Literature / The Jonah

''There is no such thing as a jinx, or a Jonah! It's in the same league as curses and spells and witchcraft and ghouls. It has nothing to do with real life!"

A 1981 novel by James Herbert.

Thirty-one-year-old Detective Constable Jim Kelso, among his fellow police officers, has a reputation as a Jonah - around him, misfortune is unnervingly recurrent. DI Cook, concerned for his officers’ peace of mind, reassigns Kelso to the Drugs Squad, who in turn loan him to the undermanned Suffolk Constabulary.

In the coastal town of Adleby, Kelso, joined by Customs and Excise officer Ellie Shepherd, investigate an apparent drug trade - a young family has been poisoned by lysergic acid; a locally stationed USAF pilot has fatally crashed his plane, and Rosie crewman Andy Trewick is wary of a hard-faced man in a leather jacket.

While their investigation leads them to Eshley Hall, Kelso and Ellie grow irresistibly close - which, in light of their near-fatal encounter with a bulldozer, has Kelso terrified for her safety. Is business director Sir Anthony Slauden as benevolent as he seems? Why has Andy Trewick suddenly vanished? And is Kelso merely a victim of bad luck and a Guilt Complex - or something more sinister?

This novel provides examples of:

• Action Prologue: Through a tunnel beneath the Thames, a Car Chase in pursuit of armed robbers ends in violence.
• Affably Evil: While Sir Anthony has wayward staff murdered, he genuinely dislikes violence, and sternly tells Bannen to reign in the brutality.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: The tangibly manifest, deranged ghost of Kelso’s twin sister, on his forlorn entreaty for her to leave him be, touches his forehead.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Kelso, faced with his spectral twin sister, whose deranged jealousy has, to Kelso and those close to him, brought years of disaster, Kelso helplessly asks her to let him be.
• All for Nothing: The opening arrest of Eddie Mancello and his thugs, in which DC Riley is killed, sees the bank robber’s alibi spare him imprisonment.
• Bedmate Reveal: Five years before the story begins, Kelso’s old girlfriend Sandy, with illicit keys, drunkenly sneaks into his house, and, as a birthday surprise, gets into his bed - occupied by what she assumes to be Kelso. She pulls back the covers - and screams. Kelso, returning from the pub, then sees her thrown from the window.
• Big Fancy House: Eshley Hall, Sir Anthony Slauden’s grey-stoned manor house.
• Black Market: As well as directing five companies, Sir Anthony Slauden, beneath Eshley Hall, runs a well-equipped drug plant, whose ingredients and produce, via the Rosie, are imported, and via Slauden’s animal feed business, exported.
• Black Comedy: While a storm-roused flood pounds Adleby, young waiter John, onto an unwitting diner’s toupee, spills some pea soup. Before John can try to discreetly wipe it, a water-driven boat shatters the restaurant window.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Kelso’s twin sister, whose eyes have no irises and barely visible sclera, is viciously, homicidally insane.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Averted. While an overpowered Kelso, by marginally shifting his head on impact, stops facial blows from breaking his nose, the scene remains horrifyingly brutal.
• Body Horror: Kelso’s spectral twin sister, deformed in the womb with a curved, exposed spine, sloping brow, and underdeveloped features, is also severely decayed. Several gaping wounds hold visible bugs, and her largely absent face exposes black veins.
• Body Surf: At the end, Kelso’s dead sister seems, to at least some extent, taken up residence in Ellie’s body.
• Bookcase Passage: In Eshley Hall’s basement, a wine rack hides the entrance to a well-equipped drug manufacturing lab.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Despite his guilt and fear, Kelso enjoys Ellie’s jovial affability; she in turn enjoys his “quiet but wry sense of humour.”
• The Bully: In 1960, ten-year-old Billy Cross, fourteen-year-old Davey and friend Bri persecute ten-year-old Jimmy Kelso. Jimmy headbutts Davey in the stomach and flees into a bombed-out house. The bullies follow him upstairs - whereupon the floor collapses…
• Buried Alive: Having fallen into a grain silo, Kelso and Bannen struggle to avoid this; the latter tries to inflict it on the former.
• Car Chase Shoot-Out: Having chased through a tunnel a fleeing car, DI Frank Cook, DC Dave Riley and DC Kelso contend with two masked gunmen. While one of them prepares to open fire, Kelso’s gun jams.
• Cartwright Curse: Kelso genuinely fears any prospective girlfriends to face an actual such threat. Once involved with Ellie, the need to run tests on a poisoned vole gives him an excuse to urge her out of danger.
