Mini Reviews #21

‘Too Clever by Half’ (1939) by G.D.H. and M. Cole. A short story featuring a locked-room puzzle, although we are told the murderer at the outset. In what would become a Columbo-style set-up, we follow the detective as he unravels the clues. The idea is that if the killer hadn’t been so attentive in trying to cover up the crime, he’d probably have gotten away with it; the extra touches were his undoing. If any real murderer made any one of this killer’s five mistakes (e.g. leaving a ‘suicide note’ but neglecting the pen), then ‘clever’ is not the word one would use.

Busman’s Honeymoon (1940) directed by Arthur B. Woods. Competent film adaptation of the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and the play she co-wrote with Muriel St Clare Byrne, featuring Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter Wimsey and Constance Cummings as Harriet Vane. Yes, Americans! Take it as a period murder mystery, rather than as anything to do with Sayers’ ambitious (and, arguably, unsuccessful) novel, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

A Simple Favour (2018) directed by Paul Feig. This movie, based on Darcey Bell’s debut and starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, is absolutely marvellous. I haven’t read the novel, and, candidly, I’m not keen to because it looks like a serious thriller, and the plot is an utterly ridiculous elevation ofGone Girl. However, the film is so splendidly camp – every scene contains one of those cringy stress-release gags that appear once an hour in normal thrillers – that it works brilliantly. Kendrick gives her best ever performance as a single mother-turned-YouTuber and Lively plays her mysterious rich new friend in a way that will make everyone recognise someone they know. The whole thing is very slick and very entertaining.

Bodyguard (BBC, 2018). Honestly, I don’t know why you’re all raving about this, or why you’re all complaining about the last episode. It starts as it means to go on: as a pretty standard BBC political thriller. That is, very gripping, quite preposterous, and mildly jingoistic, like London Spy. The final episode which disappointed so many viewers (seriously, I don’t know why?) is exactly what the first five episodes promised.

Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) by Liane Moriarty. Moriarty’s new novel is a satire that is sometimes witty and sometimes poignant. Set in an unorthodox health resort, it features an engaging and very believable villain, and a nice range of annoying rich protagonists. There is a delightful meta moment in chapter 58, in which a middle-aged romantic novelist trips out on LSD and realizes that she is a character in a poorly written detective story in which no one has yet died. The move towards satire in what used to be called ‘grip-lit’ is very reassuring, although I’ve not yet seen it perfected; Moriarty veers from dark humour to ‘I’m being serious’ moments – and she isn’t alone in that.

Mini reviews #12

Death in a White Tie (1938) by Ngaio Marsh. Blackmail, debutantes, and dying social niceties abound in this golden-age mystery with more than a touch of the self-parodic. Although one of the least substantial Roderick Alleyn novels, I think it’s one of the best. Marsh is at her best when she’s writing like a wasp sampling sugar.

Knots and Crosses (1987) by Ian Rankin. The first Rebus novel, which was, apparently, never meant to spawn a series. The idea of a divorced alcoholic detective, unable to recreate his former glories while all the time the world around him needs fixing is old and hackneyed now, but it was probably fresh when Rankin wrote this. And, the way he writes, it still feels fresh.

Agatha Christie: The Grand Tour (2012), edited by Mathew Prichard. I’m conflicted about this beautiful book. It is, undeniably, a lovely thing to behold. The format is simple: a collection of Agatha Christie’s letters, written to her mother during her 1922 world tour with her first husband. As a Christie enthusiast, I love the insights into my favourite writer’s early professional life. As a human being, I feel a bit dodgy dipping into her personal – and definitely not professional – correspondence.

Death Comes to Pemberley (2013) by P.D. James. An almost unspeakably dull mystery sequel to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and, it turns out, James’s final book. I have very little good to say about this, except that the author’s love and affection for her source shines through on most pages.

Detecting Wimsey: Papers on Dorothy L. Sayers (2017) by Nancy-Lou Patterson. A collection of old (mostly 1970s/1980s) essays on Sayers and her detective, previously published in specialist journals and edited by Patterson’s students. While there is nothing ‘new’ in the scholarship, it provides a fascinating glimpse of how crime fiction studies used to be – and, by proxy, how far the field has come.

Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lately, I’ve not had much time to read crime fiction. My two jobs – lecturing at a university and doing admin for a novelist – have meant reading a hell of a lot of books in completely different genres. That’s why my last two posts have been – cringe – recycled versions of reviews that are nearly five years old. I have, however, been getting my criminal fix by regularly checking my favourite blogs and also by dipping in and out of books. Today, I’ll be looking again at Dorothy L. Sayers; this time at a short story.

The three stories collected in Striding Folly (1972) are among the only pieces of Sayers’ ‘detectivism’ (her word) that I still had left to read. So I had a go at the title story, originally published in a 1939 anthology. Technically, this is a Lord Peter Wimsey tale, although His Lordship only appears three quarters of the way through, and doesn’t do much except polish his monocle and reference the classics. Then he identifies some hitherto unintroduced culprit, despite never having been given any details of the case, and disappears – a deus ex machina created by someone who no longer believes in that particular god.

We follow an evening in the life of Mr Mellilow, who is waiting for his friend to arrive for a game of chess. While he waits, a stranger pays a visit – a man called Mr Moses who endures that smarmy middle-class condescending antisemitism (on the parts of both the protagonist and the author) that certain other minorities experience today. The two men play chess for a couple of hours. Realising that his expected guest is a no-show, Mellilow goes to bed. He wakes up, prompted by a violent dream, and rushes out to a folly, where he finds that his friend is not just late for chess, but late as late can be.

When he tells the police about his alibi – he can’t have killed the man because of Mr Moses – nobody believes that Mr Moses exists … until Wimsey rolls up and sets everything right. The solution Wimsey expounds is amazingly flimsy. You know how, when you read a murder mystery, you can spot some bits but generally not work out a whole conclusive solution? Well, Sayers gives us the bits we can easily work out and anticipate and does nothing with them. It literally goes no further.

Personally, I had a much more elaborate solution in mind when I read this story, and I am fairly sure that Sayers was thinking of something along those lines. I wonder if she got bored writing ‘Striding Folly’ and just dashed off the ending, from Wimsey’s entrance onwards? I’m not sure of the circumstances of commission and publication, but I would be genuinely shocked if she wrote this story for anything but stone-cold cash.

                                                             

As you might have gathered, I wasn’t wildly keen on this story, finding it a little pointless. Sure, there is something going on with chess: the self-conscious presentation of a strategy game in a genre that Sayers perceived to be reprehensibly fixated on puzzles at the expense of social and literary imperatives. However, she did something along these lines but with crosswords much more effectively in ‘Uncle Meleager’s Will’. All in all, ‘Striding Folly’ strikes me as uninspired, and little more than a Golden Age zombie.

Only read this final bit if you’ve already read the story, or don’t care how it ends:

If you would like to know the solution I think Sayers might have planned:  I think that Mr Moses had some kind of remote control device hidden in his left glove – hence keeping his gloves on and only using his right hand to play chess – which he triggered at ten minutes to nine (the exact time he fell into his first trap in the chess game, because his mind was elsewhere).  I think this set off some kind of electrical charge in a chess piece that the victim was holding, or which was in his boot, and which was later found by the body, or possibly switched with an identical piece by Moses after the event. There is precedence for this kind ending with Sayers; 'The Cave of Ali Baba' (1929) hinges on voice recognition software. Anyway, just a theory!

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Forgive the horrible cover -- I always try to post the edition I read, and this is it!

Seriously, my opinion on Sayers changes with every new moon. At the moment, I like her books a lot, although a reread of Whose Body? (1923) does little to cement the notion that we're dealing with one of the greatest minds in twentieth century crime fiction.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) remains a fascinating figure. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford University, she initially started writing detective fiction for pecuniary reasons while working in an advertising agency. Whose Body? was her first novel, and it was an immediate success -- so she went on to write about her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in several more volumes. As the series progressed, she also sought to stretch the possibilities of the crime fiction form, introducing ethical questions and thematic experiments. The ending of Busman's Honeymoon (1937) is rightly well-known for the unusual attention given to the psychological impact of sending a murderer to the gallows. Ultimately, Sayers abandoned crime writing in favour of translation and quite bad theology.

Sayers was very good at quotable quotes. Among my favourites is this, from Have His Carcase:

I always have a quotation for everything -- it saves original thinking.

But I also like a little poem she wrote (not sure where it comes from, as I've only ever seen it quoted):

As I grow older and older
and totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
who goes to bed with whom.

