Crime fiction: the writer as adult educator

Brenda Blethyn as Vera Stanhope

In a rare sortie into the outside world this summer, we spent half a day in August visiting the Farne Islands. A group of 15-20 rocky islands in the North Sea (the precise number depends on the tide), they are managed by the National Trust, and are rightly famous for their wildlife and for their association with Grace Darling. They also featured in Series 7, Episode 1 of Vera.

The Vera novels, written by Ann Cleeves, are fine British police procedural novels. Cleeves’ central character is Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope is a dishevelled, badly dressed, irrascible, overweight, stubborn, compassionate yet solitary-minded woman who is also an inspired investigator. Her character and appearance were softened for television, where she is played by the superb Brenda Blethyn. I enjoy both series, different though they are, not least for their Northumberland setting, but I’ve not spotted any obvious ties with the wonderful world of adult learning.

The author, though, is making her mark in the field. More precisely, she is contributing to literacy work through the Reading for Wellbeing project that she is funding. Through the projecct, community reading workers have undertaken training and are working with local health centres and others in disadvantaged north-eastern communities “support, empower and motivate individuals to take proactive steps to improve their health and wellbeing by providing practical help though access to books and spaces/places for reading, and emotional support through improved confidence in reading and relationship building”.

Cleeves describes the initiative as rooted in her own experience, in several ways. First is her own engagement with reading as a source of comfort while supporting her husband through profound mental health challenges. Second was her career as a librarian in Kirklees, where the local library service pioneered a social prescribing programme for patients with depression or chronic pain. Cleeves later went on to help set up reading groups for groups as diverse as prisoners, men in pubs, and bus drivers.

Cleeves is fnot the only successful crime writer with a track record of supporting adult learners. Among others, Martyn Waites, who worked with teenage ex-offenders before publishing crime fiction set in Newcastle, has held two writing residencies in prisons as well as delivering drama and creative writing workshops to socially excluded adults and teenagers in South London and Essex. And several crime authors have taught creative writing at one stage or another in their careers.

Returning to Ann Cleeves’ project, I’m afraid it’s all too easy to dismiss such initiatives such as too small to make a difference, or to say that the state should fund them rather than relying on individual charity. The reality is that all four governments in Britain don’t fund much family learning (the Kirklees programme stopped when its funding came to an end), and we have so far not managed to persuade governments that adult learning has to become a higher priority if we are to achieve a more inclusive, prosperous and sustainable society.

And we should remember our history. Adult education movements in many countries started life as voluntary initiatives long before the state became involved; in the UK we need only think of the literary and philosophical societies, the Adult School movement, or workers’ education to see the power of voluntarism in beating a path towards a wider recognition of the need for adult learning and education. Reading for Wellbeing is being evaluated, so let’s see what it can contribute – I certainly wish it well.

Adult education, democracy, and murder in Nordic Noir

In her novel Red Wolf, the Swedish crime writer Liza Marklund bumps off a character who lives in the far northern region of Norrbotten. Margit Axelsson, a one-time Maoist revolutionary in the 60s, now makes a living by teaching ceramics to adults in the remote town of Piteå.

Norbotten, photographed by Simo Rasanen (Creative Commons)

Marklund portrays Swedish adult education, at least as carried out by the Arbetarnas bildningsförbund (AFB, or WEA), as an extension of Margit’s beliefs:

The Workers’ Educational Association had always believed that those who had received the fewest of society’s resources should be compensated through education, cultural activities, and opportunities. he regarded it as jjstice applied in the educational and cultural sphere.

Study groups were a lesson in democracy. They took as their starting point the belief that every inividual has the capacity and desire to develop themselves, to exert influence and take responsibility, that every ndividual is a resource.

And she saw how the members grew, youing and old alike. Whwen they learned to handle the clay and the glazes their self-confidence grew, their understanding of the opinions of others, and, with that, their ability to actively influence what went on in the society around them.

It all ends badly for Margit, but isn’t it interesting to see an author set out such a clear analysis of the wider effects of adult learning? I have no way of knowing whether the study circles of the Arbetarnas bildningsförbund really do have these effects, but I hope so.

