Panic

by Colin Spencer

'Seediness, obsessions, sex and violence, glimpses of underworld Brighton - all this might sound like Greeneland Revisited, but Colin Spencer's "Panic" is strong enough to stand on its own feet without invidious comparisons.... As an imaginative achievement Mr. Spencer's success in seeing the killer from the inside is especially impressive.' - "Observer"'This is a disturbing, beautifully imagined novel, serious in intent . . . and written with a great sense of commitment.' - "New Statesman"'Spencer indulges his taste for the lurid, the grotesque and the macabre to the full in "Panic" . . . a writer of brilliant talent.' - "Sunday Telegraph"'It is a book written with deep compassion and understanding. It is a firm statement, the like of which far too few novelists dare make.' - "Time Out"'Colin Spencer creates a vivid and authentic world of nightmare, governed by outrage and violation, and concealed from the authorities by fear.' - "Times Educational Supplement"One year ago, Rod Johnson's life was shattered by the kidnapping and murder of his young daughter Lucy and the suicide of his wife. Convinced that the police are not doing enough to find the man responsible, Rod has become obsessed with tracking down the killer himself in an effort to understand how anyone could commit such a heinous crime. His quest leads him to an array of strange Emma, a young woman on the run from her past, her uncle Woody, an old man with a dark secret, the dwarf Jumbo and his accomplice in crime, Trigger, a lesbian burglar. Told alternately from each character's point of view, it is a bizarre story of unprecedented panic . . .First published in 1971, Colin Spencer's "Panic," with its seedy Brighton setting, drew comparisons to the works of Graham Greene and earned widespread critical acclaim for its psychological insight into the mind of a killer. This edition features a new introduction by the author.

223 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Author biography:

Colin Spencer was born in London in 1933 and attended Brighton Grammar School and Brighton Art College. From an early age, he was interested in both art and writing and had his first stories published in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

A man of many talents, Spencer is also a prolific author of non-fiction books, including gay-interest titles like Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997) and acclaimed works on food and cooking which led Germaine Greer to call him ‘the greatest living food writer’.

More recently, Spencer has devoted himself to painting and to writing a trilogy of autobiographical works, the first of which, the memoir Backing into Light: My Father’s Son, was published by Quartet in 2013. He lives in East Sussex.

Reviews

[David Gee · Rating 3 out of 5]

US publishers Valancourt Books have set out to revive neglected novels from both sides of the Atlantic. After seeing my review of Colin Spencer's recent volume of memoirs they invited me to review Panic, his highly acclaimed and deeply weird novel set in 1960s Brighton. This short book (160 pages) is centred on a grief-stricken father whose young daughter was murdered a year ago. Rod Johnson now haunts Brighton's seedier streets and pubs, hoping to find a clue that will lead him to Lucy's killer.

The story is narrated in successive chapters by Rod, by his 'damaged' girlfriend Emma and by her creepy uncle Woody. With the disappearance of Madeleine McCann seven years ago still in the news, together with revelations about predatory priests and celebrities, it's a bold gesture by the publishers to reprint a book that attempts to get inside the head of a child-molester, which is what Spencer does in two very disturbing chapters. But I guess Lolita would not be an easy read today, if it ever was.

I'm a big admirer of Mr Spencer. I rate The Tyranny of Love, the second in his quartet A Generation, one of the greatest modern 'relationship' novels, up there with James Baldwin's Another Country and John Updike's Couples. I'm not sure how I missed Panic when it came out in 1971. In the early chapters his characters all seem to be speak with a rather similar 'voice'. In the Introduction he admits to an influence by Faulkner, but what I picked up were echoes of Forster, which makes the back-story seem more Edwardian than post-war. The shorter chapters in the second half are more dynamic, and the climactic confession scene is another gruelling read. The subject matter makes this book as 'challenging' for the reader as it must have been for the author.