  Kelso: Ellie, I’ve tried for a long time not to feel this way about anyone, but now that I do, I don’t intend to let anything spoil it. I’m treading carefully - for your sake and for mine - so will you scram and take a load off my mind?
• Cataclysm Climax: A succession of tornado strength gusts mounts a furiously destructive flood. Slauden’s men’s capture of Kelso and Ellie turns into a mutual struggle against the raging waters.
• Cheerful Child: In 1960, a ten-year-old Kelso, amidst bombed-out buildings, pretends to be the The Lone Ranger, and happily anticipates a summer of shopping with his mother, helping his father, and Fridays at the cinema.
• Chekhov's Gun: On her way back to Adleby, Ellie, having read Kelso’s file, buys him a lighter for his birthday - of which they’re both very glad when sealed in the mill’s pitch-dark, rat-filled basement.
• Clandestine Chemist: Dr Vernon Collingbury realises his naivety to have trusted Slauden’s assurance of no further illegality than the drug trade.
• Claustrophobia: Kelso seems to have a touch of it - snooping in Slauden’s boathouse, he’s less than happy about visiting a trapdoor-screened secret passage. Or being thrown down a trapdoor into the mill’s basement.
• Climbing Climax: In his mill, Slauden, from the flood, flees upstairs, followed by Kelso and Ellie. Bannen ambushes Kelso, whereupon a fierce struggle tips them both into one of the grain silos…
• Combat Pragmatist: When Bannen prepares to roll up Kelso’s sleeve for a near-lethal LSD injection, Kelso, from the fireplace, forces himself to pick up a burning log, and jams it into Bannen’s face.
• Construction Vehicle Rampage: On their way back from an evening pub visit, between the shingle beach and nearby river, a bulldozer suddenly starts up, with its blade, pursues Kelso and Ellie. A shallow, water-filled dip narrowly saves them from being crushed.
• Cop Killer: From one of Eddie Mancello’s henchmen, DC Dave Riley takes a fatal shotgun blast.
• Courier: Rosie crewman Andy Trewick helps Sir Anthony Slauden import drugs and drug ingredients.
• Creepy Basement: More like bloody terrifying basement - through a trapdoor, a cramped, pitch-dark, rat-filled chamber, termed the Pit, houses the mill’s conveyor belt.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Jim Kelso, orphaned at birth, spent his first six years of life at a not-particularly-nice orphanage. Aged ten, into a bombed-out house, he fled three bullies, two of whom, having fallen through the upstairs floor, were respectively crippled and killed. Nellie, Jim’s adopted mother, was later killed by a drunk driver. A few years later, his adopted father Edward died of an angina attack. Throughout his police career, uncannily recurrent, hazardous misfortune befell both Jim and his fellow officers.
  • At university, Ellie brought friend Ginny to a pot and cocaine-supplied party. Despite Ellie’s warnings, Ginny felt obliged to try an unidentified pill - which turned out to be LSD. Scared to hysteria, Ginny died of asphyxia.
• Deer in the Headlights:
  • Shut in the mill’s cramped, trapdoor-sealed basement, Ellie, at first too scared to move, clings to the ladder.
  • On the mill’s upper floor, arrival of Kelso’s spectral twin, Slauden nearly faints; Ellie loses control of her bladder, and Bannen is petrified with shock.
• Defective Detective: DC Jim Kelso, while a good undercover man, courts an undeniable succession of hazardous misfortune. It unsettles his fellow officers and burdens him with guilt.
• Defiant Captive:
  • A badly battered Kelso, when Bannen tries to give him an LSD overdose, takes a fireplace log, and shoves it in Bannen’s face.
  • At the caravan, when Slauden’s thugs grab Ellie, she puts up a struggle.
• Disaster Dominoes: Near Iceland, a depression builds a sudden breeze into a wind. At the Hebrides, the wind becomes a gale. Travelling south, the depression’s gusts reach 120 mph. Before it, banked up waters destroy property and lives - with Adleby right in its path…
• Disney Villain Death:
  • During the storm, on the mill’s second floor, Slauden, in fear of Kelso’s twin, backs into the wall. Beneath and around him, the floor and wall collapse.
  • Bannen, still in the grain bin when the floodwaters open the silo chutes, fatally sinks beneath the falling grain.
• Doorstep Baby: In 1950, toilet attendant Vera Braid, in a cubicle, finds two newborn twins. One is our hero, the other having died at birth, starts a lifelong haunting of her brother.
