Too Many Cousins, by Douglas G. Browne (1946)

Too Many Cousins, Douglas G. Browne; the Dover trade paperback edition

I recently reacquainted myself with this book courtesy of my fellow GAD blogger at the excellent crossexaminingcrime who yesterday discussed another book (The May Week Murders) by Douglas G. Browne. I was prompted to comment and confessed that I didn’t quite remember the details of this book. But later that afternoon I saw my copy of the Dover edition in a stack of books, picked it up, and was very pleased to remember the pleasure I took in this book when I first read it. So I thought I’d make a few comments here to let you see if you were interested in reading it yourself.

Please be warned that this essay concerns a work of detective fiction; part of its potential enjoyment is based on surprising the reader. If you read any further, you will learn something about the titular novel and perhaps some others. I do not reveal whodunit, but I do discuss elements of plot and construction. If you haven’t already read this novel, it will have lost its power to surprise you to greater or lesser extent, and that would be a shame. So please go and read this book before you spoil your own enjoyment. If you proceed past this point, you’re on your own. 

What is this book about?

In Too Many Cousins, a 1946 story by Douglas G. Browne, six cousins are the surviving descendants of a wealthy Victorian who inherit when his last wife finally dies. (The elderly Mrs. Shearsby was much younger than her late husband.) Mrs. Shearsby has a life interest in his fortune which upon her death devolves per stirpes to multiple branches of his family. It might be that not all the cousins are content to wait patiently for their inheritance; as the story opens, three of the cousins have died in recent months and the other three are nervous. The three deaths may have been accidental but it’s an unusual coincidence even so.

Humphrey Bogart looking like what I imagine to be “Mephistophelean”.

Harvey Tuke (who apparently bears a striking resemblance to Mephistopheles) is a powerful official in the public prosecutor’s office and learns of this string of deaths through an odd gentleman who is a master of obituaries; he prepares them in advance and follows them, and is the only one to have noticed the Shearsby coincidence. Tuke investigates and learns the story of the cousins, investigates the deaths, and gets to know the surviving cousins, at least one of whom has escaped accidental death recently.

Mr. Tuke has also been spending time with the three cousins, who are not much involved in each others’ lives. One of them is Mrs. Tuke’s assistant in her war efforts; Mlle Cecile Boulanger helps the aristocratic Yvette Tuke (neé Garay) work on behalf of the French Navy (it’s the end of the war, perhaps 1945). Immediately after Tuke’s encounter with the concerned obituarist, Cecile tells him about having received a hard push into traffic and escaping death by the skin of her teeth — she proves to be one of the three prospective heirs.

Another of the three surviving cousins, Mortimer Shearsby is a chemist at a company that produces artificial fabrics — currently for the war effort, although they began by producing artificial silk. He and his wife Lilian have both worked at Sansil and come into contact with an unusual poison, sodium nitrite; which is of interest because another of the three deceased cousins apparently poisoned herself accidentally with sodium nitrite. But Mortimer and Lilian insist that sodium nitrite is easy to get hold of, and unfortunately that seems to be the case. (Its poisonous properties here I think must be imaginary, or else Browne has misattributed the effects of one chemical to another for reasons of public safety.)

Mortimer and Lilian are vulgar little middle-class bourgeois, but the third cousin is more to the social taste of Tuke and his beautifully-dressed wife Yvette; Miss Vivien Ardmore is well-dressed, well-mannered, and everything about her is in good taste. Yvette Tuke and Vivien recognize kindred spirits and become friendly. Vivien is very social and entertains a lot; she seems to have a lot of impromptu parties.

Too Many Cousins, an American edition from Macmillan (1953). The illustration reminded me of early Andy Warhol book jacket art although I don’t think this is his work.

Oddly enough, one deceased cousin, a professional writer, recently produced a story called “Too Many Cousins” — and then called it back from his publisher, insisting that it could not be published. So there’s a hunt for the manuscript. There’s also a hunt for Uncle Martin, another potential heir, who vanished long ago and is generally considered deceased except … Mr. Tuke may suspect something to the contrary.

After establishing the characters, the book segues into six separate skeins of investigation: the suspicious deaths of the three cousins and the possibility that one of the remaining three may have had something to do with any of those deaths. So the full attention of the law is turned upon all six threads, and Mr. Tuke stays in touch with the survivors.

The second half of the book is very much concerned with who could have been where when, and how they might have traveled there. Timetables are generated; alibis are tested. In the course of tracing someone’s movements, the police become aware that a petty criminal has somehow become involved at the periphery of this case, possibly because he’s blackmailing one of the principals. When his body, poisoned with sodium nitrite, is found in a storage room during a party at Vivien Ardmore’s home, it doesn’t take long for Tuke to point the police in the right direction; although the victim has prudently done so as a precaution and the case would have been solved anyway.

In the traditional manner, Tuke explains the details to the interested obituarist; the elderly lady dies, and all the remaining heirs come into their long-awaited money.

Why is this book worth your time?

If I may be permitted to quote myself from someone else’s blog, here’s the comment I left about this book yesterday at crossexaminingcrime.

“LOL oh my it’s been a lot of years since I read [Too Many Cousins]. I remember being surprised at whodunit but not feeling cheated … and that there was some clever characterization along the way. But I apologize for not being able to remember much more than that.”

That kind of sums it up on a superficial level. The solution is perhaps surprising but if you’ve read the book carefully, you should be prepared for it; there are plenty of clues if you are paying attention. There was indeed some clever characterization but, ultimately, the plot was not sufficiently memorable to stay in my mind for what might have been twenty years.

That being said — I enjoyed the hell out of this the second time around and I’m not sure why I didn’t remember it from my first reading.

The UK first edition of Too Many Cousins (MacDonald, 1946).

Possibly my earlier dismissal of this volume has to do with the idea that, over the years, the things in which I find pleasure in detective fiction have changed. In my early years I was fascinated by puzzles and detection. Lately it seems as though my attention is more focused upon the period itself. I enjoy the details of everyday life in 1946, both the grand sweep of world events and the evanescent and temporary things that catch the attention of a nation and concatenate through into popular fiction. As you have probably already imagined, there’s a lot of social detail for me to enjoy in this book.

The mystery itself is not all that mysterious, although I imagine I, upon my first reading, as well as most of the potential readers of this volume upon their first encounter will have been unable to identify the murderer and that person’s methods with any degree of precision.  Browne has actually constructed quite a clever murder plot but there are a couple of problems with how it is presented that make it less interesting than it actually is. They’re quite simultaneous issues: (1) that while there may be too many cousins, not enough of them have survived to make the field of suspects sufficiently large, and (2) that Browne takes the stand that really only one of the cousins is sufficiently … I’ll say “low-class” … to have actually committed a murder. Rather than spoil things for you, I’ll just say that this is either a smokescreen or an easy way to pick out the murderer without doing much thinking about the method. So it’s possible to have a strong suspect for murder and half the method without having been able to pierce the really very clever clueing and identify how the murders were committed; I expect I would have felt like I’d solved the mystery for the most part, which is a little unsatisfying, without having had either the wit or the ability to do so.

