Feedback - Hugh Miller

THE STORY: Matt Galt, Scottish ex-pat and private detective with a middling business, lives and works in Stratford primarily because he is an aficionado of the Bard. At the start of this novel he is hired by antiques dealer Timothy Barton to discover who has been sneaking rats into his shop.  Galt spends the night in the shop, has a frightening encounter with the vandal and a small army of rats. The next day he delivers the news to Barton. Barton is not satisfied. He tells Galt he knows who is responsible but he needs better proof and that means literally catching the culprit. The case leads Galt into the gay subculture where he meets  a coterie of theater people, antique dealers and two shifty owners of a gay S&M leather shop.  His dogged investigations also lead to the discovery of an ugly white supremacist organization that is harassing immigrants. 

THE CHARACTERS: Galt is described as "43 years old going on 50" on the first page of Feedback (1974).  He also has "delicate long hands of an aesthete and the sallow lined face of a ruined saint." We learn Galt is a "sartorial disaster" who once paid close attention to his grooming and his clothes but "abdicated" his enthusiasm when he "came to realize that he had the kind of body to which good clothes did not take kindly."  Miller's sardonic sense of humor is pervasive as his insistence on pointing out Galt's anti-gay sentiments. Well, loathing is the real word. He uses "abomination" a couple of times in the three page rant that comes early in the book. But Galt will soon find himself confronting all his bigotry and biases when he is forced to role play in order to get information from the many gay men he meets.  Nearly all the gay men he meets are either crooks or con men. They are predatory, vain, arrogant or  patronizing -- most are a combination of several of those negative traits. No surprise, right?

Galt's old pal Bunny McQuaid is a highlight among the supporting characters and appears late in the book. Only 30 years old, blond, athletically built and much more attractive than dumpy and short Matt Galt, Bunny takes advantage of his physique and good looks in luring several of the more dangerous suspects. A scene between the sinister owners of the leather shop morphs from a faux seduction scene to an all-out brawl. There are a few action sequences in the book but this one is probably the best with the most satisfying conclusion.

Being a pop fiction book of the 1970s there of course is the requisite sex scene. Galt runs into his old flame Margaret who though married still has feelings for Galt.  The reader gets to see exactly how strong those feelings are in a two page romp that goes into great detail describing Margaret's body, her orgasm and her apparent ecstasy.  Galt's body, actions and sexual satisfaction are not described at all. No surprise there either.  These type of censored sex scenes written by straight men always made me laugh when I was a teen in the 1970s.  I still find them utterly hilarious.

The most surprising part of the book comes at the midpoint when Kadija, a 12 year-old Indian girl, is seen sitting outside of Galt's office. She reports how her father was struck down by a car and is recovering from severe injuries in a hospital. She wants Galt to get the man who drove the car arrested and put in jail.  Not so easy, he tells her. It's really a matter for the police. But her story touches him and when she pulls a wad of money out of her pocket (all of her savings for the past three months) he refuses to take it.  He promises he will take her case for free.

Galt eventually meets with Maldur Singh, a Sikh who is the community leader for the small group of Indians living in and around Stratford.  The community has been harassed for months and part of the problem is a rat infestation in their homes and businesses.  Singh cannot understand where so many came form because he knows that the people who live there are meticulously cleaning all the time.  Galt begins to see a connection between the racist organization and the rat problem at Barton's antique shop.  The same person, he figures, must be involved, possibly linked to the organization. It all smells like a conspiracy with the racists behind it all and the end result the complete eradication of the Indian immigrants.

INNOVATIONS: One of Galt's biggest clues is a photograph of three men he steals from Barton's antique shop.  He find it by accident the night of the rat battle when an antique mug falls off a table.  The photo depicts Barton on his knees in front of two naked men displaying themselves. A souvenir of some erotic night of debauchery, Galt figures. But he vaguely recalls seeing the face of one of the naked men. He pockets the photo and shows it to several men and two women over the course of the book. Both naked men will eventually be identified by name and profession, both will figure prominently later in the book especially in the violent finale. 

One of the most original bits of detective work involves Galt's highly developed sense of smell. While doing battle with the mysterious rat vandal and the army of rodents Galt smelled a strange cologne. His memory for that unique scent haunts him and he wants to identify it. He thinks it must be a custom made cologne which he describes as redolent of "dahlias, but heavy, verging on decay."  While attending a play he catches a whiff of the cologne while buying a drink at the theater's bar.  He approaches Dominic Treadworthy, a voice and diction teacher, and starts talking to him about his cologne. Through flattery and elaborate lies Galt discovers that the custom cologne, Gilead Oil, is available only in one place -- a leather shop specializing in S&M costumes and equipment.  The two men who own the store keep popping up in this case. Coincidences and chance are also a running motif in the plot.

I also liked a scene where Galt picks up a prostitute and then reveals he's not interested in sex at all.  Essentially he blackmails her into revealing information on her clients. It is during this scene that Galt learns of the names of the owners of the S&M shop and that Harry Caine, the older nastier man of the two and a pansexual of sorts who will have sex with anyone, has the bizarre hobby of breeding domesticated rats. Rose, the prostitute, begins dishing the dirt not so much out of fear of what Galt will do if she doens't talk, but because she hates the men who run the shop. Anything she can do to bring about their ruin will give her perverse pleasure.

