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nineveh_uk"Some thoughts" rather than a thesis. This is a re-post of a message on the LordPeter Yahoo list in response a message that quoted an extract from "Talking About Detective Fiction" by P.D. James. Note, because of the immediate context in which this was originally written (discussion of Whose Body only, with some people on list whose views are on the right wing of the US political spectrum), and the consequent possibility of ructions, I have kept very strictly to answering the questions as posed, and because this is a quick post I have not re-edited for LJ. There's a lot more I could say on this and related issues, but not now. Still, I thought it might not be wholly uninteresting to some.
WHOS = "Whose Body"
BUSM - "Busman's Honeymoon"
To quote the OP of the message I was responding to:
> In the course of a chapter devoted to various common criticisms of the
> detective story, she cites the position "that the basic morality of
> the genre is strongly right-wing, upholding the right of the
> privileged against the dispossessed, in which working-class
> characters are little better than caricatures..."
>
> It seems to me that there are two criticisms conflated here --
> namely, the inherent political stance and the inaccurate portrayal of
> lower-class characters. I wonder how you think DLS fared on either
> of these points. Certainly there are very few lower-class persons in
> WHOS's dramatis personae. But among those few, are they /real/? And
> second, is WHOS a right-wing book?
Nineveh_uk:
[Cut for reference to the OP] PD James herself is a Conservative life peer, which no doubt informs her perspective.
I think that you are correct that two points are conflated in the way James words them in the quote. I don't think they are always separate, but they are not necessarily joined.
First, with regard to the inherent political stance. Here I feel that a lot of mystery fiction does tend to the small-c conservative side of things. Mystery fiction describes a situation in which life is disrupted by criminal - often violent means - and then by the actions of the detective, order is restored. This doesn't necessarily mean a big-C Conservative order. It's perfectly possible to imagine in a detective novel set in 1930s USSR in which a murder takes place, the detective solves it, and the order that is restored is a Communist one*. In the Wallander novels, social-democratic Sweden is restored (sometimes with caveats). But it is generally important in mystery fiction that the overall order is restored, the mystery solved, the murderer brought to justice, even if in the course of events some small disorders have been brought to light. This being the case, it is not surprising that given the politically Big-C Conservative stance of authors like Sayers herself, the order that is restored in their novels is a conservative - or indeed Conservative - one.**
What about WHOS? Well, I think we can agree that DLS is not a socialist and isn't writing left-wing polemic. The forces of law-and-order - with a little help from their aristocratic friend - catch the murderer, and the architect, suitably grateful, can go ahead with the Duke's Denver church roof. On the other hand, the order that is restored is the honour (not walked out on wife and business) of a self-made Jewish businessman. The genie remains out of the barrel, and the man with whom her father once had an 'understanding' does not get to marry a widowed Christine Levy nee Ford.
Concerning characters. I think there is little argument that with the exception of servants (by this period a dying class) DLS simply doesn't do urban working class characters. The working class formed the majority of the population, but you wouldn't know it from the Wimsey novels. Perhaps it is a lack of knowledge - the only working class people it seems Sayers has ever really known well are servants. That said she notes in her letters that she scarcely knew any men until her mid-twenties, but wrote them simply by writing them as human. Perhaps it is a lack of interest, then. DLS did learn about bellringing, and had she wanted Lord Peter to come across a fascinating case in an urban working class environment she could have arranged it. The corpse of a Covent Garden barrow boy, perhaps, discovered on the way home from the opera. A bus conductor falling - poisoned? - down the steps. It seems clear that these weren't stories DLS was much interested in telling, even as sideshows. It is hard to envisage her writing Nicholas Blake's patriotic trade unionist lorry drivers of "The Smiler with the Knife".
Sayers _does_ write the rural working class, in NINE and BUSM, and can do so with respect and humanity even in a minor, often comic character like Puffett. Mrs Grimethorpe, not technically working-class but certainly a figure wholly without social power, is presented as a woman of dignity, honour, and courage, despite her awful circumstances. In the rural world, too, there are the servants we find in the city. In Mrs Ruddle her competency as cleaner is a redeeming feature. Mary Thoday was less satisfactory - and so are other women who seek to move out of service. The Gotobed sisters and BUSM's Polly, are explicitly characterised as a bit flighty, seeking the bright lights of the stocking counter and teashop rather than the wife-preparation role of the housemaid. In this DLS sets herself against the way the world was going, in which more and more women (and men) were rejecting domestic service in favour, among other things, of freedom and higher wages. Frank Crutchley is little more than a cliche, if a technically fairly well presented one. Returning to WHOS and the Levys, one might note that we meet Christine, but not Reuben, and Rachel will recur but only as mention, never in person. There's no reason that a person who was politically right-wing couldn't write complex, interesting and sympathetic portrayals of working class life, but Sayers is definitely not that author.