In terms of social history, there are two main threads of this book that I found very enjoyable. The first is that this book is relentless about describing people and their possessions, particularly their clothes but also their homes and accessories, in a way that lets you form conclusions about what type of person they are. I always enjoy this, although I suspect that at the distance of some 70 years the details of why smoking a Larranaga cigar makes you more discerning than if you smoke other brands have slipped by the wayside.

The other large thread of this book is some fairly explicit statements of the way that social class works in England. I don’t know that the book ever says anything about class per se. What it does is make observations about people (clothes, homes, and accessories as noted above) in such a way that (a) you know that the author is a person of the upper classes and assumes that you are too, and (b) is quite snotty about people and things who have the misfortune to not belong to the upper class. Browne indeed selects two characters, Mortimer and Lilian Shearsby, and pillories them mercilessly for the crime of being hard-core bourgeoisie.

Here’s a description of Lilian Shearsby that gives you most of what I’m talking about (a little long, but its detail is part of its charm):

“… [S]he was a tall woman. Harvey’s first impression of her was that she was also a handsome one. She had the good looks of well cut features — a short nose and upper lip, fine arched eyebrows, a pointed and determined chin. But her complexion, if left alone, would have been pasty, and her carefully waved hair was a nondescript brown. Art had been called in to enliven nature, and a lock over her forehead was bleached yellow. Behind rimless pince-nez pale grey eyes flitted about with quick little movements, like the eyes of a mouse or bird. Unlike her husband, who wore a baggy tweed suit under his overcoat, Mrs. Shearsby was a thought overdressed. Her green coat and skirt, tailored to reveal a good figure, were set off by too many clips and bracelets, her little green hat was an exaggeration of a current mode, and her high-heeled shoes of patent leather were too smart for the costume and the occasion. Under her arm she carried an enormous green bag.”

In other words she’s aping the clothing of her social betters but not getting the details right. Don’t you love the subtle bitchiness of “a thought overdressed”? Browne also gives us fashions of which he actually does approve:

“Vivien Ardmore had perhaps no claim to beauty; her features were irregular, her nose too long, her scarlet mouth too wide; but her fine eyes were widely set, and she obviously had intelligence. Her expression, a little hard in repose, was lightened and transformed when she smiled. An admirable figure was admirably set off by a tailor-made coat and skirt of light grey flannel. On her pale gold hair, elaborately waved, perched a tiny grey hat with white flowers. White gloves, a white handbag, and stockings and shoes which suggested neither economy nor utility completed an ensemble upon which Mrs. Tuke cast an approving eye. Miss Ardmore’s glance at Yvette returned the compliment.”

Woman in a gray flannel suit that reminded me of Vivian Ardmore

Douglas Browne either had a strong eye for women’s fashion or the benefit of a consultant who did; I suggest that the way in which Miss Ardmore and Mrs. Tuke each acknowledge the other’s wartime chic with approval (“neither economy nor utility” had a special meaning in the days of the “utility suit”) is not something a male ordinarily notices.

The author is also scathing upon such details of bourgeois life as being sufficiently vulgar as to name your house Aylwynstowe — no, I’m sorry, I have no idea as to why that’s vulgar, but it’s clear from the authorial tone that it is — and to fill its over-manicured garden with gnomes which, okay, that I get. Browne is particularly scornful about a garden bench inscribed “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot”; I can understand dimly that this is a version of the house-proud lower classes of the modern day who patronize with approval any commercial establishment that begins with “Ye olde …” but for the life of me I can’t figure out why he’s so down on this particular line from the poetry of Thomas Brown (the original verse suggests that God manifests himself in gardens). Later in the same chapter he calls Mortimer’s activities in his garden “godwottery” so there must be something about that particular quotation that has an association lost to the modern day, or at least to the resources of the internet. Or else Browne is just using it as a kind of shorthand to everything he dislikes about bourgeois gardens.

This less-than-perfectly-chic lady reminded me of Lilian Shearsby.

Buried in all this keen observation of clothes and furniture are some actual clues to the mystery, and to be honest they are beautifully buried. If after reading this volume you think back to what you might have noticed, there’s a casual remark by a background character that could have given you the entire murder plot, if you’d only paid attention; but it is buried in a great section of keen observation about social class and you are lulled into thinking that this background character is more of the same. I like that kind of clueing a lot.

There’s also something that underlies the entire book that in a way reverses your learning about the social situation. As is clear from the perspective of 2018, 1946 in England was a time of great social upheaval. We may enjoy the sly digs that Browne makes at the middle classes and their airs and graces, but I suspect that 1946 was close to the end of an era in which such distinctions mattered as much as they do in this story. If you think of the England of 1962 in The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side and how Miss Marple relates to her young employee Cherry Baker from The Development — Cherry is quite happy to be herself and doesn’t want to be of Miss Marple’s class, unlike here where Lilian Shearsby hates Vivian Ardmore because she is effortlessly aristocratic.

Ultimately what I enjoyed the most about this book was that the actions of the characters grew organically out of their personalities, and their personalities were very detailed and specific in order to let you know who could and could not have done the murder. For me, that places this book specifically at the end, or past the end, of the Golden Age; if this had been written in 1926 rather than 1946, there would have been a lot more about train schedules and the 4.03 express from Nether Puddleby and a lot less about how a viscountess can buy people’s loyalty with autographed photographs of herself. This mystery is not very tough as a mystery because the author is telegraphing his punch; there are not many suspects and only one reasonably red herring. (Tuke himself remarks at the end that the solution is simple and that he tried to overcomplicate it.) But as a novel of manners, a novel about how different social classes rubbed together at the end of WWII — delightful. And a little bit sad, because the world of upper-class privilege that Browne writes about is about to vanish along with this style of mystery.

Other voices

None of the usual suspects among my fellow GAD bloggers have examined this book, and the only look was a quick one here by the eminent Martin Edwards at Do You Write Under Your Own Name?. When the President of the Detection Club says “I felt that, once the main characters were introduced, the book faltered somewhat. Never mind too many cousins, there were too few suspects,” I’d be apt to agree with him 😉 I just went on at more length, that’s all 😉

Sergeant Cuff in the Saturday Review of October 31, 1953, says: “Death takes British heirs; Mr. Tuke, govt. lawyer, plays detective, has fun. Cast agreeable, realistic; handling suave, literate. Can’t go wrong here.”

As noted above, my friend armchair reviewer at crossexaminingcrime wrote a piece on a companion volume. I found it interesting and she has enticed me to find The May Week Murders because, well, call it an idiosyncrasy but I’m a sucker for a mystery about a tontine.

If you’re interested in the details of what women were wearing in 1940, here is a resource I found fascinating on the details of the utility suit/victory suit. I swiped one of their photographs which seemed to me to echo the less-than-perfect chic of Lilian Shearsby.

