Blow the House Down

By John Blackburn

The year is 1969, and in the British city of Randelwyck, racial tensions are simmering, the situation made worse by an acute housing shortage. Legendary architect Sir George Strand has a solution: two new state-of-the-art high-rise apartment towers linked by walkway bridges, symbolizing the bridging of differences and a closer link between the divided citizenry. But when a professor hints there may be a dangerous flaw in the blueprints, he quickly winds up dead. What is Sir George’s real agenda, and how is it connected to the centuries-old legend of the Skulda?

John Blackburn (1923-1993) was regarded as one of the great British mystery and thriller writers of his time. This first-ever reprint of Blow the House Down (1970), one of his scarcest books, includes a new introduction by Adrian Schober. Sixteen other thrillers, mysteries, and horror novels by Blackburn are also available from Valancourt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943910984

Book preview

BLOW THE HOUSE DOWN

JOHN BLACKBURN

with a new introduction by

ADRIAN SCHOBER

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Blow the House Down by John Blackburn

First published London: Jonathan Cape, 1970

First Valancourt Books edition 2017

Copyright © 1970 by John Blackburn

Introduction © 2018 by Adrian Schober

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Cover design by Kerry Squires

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Republishing – or reading – old novels can be a tricky thing. In many cases, the themes, ideas, and language contained in them do not reflect our current norms or values. Sometimes they can even be offensive. This novel was written half a century ago and deals with a subject that was then, as it is now, highly sensitive, namely that of race relations. We think any fair reading of the book will make it evident that to the extent John Blackburn had any purpose in writing it other than to spin an exciting yarn, it was to promote tolerance and condemn racism. However, in attempting to reflect authentically the real-life situation in England at the time, Blackburn’s novel includes a few passages in which both white and black characters use epithets that would likely not be considered acceptable in a new book published today, including one particularly offensive term used by many other writers whose books we still read, including Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Harper Lee, among others.

Valancourt Books’ aim is – and always has been – to make available out-of-print works that we consider to have literary, historical, scholarly, or other value. In his lifetime, Blackburn was considered by some critics to be the foremost British writer of mystery and horror fiction, and we think it essential that all his books, including this one, be taken into account when reevaluating his significance in the twenty-first century. For this reason, and because of the historical interest discussed in Dr Schober’s introduction – and because it remains a rollicking, exciting page-turner even today – we have reprinted it here without censorship or alteration. Readers who might be offended by sensitive content may wish to choose one of Blackburn’s other fine thrillers, fifteen of which we have previously published, instead.

INTRODUCTION

In introducing this reprint of John Blackburn’s Blow the House Down to the twenty-first century reader, one feels obliged to issue a ‘trigger warning’. First published in 1970, the novel’s lurid treatment of the subject of ‘interbreeding’ or miscegenation, not to mention its broad stereotyping of class and race, may be troublesome, verging on offensive. As a work of suspense, the novel requires us to appreciate both its socio-political background and how this contributes to the plot. For instead of the Cold War fear and paranoia of his other stories, Blackburn here seeks to exploit anxieties about race, immigration and civil unrest during one of the most turbulent decades in British history: the 1960s. Subjecting the racial politics of one of your favourite authors to this kind of retroactive scrutiny can be hard going! Despite the author’s best intentions, such scrutiny may reveal a passive, unexamined racism, and so it is with Blackburn. All things considered, I find the novel to be generally tolerant and enlightened.¹