Ultimately, despite the offbeat humor and the likeable personalities of Bunny and Matt Galt, Feedback is a bleak crime novel. For a long time I realized there was no murder. But then... the novel can end only one way. Violent fights, cruel beating and murder finally rears its ugly head. Then comes the saddest of revelations in the final pages. Yes, the villains (all of them reprehensible people and not for their sexual orientation) get their comeuppance. The consequences of all their devilry and cruelty leave lingering scars for several characters. Feedback ends with one of the most downbeat final paragraphs in any book I've read this year. 

QUOTES:  Timothy reveals he is a con artist and he fakes the age of certain ornamental items by battering them in a convoluted manner and then selling them as antiques. When confronted with his fraud he rationalizes: "I'm not the only one who does it, you know. It's a long established practice." Matt nodded. "So is child beating, but I haven't heard anyone try to pass that off as an honourable tradition. Christ."

One day he would have real office with proper heating and decent decor. And one day, he thought wryly...a couple of pigs would go flying past the window.

[Galt] knew without the benefit of a mirror to check, that his dignified, serious face was radiating absolute conviction. A gentlemen to his rubber soles, even if he did come from Glasgow.

If anybody knew that paperwork and questions were the way things got done in England it was an immigrant.

Somewhere, underneath the tendencies and perversions, was there maybe a simply, howling human soul, crying for some clean air, some ordinary decency?

THE AUTHOR:  Hugh Miller (1937 - ) was born in Wishaw, Scotland and now lives in Warwick, England. Apparently he's still alive as I could not locate an obituary. Miller began his novelist’s career in 1973 with New English Library, a British publisher of mass market paperbacks mostly originals. His first crime novel, The Drop Out, was followed quickly by five more in 1974.  Feedback, his third crime novel is his also first private eye novel. He also wrote crime fiction under the pen names John Watts and John Warwick.  

In addition to crime novels Miller wrote a romantic fiction series set in the 1920s-1930s about a nurse, nine biographies of British stage magicians, books on magic and mentalism, and several non-fiction books on forensic medicine. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Miller made his living writing TV tie-ins based on UK TV series, including Eastenders, Ballykissangel and Touching Evil. He returned to crime fiction in1990 with a trio of crime novels about his only series character Det-Insp. Mike Fletcher.

I found an apparently self-written, tongue-in-cheek biography at Lybrary, an online website devoted to selling books on magic, mentalism, sleight of hand, and gambling. Miller had a variety of unusual jobs all of which seem to have popped up in his fiction. Here's the bio he wrote:

Born in Scotland at a time when the British still believed Chamberlain was a shrewd operator, Hugh Miller entered adolescence tainted by social lunacy. With the powerful energy generated by Gaelic despair, he hurtled through a formal education and out into a broad variety of activities. Has been a TV film cameraman and stills photographer, a civil servant, an assistant to a police pathologist, a protegee of the famous Dr. John Grierson, an investigator with an international enquiry organisation, author of several books, editor of a magazine and an active student of dishonest gambling. Took up magic to combat a tendency to bite his nails.

NEW STUFF: Strange Houses - Uketsu

Here we go again. Another puzzle laden "mystery" novel has arrived fresh from the pen of Uketsu and the English language translator Jim Rion.  It's Strange Houses (2025, original Japanese edition 2021) and this time instead of a variety of unusual picture puzzles that are supposed to reveal the hidden motives of the criminally minded characters in its pages (Strange Pictures) we have an assortment of floor plans of deviously designed homes.  But it's more of the same -- contrived story meant to nest inside some silly puzzles that are not too puzzling.  The preposterous story, once again devoid of any fundamental understanding of humanity, reminded me of a 1974 TV movie called Bad Ronald I saw when I was a teen that has stayed with me for decades. Quite a campy bit of psychological horror, wild and preposterous, but in the end utterly human. It was based on a cult crime novel by John Holbrook Vance, about a boy who commits a murder and is secreted away in a hidden room. Then his mother dies, the house is sold and.... well, you probably can guess at the rest.  Bad Ronald is way more thrilling and creepy than Strange Houses which has a similar conceit at its perverse center.

Uketsu's excessively Gothic story is informed of macabre murder novels, a family curse, revenge noir and --of course-- cruelty. An attempt to redeem the plot with a character who tries to invert the curse by not committing murder is weakly handled and seems more like a 21st century fairy tale than non-violent behavior resembling something a real human would do.  But of course these are only characters in a book, right?  It's OK to shun any guise of reality because of that. I guess.

With lines like this:  "..would anyone really sacrifice their whole future for a school sweetheart?"  I came to resent the author and the book.  That line contains the basis for hundreds of well known novels, stories, plays and movie scripts. It is a sentiment that is the foundation of timeworn storytelling where something real and human and relatable is at stake. That the author ridicules such a notion speaks volumes about who he or she is and why Uketsu writes soulless nonsense like Strange Houses. Rather than embrace humanity, a more challenging pathway, Uketsu reduces the risk and adventure by piling on excesses reminiscent of 18th century Gothic horror novel conventions: deformity, obsessive love, paranoid fear, and "brainwashed" people compelled to commit murder because they have been cursed.

I'm done with Uketsu. These are not novels. They are naive puzzle books drawing on video game notion that violent revenge is the only recourse. The narrative is skeletal, the dialogue is rendered in script format adding an off-putting dispassionate layer to the entire framework. Strange Houses seems more like an instruction manual with all the real tools of fiction writing -- human characters, metaphor, descriptive and rich language -- completely stripped away to make way for a bare bones structure of logic puzzles onto which a flimsy and outlandish plot is attached. There's pulp fiction and there's trash fiction. A third English translated book from Uketsu came out this year -- Strange Buildings.  I won't be going to the open house.