A note on editions

I venture to say that just about the only edition you’ll ever be able to get your hands on is the trade paperback from Dover that is pictured at the head of this piece. It is readily available through the usual sources, possibly including your local used bookstore. I note that there is a book club edition of the American printing and this should also be easily available from antiquarian sources for a reading copy. If you want a first edition, you might expect a current (2018) price to be perhaps US$30, as always depending on condition.

No paperback editions to my knowledge exist.

 

 

The case of the cynical synthesis

E.R. Punshon (note the ears!)

It’s always interesting to me when an author breaks the fourth wall and speaks, within the confines of a work of fiction, about how or why one writes. Many mystery writers seem to do it, and I’m not sure why, but there’s generally an authentic tinge of “behind the scenes” that fascinates me.

This is from Four Strange Women by E.R. Punshon (1940). Punshon is certainly a minor figure in the history of detective fiction; what I like to call a first-rate second-rate author, who was popular in his day but whose books have, until recently, passed out of print and remained there. The speaker, Mr. Eyton, is a professional journalist who has reported on the murder that takes place in the opening chapters. But he has a bit of a hobby; he’s writing something along the lines of some recent (imaginary) best-sellers, Musings in British Gardens and Dreaming ‘Midst the Flowers; apparently prosodical thoughts on the topic of being outdoors. Eyton’s is Twilight Thoughts Beneath the Trees.

“I am writing a book. … I’ve been working on it for some time,” Mr. Eyton explained. “Whenever I can, I take my bicycle and go to the forest. I describe what I see; above all, what I feel. That’s the secret,” he said, wagging his finger at Bobby. “Any one can see. Few can feel; at least, I mean, few know what they feel until the author tells them. Explain to the average man exactly what he thought when he saw the sunset, the rabbits at play, head the wind rustling through the trees, that’s the secret of success.”

“But suppose,” Bobby objected, “he didn’t feel a blessed thing — except wondering if he could get there before closing time?”

“Ah, the homely touch.” Mr. Eyton beamed approval. “My dear sir, it is, in fact, the public who never felt anything, who couldn’t feel anything, at whom an author aims — that is, if he wishes for a large circulation. You see, it pleases people to know what they would have felt if, in fact, they had felt it. You follow me? … Of course, you mustn’t startle your reader by anything he couldn’t recognize as his own ideas if he ever had any. All is there.”

I think this relates to a favourite quote of mine about detective fiction, which I am chagrined to say I have more than once misquoted over the years, apparently changing it to suit my unconscious needs. Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight and apologize. This is the accurate quotation from page 303 of Q.D. Leavis:  Collected Essays by Q.D. (Queenie) Leavis (her seminal work, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) is available freely here) on the topic of the mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers.

“And in the matter of ideas, subject, theme, problems raised, she [Sayers] similarly performs the best-seller’s function of giving the impression of intellectual activity to readers who would very much dislike that kind of exercise if it were actually presented to them; but of course it is all shadow-boxing. With what an air of unconventionality and play of analysis Miss Sayers handles her topics, but what relief her readers must feel — it is part no doubt of her success — that they are let off with a reassurance that everything is really all right and appearances are what really matter.”

Does this sound like a cynical synthesis? Punshon (in a mystery) is saying that best-sellers fake emotion for people who aren’t equipped to have emotions, and Leavis is saying that mysteries fake intellect for people who aren’t equipped to have intellect. So the synthesis would be that popular fiction in general is faking something or other for the benefit of deficient readers, and therefore the more assiduous your reading, the larger must be your lack of some essential personality component. Yikes. I read more than anyone in my everyday life, and apparently it’s because I’m more stupid and insensitive than anyone I know. But at least I learned about my shortcomings from a novel 😉

Queenie Leavis

My first reaction was that the whole thing seemed very sneering and supercilious, and to be completely honest I’ve valued Mrs. Leavis’s observation for years precisely because it was so tart and acid. (Queenie Leavis is rather like what Dorothy Parker would have been like if she’d been very thoroughly educated in literary theory.) Perhaps it’s a function of advancing decrepitude, or perhaps it’s having recently pinpointed that one desirable function of detective fiction is indoctrination, or the introduction of the reader to information about how society works, but I find these days I am more willing to accept that works of fiction should shoulder the load of educating today’s population about how to manage their emotions and to function within society. Heaven knows nothing else seems to be able to.

As a gloss upon my recent discussion of indoctrination, let me offer Mrs. Leavis’s comment, from Fiction and the Reading Public:

“The modern reader is at once struck by the body of traditional lore the [Elizabethan] people must have possessed which served instead of the ‘knowledge’ (i.e., acquaintance with a mass of more or less unrelated facts, derived principally from an elementary school education and the newspaper) that forms the background of the modern working-man’s mind.”

And note that this volume was published in 1932, pretty much the middle of the Golden Age of Detection. Mrs. Leavis seems to be unhappy that popular fiction transmitted “more or less unrelated facts” at the time they were being communicated, but to today’s reader they are not unrelated; they are all part and parcel of a long-ago age with butlers and pukka sahibs and bodies in the library, with very little in the way of social overlap to today’s context.

It is perhaps distressing and inappropriate that today’s adolescent absorbs social mores as part of the subtext of a poorly-written book about a girl who falls in love with a sparkly vampire, but at least it’s via a book and not a music video or a MMO. Perhaps I’m prejudiced in favour of books, being so heavily invested in them, but it does seem that they are produced by people who are trying to observe human nature and society in general and reproduce the more interesting or useful bits while telling a story — AND they use the written word to do so, which has the effect of expanding one’s ability to communicate with others more precisely. It’s more useful to tell someone their actions are pathetic if both of you know what the word “pathos” means.

So what if mysteries are designed to present me with examples of logical thought structures that I cannot hope to achieve in real life? Very few people’s real-life situations are populated by people who would, for instance, use an audio recording to fake an alibi while they’re off murdering someone. Far more realistic is the common news story that someone has been murdered by a stranger to obtain a ridiculously small amount of money, using a gun or a knife or a blunt instrument, and generally speaking it’s not very interesting or informative (unless you are Truman Capote), merely sad. Detective fiction, in fact, preserves the important social meme that some people do actually try to commit subtle and serious crimes that are meant to remain undetected, and we’d better be on the lookout for them; not everyone can be a Hercule Poirot or a Jane Marple, but we can continue to acknowledge the need for such persons to detect these subtle crimes. And we can take pleasure in experiencing stories of their adventures.

And if, as Mrs. Leavis remarks, we are let off the trouble of truly deep thought by a reassurance that everything is really all right — perhaps it’s the continuing repetition of the meme that some problems (mysteries) exist that require the application of intense thought in order to “solve” them that we are gaining, and that this is a valuable frame of mind to maintain as a common understanding. I might not be able to figure out who killed Roger Ackroyd, but that story helps me to understand that there are thought patterns out there that can be learned, attained, and mastered that would have let me equal Poirot’s achievement in doing so. In the meantime, it’s not a terrible thing that I should be reassured about the essential rightness of the world in the background.