• Elemental Powers: Having encountered the spirit of his dead sister, and realised her deranged persecution of his friends, colleagues, family and girlfriends, Kelso suspects she may have also affected the weather to cause the storm-roused flood.
• Evil Gloating: A captive Kelso, suspected of drug pilfering, wonders if Sir Anthony’s detailed explanation of his elaborate operation is driven by a need to show off to his hirelings.
• Evil Plan: Inspired by World War II trawler-towing of Nazi submarines, Sir Anthony Slauden has local boat the Rosie, from the North Sea, tow sealed, weighted drugs to Adleton’s harbour; whereupon Slauden’s divers, at night, hook them to his motor cruiser. By the boathouse’s secret passage to Eshley Hall’s basement lab, the drugs are exported via Slauden’s animal feed business.
• Expert Consultant: In response to a locally stationed USAF pilot’s seemingly drug-induced fatal plane crash, Customs and Excise supplies Ellie Shepherd.
• Failure-to-Save Murder: When Kelso’s jammed gun enables the gunman to kill DC Riley, DI Cook’s address of Kelso hints disgust. On the fourth floor of Scotland Yard, Kelso’s colleagues later ignore his arrival.
• Father Neptune: Rosie skipper Tom Adcock, “a real old seadog,” driven by greed, takes Slauden’s delivery through a brewing storm. Despite his rallying of his crew, a giant wave swallows the boat.
• Fed to Pigs: During six months’ infiltration of London’s criminal fraternity, Kelso’s discovery would have threatened either this or dismemberment.
• Follow in My Footsteps: In 1969, forcibly retired policeman Edward Kelso, bereaved by a careless driver of wife Nellie, wants adopted son Jim to follow him into the force.
• Foreshadowing: Driving through a tunnel beneath the Thames, Kelso ponders the above water’s potential to crush the car. In Adleton, a freak flood later causes widespread such damage.
• Fresh Clue: When working undercover, Kelso, in his residence, makes a point of leaving domestic items in certain positions. After checking Ellie for concussion, he perceives the caravan to have been searched.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: A disastrous succession of freak gusts stir Adleby’s sea to cataclysmic frenzy.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Downplayed. While their attraction seems mutual, Ellie’s fear to sleep alone after the bulldozer attack cements the relationship.
• Ground by Gears: Andy Trewick is fed into the mill’s towering, funnel-shaped pulverizer.
• Guilt Complex: Having pressed a reluctant Kelso into confiding his sincere belief in his attraction of others’ misfortune, Ellie, with some indignation, maintains Kelso’s guilt to be a self-indulgent delusion.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Tom Adcock, asked by Kelso about absent crewman Andy Trewick, deters further questions with a threatened fist.
• Happily Adopted: In 1956, childless Edward and Nellie Kelso adopt six-year-old Jim. After the orphanage, their care supplies a sense of belonging.
• He Knows Too Much: A possible subversion - while Kelso doubts Slauden plans let him live, Slauden, who suspects Kelso to be a drug poacher, offers him a job.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: A hard-faced man in a thigh-length leather jacket, Bannen, works as one of Sir Anthony’s heavies.
• Heroic Fire Rescue: While Kelso’s freak misfortune one entailed the burning down of a police-watched house, Kelso saved the life of Georgie Fenner.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Forcibly given a mind-shattering overdose of LSD, Kelso recalls traumatic memories, his own birth, and the lifelong company of his murderous spectral twin sister.
• History Repeats: In 1953, a North Sea storm surge flooded Adleby, necessitating evacuation. Twenty-eight years later, a succession of tornado-strength gusts stokes floods to destroy property and lives.
• Hostile Weather: A succession of tornado-strength gusts whips the sea to vicious flood.
• Immune to Bullets: Faced with Kelso’s twin, a panicked Slauden opens fire. Being a crazed, solidified ghost, having her nose shot off seems not to bother her.
• Impersonation Gambit: Slauden believes Kelso to be a petty dealer looking for wayward shipper Andy Trewick. Rather than admit he’s with the police, Kelso runs with it.
• Improvised Weapon: In the Pit, Kelso finds two parts of a broken brick, one for himself and one for Ellie.
• Institutional Allegiance Concealment: Kelso, good at undercover work, is reassigned to the Drug Squad, who post him, as ornithologist Jim Kelly, to the Suffolk coastal town of Adleby. Ellie, having arrived from Customs and Excise, poses as his girlfriend.