The plot of Blow the House Down is pretty wild. The aged, infirm Sir George Strand is a world-renowned architect responsible for the design of a block of high-rise flats, which will help alleviate the housing shortage in the working-class town of Randel­wyck. As the brainchild of Michael Mallory, one of the town’s most prominent citizens, Mallory Heights supports four bridges designed to bring together white and non-white/immigrant tenants, and thus promote harmony and integration. But at a mayoral banquet a Berlin professor of engineering alludes to misgivings about the structure to Paul Gordon, a quantity surveyor for a civil engineering firm. The professor is killed in a mysterious street accident before he can make his statement. Town hall secretary, Janet Fane, is convinced that she has seen the bridges of a model of the structure move in a wind tunnel simulation, which fills her with dread. Meanwhile, rumours and bad press cast doubt on the safety of Mallory Heights, which worries slum dwellers Jack and Hilda Baxter, who have been allotted a flat in the Heights. Later, a fanatical physicist, Dr Baylis, threatens to blow up the building with an experimental substance called Terradyte K. Unsure about whether Baylis was acting on his own, police uncover a link between him and an underground organisation called God’s True Sailormen, which is hell-bent on stamping out miscegenation. But what is the connection between this organisation and Sir George? And what does this have to do with the structural integrity of the Heights? Or, for that matter, the local legend of the Skulda, a great wind-blowing dragon?

The fictional town of Randel­wyck in north-east England is almost certainly an allusion to the town of Smethwick (four miles outside of Birmingham) in western central England, which in the early 1960s was riven with socio-political tensions and conflicts vis-à-vis race and immigration. In the general election of October 1964, support for British Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths was bolstered by his party’s unofficial ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’ slogan, as part of a campaign that is widely seen to have exploited the racist underbelly within the British working class during the post-war period. This period witnessed a huge influx of immigrants from British Commonwealth countries such as Jamaica, India and Pakistan. But the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and subsequent acts sought to stem the flow of immigrants from these countries. And so when Griffiths snatched the seat of Smethwick from ‘pro-immigration’ Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, this seemed to usher in an era of racist politics, which would culminate a few years later in Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in Birmingham on April 1968. ‘We must be mad, literally mad,’ he declared, ‘as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population . . . As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. ’²

As a powder keg for racial tensions, Randel­wyck is almost a mirror image of Smethwick. In the novel, as in real life, the presence of Britain’s new arrivals, housing shortages and overcrowding are inextricably linked. Indeed, Blackburn repeatedly makes this point throughout the novel: ‘During the last six years, Randel­wyck’s coloured population had swollen to the highest percentage in the country, the housing shortage had become acute, and schools and hospitals so cramped as to be almost unmanageable. Tension was at breaking point . . .’ (p. 16). Adding to the tension is the hate-filled rhetoric of a racist preacher, the Reverend Judson, and the competing interests of nationalists, British Maoists, the Youth Power Group, and race-based factions. In pursuing the connection with Smethwick, we may note how

Housing received relentless attention in the [local weekly] Smethwick Telephone and was consistently intertwined with other concerns about the alleged local impact of West Indians and South Asians, particularly concerning sex and immorality, public health, violence and crime. Stories of white women approached by, assaulted or molested by, or cohabiting with Jamaicans, Indians and Pakistanis – invariably identified by their colour or place of origin – continually made the headlines . . . Sex and sickness often came together. Immigrants, it was proclaimed, had inordinately high rates of venereal disease, tuberculosis and leprosy that they spread among the local population and thereby burdened the National Health Service and the welfare state. Not only health but the national culture as a whole (and, by implication, the racial qualities associated with Englishness) was jeopardised by sickness and miscegenation.³

Anxieties about miscegenation are unashamedly exploited by Blackburn in the novel. The architect Sir George Strand, we learn, is a key member of God’s True Sailormen, which in its vehement opposition to miscegenation has targeted Eurasians, ‘mulattos’ and ‘half castes,’ partners and children of mixed marriages. For Strand, miscegenation violates a basic law of nature, the survival of the fittest, and is a ‘blight that can taint the race, destroy all that we have created, and debase everything worthwhile that mankind has done throughout history . . .’ (p. 166). But Strand’s opposition to miscegenation, we also learn, runs much deeper. As he tells it, his daughter Betty ran off with a man from Africa and was killed because of her ‘perverted lust’ (p. 167). As for the child conceived from this union, Strand conjures up some terrible imagery: the ‘genes had not fused and Betty’s child, my grandson, was a blind, dumb and deformed imbecile; a mere digestive system that should have never been conceived’ (p. 167). Now Strand has become twisted with thoughts of revenge, and it transpires that he has designed Mallory Heights with structural faults to be a death-trap for its multi-racial occupants. This is not the first time Blackburn has broached anxieties about miscegenation. In his 1968 horror-thriller Nothing but the Night, the countenance of the unfit mother, Anna Harb, tantalises with its suggestion of ‘mulatto’ or ‘coloured’ ancestry. Moreover, the ‘halfway’ appearance of her disturbed/possessed child Mary Valley, of ‘strikingly blonde hair and blue eyes which contrasted strangely with coloured skin,’⁴ alludes to anxieties about a tainted, ‘coloured’ bloodline.⁵ What is most striking about Blow the House Down, however, is how Blackburn makes these anxieties the raison d’être for the narrative.