I’ll close off these musings with a final thought. What I seem to be describing is a system where mystery writers are cynical in order to reassure readers that the world itself is not a terrible place. Is this a good thing? Would we be better off with finding a mode of intellectual activity that required us to actually develop intellectual skills that identify crimes rather than continuing to experience those skills by observing a fictional detective and pretending we followed right along? Or are the exigencies of modern life such that we’ll develop those skills if and when we need them, and meanwhile it is appropriate merely to remind ourselves that those skills exist in an enjoyable way?  I suspect I know where my readers’ loyalties lie, but I’m prepared to be surprised if my readers care to do so in the comments.

My apologies also to Erle Stanley Gardner, who inspired the title.

 

 

 

 

A Murder is Announced, by Agatha Christie (1950): A Bayardian exploration

WARNING: This essay concerns works of detective fiction; part of their potential enjoyment is based on surprising the reader. If you read any further, you WILL learn a huge amount about the plot of Christie’s A Murder Is Announced (1950) including the murderer’s name and motive, and a similar amount about Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I’ve also needed to talk about the solution to Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938). If you read on, these books will have completely lost their power to surprise you, and that would be a shame, because they’re excellent mystery novels. If you haven’t yet read any of the books mentioned above, go do that and return; if you proceed past this point, you’re on your own. 

I’m sure your first question will be, what is a “Bayardian exploration”? A while ago, I came across a pair of similar volumes by Pierre Bayard, who previously was only known to me as the author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. My first discovery of his witty deconstructive talents was with Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles (and I gather there also exists a volume on Hamlet as yet untranslated from Bayard’s native French that argues that Claudius did not kill Hamlet’s father). It should be clear from the title what he’s about; essentially he approaches the text of The Hound of the Baskervilles from a number of different perspectives and demonstrates that the real murderer is not identified correctly in the text, and also that the author subconsciously knew who the real culprit is. I found his writing to have an overall air of sly humour, but that might just be the effect of all that post-modernist literary theory; your mileage may vary.

What piqued my interest extremely, though, was Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery. In the Bayardian spirit, since I haven’t actually read this volume, I’ll tell you my understanding from reading comments about this volume. Essentially Bayard takes apart The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and “proves” that, in a very post-modern approach to the text, the murder was not actually committed by the doctor/narrator but by his sister Caroline, whom Christie has said was a precursor to Jane Marple.

I went back and checked the text, and by golly the doctor never actually SAYS he committed the murder. After the body is discovered he did, in a famous turn of phrase, “what little had to be done”. This is an important point in the text since we are reading the doctor’s handwritten diary in which he describes the events of the novel that involve him directly. First his diary describes the crucial period:

“The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.”

The reader of Christie’s text is meant to understand in the final chapter, as the doctor is contemplating suicide, that in the ten-minute interval the doctor had murdered Ackroyd and set up a few red herrings. When he later says he “did what little had to be done”, the reader understands that the doctor is saying “went over and shoved the dictaphone into my medical bag, pushed back the chair, and left”.

But since the narrator is unreliable, Bayard seems to suggest, he can be even more unreliable than we’ve been told in Christie’s text. Apparently the alternate suggestion is that the doctor fakes his diary entry to conceal the involvement of his sister, for fraternal reasons, and hopes to take the blame if a detective like Hercule Poirot should be on the case. If you re-examine the text, there’s a curious passage that is open to a couple of interpretations. After all is discovered and the doctor is writing his suicide note, he adds:

“My greatest fear all through has been Caroline. I have fancied she might guess. Curious the way she spoke that day of my ‘strain of weakness.’ Well, she will never know the truth. There is, as Poirot said, one way out… I can trust him. He and Inspector Raglan will manage it between them. I should not like Caroline to know. She is fond of me, and then, too, she is proud… My death will be a grief to her, but grief passes…”

If Caroline has killed Ackroyd (for reasons connected with the blackmail of Mrs. Ferrars, for which the doctor takes credit in his confession) but does not know that her brother knows this, and intends to take responsibility for it, the passage makes as much sense, don’t you think?

So these are amusing diversions; M. Bayard is clever and intelligent, and allows people familiar with Christie’s text to have some intellectual fun. I don’t actually suggest that Bayard is “correct”.  Christie’s text says what it says, and it’s considered a classic text of detective fiction because it introduces the idea of the unreliable narrator who is attempting to keep the reader from the solution by misdirection.

Parenthetically at this point: there’s a 1938 novel by Nicholas Blake that relates intimately to TMORA and takes it one step further. The Beast Must Die is initially presented in the form of a diary in which the diarist announces his desire to kill a certain person but later announces the diarist’s innocence when the person is actually killed. The diary, you will not be surprised to learn, has been faked to protect its writer; it’s truthful up to a point and then, as I recall the precise wording of the text, veers into untruth. This is different from Christie, where the doctor’s diary is scrupulously truthful but very, very carefully worded. (Poirot remarks upon the doctor’s reticence after reading his manuscript but emphasizes that the document is accurate.) Find out more about The Beast Must Die from a fellow GAD blogger and keen analyst here.

Anyway — as it contributes to my thinking about another Christie text below, here’s what I’m taking from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Agatha Christie was capable of creating a character in a detective novel who was … well, not precisely lying, but not telling the whole truth either. And this character specifically creates a written text that appears to say one thing and actually says another.  The character shows and tells us things about himself and his actions that are true, but presented in such a way as to mislead readers and detectives.
So I had stored M. Bayard’s high-spirited gedankenexperiment in my head as amusing but largely irrelevant to my own interests, which are in the text of Golden Age mysteries as they’re actually written. But the other day, I came across a comment that interested me in this kind of meta-analytic way, with reference to another Christie novel; 1950’s A Murder is Announced.

A Murder is Announced had been on my mind of late for a couple of reasons. I wrote a rather long essay, published elsewhere, about recognizing the presentation of LGBT characters in Golden Age detective fiction (here, GAD) — and two characters from AMIA, the Misses Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd, played a large part. My thesis was that characters in GAD were not said to be LGBT but sometimes were; the way you could explore this idea is by looking for stereotypes. To make a long story short, Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd are my best example of a long-term lesbian couple. The text never makes it clear, in words of one syllable, that they are a romantic partnership as well as a domestic one. (They raise chickens together.) But to my mind, it’s clear that Hinchcliffe’s anguish at the murder of Murgatroyd is that of a spouse, not a business partner.

Then there were a couple of little things that contributed to this picture. One was an idle thought that the process of concealing one’s LGBT identity, of being “in the closet”, is quite a bit the same as concealing one’s identity as a murderer in a piece of detective fiction. Rather like the experience of the doctor in TMORA. A gay man working in a conservative office environment — or a few decades ago anywhere — doesn’t have to announce his sexual preference, and doesn’t need to tell lies, but can leave things around like, say, a snapshot of himself with a beautiful female friend tacked up over his computer monitor. This is neither an original nor an especially complex insight, just one that was on my mind.

