Gallows Bait

‘People who never have anything to do with the law courts, because they lead irreproachable lives, because they steer adroitly through difficult waters, or simply because they’re lucky, sometimes have a mistaken impression of prison.’ That is how Roger Van de Velde introduces his stories in the prologue to ‘Gallows Bait’ (1966). In sixteen short stories he then shines a kaleidoscopic light on a time spent in prison, where as a journalist he ended up after forging prescriptions for Palfium, a painkiller to which he was addicted.

With his familiar lightness of touch and sense of humour, Van de Velde portrays characters like the innocent convict Hellemans, the drag queen Zita and the lazy Michelangelo, who manages to get himself served breakfast in bed like a prince. Nor do the prison staff escape Van de Velde’s keen eye. He scrutinizes, for example, a prison guard who comes close to despair when faced with having to retire and go back to his bad marriage in the ‘free world’. And there’s a hilarious and at the same time trenchant story about a lovesick court psychiatrist. It is greatly to the author’s credit that the book is free of any trace of rancour. With a sense of the grotesque, he manages to describe comical situations that reveal all the many layers of a character. The longing for warmth and human contact is a theme that runs through all the stories.

‘Gallows Bait’ is Van de Velde’s literary debut, and on publication it was highly praised. The government was less happy with it, however. Van de Velde was censored; his writings were no longer allowed to leave the prison. Thanks to his wife, who smuggled out tiny rolls of paper in cigarette cartons, his next book, ‘Crackling Skulls’ (1969), was also able to reach the wider world.