The first Sayers I read was Murder Must Advertise. I was quite young and determined to hate it because all the glossy crime scholarship I'd read sneered at the 'highbrow' pretensions of 'Miss Sayers' (use of the prefix should have been my clue that these were not discerning critics). So I was kind of annoyed to thoroughly enjoy it. I just told myself that I didn't like it because the murderer was easy to spot -- although that was very much the point. I then started reading her again at university, and now have two novels and a few short stories left to tackle.

But Whose Body? was a re-read. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed this book less the second time around, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it at all. It begins with His Lordship dashing out to an art sale, only to be assailed over the telephone by his mother, the Duchess of Denver, who informs him that a body has been found in a bathtub. And not just any body. This is the corpse of a man wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez.

The plot is okay, but not substantial. It's not really a whodunit, because there are so few characters you spot the killer straight away and have fun watching Wimsey catch them. The best bit about the book is certainly Wimsey himself, who appears here fulfilling his author's stated aim: to create a hero who was 'part Fred Astaire and part Bertie Wooster'. His first dialogue is 'Oh, damn!' (this may sound silly, but the comma shows that the author takes the written word seriously), and these words -- which also open the entire canon -- are a rather nice way to set things off. When we meet Wimsey, he is described as possessing a 'long, amiable face [that] looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.' Phwoar.

Agatha Christie loved this description of Wimsey, and when Sayers gave her hero more depth, and a girlfriend, Christie got miffed and wrote a gloriously passive aggressive account of Sayers' (and others') work for a Russian newspaper. She concluded that Wimsey's marriage, which happens somewhere between Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman's Honeymoon (1947) had made him 'a good man spoiled.'

Even at this early stage, however, Wimsey has more psychological nuance than many of his peers. He suffers very clearly from shell-shock, and there is a genuinely shocking scene in which he experiences night-terrors, reliving his horrific experiences on the front line in France during the First World War. This scene also gives Bunter -- in many ways, a cross between Wooster's Jeeves and Poirot's George(s) -- more depth than one might expect from such a conservative writer. We see his servile position as one based on mutual dependence, friendship, and the great equalising consequences of war.

There are some issues in this book that I don't think we can ignore. Many of the golden age crime writers were downright anti-semitic, and I don't think we can excuse this as being 'of its time'. I think it's important to call it out.  Writing in a Jewish e-zine, Amy E. Schwartz has called Whose Body?  'a welter of obsession with Jews': it begins with an apparently Jewish corpse, proceeds through numerous problematic quips (outlined in the linked article), and ends quite unrepentantly in the same vein. Apparently, the first draft of the novel had Lord Peter wowing the implied reader with his cheekiness by pointing out that the body in the bathtub cannot be that of a Jewish financier because it isn't circumcised.

Of course, Sayers toned down the anti-semitism in later novels, once she became aware of the problem's extent and reach -- nearly all the guilty writers did this, whether by design or co-ercement (and it's an area where Agatha herself falls regrettably short). This book, on one level, so drenched in problematic attitudes that it's about anti-semitism. But, at the same time, it's equally indulging-while-pointing-out hilarious snobbery, the death of class security, and the conflict between post-war trauma and post-war nostalgia.

Whose Body? is not a great novel. It's the work of an author still finding her feet, and working out what she wants to do or say with the genre. But any assessment must bear in mind what it spawned -- one of the most significant and interesting series of the golden age.

Greedy Night by E.C. Bentley

A curio today, and one of the shortest texts I've reviewed so far. 'Greedy Night' (1936) is a short send-up of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, which appears in Parody Party, a fascinating volume edited by Leonard Russell and printed on what looks like watermarked writing paper by Hutchinson. Russell's 'introductory note' seeks to trivialise the book as the result of a weekend parlour game, and makes what I think is a wonderful point.

Responding to what he sees as the inevitable criticism that 'post-war novelists and people haven't sufficiently distinctive styles to admit of the better sort of parody', Russell points out that parody as a 'critical' tool serves to draw out these distinctive styles that are otherwise invisible in a contemporary world. It is, of course, heartbreaking to realise that people living in what we now call the interwar period described themselves as living 'post-war', and even more so to reflect that the unique and specific prose styles we so readily associate with those years are themselves defined by the passing of one war and the anticipation of another.