• I Work Alone: Kelso, genuinely scared for her safety from his uncanny attraction of hazardous misfortune, is reluctant to work with Ellie.
• The Jeeves: Julian Henson, Sir Anthony’s personal secretary, is diligently complicit in his employer’s business.
• The Jinx: Kelso, enough to seriously unsettle his fellow police officers - a car in which he rode fatally crashed into a civilian; on a warehouse job, Kelso and a few other detectives fell over the rooftops, and in Notting Hill Gate, a police-watched house burned down.
  Cook: It’d read like a fucking comedy script if it wasn’t so serious.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Subverted; Kelso’s fear of his uncanny tendency to misfortune’s endangerment of Ellie, rather than any aversion to Customs and Excise, initially persuades him against their partnership.
• Locked in the Dungeon: Through a trapdoor in the mill, Slauden’s thugs throw Kelso, and later Ellie, into the cramped, pitch-dark, rat-filled Pit.
• London Gangster:
  • Kelso’s last undercover assignment was to infiltrate mastermind Ilford bank job mastermind Eddie Mancello’s circles.
  • Bannen and his two thugs seem to be from Whitechapel.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: In 1969, nineteen-year-old Kelso finds his father, having fallen asleep in the bath to have suffered a fatal angina attack - with the pills conspicuously out of reach. Kelso’s spectral twin seems to have deliberately moved them.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Company director Anthony Slauden, by his manor’s grounds, keeps a bird sanctuary.
• Mood-Swinger: Unexpectedly partnered with Ellie, fears of her prospective endangerment frequently swings Kelso to moodiness.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • Two, both destructive and brutal. At the Preece house, lysergic acid in the water supply saw father, mother and seven-year-old son respectively transfixed by wallpaper; paralysed with hallucinatory terror and injured by jumping out of an upstairs window.
  • Doubtful of Kelso’s cover story, Slauden, to send him into a state of agonising shock, has him forcibly injected with six hundred microgrammes of lysergic acid. Locked in the mill’s Pit, terrifying hallucinations progress to memories of others’ fatal misfortune - followed by a cold, brittle hand’s grasp of his…
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: On finding him exploring Sir Anthony’s boathouse, Bannen and an unnamed thug, after a brief struggle, overpower Kelso. Bannen repeatedly smashes into Kelso’s face a knuckle-dusted fist, and with a wrench, whacks him viciously in the groin.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Subverted. Adleton, with its fishing trade, vulnerability to floods, and history of smuggling, is quiet, but not immune to incident.
• Not Quite Saved Enough: Downplayed. On a boat with other flood survivors, Kelso and Ellie ride to safety. Exhausted yet exhilarated with relief, Kelso believes his spectral sister, and thereby his unnatural misfortune, to have relented. And then he looks at Ellie, and sees her eyes to have briefly turned black - the implication being that his sister, instead of persecuting from beyond the grave, has taken up residence, to at least some extent, in Ellie’s body.
• Offscreen Teleportation: In 1953, orphanage-employed odd-job man Sammy Fisher, after berating young Jimmy Kelso for talking to himself after hours; having seen no other child awake in the dormitory, hears, at the stairs, approaching footsteps, whereupon small hands which fatally push him downstairs.
• Old Flame: Invoked with lab analyst Foxcroft, Ellie’s brief dalliance with whom she uses for a prompt test of the LSD-poisoned vole.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Throughout his life, Kelso has glimpsed, lurking in the shadows, his twin sister. Having died at birth, her spirit, from his psyche, has fed and grown, with tangible manifestation.
• Parental Abandonment: Kelso, orphaned from birth, is, aged six, Happily Adopted - only for his adopted mother and father respectively to suffer a fatal road collision and angina attack.
• Parting-Words Regret: In 1969, Jim Kelso, with adopted father Edward, heatedly argues about Edward’s desire for Jim to follow him into the police force. Returning from a night out, Jim finds Edward, having dosed off in the bath, to have had an angina attack - and was fatally unable to reach his glyceryl trinitrate tablets.
• Poltergeist: With Kelso and Ellie having slept together, the caravan unaccountably vibrates.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Downplayed - while the small coastal town of Adleton isn’t a punishment, either in character or for any misdemeanour, Cook, understandably concerned for his officers’ peace of mind, reassigns Kelso to the Drug Squad, who in turn relegate him to the undermanned Suffolk Constabulary.
• Regularly Scheduled Evil: On his birthdays, Kelso finds his attraction of grave misfortune to be strongest. This seems to be because it’s also his deranged, life force-absorbing spectral sister’s birthday.
