Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper

What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer?

In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.)

One aspect of the story reminded me of  O. Henry’s  The Cop and the Anthem (1904). 

That short story tells of Soapy, a homeless man in New York who longs for a warm jail cell for the winter. His attempts to get arrested fail until, moved by church music, he decides to reform – only to be arrested for vagrancy and sent to Blackwell’s Island.

Similarly, William Bowling anticipates and hopes for his imminent arrest for the murder of his wife.

Thanks to Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings for putting me on to this one. Like her, I found this morally slippery novel – steeped in the blackout streets and shifting loyalties of wartime London – very appealing.

The title brings other Mr.s to mind – Polly, Britling, Chips – and hides a twist. Buying a newspaper is an ordinary thing to do. Mr. Bowling buys the paper to check whether his crimes have been reported.

Early on, we learn Bowling murdered his wife, a deed that sets his life on a grim new trajectory. He reflects:

“I’m not a sinner at all, really. No worse than the next chap. I’d help anyone. I jolly soon started in at war work. It was partly the change, we all like change, and I got fed up with insurance. I never thought of this new line, not then. Not until we got a direct hit and we got buried, and she started up that awful screaming. And I put my hand on her mouth, close to her nose. My, she went out quickly, like a snuffed candle. It was only murder if you analysed it. There were worse things. Blackmail was worse. Homosexuality was worse. Who said murder was the only capital crime? It wasn’t so in the old days. You got stoned to death for all sorts of things. Poor old girl, but she was a cow, a real cow, what a cow she was. Poor old dear. And if it hadn’t been me, it might have been the roof falling in. Who could tell? Anyway, it’s between me and my God.”

And he thought: “And for the first time, I got a bit of money out of something! Insurance! I’d never even thought of that!”

Bowling is a dispirited man whose hopes for status and wealth have not materialized. After a pub visit, he stumbles back to his room “just beginning to feel pretty good… just beginning to get the feeling of being a bachelor again, and living alone in a room in the old way which he so used to hate.”

Reflecting bitterly on marriage, he muses:

“A man married for reasons of loneliness, and so as to make love regularly… Sometimes, if he was lucky, for money. If he was really lucky, he married for love. But there, some people had the luck, others didn’t.”

He confesses his crime to the reader with unsettling candor. This combination of cold rationalization and self-pity creates a voice that is dark, and funny.

A fellow lodger, Alice, declares she is in love with him but Mr.Bowling is not interested. He tells her he is moving to Guildford. Then she sees him on the street.  He runs (like a hedgehog) and she chases him down:

He felt strangely amused, running like this about London, and leaned up against the fence to get his breath back.

‘When the blitz was on,’ he commented, panting, ‘I was walking up here one night, and a shower of incendiaries dropped all round the bally place. There was a fire on the roof of one place, and I knocked the people up and helped put it out. When I’d finished, the old cow said, thanks so much, do you mind carrying these buckets downstairs before you go, I do dislike them up here. I said, but of course, madam, but mayn’t I wash up the dinner things before I go? … It was the night before that place was burnt out,’ he said, pointing at Holland House.

‘Bill, couldn’t we be together? A sort of trial? I know I could make you happy.’
‘No one can make me happy,’ he snapped in sudden anger, and started to stride off.
Perplexed, she stared after him, her sad little voice wailing:
‘Oh … Bill …”

Having claimed the insurance money for his wife’s death Bowling splurges it:

“He carted vast sums about with him, it was a sort of complex after all those frightful years of sitting on divans wondering how far he could make 1s 8d go, let’s see, ten Gold Flake, a pint of Mild, a packet of notepaper, or else …”

Who knew that the equivalent of 8p could buy so much back then?

Bowling moves upscale to Addison Heights, an imposing block of flats with a shop run by Mr. Farthing and a restaurant managed by Mrs. Farthing. The Farthings are a bitter couple: Mr. Farthing “had no forehead and a bald, sloping head, and a great, stupid jowl set in a soured line… looking like an anthropoid ape.” He instantly dislikes Bowling, sneering at him as “another bloated Capitalist.”

