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The Rescue Man is a tale of two cities, of the same name. One is Liverpool during the Blitz of 1940-41, where Tom Baines, an architectural historian, has joined a Heavy Rescue team, retrieving the wounded and dead from bomb-damaged buildings. The other is Liverpool during the Victorian boom years of the 1860s, when the city was a thriving port, a magnet to building speculators and a newly rich mercantile class. Here a young architect, Peter Eames, is making a name for himself as a brilliant innovator: his story of loss and betrayal, set down in journals, is uncovered by Baines seventy years later.

Some wise man once wrote that you don’t choose a subject for a novel, you simply recognise it. That was my experience. For years I had wanted to write a novel, but despaired of ever finding something to write about. As it transpired, my subject was staring me in the face. Liverpool, where I grew up, had always been on obsession, one that became more acute the longer I had lived away. I had left it for college in 1982, and moved to London four years later. So it only took me 25 years to get round to writing something.

The seed of the book was a building. Having long admired the remarkable Oriel Chambers (1864) on Water Street, I was reading Joseph Sharples’s revised Pevsner guide to Liverpool when I came across a description of the building and a reference to its architect, Peter Ellis, as ‘a frustratingly shadowy figure’. Those were the words that triggered the story. If virtually nothing was known about him, I was free to invent, and Ellis (who actually lived till he was 80) became the visionary but ill-starred Eames, his life tragically cut short at the age of 33. Finding the voice of the journals was relatively easy: I knew his tone, and from reading Dickens, Byron, Ruskin and others I learned his language.

Readers and reviewers have discerned a cinematic element in the novel, perhaps because my day job is film reviewing for The Independent. While I would concede that film has been an influence – the name Baines I took from the lovelorn butler, played by Ralph Richardson, in the 1948 Carol Reed/Graham Greene film The Fallen Idol – I truly didn’t write The Rescue Man with any intention of it being adapted for the screen. I was too busy trying to make it work as a novel without the additional worry of how it might play as a movie. In any case, the most important influence on the book wasn’t film, but photography. Nothing moved me or provoked my imagination more than staring, sometimes with a magnifying glass, at photographs of old Liverpool. For hours at a time I would examine Victorian and Edwardian streetscapes, and just to gaze at an old shopfront, or a tramcar, or a mother and daughter crossing some thoroughfare, would open up different avenues of narrative possibility. And there were deeply poignant photographic records, too, of Liverpool coping with the Blitz, not just of the shattered streets and collapsed buildings, but of those brave, ashen-faced ARP volunteers and rescue squads searching through the rubble. Oral testimonies were vital, of course, but my most productive research lay in the places and faces that an old camera might have caught for posterity.

Baines, who in 1939 is compiling a study of Liverpool’s architectural heritage, worries that his efforts may be in vain once the bombs start to fall. That sense of anticipated regret must have infected me, because I found that, half-unconsciously, I would set scenes in buildings, and even streets, that no longer existed. When Baines and his photographer friend Richard Tanqueray go on a perambulation, they walk along South Castle Street to the Old Sailors’ Home on Canning Place – all of them vanished. Other significant scenes in the book occur at The Imperial Hotel, the Kardomah Cafe on Dale Street, St.Catherine’s Church in Abercromby Square, the little warren of Georgian lanes and courts off Red Cross Street where Peter Eames goes in search of his brother – these, too, are all gone, many destroyed not by the Luftwaffe by postwar planners and councillors. I quiver to think how Baines, an ardent friend to his city’s architecture, would have coped with the municipal depredations of the 1960s. But that’s another story. ‘Liverpool’s an altered town’ was the refrain of a music-hall ballad of the 1830s. Nothing lasts for long here. The old streets and squares have disappeared. I couldn’t visit those places, so I had to write The Rescue Man to make them come and visit me.

Further reading...

The Rescue Man
by Anthony Quinn
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