• Reluctant Retiree: Angina forced Kelso’s adoptive father, Edward Kelso, into early retirement.
• The Reveal: Does Kelso really somehow attract disaster? Is it all just coincidence? His deformed twin sister, who died at birth, matured, in a spectral body, alongside him. Dependent on Kelso’s life force, she both enviously loathes and fraternally loves him. To anyone who gets too close to him, she brings disaster.
• Rising Water, Rising Tension: The climactic flood, into Slauden’s mill, sends a ferocious surge of water. While several of Slauden’s minions drown, Kelso and Ellie narrowly reach the stairs.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: For shoving a burning log in his face, Bannen, despite the raging flood, pursues Kelso with single-minded brutality.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: Beneath Eshley Hall, a fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged basement area holds LSD ingredients, measuring tools and manufacturing equipment.
• Sane Boss, Psycho Henchmen: Amicable Sir Anthony and brutal Bannen.
• Satiating Sandwich: In defiance of Kelso’s disregard for breakfast, Ellie feeds him and herself some enticingly narrated toasted bacon sandwiches.
• Seadog Beard: Young fisherman Andy Trewick sports a curly black beard.
• Secret Underground Passage: Built by Eshley Hall’s original smuggler owners, it links Sir Anthony Slauden’s boathouse and the house’s basement laboratory.
• Shout-Out:
  • Unexpectedly finding Ellie in his caravan, Kelso addresses her as Goldilocks.
  • In 1960, a ten-year-old Jim Kelso reenacts The Lone Ranger.
  • In 1969, Kelso plays in a pub band with Max and Tony, who, with wire-framed glasses and flowing hair, tries to look like John Lennon.
• Shown Their Work: In-Universe; Kelso, posing as an ornithologist researching for a conservationist society, tells Sir Anthony of their concern about aeroplane noise pollution; and notes some yellow wagtails vulnerability to a nearby marsh harrier.
• Slasher Movie: In Adleby’s cinema, just before the flood water arrives, usherette Hilary Burnchard reluctantly watches a film about a mad axeman.
• Subterranean Sanity Failure: Being locked in the mill’s cramped, pitch-dark Pit seems to worsen the effects of Kelso’s enforced LSD overdose.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Around Ellie, Kelso abruptly switches from jovial amiability to sullen melancholia.
• Tap on the Head: Downplayed - in the caravan, with Ellie dazed by a stealthy intruder, Kelso makes sure to check for concussion.
• Trespassing to Talk: In his caravan, Kelso finds Customs and Excise officer Ellie Shepherd, assigned to assist in finding a suspected local drug trade.
• Twin Telepathy: Kelso, faced with his spectral twin, is given a share in her memories.
• Undercover as Lovers: To aid the investigation, Ellie pretends to be Kelso's newly arrived girlfriend - although the “undercover” part is soon subverted.
• Vengeful Ghost: Kelso’s twin sister, who died at birth, in both envious hatred and fraternal love, brings disaster to anyone who gets too close to her living brother.
• Villainous Rescue:
  • If you count a cataclysmic flood as a villain - or, if Kelso’s spectral twin did indeed bring it about, a villainous assault - it disrupts Henson’s attempt to give Ellie a fatal LSD dose.
  • Unexpected arrival of Kelso’s spectral decomposed twin shocks Bannen away from trying to drown Kelso in grain.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Sir Anthony, director of five companies, is a twice-decorated World War II veteran and regular donor to several charities. He also secretly runs a drugs manufacturing plant and thinks nothing of having his thugs murder wayward employees.
• Water Source Tampering: Seeing a gardener get water from the canal, Ellie realises a leak of factory-produced lysergic acid may have tainted the Preece’s homegrown vegetables. By map, Kelso finds the canal to connect to Eshley Hall. As it turns out, drug deliverer Andy Trewick, in sneaking LSD crystals through the laboratory’s drainage system, happened to use a dodgy plastic bag.
• Wham Line: An unexpected arrival at the Mill prompts Kelso to realise:
  Kelso: It’s… my… twin.
• Would Hit a Girl: Bannen and friends aren’t averse to the idea of using interrogative violence on Ellie. Slauden, for his master’s sake, forbids it.
• You Are Too Late: When the storm hits Adleby, Sector Officer George Gavin, concerned for arthritic wife Mary, leaves his lookout tower - only to find this storm is much bigger than the one in 1953.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Played for Horror when Ellie is brought to the mill’s cramped, trapdoor-sealed Pit to join Kelso.