Christopher Tayler

In the rich American vocabulary of abuse for the white rural poor, hicks and hayseeds connote ignorance but also innocence. The Hill-billie of Mathews’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1900) is a cheerful enough character ‘who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him’. The stereotype is still more comic than threatening. The word redneck, on the other hand, is, variously, ‘a derog. term for a country dweller, a peasant, esp. a southern US poor farmer who is stupid and racist’, a ‘bigoted and conventional person; a loutish ultraconservative’ and – most hurtfully – ‘a Southern rural white; hence, a reactionary’. The urbanised descendants of these people are ‘trailer park trash’ – badly dressed, illiterate, their obesity commensurate with their appetites for junk food and generic beer – a near-universal formula for the undeserving poor.’‘

In its fifties heyday 7000 Romaine was the operations centre of Howard Hughes’s organisation, and lent its name to an unusual document known as the ‘Romaine Street Procedures Manual’, an attempt to codify both Hughes’s memoranda and the instructions set down by his compliant lieutenants. Its guidelines for employees, generously quoted in Barlett and Steele’s 1979 biography of Hughes, are extremely precise. They range from general conduct (‘Do not fraternise with persons outside the office … Tell your wife as little as possible’), to the most minute detail: when opening the cinema door for Hughes’s future wife ‘do so with the feet, not the hands’; ‘When crossing any bump, dip, swale, ditch, railroad track or any uneven part of any road’ in the course of chauffeuring one of his contract starlets ‘the speed should be reduced to such a minimum … that no violent motion … would tend to disturb the position of the party’ – Hughes feared that their breasts might be damaged by jolting. The main preoccupation, however, is hygiene. In January 1958, for example, Hughes dictated three pages of single-spaced instructions on how to open a can of fruit:’‘

Fictional representations of real events from Hillsborough to the Stephen Lawrence case – mostly in the form of plays and television dramas – have played a surprisingly large part in shaping national debates about the police and police culture. Novels, however, tend either to use the figure of the detective to investigate larger questions than those of routine police work, or to fall back on the conventional oppositions (efficiency and incompetence, probity and graft) which tend to prop up the morphology of the fictional plod. When three novels emerge which explicitly or implicitly claim to deal with questions of police power and its abuses, it’s hard not to hope for something more than straightforward inversions of the mythic neighbourhood bobby. Unfortunately, the only one of these books with any insight into the daily grind of law enforcement and the attitudes it engenders is a failure as a novel; the other two, no masterpieces themselves, content themselves with posturing and caricature.’

Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the third, Dago Red (1940), was a collection of short stories. All three were well received. Ask the Dust disconcerted some of its reviewers, but Bandini was admired by James Farrell and Steinbeck praised Dago Red. Italian and Norwegian translations were commissioned, Bandini was published in London, and Hollywood optioned both novels. Then, for various reasons, nothing happened. Distracted by a lawsuit brought against them by the German Government for an unauthorised publication of Mein Kampf, his publishers were unable to promote his work. After drinking and gambling away the money he had earned from his books, he took to the Hollywood treadmill as a screenwriter and scenarist. As a serious writer, he was effectively forgotten for almost forty years.

Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings...