Diana Norman
(aka Ariana Franklin)
1933-2011
A Long Way from 39 Market Street

by
John Lawton

I met Diana Norman in the spring of 1985. She had published two novels set in the reign of her hero Henry II (Fitzempress' Law and King of the Last Days) and a third (The Morning Gift) was on the presses.

I was the new boy at a London literary agency in Regent Street. Diana's husband Barry was also represented by the agency, and his television agent, Sue Freathy, thought it a good idea for me to act for Diana - she would get all the attention of being the first writer on my list and I would get a head start, a fine novelist with three superb novels under her belt. Not entirely to my amazement the agency agreed to this.

The woman I was introduced to was a beautiful, 51 year-old blonde with slate-blue eyes and a captivatingly louche voice, which her daughters have been lucky enough to inherit. What she did with that voice often set me back on my heels. The author of novels that firmly espoused love, romance and family could also be a blunt, plain-speaking pragmatist, capable of ordering the life and lives of those around her with all the skill of a regimental sergeant-major. I would never have used the phrase in her presence, but, as positively as it can ever be used, Diana was that figure so beloved of undergraduate history seminars, a benign dictator.

When another agency was trying to woo Barry away from Freathy, it was Diana who quashed the notion with, "What other agent would be able to help your wife decipher her knitting patterns?" When the Daily Mail made Barry redundant in 1971, leaving him with a wife and two small daughters to support, Diana was determined that the girls should grasp the seriousness of the situation by sharing the economies. "You … must … you must ..." little sprang to mind and she ended the sentence with … "… Use less loo paper!"

The die-hard romantic co-existed with the firm pragmatist.

Diana's next book was one of her few works of non-fiction, a life of another hero, Constance Markiewicz - the Irish Republican, who had been the first woman ever elected to Westminster. Writing the proposal took me out to Hertfordshire for the first time, to a small village not far from Welwyn, in which Diana and Barry had settled in the late 1950s - a village which had taken them to its own and had handled Barry's, by now, national fame with a careful indifference. And I quickly learnt about the life that had led her this far from Devon.

It may be that Diana was born to be a journalist. Her father was A.H. Narracott, The Times air correspondent in the 1930s and 40s and author of How The RAF Works (1941). She was born in Plymouth on August 25th 1933 - both Narracott and Diana's mother Aeron were from the West Country, indeed Narracott is a frequent place name in Devon. Journalism took him to Fleet Street, and when Diana was small they lived in Camden at the home of her Great Uncle, a minister in Churchill's wartime coalition.

Occasionally Diana brushed shoulders with the high and mighty. Out walking with the nanny and the housemaid aged seven she encountered her uncle's friend and colleague Lord Halifax, and introduced her escorts as 'my servants' - a dropped brick, a rare instance of snobbery, for which the lifelong socialist never quite forgave herself.

Escaping the blitz took Aeron and Diana to Torquay and the home of her maternal grandparents. Narracott did not follow and effectively the marriage was over, and with it any security Diana felt. This sudden plunge into near-poverty was shaping - she never forgot it, never escaped it and I don't think any amount of success or wealth in later life ever restored that sense of security. On the other hand, it also shaped her novels.

There were obvious similarities between Diana and her mother (the voice, for one), and just as obvious differences. Aeron Narracott was not as forceful a character as her daughter. I always thought of her as someone more blown by chance, and Diana, above all, sought to control the random elements in her life. But Aeron had strength and selflessness. Singular though this incident is, it's also typical : in the middle of the war a friend of Aeron's became pregnant by a foreign soldier while her husband was away fighting. Discretion was everything - Aeron agreed to adopt the baby, who was handed over on a West Country railway station to become Diana's little brother, Tony. At the age of ten Diana found herself team leader, in a small, poor family in which fathers were conspicuous by their absence. The basis of Diana's fiction was laid in these years - this is the ur-Diana Norman plot - it's a notion Kurt Vonnegut would one day name as a karass - not the family you are born to but the ad hoc one that assembles itself around you. The battling heroine at the centre of the random family that figures so much in Diana's fiction is surely a version of her own mother.

