Note: this review is a little heavy on the spoilers, but given that this book
is so obscure and difficult to experience firsthand these days, I felt a deep
dive was called for.
Another tale of murder and gender confusion from 'Carl Noone', better known as
comedian Charlie Chester. Whereas his later book 'Even the Rainbow's Bent'
dealt with a gay man who turned to murder after an ill-fated attempt to live as
a woman, here Charlie tells us one about a murderous schoolgirl trying to pass
herself off as a choir-boy.
The seemingly sweet and innocent Kristi Marlowe dotes on her diminutive daddy Timothy 'Tiny Tim' Marlowe but despises her new stepmother Brenda. "In little Kristi's mind...there was no peace and no harmony. There was only hate!".
Kristi is in dire need of someone to look up to, which isn't easy when your father is a jockey, and Tiny Tim puts his foot in it when he lets slip that he wishes that Kristi had been born a boy. Due to the fact that she could then have followed him into the manly world of horse racing. Frustrated by this, and overhearing that girls are similarly excluded from singing in the local church choir, young Kristi decides to go undercover as a choir boy, disguising her real gender by cutting her hair, stealing a boy's clothes and infiltrating the boys only church choir.
Chester's gender non-conforming characters never show a great deal of
imagination when it comes to their choice of new identity. Whereas Even the
Rainbow's Bent's psychopath Adrian merely calls himself Adrienne when he lives
as female, Kristi Marlowe comes up with giving her first name a masculine twist
and abridging her second one. Thus Kristi Marlowe becomes Chris Lowe. A rather
unfortunate choice of name from Chester, since it's now more synonymous with
the keyboard player in The Pet Shop Boys, giving you an unwanted mental image
of what that Chris Lowe would look like had he been born a west end girl. I
fear a young Chris Lowe would have thoroughly had the piss taken out of him, if
a copy of Sweet Cyanide had ever been passed around his schoolyard. It might
have even caused him to wonder 'what have I done to deserve this?'.
On the surface Sweet Cyanide hardly sounds like it has all the ingredients for
an explosive book, the worlds of choir singing and horse racing hardly cry out
exciting subject matter. Yet Sweet Cyanide is surprising rich in incident by
Charlie Chester's standards, containing few dull stretches. This is perhaps due
to the fact that Chester is initially juggling three storylines here. As well
as the drama with Kristi/Chris, Sweet Cyanide follows Brenda as she embarks on
an affair with her touchy feely boss J.W. Deakin, in order to further her
career. Chester lets his comedy credentials slip with the saucy line 'as far as
she was concerned lying back in the bedroom, might one day mean sitting up in
the boardroom'.
Whereas elsewhere Tiny Tim gets a shot at becoming a big time jockey, only to
find there's trouble at the top when he gets threatened by hardmen goons who
want him to throw a race on behalf of their guv'nor. There is a noticeable
anger in Sweet Cyanide over the diminutive among us being pushed around by
taller folk. A recurring theme in both Tiny Tim's dealings with the gangsters
and Kristi's experiences with the taller choirboys. Allot of which comes across
as quite heartfelt and personal on Chester's behalf. Odd, as Chester looks to
have been of average height, and not someone who you'd expect to carry around
mental baggage over his height. Its a trait of this book that would have made
more sense had 'Carl Noone' been a pen name of say, Arthur Askey or Lynsey De
Paul.