I shall finish with a final question: what of the workhouse man? Who is he? He has worked hard and lost his job (the economic situation, Freke implies), he is knocked down, and being unidentified is taken to the workhouse (not something one suspects would be the fate of even an unconscious unidentified Bunter), given medical treatment but then possibly murdered by Freke, has his body carved up, and is destined for a pauper's grave. No-one in the book gives consideration to who he might be as an individual, as a living human being, rather than a puzzle to be solved, or sympathises with this poor man who couldn't get work. He is ultimately only a device, for the murderer's game, for the author's plot. Might Lord Peter or the police have gone down to Chelsea, interview the tramps, tried to discover who this man was beyond a mystery corpse and told his family of his end? Who knows - but DLS isn't interested in telling us.
* If anyone can recommend such a book translated into English, I'd love to know.
** It is not impossible to write a detective novel in which order is not restored, or in which the restored order is depicted as negative. In James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, Robicheaux's attempts to restore the moral order by catching the murderer frequently disrupt a social order in which it suits the authorities/others in charge for the murder to be forgotten, in a social order characterised by "the rich get away with it". Burke's books are not paeans to the power of justice, but rage against a profoundly unequal society.
WHOS = "Whose Body"
BUSM - "Busman's Honeymoon"
To quote the OP of the message I was responding to:
> In the course of a chapter devoted to various common criticisms of the
> detective story, she cites the position "that the basic morality of
> the genre is strongly right-wing, upholding the right of the
> privileged against the dispossessed, in which working-class
> characters are little better than caricatures..."
>
> It seems to me that there are two criticisms conflated here --
> namely, the inherent political stance and the inaccurate portrayal of
> lower-class characters. I wonder how you think DLS fared on either
> of these points. Certainly there are very few lower-class persons in
> WHOS's dramatis personae. But among those few, are they /real/? And
> second, is WHOS a right-wing book?
Nineveh_uk:
[Cut for reference to the OP] PD James herself is a Conservative life peer, which no doubt informs her perspective.
I think that you are correct that two points are conflated in the way James words them in the quote. I don't think they are always separate, but they are not necessarily joined.
First, with regard to the inherent political stance. Here I feel that a lot of mystery fiction does tend to the small-c conservative side of things. Mystery fiction describes a situation in which life is disrupted by criminal - often violent means - and then by the actions of the detective, order is restored. This doesn't necessarily mean a big-C Conservative order. It's perfectly possible to imagine in a detective novel set in 1930s USSR in which a murder takes place, the detective solves it, and the order that is restored is a Communist one*. In the Wallander novels, social-democratic Sweden is restored (sometimes with caveats). But it is generally important in mystery fiction that the overall order is restored, the mystery solved, the murderer brought to justice, even if in the course of events some small disorders have been brought to light. This being the case, it is not surprising that given the politically Big-C Conservative stance of authors like Sayers herself, the order that is restored in their novels is a conservative - or indeed Conservative - one.**
What about WHOS? Well, I think we can agree that DLS is not a socialist and isn't writing left-wing polemic. The forces of law-and-order - with a little help from their aristocratic friend - catch the murderer, and the architect, suitably grateful, can go ahead with the Duke's Denver church roof. On the other hand, the order that is restored is the honour (not walked out on wife and business) of a self-made Jewish businessman. The genie remains out of the barrel, and the man with whom her father once had an 'understanding' does not get to marry a widowed Christine Levy nee Ford.
Concerning characters. I think there is little argument that with the exception of servants (by this period a dying class) DLS simply doesn't do urban working class characters. The working class formed the majority of the population, but you wouldn't know it from the Wimsey novels. Perhaps it is a lack of knowledge - the only working class people it seems Sayers has ever really known well are servants. That said she notes in her letters that she scarcely knew any men until her mid-twenties, but wrote them simply by writing them as human. Perhaps it is a lack of interest, then. DLS did learn about bellringing, and had she wanted Lord Peter to come across a fascinating case in an urban working class environment she could have arranged it. The corpse of a Covent Garden barrow boy, perhaps, discovered on the way home from the opera. A bus conductor falling - poisoned? - down the steps. It seems clear that these weren't stories DLS was much interested in telling, even as sideshows. It is hard to envisage her writing Nicholas Blake's patriotic trade unionist lorry drivers of "The Smiler with the Knife".