With this driving her, Diana took responsibility for the family, probably when she was as young as fifteen. She left school, worked on a local Devon paper, moved to an East London paper and by the time she was twenty was on the Daily Herald, and the youngest reporter in Fleet Street. At twenty-four she was finally in a position to re-create the lost security, she took out a mortgage on a bungalow in Hertfordshire, but not for herself - the bungalow was for Aeron. Diana's own security meant nothing, was scarcely possible, if she could not first put a roof over her mother's head that no one could take away. It worked. Aeron was never more than half a mile away, and lived there until the day she died.

Meanwhile Diana Narracott of the Daily Herald had met Barry Norman of the Daily Sketch, when their respective papers assigned them to cover the 1957 visit of the Moscow State Circus. A meeting that might easily never have happened. Barry and Diana worked at opposite ends of the press spectrum. Barry covered show biz, wrote a gossip column and later provided the dialogue for Wally Fawkes' Flook. Ned Sherrin remarks in his autobiography that if there was gossip in the air about him, Barry would always be the first to knock at his door. Diana? … Diana was a Fleet Street 'heavy', Diana covered murders, Diana went on live ammunition exercises with commandos, invaded Wales with the Royal Marines, her face blacked up … and she always carried her passport in her handbag - 'it was a sackable offence not to have it with me'.

Diana once said to me that she had been surprised at the difficulty of getting pregnant, along the lines of "I expected it to happen just like that. I was pushing thirty and it just didn't seem to be happening. I thought there was something wrong me."

There wasn't, and her two daughters were born with scarcely an interval - Samantha in December 1962 and Emma in February 1964.

Village life evolved into a secure zone - the place that was not London, was not Fleet Street and was not television. Diana found her place in it, perhaps not the traditional place - she sampled the WI and made up her mind it was not for her in a single visit. And her politics, in an un-English, an un-village way, were always highly visible, and on occasion dramatically so - in the days of boycotting South African produce Diana won a bottle of South African sherry in a village raffle, opened it on the spot and poured it away.

Diana and Barry were among the dissidents who formed the SDP. I doubt there was anything fading pink about this shift - for her the emphasis was always on 'socialist' - she did once say that she had got tired of being shouted down at local Labour meetings and dismissed as 'bourgeois' - and the flurry of angry e-mails I've received since last May would make depressing reading for Nick Clegg.

For several years she got the whole village involved in 'A Day in the Country' - wild days of summer when a coach-load of children from London would come out to the village and spend the day, eating, getting lost, attacked by wild animals, feeling homesick, weeping and then disappearing … leaving chaos and satisfaction behind.

I think Diana's role as matriarch was as inevitable as her being a writer. She ran a 'tight ship' in an easy way. The house seemed a very open house, and I suspect that Diana knew every teenager in the village as at one time or another every one of them passed through. She had her study at one end of the house, a kitchen that seemed never to be quite big enough, and Barry had his study at the opposite end, which, on wet days, he shared with the clothes horse and the washing … a string of dogs … and a cat who seemed to be perpetually at loggerheads with his owner

By the early eighties Diana was writing regular articles for magazines - and … novels. There's a family legend, and probably a true one, that she spent twelve years writing the first novel, which would date its inception to the year her younger daughter Emma started school. Once published, critical acclaim came quickly - a BBC award for the historical accuracy of Fitzempress' Law (1981). Commercial success didn't. None of the early novels even made into paperback. A move to Penguin changed that. By the 1990s, she was writing at peak - with The Pirate Queen (1992) and The Vizard Mask (1994). Opting to move forward a generation or two with every novel, it seemed to me that she would eventually reach the twentieth century.