Due to the demands of his job, Tiny Tim is largely an absent parent. When he
isn't out horse racing he's spending time hanging out with boxers at the local
steam baths and impressing them with his poetry. Suggesting that Kristi isn't
the only one in her family who is suffering from sexual confusion. 'It
surprised Tim too, to learn that many a hard face with a broken nose enjoyed
the odd stanza of poetry'. The unexpected male bonding over poetry in Sweet
Cyanide is likely the result of Charlie bringing a bit of himself to the
material. In real life Chester fancied himself as a poet, and as a result of
being in the public eye would regularly receive amateur poetry from members of
the public, as well as incarcerated prisoners, examples of which can be found
in his 1977 non-fiction book 'Cry Simba'. Fortunately for Tiny Tim his poetry
wins him fans like ex-boxers Ernie and Mick the Mountain, who volunteer
themselves as protection against the gangsters who are threatening to duff up
the jockey. Ernie and Mick the Mountain are the sort of gruff, dim witted, salt
of the earth types that you find littered throughout Chester's books. They are
the kind of characters who, if this were on film, would have probably been
played by Nosher Powell, Ivor Salter or Derek Deadman. Some might feel that
Chester was indulging in patronising, working class caricatures here, but I
sense genuine warmth and affection in his writing 'they might never win prizes
for academic thinking, but they had a classic loyalty, and strange as it may
seem there were some soft hearts among the tin ears and resin'.
Sweet Cyanide is a book of mixed messages when it comes to the role of women. On one hand, the Kristi storyline carries with it a sense of injustice at the preferential treatment of boys over girls, the key to Kristi's disturbed behaviour. On the other hand, Chester is contemptuous towards Brenda over her adultery and rejection of the traditional wife and mother roles. Not only does Brenda go out to work and refuses to act as a mother to Kristi, but she has also had herself 'fixed' so that she can't have any children with Tiny Tim. Leading randy toad J.W. Deakin to quip "that means you can have all the fun without any of the risks". To Brenda, sex is a bargaining tool, she largely cuts off Tiny Tim who has nothing to offer in return for her favours, while leading J.W on with the promise of sex, without ever actually putting out for him.
In Chester's book, hold girls back and you'll screw with their heads and cause them to hate their bodies, but let women out of the kitchen and they'll turn into adulterous, power hungry bitches. Ultimately, Sweet Cyanide is a book that is fighting a battle within itself over whether it wants to be a feminist book or an anti-feminist book.
Of course, Charlie Chester being Charlie Chester, his more unsavoury obsessions rise to the surface in Sweet Cyanide. While Chester is rather reserved and dispassionate when it comes to regular sex, his writing comes alive when Sweet Cyanide drifts in the direction of S&M and jailbait themes. Homosexuality threatens to unmask Kristi due to the other choirboys' bullying and sexual curiosity. The choirboys' beating and stripping of one of their own 'in their course juvenile way they would take turns to spit on his penis', gives Kristi both the shock of being exposed to male genitalia for the first time, and the fearful realisation that when her own number comes up, she'll have no penis for them to spit on. Kristi's identity is accidentally discovered by fellow choirboy Ginger Catlin, after a fight between them turns into a grope-a-thon "so little Chris Lowe has got tits like a girl" pervs Ginger. A Charlie Chester book isn't a safe place to be a schoolgirl, they are the subject of a woodlands rape in 'Bannerman', murder in 'Even the Rainbow's Bent' and sexual blackmail in 'Symphony & Psychopath'. Is it any wonder that Kristi wants to opt out of being one?
The torch that Chester carried for S&M predictably rears its head in the Brenda storyline. All but pimped out by J.W. Deakin to a rich and powerful man, Brenda agrees to throw some sex in the direction of one Arnold Laiker, after J.W tells her that Laiker can help advance both their careers. A man with a dirty mind, Laiker had speculated to J.W that Brenda might be a lesbian, only for J.W to jump to her defense "when it comes to sex, she takes some beating". A comment misunderstood by Laiker, leading him to think that Brenda is a severe masochist. The subsequent S&M encounter between the two does little to conceal Chester's own love of this subject matter. "Brenda cried out and tried to cover up, but whichever way she turned she received the leather". It's also the point in the book where Chester's writing is at its most entertainingly tabloidish 'Arnold Laiker wasn't just kinky, he was a bloody depraved monster. A lunatic'.
For all of his sleaze inclinations though, there is something a little out of time and old fashioned about Chester's books. The gangster and later police procedural aspects of Sweet Cyanide feel like a throwback to a second feature, British crime feature from the early 1960s, and when Chester turns the air blue, he tends to favour mild expletives like 'sod' and 'bloody'.