Finally what coalesced everything for me was a comment I read here, in a discussion of the perception of Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd. The basis is an intelligent note that is focused upon the relationship of these two women, but the poster says two quite extraordinary things that got my mind working. The first is:

“It’s clear Christie was a close observer of human nature and the subtleties of relationships. In fact, in this same book she has two other women who are longtime friends and companions in the same house, but there’s zero undercurrent as in the [Hinchcliffe/Murgatroyd] case.”

And the second was even more striking for me:

“Incidentally, while thinking about this case, I realized that almost every possible non-polygamous relationship exists among the main characters in this one book, from single to married to widowed to trophy wife to lesbians to friends.”

One comment from a different writer suggests that “Letitia Blacklock and Dora Bunner have a Boston marriage but of the friendship-only variety.” (It was actually Charlotte masquerading as Letitia, but let that pass.) There’s an extensive discussion of the concept of “Boston marriage”, but what it boils down to is, according to most of the people who have read the book and given this matter some thought, Letty and Dora are not having sex and Hinch and Murgatroyd pretty much are.

The part that hadn’t struck me previously is the relationship between Lotty and Dora. Now, bear in mind two things here. One is that, in this novel, Lotty is the murderer of both Dora and Murgatroyd. The second is that, in Christie, we have precedent for murderers to provide testimony about their own activities that is partially true and partially false.  With that in mind, this is Jane Marple speaking in the denouement of AMIA about the relationship between Letty/Lotty Blacklock and Dora Bunner.

“The whole thing was going splendidly. And then – she made her big mistake. It was a mistake that arose solely from her kindness of heart and her naturally affectionate nature. She got a letter from an old school friend who had fallen on evil days, and she hurried to the rescue. Perhaps it may have been partly because she was, in spite of everything, lonely. Her secret kept her in a way apart from people. And she had been genuinely fond of Dora Bunner and remembered her as a symbol of her own gay carefree days at school.”

No, I’m not going to make a big thing about Christie’s using the word “gay”; she meant it in the sense of “festive”. But I started to wonder — how does Jane Marple know this stuff? The police have evidence, yes, that Rudi Scherz saw Charlotte in Switzerland when she was a patient, and that’s why she has to murder him. But if you think about it, it’s impossible for Miss Marple to know why Miss Blacklock has done anything that she’s done. The final chapter is full of “must haves” — “Charlotte must, I think, have overheard a good deal that morning she came into the cafe.” So this is not evidence that Miss Marple and the police are getting from Charlotte herself; this is what Miss Marple knows happened and why she THINKS it happened.

My astute readers will have gotten to my central thought by now, I think. There’s already one instance in the book of a lesbian couple who don’t exactly conceal their relationship but make it look like something more innocent. Why shouldn’t Charlotte and Dora have been in a youthful relationship at school? And why shouldn’t they have corresponded all these years?  Frankly, that stuff about “an old school friend who had fallen on evil days” isn’t substantiated by anything and could be just so much nonsense. And it could be nonsense that Miss Marple was led to believe by tiny clues that the pair scattered in their path; perhaps even faked letters about the circumstances of their past. There’s nothing textually that stops this from being the case; I’ll be scrupulous and say that there’s nothing that really suggests it, either.

Well, now, wait.  Even Miss Marple says “[Charlotte] loved Dora – she didn’t want to kill Dora – but she couldn’t see any other way.” And Charlotte Blacklock, in the dramatic scene where her guilt is revealed in her kitchen, says

“‘I didn’t want to kill anybody – I had to – but it’s Dora I mind about – after Dora was dead, I was all alone – ever since she died – I’ve been alone – oh, Dora – Dora -‘ And once again she dropped her head on her hands and wept.”

Does that sound to you like a Boston marriage? Or does it sound to you, much like is suggested by the vehemence of Miss Hinchcliffe’s desire to physically injure her lover’s murderer in the same scene, like Charlotte and Dora were more of a long-term couple than you’d heretofore thought? Jane Marple says Charlotte loved Dora; she didn’t say exactly how much.

 

All of the events of the novel, if you care to consider them in a harsher light, can be brought to the doorstep of a considerably more evil Charlotte Blacklock than you may have considered. All you have to do is treat the text with the same respect that Miss Marple and the police treat the evidence; corroborated evidence is fine, and speculations about people’s emotions are just that, speculation.

Here’s how my version goes. Miss Blacklock didn’t get a letter from Dora pleading poverty; they made that up to explain her presence in the household as “companion”. In reality, they have been, and probably still are, lovers. They settle in a village which is known to accept a pair of women living together without scandal being aroused. And they safeguard the fortune they have cheated to obtain. Then Charlotte realizes that she has to dispose of Rudi Scherz and enlists Dora’s help in generating an alibi. Charlotte must safeguard herself from her lover’s carelessness and Miss Murgatroyd’s awareness, and kills them both, and finally is found out by Miss Marple, who uses a trick to force a confession.

I’m not going to be specific about what surrounds the killing of Dora Bunner in my version.  I’ll merely say that if some of the individuals concerned were males, it would be more tenable that Charlotte kills Dora and Murgatroyd in order to end up with Hinchcliffe, but as the text stands it’s not reasonable. Hinchcliffe appears to be truly in love with Murgatroyd. There are other possibilities for the person with whom Charlotte sees herself after the police investigation dies down; the various permutations of Pip and Emma in the novel, wherein just about anyone of the right age could have been either, may have meant that Charlotte intended to control the fortune even if she had had to relinquish it. But once I started considering, there’s one person whose presence in the Blacklock household is equally inexplicable — the volatile Mitzi. Mitzi, who has escaped from war-torn Europe — perhaps Switzerland, where Charlotte and her sister stayed for a year during the war. Mitzi, who is of a closer age to Charlotte than any other potential lover; Mitzi, who finally cooperates in forcing an admission of guilt out of Charlotte because, after all, Charlotte has just finished killing her previous lover, Dora.  Perhaps it’s Mitzi who will be Charlotte’s lover after all is said and done.

But these are all speculations … they’re based on a premise that Agatha Christie, like other writers of detective fiction, had the job of creating characters who looked like one thing and acted like another. I don’t think you can say that it’s wrong for a reader who is aware that he has signed up to be fooled by the author to range through a wide spectrum of theories in an attempt to not be fooled; it’s merely that my speculation is after I know who Christie says was the murderer, that’s all.

If I were to be really getting wild in my speculations, I’d start thinking about who in the volume might have had a sex-change operation. It’s that pesky Pip and Emma dilemma. They turn out to be both women … but did they both start out as women? It’s always been curious to me that Charlotte’s medical operation in Switzerland was for goitre, which I understand was quite a bit less curable than it is today.  (We have iodine in salt these days, which forestalls it.) What other reasons are there for people to have a secretive operation in a European country — and then to come home with a lifelong habit of wearing a concealing strand of pearls?  Scars from goitre aren’t the only things that pearls serve to conceal; there’s also the telltale signs of a shaved-down Adam’s apple… Did the deceased financier actually fake his own death and then return as his secretary?

I apologize to anyone whom I’ve offended by these speculations, or anyone who thinks I’m crazy for speculating that the story could go beyond the only text. In closing, I thought I’d offer a long quotation from Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read:

“When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion…We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. … What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.”

