Last year for this project I read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate, and enjoyed it enough to pick up her debut novel, The Blackmailer (1958), this year.

I must admit my expectations were moderate – I liked The Shooting Party but thought it had far too many characters, and I expected a first novel written 22 years earlier to be less skilled. The author’s Foreword says “I look back on The Blackmailer with a certain affection” which to me hints at an unconditional fondness for something you know is flawed. But in fact found it tightly focussed and complex.

It has a distinctly unlikable titular protagonist in Baldwin Reeves. He is a barrister, resentful of those he feels were born with social and financial advantages, and determined to do whatever it takes to be a QC (as it was in the 1950s) and a politician.

“His ‘rivals’ were of course everyone else in the world.”

One of those he resents most severely is Anthony Lane: landed gentry, charming and charmed, war hero, seemingly universally adored. But Baldwin served with Anthony in Korea, and he knows he was dangerously inept, cowardly, and despised by his comrades.

Baldwin needs money, and so he decides to blackmail Anthony’s widow Judith to preserve the dead man’s posthumous reputation. She knows her husband wasn’t the same as the revered memory:

“Later she had come to believe what had at first seemed to her odd and rather degrading, that love was not always based on a similarity of principles, and that it was possible genuinely to love and even at times to admire someone whom one could seldom, if ever, respect.”

The degradation alongside love is important. Although initially Baldwin and Judith see each other as agonists, they quite quickly develop a warped rapport, feeling drawn to one another. For Baldwin, this is wrapped up in his feelings for Anthony:

“As if anything he might have thought about her late husband was a matter of indifference to her. This was not quite what he had expected, but after all there was a sort of familiarity about it: with Anthony too one’s opinions had not mattered because he had been so sure of his own.”

More than once it is mentioned that Baldwin loved Anthony, although it is not stated whether this included sexual attraction. So two people who both despised and were drawn to Anthony find he is bound up in their relationship after his death.

It’s not entirely clear why Judith should care if her dead husband’s name is tarnished, but it is partly due to loyalty towards her spiky, snobbish mother-in-law who adored her flawed son, and also Anthony’s sweet grandfather who saw Anthony as he was.

The story follows Baldwin and Judith’s odd kinship/courtship of sorts, as two somewhat unhappy people struggle against their circumstances in various ways.

‘I completely fail to understand how you can write anything so appalling,’ she said.

‘Yes, it’s nasty isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I shall try to keep my own name out of it if possible, but I may not be able to.’

Those of you who enjoy the writing of Diana Athill may enjoy the scenes of Julia at work in a publishing house. One publisher was utterly convinced that Colegate knew Andre Deutsch, so close was the portrait of Judith’s boss Felix Hanescu to the great man:

“That was what he had wanted to be, a genius: having just missed it, he had become a personality instead.”

The Blackmailer is almost a comedy of manners, but a bit too spiky. It could be very dark, but steps back from being so, such as when Baldwin insists Judith fire her beloved housekeeper (a man of shorter height who is consistently referred to by what is an offensive term now, although not necessarily intended to be so in the book). This piece of attempted psychological warfare is comedically undermined in a scene of absolute farce, rendering Baldwin ridiculous.

Similarly, The Blackmailer is a psychological study of a distorted relationship and the effects of fantasy, jealousy and lies, but it also doesn’t seek to explain the psychology of anyone. Rather it presents the relationships and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions.

I can imagine this could be a frustrating read for some, but I enjoyed it and the lack of explanations, the wavering between genres. While this kept me at a bit of a distance for much of the novel, Colegate creates two scenes that pack a punch towards the end – one dramatically, one quietly, both devastating in their different ways.

“Lately, for the first time, the points system on which he conducted his relations with other people had been beginning to show its failings.“