Bowling’s gestures of generosity – like impulsively buying a piano for his flat – contrast bitterly with his solitude and the looming threat of arrest:

“He smiled and pulled out his wallet… ‘I don’t want to disappoint you, I expect you get some commission.’”

He imagines parties where “they’d all swim in gin and whisky… He’d play the piano for them, and he might even croon!” Yet, after a party, he “stood amongst the debris feeling bored to death and completely alone… He sat sorrowfully and wearily down at the piano… feeling self-pitying and sentimental… ‘I really am a tedious fellow.’”

Henderson’s depiction of daily life – the social anxiety, the blackout, and wartime attitudes toward sex and class – rings authentic. The world of this novel is one of rooming houses, blackout curtains, noisy smoke-filled pubs, and people on the move. Onions are luxury items, tripe an option, scotch ale is in short supply. Everyone is in uniform or doing war work, Scotland Yard serves stewed rabbit, and class, alcohol-fueled parties, and opinions about sex dominate the narrative.

Social pretensions are skewered:

“Lady Wilton had been telephoned for, to lend tone at teatime, notwithstanding she hadn’t a single original thought in her stupid head, and notwithstanding one of her brothers was in a mental home for inebriates.”

Bowling did not set out to kill his wife, and when he kills again, it’s mostly out of a morbid wish to be caught and found guilty. Like O. Henry’s Soapy, his intentions are thwarted. He is trapped in a cycle of crime and despair until – an unexpected twist of fate changes the course of his story.

Henderson and Highsmith

If Patricia Highsmith’s moral ambiguities unsettle you, or if the idea of a serial killer as comic material feels unacceptable, don’t read this book. Henderson’s novel invites you to enjoy the company of a man who murders without remorse, all in a tone that recalls Ealing comedies like The Ladykillers  (1955) or the comic narrative and twisted psychology of The Horizontal Man.

Bowling’s nearest fictional cousin is Tom Ripley. Highsmith has readers admiring Ripley’s charm and cultivated tastes even as he kills – a moral seduction some find dangerous. Henderson similarly makes Bowling sympathetic, but here the effect comes from the awfulness of his victims and the grimness of his own life. Ripley is a predator; Bowling is a disappointed, drifting man, a victim of circumstances and emotional deprivation who slips into murder almost by accident. Ripley prospers in luxury and escapes justice. Bowling wants to be caught, and Henderson leaves a door open for moral or spiritual resolution.

Both Henderson and Highsmith subvert the classic crime fiction moral contract. Traditional detective stories disrupt the world with violence, then restore order, rewarding good and punishing evil. Ripley and Bowling blur those boundaries.

Gripping, funny, and unsettling, this novel captures a wartime London mood – blackout streets, moral shadows, and the uneasy sense that some people are better off dead..

The Ladykillers

For a delightful comedy of robbery and murder, watch: 

Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper and the The Ladykillers  mix crime with dark humor, although they differ in tone and focus. The Ladykillers is a lighthearted, quite ridiculous Ealing comedy about a bumbling gang whose criminal plans are undone by little old Mrs Wilberforce. She gives them a right telling off when she learns of their crime. She represents a moral order and yet ultimately benefits from the fact that it has been disturbed. That and the final double death scene give the satisfaction of just desserts. (And the rail yard and train are a dramatic plus.) 

Mr Bowling  is an altogether  bleaker story about an emotionally damaged loner. Where The Ladykillers invites affectionate laughter at its eccentric criminals, Henderson’s novel forces uncomfortable sympathy for a tragic anti-hero trapped in despair.

Brighton Rock

This novel also had me thinking of Graham Greene’s “entertainment” Brighton Rock  (1938)- a novel that I was once assigned to “teach”, presumably on the grounds that adolescents like novels about teenager sociopaths.

Like Pinkie, Mr. Bowling lives in that foggy territory where crime, guilt and pity overlap in a murky morality. 

Both books have a killer at the center. Bowling –  both spoiled and spoilt, world weary and worn wants to be found out.  Pinkie, ruthless cold-blooded and manipulative tussles with damnation.

Greene’s world is one of Catholic damnation and forgiveness. Bowling’s world is simpler and his angst is from disappointment and loneliness. Both novels leave us uncomfortably close to their murderers, yet never let us forget how dark their worlds are.