Further recast by our private fantasies, indeed.  Enjoy your own imaginative takes on books you have read!

 

The Tuesday Night Bloggers: Ellery Queen, broad brand, and continuation works

A group of related bloggers who work in the general area of Golden Age Mysteries has decided to collaborate and publish a blog post every Tuesday as the Tuesday Night Bloggers. We began in the spirit of celebrating Agatha Christie’s 125th birthday anniversary. We’ve now going to continue with a different Golden Age mystery writer every three weeks; the first three Tuesdays of November will be devoted to Ellery Queen.

A note: henceforth when I refer to “Ellery Queen” I mean the literary character. Any reference to “EQ” will refer to the two real-life cousins who wrote together and signed their work as Ellery Queen.

 

Ellery Queen as a brand

Literary characters like Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen are called “brands” in certain contexts because of the similarities between them and the brands of, say, Nike and Burger King. There is a set of associations that aficionados associate with each brand; Nike denotes speed and Sherlock Holmes denotes deductive logic, among many other associations that compose the “brand platform” or brand image. The brand platform — or corporate image — represents how customers feel about the brand in various ways. If I wear a T-shirt with the logo of Apple or a silhouette of Hercule Poirot on it, what am I saying about myself as a person? Whatever the qualities that people associate with Poirot, by wearing the shirt I am associating myself with his brand.

Good brands have three properties: length, depth, and breadth. Length is longevity; good brands have been around for a long time and expect to be around in the future. Superman, dating back to 1938, is a more powerful brand than X-Men, who only date back to 1963. Depth is more difficult to define, but a brand with depth is one where the brand platform has a larger number of complex associations that come to mind in connection with the brand. You might think of Ferrari as a brand with more depth than Chevrolet because there are so many associations for Ferrari with wealth, the international racing circuit, or high performance machinery.

In terms of Ellery Queen, it’s the breadth of this brand that is most impressive to me and what I propose to discuss here. Breadth increases with the number of ways in which the brand is available to be experienced. Superman, for instance, began in the pages of a comic book. That brand has since transmigrated to television, film, books, hip-hop dance, popular music, numismatics, video games, and many other modalities. In detective fiction, I’d say there are three major brands with the most length, depth, and overall breadth: Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple, and Hercule Poirot. But at the second rank there are a number of excellent brands, and in terms of breadth I think Ellery Queen is primus inter pares with other detective brands like Nero Wolfe, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jessica Fletcher because of the extraordinary breadth of the brand.

EQ, the cousins Dannay and Lee who created the Ellery Queen character and eponym, were early innovators in branding breadth. It’s as though, after a certain point, EQ were determined to extend Ellery Queen into every conceivable variation within every available medium. I don’t think what they did was really a brand strategy, as we today know the term; EQ were innovators who were making it up as they went along, since branding theory had not yet been invented, but they had a huge amount of natural talent and an almost uncanny instinct for what worked and what didn’t.

It’s far beyond the limits of a blog post to examine the entire EQ career as an exercise in branding; that would be enough material to write a textbook, although I doubt I ever will. Let me take the lazy man’s way out and present you with a series of roughly chronological bullet points, each of which illustrates an aspect of how EQ approached their literary property. The chronology can be found in detail here and begins in 1929 with the publication of their first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery.

• After their first three Ellery Queen novels, EQ began to diversify and published their first of four mystery novels as by Barnaby Ross. Although the differentiation made for some interesting marketing ploys, such as the cousins giving amusing lectures while both masked, one as Queen, one as Ross, it soon became apparent that the Ellery Queen brand was the dominant one. It seems as though they quickly admitted the pen name and folded it into the Ellery Queen brand. EQ licensed out the Barnaby Ross name in the 1960s for a series of historical novels … I’ve never been sure quite why.
• The cousins began a short-lived magazine of their own called Mystery League, which published short stories. It ran only four issues.
• Over the five years following the first Ellery Queen novel, the cousins diversified by selling short stories to the “slicks”, magazines like Redbook; after five years they had enough to collect in a volume and published their first anthology, which also went into paperback. This encouraged them to keep a strong secondary focus on the short-story form as it allowed them to sell the same material in two markets.
• In 1934 the first “package” — a compendium volume collecting multiple earlier novels — was published, The Ellery Queen Omnibus.
• With the final First Period “nationalities” novel in 1935, The Spanish Cape Mystery, EQ began to experiment in two literary directions. One was the subject of my last blog piece, Halfway House as the transition between Periods One and Two; the other was the production of fast-and-dirty novels which seemed designed as scenarios for motion pictures. The first Ellery Queen movie, The Spanish Cape Mystery, came out in 1935 and was followed by two more films based recognizably on novels, and then seven films between 1940 and 1942 that were not based on anything canonic.
• The radio programme The Adventures of Ellery Queen ran between 1939 and 1948; Dannay and Lee wrote the scripts until 1945 and then handed the job to Anthony Boucher.
• In 1940, one of the radio programme’s scripts was turned into a Whitman Big Little Book; this is a palm-sized (3-5/8″ x 4-1/2″) volume with text on the verso page and a black and white illustration on the recto page. The Adventure of the Last Man Club was a typical entry in the series, which was a primitive attempt at cross-platforming properties from radio, comic strips, and series of adventure novels like Tarzan.  This specific novel will come up in my discussion again; I’ll just note here that this book was written by an unknown author based on an EQ radio script. It was later turned into a paperback original by deleting the illustrations and editing the volume. Even more interesting to me is  Ellery Queen, Master Detective, which is a 1941 novelization of the movie of the same name. The movie is “loosely based” on 1937’s The Door Between. In other words — there’s a book called The Door Between that was altered for a movie and then taken by another (unknown) author and turned into a novel called Ellery Queen, Master Detective. Similarly, The Devil to Pay became the film Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime, which was novelized as The Perfect Crime. More novelizations of radio plays from the period exist.
• Ellery Queen’s first appearance in comic books/graphic novels was in 1940, and he was the subject of two short-lived series in 1952 and 1962.
• 1941 saw the introduction of EQ’s second and soon-to-be-permanent foray into magazine publishing, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which is still published today in 2015.
• EQ were becoming known as assemblers of short-story packages and they contributed extremely well-informed forewords to a number of other author’s collections, including John Dickson Carr, Dashiell Hammett, Stanley Ellin, Stuart Palmer, Margery Allingham, and Roy Vickers. They continued to assemble volumes of short stories by other authors and occasionally volumes of Ellery Queen stories.
• 1941 saw the publication of the first novel as by Ellery Queen, Jr., all of which were written by other authors and edited by Lee.
• In 1942 EQ began to write critical non-fiction about an area of their particular expertise, the detective short story. Queen’s Quorum (1951) is still considered the principal text in this area.
• In 1961, EQ licensed the first novel as by Ellery Queen (Dead Man’s Tale by Stephen Marlowe) which was the first of 28 novels written by other authors and published as by Ellery Queen. This, with the earlier 5 novelizations brings the total to 33 “as by Ellery Queen” novels; another four novels were ghost-written with close supervision by EQ, so the total is (loosely) 37. This contrasts directly with 30 novels as by Ellery Queen that actually were written by EQ over their lifetimes. There’s an asterisk to this: The Lamp of God by EQ was published in a 64-page edition by Dell Ten-Cent in 1951. So let’s call it 30-1/2 volumes they wrote and 37 they didn’t.  There are a lot of other ifs-ands-buts that go along with this; my point is either that EQ had more novels as by Ellery Queen ghosted than the ones they wrote themselves, or damn close to.
• Ellery Queen became the subject of a television series a number of times in the 1950s, a television movie in 1971 and 1975, and another short-lived series in 1975-76.
• Throughout EQ’s lifetime, they licensed the character of Ellery Queen for board games, jigsaw puzzles, and computer games, etc., as often as they could.
• Finally, although it counts as posthumous, I couldn’t resist the temptation to add in a plug for the first Ellery Queen theatrical adaptation of Calamity Town, written by my Facebook friend and expert in all things Queenian, Joseph Goodrich. The play opens at the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary, Canada, on January 23, 2016 and runs till February 21, 2016.