Her working pattern became if not obsessive, then writerly to a T. Professional journalistic standards applied to the anarchic job of novelist. She went to her desk early in the day - I'd often get up at ten or eleven to find e-mails that had been sent at six. She abandoned her study on the ground floor of the house and retreated to the bedroom recently given up by one of her daughters. There were fewer distractions, and if anyone called she could pretend she wasn't home. When the last dog died it wasn't replaced - one less reason to leave the desk. As the house grew to suit the Normans' taste and whims, she could have had as much space as she wanted - instead she worked in a tiny room, surrounded by books from the London Library, typing on to a Mac, whose slots she had vainly tried to tape up to keep fag ash and smoke out of the electronic innards. It didn't work - and she got through computers at an alarming rate. I was probably one of dozens who said, "Give up cigarettes", but there was always a reason or at least a manaña. In reality I suspect she could not focus or concentrate as well without the drug of her choice. It facilitated the bigger, better drug - writing. When she developed heart murmurs, the writing on the arterial wall, she still didn't stop smoking. Arguing was impossible, the infuriating, exasperating, iron-willed matriarch came to the fore. I stopped asking.

The commercial success Diana wanted was still eluding her - no amount of critical praise was making up for not having a bestseller. We never saw eye to eye on this. My attitude had always been, if you do not need money you are free to write what you want. I think Diana regarded this as defeatism, wilful elitism or at least as not being able to see where your chances lay. Success mattered - it mattered to the fatherless child of the war years and hence it mattered to the talented novelist of the 90s.

Diana took a gamble. Encouraged by her agent, the Toronto-based Helen Heller, she adopted the pseudonym of Ariana Franklin. At last her historical novels reached the twentieth century with City of Shadows, and at last her advances and sales began to look, as a rather perplexing cliché has it, 'respectable'. But what next?

Again, Helen Heller steered a course for Diana. It's probably a journalistic trait to respond to other people's input and to be able to work to a deadline. Many a novelist cannot do either. Diana could - she always seemed to prefer a deadline rather than an open ended illusion of freedom - and when Helen suggested a series of historical thrillers set where Diana had begun, in the era of Henry II, it proved to be just what was needed to channel Diana's imagination into novels that would get the success they deserved.

Agent-writer relationships don't have to be a meeting of minds, but this one was.

"I was looking for someone to do a Blood Libel thriller about the Jews in 12th Century England. And it turned out that Diana was an expert. So we put together Mistress of the Art of Death, which became a New York Times bestseller. What I loved about Diana's books is that she recreated the time effortlessly without resorting to too much historical detail or talking forsoothly. She was a completely natural storyteller."

To which Diana's first editor (all the way back to Fitzempress' Law) Maggie Body adds "a positively life-enhancing author - a joy to work with."

When Mistress of the Art of Death won the Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters award for historical crime, I should have asked, "Content now? NYT bestseller? CWA award? Feel like easing up?" but I didn't ask and Diana didn't ease up.

Three more novels featuring Adelia Aguilar followed rapidly, and four months after the publication of The Assassin's Prayer, in November 2010, Diana received another CWA award, the Dagger in the Library, which is given to an author of crime fiction whose work gives the greatest enjoyment to library users.

There was no question I could ask at this point. In amongst the ambition, the drive and the diligence there was always a modesty. She never told me.

Back to '85. That summer Diana and I drove across Ireland from Dublin to Sligo as she researched her life of Markiewicz. The last of the Gore-Booth family, looking much the worse for the passage of time, still inhabited the ancestral home at Lissadell, guiding tourists around with an air of Anglo-Irish Ascendant disdain for the hoi-polloi so strong I could almost touch it. Revolutionaries they were not. I stuck with the talk, Diana didn't. I found her at the end of the tour outside the gift shop, stuffing postcards into her handbag.

"I stole them. I had to do something."

"But you're a JP, a fucking magistrate for Christ's sake!"

"I needed to do something … I needed to get back at those … those dreadful old biddies!"

I was delighted to think that within the family matriarch, convinced Christian and founding member of the SDP there might lurk a closet anarchist. If she had lived to be a hundred, there was no chance she would ever be a 'dreadful old biddy'.

© John Lawton, 2011.