Fascinatingly, Blackburn’s own bloodline bespeaks anxieties about miscegenation. In the autobiographical A Clip of Steel (1969), Blackburn’s poet brother Thomas recounts the family’s history on Mauritius, including intermarriage with islander women over the generations. ‘If marriage with an Indian, Eurasian, Chinese or Creole could isolate one from friends and family as effectively as a pestilence,’ writes Thomas, ‘it was a catastrophe to be dreaded.’⁶ In the case of Thomas and John’s father, he was tormented by a racial mélange that ‘suggested the possibility of some Indian or Creole ancestor by a somewhat dusky skin and a certain indefinable quality of mouth and nostril.’⁷ So fearful was he of any tell-tale signs in Thomas’s appearance that he tried bleaching his son’s skin using lemon and hydrogen peroxide! This was a strange ritual of abuse designed to bring about his son’s redemption.

In our era of political correctness, the use of terms such as ‘half blood’, ‘half breed’ or ‘mulatto’ to pathologise and marginalise segments of society has become taboo. But as a category, ‘half-caste’ has ‘its origins in Britain’s colonial project, census agencies and official data collectors in the late nineteenth century thereby seeking to capture those in their populations who were the offspring of mixed ethnic/racial unions.’⁸ The pseudo-­scientific eugenics movement of the interwar eras helped to turn the use of this largely administrative term into something far more stigmatising and harmful.⁹ At the forefront of this movement in Britain was the Eugenics Education Society (later the Galton Institute), founded in 1907. The arguments used by Strand and his mysterious Sailormen to insist on the evils of miscegenation are a throwback to this movement. According to the opponents of miscegenation, ‘half caste’ children were enfeebled both physically and mentally, which inevitably meant a lower standard of living for them and their families. Also damaging was the so-called Fletcher Report of 1930, the research of eugenicists on behalf of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children. Led by social researcher Muriel E. Fletcher, the report perpetuated myths about ‘negro’ promiscuity with white women, and asserted that white women who had illegitimate children to ‘negroes’ were doing so in the ‘spirit of adventure’ and found ‘themselves unable to break away.’¹⁰ Such bunkum of course resonates with Strand’s account of the fate of his wayward daughter in Blow the House Down.

In the wake of carnage and destruction Blackburn offers a glimmer of hope for racial harmony. In the epilogue, two of the building’s survivors, Jack Baxter and Luke Virgil, stay in the same hostel. They trade racial slurs before going together to the local pub to meet their wives, whereby ‘Another wall had come tumbling down’ (p. 174). Previously we have seen how the Baxters barely tolerated the Virgils, their revelling black neighbours, in the terraced housing of Shelley Street. To his credit, Blackburn tries to balance the racial bigotry of the Baxters with the contrasting perspective of the Virgils, even if he does fall into the sort of stereo­typical assumptions that show the limits to an Englishman’s experience and imagination. Blackburn in the epilogue also takes some of the weight off the book’s depiction of xenophobia and racism with his appeal to a common humanity. In keeping with the wind analogy, I am reminded of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech from 1960, in which he called for an end to the system of apartheid in South Africa and defended African national consciousness. While we would not want to overstate Blackburn’s moral purpose – after all, he was tapping into anxieties of the period for the sake of a good yarn – I’d like to think that he was calling for an end to racial segregation or discrimination back home.