To sum up: novels, magazines, anthologies, compendia, films, radio, odd-format books, comic books/manga, assemblages of short-story collections, children’s books, non-fiction, licensed novels, television, board games, jigsaw puzzles, computer games and live theatre. The only other detective brands that can approach or equal this breadth are Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple.

Continuation novels

At this point let me stop for a definition of the “continuation novel”; I intend to link this to the breadth of the Ellery Queen brand to tie off my thesis.

“Continuation novel” is a polite term for a novel that, as Wikipedia puts it, “is a novel in the style of an established series, produced by a new author after the original author’s death”. When the series’s characters are still within copyright, the new author must have the permission of the deceased author’s estate (such as Sophie Hannah’s 2014 Hercule Poirot continuation, The Monogram Murders). Characters like Sherlock Holmes may be continued by anyone, and it seems as though any number of authors have had a whack at Holmes in the past decade or two.

You may be surprised to know just how many well-known mystery writers have been continued by other authors.

• Margery Allingham was continued immediately after her death by her husband and within the last year by mystery writer Mike Ripley.
• Agatha Christie was continued by Sophie Hannah in 2014, as noted above, and also by Charles Osborne,who novelized three plays in 1998-2000.
• Dorothy L. Sayers has been continued by mystery writer Jill Paton Walsh.
• Rex Stout was continued by Robert Goldsborough from 1986 – 1992, and then from 2012 to the present.
• Erle Stanley Gardner was continued by Thomas Chastain in two Perry Mason novels in 1989/1990.
• Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan series was continued by Dennis Lynds in 1974. (Lynds apparently novelized an unproduced screenplay by other authors.)
• Heron Carvic’s Miss Seeton series was continued by two other authors in paperback originals from 1990 to 1999.
• Raymond Chandler was continued by Robert B. Parker in 1991; Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series has been continued by Ace Atkins.
• Leslie Charteris’s The Saint series was continued by Burl Barer in 1997, who novelized a film script of the same year.
• Craig Rice was continued by Ed McBain.
• Virginia Rich was continued by Nancy Pickard.
• And of course a reference work outlining continuation pieces goes on for an entire chapter about Sherlock Holmes. It’s interesting to note that one such novel bears the name of Ellery Queen!

Admittedly some of these would qualify as “collaborations” rather than continuations. For instance, Ed McBain was given half a book written by Craig Rice before she died and completed it and this is commonly referred to as a collaboration. The operative part of the definition of “continuation novel” is that the original author is dead. The related definition of “pastiche” is apparently based upon the idea that the original author is still alive; thus Case for Three Detectives by Leo Bruce, which presents thinly-disguised portraits of Peter Wimsey, Father Brown, and Hercule Poirot by different names, counts as pastiche but not continuation. Another closely related concept is the “adaptation”, wherein one author adapts the work of another into a different medium (such as film or radio); adaptations can be close or extremely loose (Sherlock Holmes in Washington comes to mind, or the current US television series Elementary). 

If you’ll allow me to lump all these definitions together into one for a moment, to create my own usage, let’s imagine that a “continuation” work is where one writer creates a character and another writer uses that character in an original work, whether closely or loosely allied with the original author’s vision. Under this definition it seems as though nearly every single well-known mystery writer has been continued in one way or another … I can’t think of more than a few who haven’t been, although Sue Grafton comes to mind. (Grafton herself continued Miss Marple by writing a screenplay for A Caribbean Mystery.)

Under this looser definition, Ellery Queen is already a shining example of continuation. EQ published a number of novels as by Ellery Queen that were about the Ellery Queen character but written by two other writers (Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson). EQ licensed both the Ellery Queen authorial name and their other pseudonym of Barnaby Ross for the publication of a wide range of novels, ranging from hard-boiled cop novels to a charming locked-room mystery by John Holbrook Vance. Other authors wrote screenplays, teleplays, and radio plays (including Anthony Boucher) about Ellery Queen. And as I noted above, EQ allowed a couple of their books to be turned into screenplays by one writer which were then novelized by another; I honestly can’t think of another example in literature like this, where an author authorizes two different versions of the same material (one EQ’s, one not) to be simultaneously available. There are Ellery Queen computer games and “mystery jigsaw puzzles” and board games that were designed and created by other people. Now there is a stage adaptation of Calamity Town that means that the Ellery Queen brand is available in just about every communications medium known to humans. And more often than not, that material was created by people other than the EQ cousins.

This really is an extraordinary achievement by EQ, especially since in modern terms it’s taken the resources of a large corporate structure (currently Acorn in the UK) to extend the Agatha Christie brand into as many media platforms. Not only did EQ have to achieve this breadth, they had to invent its possibility; in 1929, “branding” meant something you did to the rear ends of cattle. So full marks to Messrs. Dannay and Lee for creating such a versatile character as Ellery Queen and then for creating the methods to ensure that character’s spread into as many niches as possible.

Into the future

Manfred Lee died in 1971 and Fred Dannay in 1982, and 1982 seems to be the moment when, unsurprisingly, the Ellery Queen brand began to sink into desuetude. Other than the continuing existence of EQMM, which Dannay continued to edit until the year before his death, there was almost no product in any medium bearing the name of Ellery Queen. The people at Crippen & Landru did a diligent and thorough job of tracking down the last remaining unpublished or uncollected material and putting it into modern volumes for our convenience about ten years ago, and Ellery Queen fans owe them a vote of thanks. I’d be willing to believe that pretty much everything is in print that’s going to be in print, barring a few rags and tags. There appear to be no new television adaptations or films, Internet series or virtual reality games on the horizon that leverage the Ellery Queen brand, and pretty much all the print volumes have been published in an attractive uniform E-book edition. I think it’s very likely that the brand has slipped into stasis since 1982 and is in great danger of not being able to recover. (I’m aware that occasionally a brand gets reversed upon itself upon revival, and becomes something quite different from what it used to mean — look up Space Ghost — and I can only hope that that doesn’t happen here.) The neglect of any appreciable amount of new product in 30 years has put the Ellery Queen brand into a terminal condition and it may become a dead, historic brand very much like what happened to Philo Vance.