Sayers _does_ write the rural working class, in NINE and BUSM, and can do so with respect and humanity even in a minor, often comic character like Puffett. Mrs Grimethorpe, not technically working-class but certainly a figure wholly without social power, is presented as a woman of dignity, honour, and courage, despite her awful circumstances. In the rural world, too, there are the servants we find in the city. In Mrs Ruddle her competency as cleaner is a redeeming feature. Mary Thoday was less satisfactory - and so are other women who seek to move out of service. The Gotobed sisters and BUSM's Polly, are explicitly characterised as a bit flighty, seeking the bright lights of the stocking counter and teashop rather than the wife-preparation role of the housemaid. In this DLS sets herself against the way the world was going, in which more and more women (and men) were rejecting domestic service in favour, among other things, of freedom and higher wages. Frank Crutchley is little more than a cliche, if a technically fairly well presented one. Returning to WHOS and the Levys, one might note that we meet Christine, but not Reuben, and Rachel will recur but only as mention, never in person. There's no reason that a person who was politically right-wing couldn't write complex, interesting and sympathetic portrayals of working class life, but Sayers is definitely not that author.
I shall finish with a final question: what of the workhouse man? Who is he? He has worked hard and lost his job (the economic situation, Freke implies), he is knocked down, and being unidentified is taken to the workhouse (not something one suspects would be the fate of even an unconscious unidentified Bunter), given medical treatment but then possibly murdered by Freke, has his body carved up, and is destined for a pauper's grave. No-one in the book gives consideration to who he might be as an individual, as a living human being, rather than a puzzle to be solved, or sympathises with this poor man who couldn't get work. He is ultimately only a device, for the murderer's game, for the author's plot. Might Lord Peter or the police have gone down to Chelsea, interview the tramps, tried to discover who this man was beyond a mystery corpse and told his family of his end? Who knows - but DLS isn't interested in telling us.
* If anyone can recommend such a book translated into English, I'd love to know.
** It is not impossible to write a detective novel in which order is not restored, or in which the restored order is depicted as negative. In James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, Robicheaux's attempts to restore the moral order by catching the murderer frequently disrupt a social order in which it suits the authorities/others in charge for the murder to be forgotten, in a social order characterised by "the rich get away with it". Burke's books are not paeans to the power of justice, but rage against a profoundly unequal society.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 08:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:00 pm (UTC)Ah.
Date: 2010-06-30 09:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:37 pm (UTC)And a comic character, by virtue of the evangelicism, which was definitely not DLS's brand of Christianity.
To say the least :)
Now that I've both hands free: is it simply the case that she wasn't exposed as much to the urban working class... bother. I just disproved this in my head. After all, the father of her son was a motorcycle mechanic, I think. I suppose the dancers in HAVE (to use the convention, now that I know it) aren't urban themselves - neither fish or fowl, perhaps? But Paul and Antoine aside, they aren't particularly well fleshed out either.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:46 pm (UTC)I am sure that DLS's contact with the urban working class was probably limited, especially when she left London. But there would have been working class staff at Benson's, and she did shop and so on. My feeling is that if she wanted to, she could have written about them, as she wrote about men and bellringing and the insides of gentlemen's clubs, so that ultimately she didn't write about them because she didn't choose to, whatever the reasons for that choice. I had forgotten the motorcycle mechanic - maybe there was literary revenge on him as well as John Cournos!
The professional dancers are interesting - quite sympathetically portrayed even as the men are sleazy and foreign, and the women though vulgar, are not bad. Still, Doris's accent is sneered at, however kindly she is.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 10:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 06:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 05:59 am (UTC)His daughter Valerie Napier's letter to John Anthony at the end of vol 2 of the Letters objects to the depiction of their father in the Brabazon biography. "Bill was not the common, ill-educated little clerk he was made out to be in the book. Both my mother and yours agreed he was a 'charming rotter'".
Barbara Reynolds in this appendix says he was the son of a vicar, brought up by an aunt when his parents died, and went to Denstone College public school. He was a clerk at Coutts bank, a motorbike despatch rider in WWI and spoke fluent French (what's the betting he did it in bed?). He resigned from the bank in 1920 to try and find work in the motorcycle trade. So unemployed and impoverished but not exactly a bit of rough.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 07:14 am (UTC).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 09:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 05:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 09:08 pm (UTC)I suspect that the nearest one can come to detective fiction in the Soviet Union is Yulian Semyonov's Seventeen Moments of Spring, though its protagonist is more of a spy-thriller hero than a detective. I believe that China (post-1970 or so) has produced some detective stories that follow the trends of the whodunit or police procedural, but I don't know any specific authors or titles. Google Books has turned up this, though, which may provide more information!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 11:09 am (UTC)Which order?
Date: 2010-06-30 09:19 pm (UTC)Re: Which order?