It's a really interesting book, which is sometimes available online and cheap. And there are some great contributors including Rebecca West (parodying Charles Morgan), Rose McCaulay (Ernest Hemingway), Francis Iles (Hugh Walpole), Cyril Connolly (Aldous Huxley), John Betjeman (various Russians), and more.

Before going any further, a note of warning: this post contains spoilers. Personally, I find it difficult to discuss the joys of detective fiction without blabbing about the solutions, because often the story of the crime itself is essential to whatever contribution the text is making. In a similar vein, I don't mind a jot if I read a book already knowing whodunit. For me, it really isn't a case of 'animated algebra.' But I know that many people disagree, so accept this spoiler warning, the only intimation!

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), as if you needed to know, wrote Trent's Last Case (1913), a comic country house mystery that many have credited with spawning the British murder mystery as a distinct literary genre. He also invented the appropriately-named clerihew, a form of verse that haunts me from my student days, when our poetry tutor regaled us with an assortment of his own miniature masterpieces, from which I have yet to recover.

In this intriguing send-up of Dorothy L. Sayers, Bentley contributes a clerihew of his own which appears both in the text and ahead of it, accompanied by an image attributed to Bentley's famous son ('Nicolas Bentley drew the pictures', runs the credit line). I quote the clerihew in full because it reveals the story's charms and its limitations:

Lord Peter Wimsey 

May look a little flimsy, 

But he's simply sublime 

When nosing out a crime.

Charming because it's a clerihew by E. Clerihew himself, and it's clearly done in a spirit of great affection. Limited precisely because it's clearly done in a spirit of great affection, and, technically, it's not very good. These four lines alone tell us that there's not going to be any serrated criticism in the story -- and that's fine, of course. By its very nature, parody tells us something about contemporary reception and interpretation, even if this has been carefully controlled. I'm looking forward to reading the chapter parodying Hugh Walpole by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley, aka A.B. Cox), who was not well known for softening the blows to his peers.

The opening scene has Bunter, Wimsey's faithful manservant, bringing his master breakfast in bed. When they discuss the unfortunate substances that His Lordship imbibed the previous night, and when Bunter casually lets drop that he has 'always taken an interest in the technical study of medieval calligraphy', it's clear that the character here is early Wimsey, not late Wimsey. This is the character Sayers described as a cross between 'Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster' and not the introspective married feminist that Wimsey was about to become at the time of the story's publication.

Another figure soon arrives on the scene: no less a personage than the Bishop of Glastonbury. A mysterious death has taken place, and His Grace invites His Lordship to investigate. The investigation takes Wimsey into an academic setting -- of course -- where everyone starts to talk about eating. There is a curious exchange between Wimsey and a young admirer called Mitchell:

Wimsey laughed. 'I must go. But do you and your friends really read the chronicles of my misspent life, then?' 

'Do we read them?' cried Mr Mitchell. 'I should say we do read them! We eat them!' 

'How jolly for you -- I mean for me -- that is to say, for her -- oh well, you know what I mean,' Wimsey said distractedly.

There is a nod here to the grand generic tradition of acknowledging the artificial status of the narrative; to Sherlock Holmes' many remarks about the people who read his adventures in The Strand. And the reference to 'her' takes it one step further.

The words 'we eat them' become relevant, too.  At the end of the book, Wimsey opens up the corpse's mouth -- God knows what the corpse is still doing there -- and removes several pages of a book. That book is Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (with a handy footnote explaining the publisher, and just falling short of 'available in all good bookshops'). Wimsey explains:

Strong Poison! [...] Too strong indeed for poor Dermot. Such is the magic of that incisive, compelling style that even the very printed word is saturated with the essence of what it imparts. Others eat her works in a figurative sense only; Dermot began to eat this one in truth and in fact and so rushed, all unknowing, on his doom.

Do we detect here a josh in the direction of Sayers, who sought to elevate the intellectual standing of a detective novel and was about to give it up all together? Is the hyperbole mere sycophancy or is it a ruthless critique of what many people still consider pretension? What I really want to know is -- what did Dorothy L. Sayers think of this story? I'm sure she will have read it.

There are also some hints here -- as there are in Trent and much of the fiction it inspired -- of what we now call postmodernism. I think that we can expect a po-mo crime revival one of these days. But I'm rambling, and in discussions of this nature, that's not a good thing.