The Times Literary Supplement reviewed Blow the House Down as a ‘clever, tricky book . . . based, this time, not on supernatural but human evil, not on impending cosmic but civic disaster.’¹¹ I suspect that some modern readers will find the potentially offensive subject matter of the novel tricky. Peter Parley of The Spectator thought that the book a ‘macabre entertainment by an accomplished thriller writer. Not macabre in a specific sense but merely disturbing in some of its implications.’¹² What is most interesting is how this entertainment has significance as a human document. As set against the backdrop of race riots, factional uprisings and mass demonstrations, it is very much a novel of its time. Yet its final statement about racial tolerance remains relevant in the post 9/11 era. Not only is this novel one of Blackburn’s most unusual but it is also one of his most scarce. At the time of writing a copy on amazon.com is fetching $533! But thanks to Valancourt Books’ reissue of John Blackburn’s titles we can all enjoy this rediscovered time-capsule novel of post-war Britain.

Adrian Schober

Adrian Schober, who has a PhD in English from Monash University, is the author of Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and co-editor of Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg (Lexington Books, 2016). As well as introducing the Valancourt Books reprint of John Blackburn’s A Ring of Roses, he has published a critical essay on his novel Nothing but the Night in The Journal of Popular Culture.

1 Because the remainder of the Introduction discusses the novel’s plot and reveals some important plot twists, readers may wish to return to it after finishing the novel.

2 Enoch Powell, ‘Enoch Powell’s River’s of Blood speech’, The Telegraph, November 6, 2007, accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

3 Elizabeth Buettner, ‘ This is Staffordshire, not Alabama: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 42, no. 4, 2014, pp. 715-716.

4 John Blackburn, Nothing but the Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 18.

5 Adrian Schober, ‘Welfare, Motherhood, and the Best Interests of the Lost/Possessed Child,’ The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1188-89.

6 Thomas Blackburn, A Clip of Steel (Richmond, Va.: Valancourt Books, 2014), p. 8.

7 Thomas Blackburn, p. 9.

8 Peter J. Aspinall, ‘The Social Evolution of the Term Half-Caste in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self-Descriptor,’ Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 26, no.4, 2013, pp. 509-510.

9 Aspinall, p. 505.

10 Muriel E. Fletcher, Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and other Ports (Liverpool: Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children, 1930), p. 22.

11 Times Literary Supplement, July 31, 1970, p. 857.

12 Peter Parley, ‘Heads You Win,’ The Spectator, May 2, 1970, p. 16.

Prologue

‘I am alone now and we can talk quite freely.’ His landlady had shuffled away down the corridor and the man heard the kitchen door slam behind her. At his feet her old and evil-­smelling tom-­cat, appropriately named Jerry, purred and rubbed against his trousers for attention. ‘May I have the description please?’

‘About six foot tall, heavily built, fiftyish, balding and wearing a dark-­blue suit.’ He made a note on the back of an envelope while he listened. ‘Yes, I’ve got that, but you haven’t told me why I have to meet him.’

‘What – what?’ His face went rigid and the pencil snapped between his fingers as he heard the next statement. ‘You can’t mean it, you don’t expect that from me – not from me.’ While he listened to the voice on the telephone, another voice started to run through his head endlessly repeating itself like a cracked gramophone record: ‘If it be possible . . . possible . . . possible . . . if it be possible . . .’

‘I believe in our cause, I trust the Sailorman completely, but I just haven’t the strength to obey him.’ Frustrated by lack of attention the old cat had dug its claws into his ankle, but the man hardly felt them. All that he could do was to listen to the voice of his caller and the voice of his own mind. ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’

But it was not possible. The physical voice made that completely clear and his body slumped in resignation.

‘Very well, if our plans are threatened, and there is no one else available, I will try to do my duty.’ Through the window he saw a