Adult learning in spy fiction: John Le Carré

Le Carré at the Zeit Forum Kultur, 2008, Hamburg

There’s a brief but telling mention of adult education in John Le Carré’s latest novel. Describing a character who has a left-wing father from a mining background, Le Carré adds that

His mother spent whatever free time she had from work at adult education classes until they were cut.

Le Carré is describing here a politically engaged self-improving working class milieu which he believes no longer exists, due in part to the erosion of public civic spaces of learning.

Agent Running in the Field is entertaining enough, but it’s unlikely to be judged one of Le Carré’s better novels, though its plot may resonate with the beliefs and fears of some Remainers. For the purposes of this blog, though, I will confine my comments to his very brief mention of adult education.

First, the author presents the weakness of UK adult education as a given; and while I think he is wrong about it, I understand that a lot of his readers will share this view.

Second, I’m encouraged that an author of his stature has actually noticed that UK adult education is not in great shape, and can assume that this observation will resonate with his readers. Maybe someone should be signing Le Carré up as patron of a campaign for adult learning (while gently pointing out to him that it isn’t quite dead yet).

Adult learning as embarrassment: more adult learning in crime fiction

I’ve polished off another German crime novel, which I bought in the Oxfam shop in Bonn. It features a middle aged male detective, Adalbert Kluftinger, who is rather set in his ways, and lives in the picturesque but socially conservative southern region known as the Allgäu. And as in so many German Krimis, up pops adult education. Twice.

The Allgäu town of Kempten, image licensed under Creative Commons

On the first occasion, Kluftinger heads to the local university for applied science to interview a witness, who happens to be lecturing at the time. After getting lost on the campus, Kluftinger walks through a door into the lecture hall, where everyone assumes that he is a pensioner who has come along out of interest. Far too embarrassed to explain otherwise, he waits until the lecture is over.

This episode assumes that the reader knows of the German practice of Seniorenstudium, under which for a small fee, older adults may attend courses as ‘Gasthörer‘, or ‘guest listeners’. In Kempten, as in my old haunt of Cologne, the fee is €100 (or up to €300 per semester depending on the number of courses taken), and the university doesn’t separate older adults from others who register (online) as Gasthörer. But in practice, most such associate students are older adults, and the scheme is a popular one.

The second occasion involves a dancing class. Frau Kluftinger, a dance lover, has enrolled herself and her husband for the course, which inevitably involves him in humiliation at the hands of the tutors. I’d like to think that most adult teachers don’t enjoy humiliating their weaker learners, and the novel turns the tutors – an ultra-camp German male and an Italian woman whose grasp of German grammar is weaker than mine – into parodies. it isn’t clear in the novel who the course provider is.

The novel is called Laienspiel, which I understand as roughly equivalent to ‘Amateur Dramatics’, and the plot involves wicked goings on around a community performance of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. It’s a novel with a lot of humour, and it exploits adult education in order to emphasise the awkwardness and discomfort Kluftinger feels with the unknown, uncertain, and unpredictable. And it’s another example of the way in which adult education serves so often in German krimis as an unremarkable backdrop to dramatic events.

I wonder, though, whether we have underestimated the importance of embarrassment in adult learning. Or rather, in deterring some people from taking a formal course, with the risk that others will judge you for needing to ‘return to school’, or that you will show yourself up in some way by making mistakes in front of people who seem more confident and competent than you. Perhaps this is one more reason why remote forms of learning, where no one sees you fail, attract some people ?

Adult education in fiction: the rhythms of the year in Jon McGregor’s “Reservoir 13”

I’m constantly impressed by the regularity with which adult education features in German crime fiction. What stands out is that in most cases, adult education doesn’t stand out – it is there in the background as part of every day German life. That’s rare in English language fiction, where adult education is either the main setting or serves as a marker of difference.

In Jon McGregor’s award-winning Reservoir 13, though, adult education features as a marker of passing time. The novel covers 13 years in the life of an English village, mirroring the age of a missing teenager. And every year, as regular as well dressing (Derbyshire perhaps?), harvest festival, or the village panto, the Workers’ Educational Association holds a class in the village.

McGregor doesn’t go into detail about the WEA classes. Their role in the novel is to mark the turning of the months, as one of the threads of continuity that are woven into the changing relationships and lives of the villagers. Who takes part, and why, are not particularly important.

