Six Degrees: From Knife to A Dark Adapted eye

The great chain of books – #6Degrees – how one book leads to another. 

There’s an explanation of how all this works here.  Everyone is welcome to join in. 

This is my contribution for April 2025:

Our collective starting point is Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder  (2024). It’s a memoir that begins with a harrowing account of the murderous attack Rushdie endured in August 2022 while speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.

Knife  relates the trauma of the attack, and also the aftermath and long and painful recovery. Rushdie reflects on how to adapt to life as “a one-eyed man in a two-eyed world.” He shares the torment of nightmares that disrupt his sleep and the role therapy plays in his painful recovery. As his would-be murderer approached him, he had a moment of resignation—of acceptance of the inevitability of an assassin’s arrival after years of living as a marked man. “So it’s you,” he recalls thinking as the man approached. “Here you are.” Equally striking is his vivid description of watching his blood pool on the floor and calmly concluding that he is dying.

It’s a very readable account, rich with personal anecdotes, asides, and associations.

I am glad #6Degrees brought it to my attention. 

First Degree

The Irish writer Samuel Beckett also survived a stabbing. He was attacked in the early hours of 7 January 1938, after being confronted on the Avenue de la Porte-d’Orléans in Paris. He was returning home after a night at the cinema when a pimp called Prudent accosted him, demanding money. When rebuffed, Prudent took out a clasp knife and stabbed Beckett in the chest. Beckett collapsed, bleeding profusely—the knife had narrowly missed his heart.

Like Rushdie, Beckett came close to death. He was taken to the nearby Hôpital Broussais, where he was treated and recovered. Fellow ex-patriot James Joyce paid for him to have a private room and brought him a reading lamp to make it easier for him to work on correcting the proofs of his novel, Murphy (1938).

I once tried to read Murphy. Meaning—I did  read some of it, with many fits and starts, because I found its rather manic lunacies and heavy-handed humor only tolerable in short bursts, and I needed distractions. The first sentence had promise: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” but I couldn’t really warm to the ne’er-do-well protagonist.

There’s an Irish poet with the felicitous name of Austin Ticklepenny, who bewails his job at a psychiatric home—the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. There’s a scene in a tea shop where Murphy tries to get a free refill for his tea, and then, for some reason, he has six different biscuits and lays them out on the grass in Hyde Park to calculate the permutations of the order in which to eat them. One was a ginger nut. He is approached by a spiritualist called Rosa from Paddington who asks him to hold the leash of her dachshund, Nelly, while she feeds lettuce to the sheep.

Nelly the dachshund eats his biscuits.

I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but that’s what I remember. And that leads me to a rather gruesome mystery.

Second Degree

Heads You Lose by Christianna Brand (1941)—and another dachshund, called Aziz.

It’s a classic country house murder mystery, and the first victim is Grace Morland, who has a gift for saying the wrong thing and demonstrating that she doesn’t quite belong in this sophisticated crowd. Remember, this was written in 1941—not only was it a different time, but there’s also a war on.

Grace comments on the name of a beloved dachshund:

“‘Aziz! What an odd name!”
“‘It’s because he’s our Black Boy,” said Venetia, as if that explained everything.
Miss Morland looked blank.
“After the little doctor in A Passage to India,’” explained Henry courteously. ‘”His mother was called Esmiss Esmoor.”
Grace assumed her Boots Library look, tapping her front teeth with her thumbnail, rolling her faded blue eyes. “‘A Passage to India—A Passage to India. No! Haven’t come across it.”That dismissed A Passage to India; but she added affectedly: “‘Odd, because I’m so fond of travel books.’”

There was a rather appalling silence; she could see that she had gone wrong somewhere and sought to cover it by saying brightly: “Fancy having a dachshund! I don’t think I should care to; not in wartime, anyway.”

That leads to another mystery from the same year:

Third Degree
The Case of the Abominable Snowman by Cecil Day-Lewis, written under the pen name Nicholas Blake. It is the seventh in a series of novels featuring his private detective Nigel Strangeways.

Day-Lewis is probably better known as a poet (and these days as the father of the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.. He is the “day” in Roy Campbell’s mash-up MacSpaunday, a name coined to mock the 1930s poets: MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day-Lewis.

The case involves a psychic cat, a murder at a snowbound manor house, cocaine addiction, and a snowman.

The country house and the snow bring me to the

Fourth Degree 

Death at the Sign of the Rook  (2024) is Kate Atkinson’s latest Jackson Brodie romp.  There’s a set piece toward the end of the novel where all the main characters are snowbound inside a vast ancestral home, with more entrances and exits, comings and goings than a Brian Rix farce.

It’s an entertaining read stuffed with distinctly dotty characters and I’m now at the chapter called Denouement, in which I hope all loose ends will be tidied away, mysteries solved, murderers captured, and order restored.

One of the characters—Ben Jennings—lost a leg to an IED while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan. And that’s my link to the

Fifth Degree

J.K. Rowling writes crime thrillers under the name Robert Galbraith. Her detective, Cormoran Strike, is also a war-damaged ex-soldier with a prosthetic leg. In The Running Grave (2023)—also a seventh in a series—Strike’s detective agency partner, Robin Ellacott, goes undercover to unravel the evil doings of a sinister cult with a compound in Norfolk.

Sixth Degree

Many authors have written under a pseudonym—George Eliot, Mark Twain, and George Orwell come to mind. Some like C.Day Lewis  and a whole raft of crime writers choose a second name for their fiction to separate it from more scholarly endeavors. The feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun, for example, wrote her mysteries under the name Amanda Cross.

Salman Rushdie chose his alias Joseph Anton to honor the writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

Penguin Books explained why Ruth Rendell often wrote novels under the name Barbara Vine: “She used a different name because she wanted to write in a different way.”

Vine’s novels often have a strong sense of location, and if it’s a place with which you’re familiar, her books have an uncanny sense of recognition. It’s been a long time since I read A Dark-Adapted Eye, (1986) which I found impressive—a complicated and satisfying psychological thriller full of dark domestic secrets and the emotional undercurrents of deception and betrayal 

These are the kinds of half-hidden family dark secrets and memories that adults discuss when relatives come to visit and the children are in bed and thought to be asleep.

The novel is set in a small village in the Suffolk countryside, with Faith, a young Londoner, sent to stay with her aunts Vera and Eden in their cottage in Great Sindon to escape the war. One of the aunts is hanged for murder. What happened? Why? At  Laurel Cottage everything is suffocatingly neat and correct and Faith’s dread at breaking the rules creates an atmosphere of tension and apprehension. The tangle of family secrets is eventually unravelled. This is one I need to re-read to see whether it still holds up.