The Tin Men

Michael Frayn

Also available by the same author

The Russian Interpreter

Towards the End of the Morning

A Very Private Life

Sweet Dreams

Matchbox Theatre

THE TIN MEN

MICHAEL FRAYN

VALANCOURT BOOKS

The Tin Men by Michael Frayn

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1965

First U.S. edition published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1965

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Cover photograph: USDA officials using an IBM 360 computer, 1966. Reproduced under a Flickr Creative Commons license.

Cover design by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

My first novel, published exactly fifty years ago. Always something of a challenge for the young writer, that first novel. These days, judging by the number of courses you see advertised offering to teach you how to write one, it must be a rite of passage almost as common as the first date or the first driving lesson. A bit daunting still, all the same.

In my case, actually, I wasn’t really so young – thirty-two, an age by which a lot of writers have written not only their first novel but their best – even their last – and are already sinking into obscurity, celebrity, or alcoholism. It had been hanging over me, like a mountain waiting to be climbed, for quite some time. But I’d been writing a humorous newspaper column three times a week, and it hadn’t left me with much breath for the great ascent. So I’d moved to another newspaper, where I had to write only one column a week, and cleaned out the type on my typewriter once again.

Nor was it the first book I’d had published – there had already been two selections from the column. It wasn’t even the first novel I’d written. That had been six years earlier, when I was still a reporter. I’d sent it to my newly acquired literary agent, who said she quite liked the first thirty pages, but not the three hundred that followed, which she advised me to put away in a dark place somewhere far from the eyes of man. I had at any rate the good sense to obey, and when I looked at the manuscript again a few years ago I realised that even her cautious approval of the first eleventh of the book had been recklessly soft-hearted.

One of the characters in the story that I now began is also struggling to write his first novel (a boldly original touch, it seemed to me at the time, but I’ve realised since that it’s one quite a lot of first-time novelists resort to). His name is Hugh Rowe, but whether he is the hughrowe of only his own novel, or whether he’s supposed to have some likeness to me I’m not sure. His aims are actually rather higher than mine. He seems to be trying to imitate one or more of the accepted literary forms of the time, whereas I wasn’t venturing all that far from what I’d been doing in my column, with its short takes, broad satire, and staff of simple comic characters.