Do novelists need credentials? Once, almost a century ago, the vogue for hard-boiled fiction meant that in the masculine Hemingway hegemony then holding sway, novelists needed to be graduates of the ‘University of Life’. Writers, it was argued, had to spend their apprenticeship riding the rails, tending bar in tough-guy saloons and doing almost any work that could be described as manual labour.
This changed postwar, with greater affluence and millions more people in higher education, including women. Among them were a growing number taking postgraduate degrees in creative writing – most famously at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but followed quite credibly in this country at the University of East Anglia.
What, then, to make of a writer who flouts these conventions, appearing with a first novel at the age of 65, without a university degree or any DEI affiliations? An Old Etonian, moreover, who has spent 20 years in the army, followed by ten as an equerry and private secretary to the royal family? All I can say is that Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton’s When Love and Loyalty Collide (Bantam, £16.99) defeated all my cynical expectations. It is a very good read – intelligently structured, well-written and candid when candour is called for (there are many violent scenes and a few explicit sexual encounters).
