December 23, 2009
THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN A WORLD WHERE HE WAS LESS WELL-KNOWN THAN THAT MORAL IMBECILE LECARRE:
The genius of Lionel Davidson (Barbara Kay, 12/23/09, National Post)
One of my favourite novelists died Oct. 21 at the age of 87, and it took a while before the news reached me: The British-Israeli Lionel Davidson was relatively unknown on this side of the pond, so there were no prominent obituaries or fond recollective write-ups of his extraordinary novels in the Canadian media.I was first introduced to Davidson, a three-time winner of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger, decades ago by a fellow bibliomane with a penchant for English writers. She pressed Davidson's second novel, The Rose of Tibet (1962) on me, assuring me that once I picked it up, I would not put it down until it was finished. And so it proved. Novelist Graham Greene said Davidson was the first contemporary storyteller to recreate the high adventure of Rider Haggard. Throw in a little Kipling, varnish with one coat of a more humorous and politically neutral John le Carre, and you have the general idea.
I never read a Davidson book I didn't find completely absorbing, but sadly there weren't as many as I'd have liked. Sometimes years would go by before a new one appeared. His last, Kolymsky Heights, a thriller set in the frozen reaches of Siberia (with a Canadian connection -- the hero, Johnny Porter, is a Gitskan Indian from British Columbia), was a happy surprise after a 16-year absence from the literary scene, during which I had concluded that Davidson had died or stopped writing altogether.
It's an outrage that none of his books are even in print.