McGregor also has one of his villagers – Susanna Wright – arrange a yoga class in the village hall. This provides something of a contrast with the routine rhythm of the WEA class:

It had taken a while but by now the classes were more popular than some had assumed they might be. She kept saying it was open to everyone, but whenever a man showed up he found himself the only one there, and soon decided not to come back. Most of the women were regulars, and after a few months some of them were disappointed by how few poses they could hold. Susanna tried to tell them yoga wasn’t about goals. There are no badges or certificates here, she said; it’s all about finding your own point of stretch.

This time, the class gives us an insight into some of the characters involved. It also serves to provide an example of change in village life, contrasting with the steady rhythm of the WEA. Susanna is new to the village, arriving in the third year of the narrative, and she is initially greeted with some suspicion. Her first attempt to organise a yoga class attracted three people, and only later does it become popular.

Reservoir 13 is an outstanding novel, and I heartily recommend it. It’s gently experimental in form, but thoroughly engaging, hypnotic even, and the disappearance at its heart remains unresolved. Quite aside from its treatment of adult learning, I really enjoyed it, and despite my general efforts to downsize my book collection, I’m hanging on to this one so I can read it again.

Murderous learning – more reflections on adult education in crime fiction

Recently I’ve been enjoying a crime novel by an Irish writer, Tana French. The Trespasser is set in Dublin, and its central character is Antoinette Conway, a hard-boiled murder squad detective of mixed race. The novel is interesting on belonging, family, gender, low-level racism, and internal hierarchies in the police. And it also touches upon adult education.

Aislinn, the murder victim, is described as a serial attender of evening classes. The detectives draw up a list of all the classes she took with a view to checking out ‘all the other students or whatever they call them’, a lead they pursue by looking though her financial records for fee payments.

I’d wondered whether this meant that the murder turned on an evening class, which would have been mightily entertaining. But no; Antoinette describes the list of evening classes as ‘depressing as hell’:

Aislinn genuinely paid actual money for a class called Restyle You!, with the exclamation mark, also one for wine appreciation, and something called Busy Babes Boot Camp.

So the evening classes turn out to be a side-alley, something the reader wonders about but which provide nothing by way of leads. Definitely not a plot device, then.

But the evening classes are nevertheless important: they tell the reader something about Aislinn’s character. Her serial pursuit of adult learning reflects Aislinn’s underlying uncertainty about who she is; and they signal her interest in adopting a new social role, restyling herself in order to explore the mystery of her own father’s disappearance.

Needless to say, hard-boiled Antoinette doesn’t think much of this, and indeed she tends to despise Aislinn more generally for being so unsure of herself, and for allowing her vanished father to dominate her life.  From this the reader concludes that Antoinette has dealt with her own childhood losses differently, so that perhaps the role of hard-boiled detective is itself a defensive performance of some kind.

As I say, an interesting novel, not only because of how it deploys adult learning. And  Antoinette’s rather cynical and dismissive view of adult learning, of course, is consistent with her seemingly hard-boiled character. So here is another fine example to add to my accounts of adult education and crime fiction in Germany, neither of which involve detectives who are ‘hard-boiled’.

As for the Busy Babes Boot Camp, no way would I let that pass by without investigating further. It turns out there is a clutch of similarly named fitness classes for Busy Moms, Busy Women, Busy Ladies, and Busy Girls. Busy Babes, though, is French’s invention

Teaching adults dancing- it’s murder!

I enjoy a good crime novel, or sometimes even quite a bad one. My most recent read was a novel called Ostseetod (Death on the Baltic) by Eva Almstädt, a popular writer who sets her stories in the North German port city of Lübeck. Some of you will already know that I enjoy spotting scenes that occur in an adult education context, and Ostseetod provides a great, if brief, example.

Lucie Warnke, a middle aged mother married to a furniture dealer, is a dancer by occupation. Because the family live in a small and remote town in Schleswig-Holstein, the opportunities for dancing are few and far between, so she makes a living from teaching local women and children. The passage is set in a morning class, with Lucie (‘for the hundred and fifty thousandth time) telling the women: ‘Chests out, tummies in, legs higher, ladies – higher!’.