Date: 2010-06-30 09:49 pm (UTC)Re: Which order?
Date: 2010-06-30 10:54 pm (UTC)Re: Which order?
Date: 2010-07-01 01:31 pm (UTC)Wasn't impressed w Walton m'self.
Date: 2010-07-03 09:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 10:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 06:47 am (UTC)The lockpicker is an exception - rare in the novels, though there are one or two in the short stories. But he's not exactly a developed character, and as a protege of Peter he counts as a 'nice' working class man. If he were bitter about prison he wouldn't be in the book (that's a nice AU - Miss Murchison doesn't learn to pick a lock, because Bill's wife and child left him while he was inside!).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 11:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 07:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 07:23 am (UTC)*I'm not suggesting corruption has gone away, just that it's gone into somewhat different channels
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 03:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-30 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 01:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 06:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 10:14 am (UTC)It doesn't stop him trying to persuade them that they're wrong in other books, though. I definitely get the impression that DLS thought that artists were above the conventions (like Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder) that constrain lesser beings - I don't think she would have thought that The Doctor's Dilemma was a dilemma at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 01:32 pm (UTC)Having read Wikipedia on TDD, I just want to shout "make a purely medical judgement, and if you can't, toss a coin!". Ed-ing again, DLS does a very good murderous doctor tale in the non-LPW short story "Blood Sacrifice".
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 05:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 06:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 10:07 am (UTC)I have to say that I find Mrs Grimethorpe totally unconvincing, and I'm not that impressed by
HeathclMr Grimethorpe, either. I think the book would have benefitted greatly from being written by someone who had read Cold Comfort Farm (yet another job for the time machine).Ginger Joe counts as an urban working class character, surely? Also Padgett, and to some extent Annie. But apart from Padgett's notion that "What this country needs is a 'Itler" (was he perhaps inspired by the socialism in national socialism) there's no suggestion that any of them want a different social order from "the rich mna in his castle, the poor man at his gate".
And going off on another tangent, I don't find the endless details of Denver's trial in CLOUD nearly as interesting as DLS expects me to. I have to keep reminding myself that a Duke was the 1920s equivalent of Brad Pitt to understand why everyone's so worked up about it (and I want to clout Mary for her assumption that she's so far above the law that lying in court is her moral duty, and Peter and Parker for going along with it).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 11:05 am (UTC)Ginger Joe is a nice lad, but he is a child, and a child that can be of use to Peter, and be repaid with a little lordly patronage by a word in someone's ear for the promotion of his brother. Though that said, the working class - and commerce-based - characters in MMA in gneral are the most plausible en masse, I think. She knows the people who are part of office life, lived with them for years, and sees them as real human beings. Too often, I don't feel she's looking at people who don't belong in the approved categories as fully human. Still, it's probably significant that the socialist is the public school man, not one of the printers.
It was an irresistible opportunity on the List!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-02 11:36 am (UTC)I've now spent a night contemplating Clouds of Witness/Cold Comfort Farm crossovers, thank you very much. Except none of them work because Flora Poste would have told Mary not to be so silly in the first five minutes and destroyed the plot. But you could get Uncle Paul and Mr Mybug together arguing about Women and the genie de l'amour and accidentally drown them in the bog. And the Duke of Denver should on no account be let anywhere near the sukebind.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-02 12:48 pm (UTC)Uncle Paul and Mr Mybug together arguing about Women and the genie de l'amour and accidentally drown them in the bog
If only. Or they might discover what it is they've been repressing all these years.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-03 05:31 am (UTC)Better yet, Flora could have told Denis Cathcart not to be so silly, and have given him the address of a little establishment where his humiliation kink could be adequately taken care of for a far more reasonable sum than he had thus far been paying. And Peter could have advised him about investing the money he made from cards in London property. Then Denis could have had a happy ending, too, in spite of being partially foreign and therefore mentally unstable.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 10:08 am (UTC)Love the List Essay; OT Wimsey Fic
Date: 2010-07-07 11:39 am (UTC)I follow your postings on the Lord Peter List and I have to say I have been enjoying the level of discourse recently. Some different voices and some provacative ideas.
Since I know from lurking on your livejournal page that you like Wimsey Fic, I thought (if it isn't known to you) you might get a kick out of the following: http://community.livejournal.com/talboys/31970.html. It brings together two of my favorite authors, though not in a way you might think!
Re: Love the List Essay; OT Wimsey Fic
Date: 2010-07-07 09:01 pm (UTC)I have seen that fic, but it never hurts to be reminded of it - it's really clever and works for me even though my knowledge of Seuss is confined to the bits quoted in popular culture. I think my favourite line is "Please, Peter, spare me your "français.""