A matter of reading

THE FREELING FEELING

As I’m known to be an avid fiction reader I’ve sometimes been asked who my favourite novelist is.  In times gone by I would have answered Aldous Huxley or Joseph Heller.  But I've come to recognise that the correct answer is Nicolas Freeling.  He's not the best, or most significant, and he hasn't written anything that changed my life.  But he is always entertaining, interesting and thought provoking.  Plus I admit that I enjoy being able to provide a response that baffles most people, for there is pleasure to be taken from being obscure.

Not many people seem to know the name nowadays, and it is almost impossible to buy his books new.  I first read some of his books many decades ago, and they remained in my collection waiting to be rediscovered.  The spur to do so came from a lovely old secondhand place in Cromer, Norfolk, who had a couple of Freelings I'd not seen before. Reading them reminded of what a fine writer he is and how in tune with much of my own way of thinking.  And that led me on to try and complete my collection.

Determining how many books he'd written is so much easier in the internet age, as is tracking them down.  Using the likes of eBay and Amazon (resellers of course) I tracked down every single title and managed to collect all the novels, and most of his non fiction works, over a period of eighteen months.  (In traditional dead tree form of course, although it is possible to get some of his works as ebooks.)  They came in various shapes and sizes - mostly small Penguin paperbacks from the sixties and seventies, but with a few hardbacks, and even one I could only find in large print format.  No matter, they are not there to be admired on my shelves, but to be read.  And that, gradually, is what I have been doing.

The novels break down into three groups.  I began with his first, Valparaiso, which Freeling originally wrote whilst in prison.  None of the characters in that novel appear again in further works, and I worked my way through the other seven books which can be considered to be stand alone, independent of his two major series of books.  I am now deep into the first of those two series and the one for which Freeling is probably best known, at least in the UK.

Not many people recognise the name of the author, but anyone of a certain age will know that of his most famous character.  It was used as the title of an early 1970s TV series, featuring Barry Foster as the eponymous Dutch policeman, with had a tingly theme tune which, somehow, became a number one hit (Eye Level, by the Simon Park Orchestra - yes, really).  Although the name of the detective, and the Amsterdam setting, came from the Freeling novels, the plots did not.  In truth it was very poorly written and I have no desire to revisit it.  But I suspect (for I cannot accurately remember the event) that it was responsible for calling my attention to the first Freeling book I purchased.  So I owe that dubious TV programme a debt of gratitude.

There are thirteen Van der Valk novels, set in the sixties and seventies. Mostly based in Amsterdam, although his investigations do take him to other parts of the Netherlands and other countries in western Europe.  Freeling, although British by birth, spent most of his life on mainland Europe, initially as a chef before his writing career took off, and he has absorbed the cultures of France, Holland, Germany and others.  Although the fictional Dutchman is his most famed creation he is not the best.  That title goes to the central character of the other series I mentioned, Henri Castang.  A French policeman in an unspecified provincial town.  Like Van der Valk he has a foreign wife (French in the Amsterdammer's case, Czech for Castang) which gives him a less parochial view of the world than that of his colleagues.  Like Van der Valk he often takes on cases that are unconventional, even ill defined.

When bookshops still stocked his output you'd find Freeling novels on the Crime and Thrillers shelves. And certainly most feature crimes, of one sort or another. But thrillers? Few would meet the criteria that we would normally associate with the term. There are murders, but rarely are they particularly gruesome. There's not much in the way of armed confrontations, or car chases, or cliffhanger moments. I think of most Freelings belonging to a genre from the past - Mysteries.

Mystery there is aplenty.  Both detective and reader may be unclear about events, even after the end has been reached, and you are left to place your own interpretations on what has passed before your eyes.  You might have some understanding of what happened, but it can be up to your imagination to fully understand (should full understanding be your thing) why circumstances and behaviour unfolded as they did.  And it this ability of the author to leave you with dots to connect at your leisure that I love most about his books, and why I know I will happily read them several times over.

The writing is good, at times outstanding, but never great.  The plots are sometimes complex, but not as multi layered as we are now used to, and the pace is quite consciously plodding at times.  The stories are relatively short by modern standards, often little more than two hundred pages.  They won't take long to read.  Except they do, for I often find myself sitting, book in hand, trying to figure out a plot twist, the meaning of a character's words or actions, or diverted into another subject altogether because the background of the story has taken me to an aspect of art or music or literature or science that I hadn't considered much before.  Freelings are like that.

With most of the canon dating back to a time before the widespread use of computing (Freeling died in 2003) the detective work has little reliance on technology. It is conversational, intuitive, foot slogging, patient, cerebral.  Both Van der Valk and Castang ponder as much about the societies they live in as the crimes they are probing.  This is crime writing as a vehicle for social investigation and philosophising.

If you crave action then look elsewhere.  If you do not have the patience for a slower moving world then these are not for you.  But if you enjoy being made to do some work by your reading matter, if you take an interest in human motives and foibles, if you like a bit of pondering, then these books might be what you're after.  Hard to come by nowadays, but worth seeking out.

Of course I might be prepared to lend you one.  But I will definitely, most definitely, want it returned.