The seven participants, we are told, are aged between their mid-20s and mid-60s, and are hoping to stay supple with a mix of dance and gymnastics. Privately, Lucie thinks the class is good but useless for the woman, and imagines herself telling them that they just need to eat less. ‘But this type of class was the bread under the butter that Lucie at present needed’, for not only does she need her own spending money, but her husband charges her rent for the dancing space.

I can’t go much further without spoiling the plot, though that might not matter much to people who don’t read German, as German and Austrian crime fiction – which can be absolutely excellent – is rarely translated; the only exception seems to be Nele Neuhaus. What is interesting here is what adult education does for the novel.

I’ve speculated previously about why adult education classes are such ideal sites for crime writers (read more here). In this brief scene, Almstädt tells us something about two characters: Lucie, with her best years of dancing (and life?) now behind her, and her more-or-less useless husband Florian, as well as the relationship between them. She also communicates something about the local community and its limitations.

Almstädt can assume that her readers will see nothing unusual about a woman earning a few euros by teaching a class in a spare room. Germany has a thriving public adult education sector, as well as a lively voluntary sector. But it is also very common to see opportunities for private educational activities. On a short walk home last night from the football, between the bus stop and my home, I spotted a firm offering yoga classes for busy professionals and a flyer for a series of comedy workshops.

Almstädt belongs to an association of women crime writers called Mörderische Schwestern, the German chapter of Sisters in Crime, which provides mentoring and support for less experienced authors.Now I think about it, Mörderische Schwestern provides a kind of adult education. It surely can’t be long until someone writes a murder story set in their ranks  – or perhaps they have already?

Murder in the evening class: adult education and the crime novel

I’ve just been to hear Klaus-Peter Wolf reading from his latest novel at my local bookshop. Wolf is best known for a series set in the far north western coastal region of East Friesland, whose central figure is Hauptkommissarin Ann Kathrin Claasen. Luckily for me, his work is highly readable, with relatively (for German) short sentences, lots of humour, and enjoyable plotting.

Several things strike me about the Claasen series. First, Claasen typifies a trend in German crime fiction, much of which has a female as the main detective. Some commentators have observed that you are much more likely to encounter a female Hauptkommissarin in fiction than in reality.

Second, the series is firmly rooted in its region. Indeed, I thought Wolf’s latest novel went overboard in contrasting the close, decent and upright communities of East Friesland with the freetic, atomised peoples of the cities (exemplified in this novel by an ambitious and ruthless reporter, who is promptly killed off).

It’s not just Wolf and East Friesland. Most German cities and regions have their own local crime writers, just as each of regional broadcaster contributes its own locale and detectives to the long-running series Tatort. Perhaps this local focus and identity in crime fiction is one more hangover from the many local states and principalities that were pushed and pulled into a Prussianised Germany in the late 1860s.

Third, though, is the role of adult education. When the principal criminal is hunting down a victim in the small town of Emden, he enrols in an adult education class at the local Volkshochschule. He studies alongside his victim before abducting her from the car park, after which detectives question her fellow classmates and the Volkshochschule principal.

Back in the real world, staff at Emden VHS seem to have embraced their fictional infamy. Far from worrying that their reputation had been stained by a vile crime, they invited the author to read from his book, accompanied by music from his wife Bettina Göschl.

This made me wonder whether and how adult learning generally features in fiction. It might be a natural location in Germany, where adult education centres are everywhere (there is a large one ten minutes’ walk away from where I live), but what about writers in other countries? I’m aware of Maeve Binchy’s novel The Evening Class, set in a Dublin suburb and  apparently often discussed by reading groups, but I can’t think of other novels that feature adult learners.

I can’t help but think that British crime writers like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid have so far missed a trick. Adult courses can be filled with suppressed intrigue, they sometimes make people frustrated with their circumstances, and they have been known to provoke jealousy from spouses and even children.An ideal setting for murder and mayhem, then.

Yet how many murders are linked – in fiction, of course – to adult courses? Is fictional mayhem in adult education a positive indicator of a learning society? And what about the shift to digital learning – can you actually murder someone in a MOOC?