I wouldn't go as far to say Chester just wrote the same book over and over again, but after you've read a few of them, you do become aware that he stuck to a formula while knocking this stuff out for New English Library. Sweet Cyanide apes the structure of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent, by initially being sympathetic to characters who are driven to murder, before turning against them in the second act when their actions trespass into more callous and reprehensible behaviour. At the outset of the book, Kristi isn't the Bad Seed/Midwich Cuckoo type killer kid that you'd quite expect. Instead she is a sensitive introvert and victim of sexual discrimination. Even her first murder -bashing a guy over the head with a metal pole while he's in the process of raping her- seems a quite justifiable act of self defence. Perhaps because of this, Chester's regular trick of turning the reader against his killer in the second act -Kristi tries to commit the 'perfect' murder and frame Brenda for it- doesn't quite come off here. Especially as even Chester himself doesn't seem particularly enamoured with Brenda, leaving the reader conflicted as to whether their allegiance should remain with Kristi or transfer to the never particularly likeable Brenda. It seems not even Chester has a heart of stone when it comes to Kristi. Whereas in Even the Rainbow's Bent, Chester signs off on a contemptuous note towards Adrian/Adrienne by refering to him as a 'warped creature' here his summing up of Kristi shows a much more compassionate side to him 'Sister Florence had tears in her eyes at the dejected little figure who obviously craved affection'.
Unfortunately Sweet Cyanide does follow the path of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent by turning into a police proceederal for its last act. Chester once again sidelines all his main characters and hands the narrative reigns over to a generic police inspector - here called Jack Morley- who shows up to solve the crime and unmask the culprit. The last acts of Symphony & Psychopath and Even the Rainbow's Bent do drag those books down a few notches. After spending two thirds of the book following incredibly strange mixed up characters we suddenly have to wave goodbye to them and spend the remainder of the book waiting for a dullard of a police inspector to solve crimes we've already been privy to. However in Sweet Cyanide there is at least one part of the mystery that the reader is equally in the dark about. Namely the whereabouts of Tiny Tim who has disappeared en route to a horse race in Australia. As this point, Chester does manage to generate some suspense over whether Tiny Tim arrived in Oz safely or fell foul of the gangsters who were on his trail. It's also worth sticking around for the priceless, penny dropping moment when Inspector Morley puts it all together, which suggests Chester should have had a career writing clues for the gameshow 3-2-1. After his pal Detective Sergeant Ed Sayers remarks that choir-boy Chris Lowe deserves a 'dressing down' from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', Morley has his eureka moment. Pointing out that the opposite of dressing down is dressing up, Morley also tells Ed that if you take the 'Pa or' away from 'Pa or Ma Lowe', and bring the two remaining words together you get Ma Lowe, which could be pronounced Marlowe. Therefore Kristi Marlowe dressed up is Chris Lowe, at which point you half expect Ted Rogers to show up and tell Morley that he has just won Dusty Bin.
After teasing the reader over the fate of Tiny Tim, Chester does rather drop the ball at the end of Sweet Cyanide by forgetting to resolve this subplot, forever leaving us unsure over whether Tiny Tim is alive, dead or tiptoeing through the tulips. Given that the book ends with Kristi being lead away by kindly, concerned nun Sister Florence, it does feel like Chester missed a trick by not having Sister Florence turn out to be Tiny Tim, who'd taken a leaf out of his daughter's book by dragging up as a nun in order to rescue Kristi from police custody. Then again, after you're read a few of his books you do come to except sloppiness as part of the whole Charlie Chester experience. There's also evidence that the title Sweet Cyanide was an 11th hour brainwave by him, since Cyanide plays absolutely no part in the actual plot, and Chester clearly felt obliged to write a line that justified using that title "she may be sweet, but she sounds like Cyanide to me".
After the awfulness of 'Bannerman' I came close to throwing in the towel on Charlie Chester books, but I'm glad I stuck around for Sweet Cyanide, which has restored my faith in the comedian turned sleaze writer, and dare I say might actually be the dirty old bugger's best book.
