great #6degrees chain of books: One death pact leads to another, connected by funerals to a game of chess and Hampstead and on to a nervous breakdown at sea and on land, and to a psychoanalyst accused of murder. Yay! Books.