In fact, there appears to be nothing that can rescue the Ellery Queen brand except continuation works. I think most people would be expecting new novels and/or short stories featuring Ellery Queen to come along sooner or later, simply because so many other detective character brands have made it happen that way. In a way I think that Acorn’s production of Sophie Hannah’s Poirot novel of 2014 might have opened the door for a number of such revivals. A couple of GAD brands are in the process of rebooting. I understand there is an American television series production coming in the near future that will transplant Jane Marple to the US as a young woman, and of course there are currently two productions featuring Sherlock Holmes in a modern-day setting. If I had to speculate, I’d say that the most likely thing to happen is that the EQ estate will license someone to write a handful of new novels.

Oh, sure, it would be tempting to suggest finding a continuation author to write actual novels. Certainly the idea appeals to me personally, since I could stand to have a regular supply of new Ellery Queen novels, one every six months for the rest of my life. And I imagine that a lot of my fellow GAD fans would love that to happen. The trouble is, the original Ellery Queen brand appealed to a wide range of regular readers, and the life-support activities implied by, say, bringing out a new Ellery Queen volume once a year for the next decade would not attract any readership beyond a cadre of middle-aged to elderly people (yes, like myself) who are aficionados of the Golden Age form and who know exactly what Ellery Queen stands for. And, frankly, we don’t focus enough buying power to make it worthwhile. It would almost be more sensible to just open up Ellery Queen to full-time house name status, like “Margaret Truman” or “Franklin W. Dixon”, and commission paperback original crime novels at the rate of three or four a year. The brand would be devalued but at least it would still bring in money.

Is that what I would do with the brand personally? Not really. One of the hallmarks of the Ellery Queen brand is a high degree of written literacy; the language, plots, and characters are sophisticated and urbane. Unfortunately today’s post-literate generation is unlikely to want to burden itself with the tedium of actually reading difficult books like that, even on an e-reader. I’d be looking for a way to leverage the brand into an extremely modern platform of some kind, probably as an on-line series, and I’d be looking to cast a very talented young actor to carry the weight of the role for a long time, along the lines of David Suchet. And I would insist that the continuation activities had three hallmarks. It doesn’t seem useful to reviving the brand to reboot it in a 21st-century way, by making Ellery Asian or female or an Asian female, or whatever. Sometimes that works, but I can’t think that would please anyone except those for whom Ellery Queen was a completely new character. So the first stricture would be, keep Ellery pretty much the way he is — single white New York male.  My second idea would be to fix Ellery Queen very firmly in the historical past. I think the 1930s would be most appropriate, but there are problems with this — I understand that Acorn have research that suggests that the period has to be “within living memory”, which is why so many 1920s/1930s brands have been updated to the 1950s and 1960s for recent television production.  If I couldn’t manage the 1930s, I’d fix him in the 1950s and do the rebranding as a period piece, just a different period. And the third stricture is that since Ellery Queen is now really associated principally with the publication of mystery short stories, that’s what I’d be building on. Sure, I’d like some novels. But I think it would be better for the brand to revive by using the short story form, if print is required.

And, of course, this is not my business, in the most literal sense. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ellery Queen and respect the EQ cousins’ great achievements with the character. I don’t want to see the brand die, but I also cannot see that it’s possible to keep the brand alive and preserve it in amber as a Golden Age relic. I have no idea why the current EQ heirs are not licensing continuation material; it’s almost too late, if it isn’t actually past the sell-by date, so perhaps they merely feel that it’s appropriate to let the brand die, out of respect for its former achievements. That’s fair and reasonable, as long as the heirs don’t need the money. If they do want to continue the brand, they have to get busy quickly.

What do you think? Is it time for Ellery Queen to sink into the dust of history, or would you like to see something happen to revive the character and the brand?

 

 

 

Ten interesting Agatha Christie novels

To commemorate the 125th birthday anniversary of Agatha Christie (September 15, 2015) her estate commissioned a world-wide poll to find out what’s the World’s Favourite Christie. You can find the results here at agathachristie.com, as well as interesting background and links to other interesting stuff. However, I’ll reproduce an ordered list here for your convenience.

1. And Then There Were None (which has sold more than one hundred million copies)
2. Murder on the Orient Express
3. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
4. Death on the Nile
5. The ABC Murders
6. A Murder is Announced
7. 4:50 From Paddington
8. Evil Under the Sun
9. Five Little Pigs
10. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

This announcement was followed closely by an article in the Guardian by well-known crime/thriller writer Val McDermid wherein she claimed that The Murder at the Vicarage — which you will note didn’t make the list — is “the best Christie as opposed to the most popular”. You can read it for yourself here. McDermid talks about her childhood experience with this particular book as her introduction to detective fiction, and that she had read it again and again.  This  makes me think that, like my childhood experience with John Dickson Carr‘s The Red Widow Murders that has given me a lifetime’s affection for what is essentially a mediocre thriller, her childhood experience might be colouring her opinion. But TMATV is really a very, very good mystery, unlike Red Widow.

Both pieces caused a small flurry of discussion in my Facebook group devoted to Golden Age detection. There was the usual back-and-forth about the relative positioning of novels on the list, or the presence or absence of a particular title. What it made me think about was what was being championed. McDermid was clear that she wanted to talk about “the best-written Christie” whereas the Christie estate called it “favourite”. Similarly my colleagues and friends in Facebook and the blogosphere had worthwhile things to say about a number of Christie novels and suggestions for what their own top-ten list might contain.

I thought it might be useful to take a more consumer-oriented look with a slightly different focus, based on my self-selected role as a “curator” of such things. Sometimes I conceive of my role as a kind of consumer advocate, to be sure; “This book is worth your time/money/effort and this one is not.” But I also think part of my role is to bring to a knowledgeable readership things which will not necessarily make the top ten list, like novels with flaws or problems, but which reveal something interesting about the author, or are an attempt to try something new — even a magnificent failure here and there.

Here, therefore, is my list of “Ten interesting Agatha Christie novels”. I will say emphatically that these are in no particular order; in fact, they’re all about equal. Perhaps if you’ve finished someone else’s choices for the top ten you might move on to these. And of course I’ll provide a reason as to why a particular volume might pique your interest. The top ten are in no danger of being ignored, but these you might have overlooked.

The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

I’ll step right up to the plate and agree with Val McDermid. This is the first Miss Marple novel and it is the one in which her character is the most “pure”; she is described as being “dangerous”. This is not the fluffy and slightly scattered little old lady of later years. This is a woman with a mind like a steel trap and an acute sense of the squalid lives and minor-league wickedness of nearly everyone in her vicinity. And it is, as I’ve remarked elsewhere recently, a novel of manners. Okay, not Jane Austen, but certainly the central focus of the book is a scandalous love affair.

Crooked House (1949)

A non-series standalone mystery with a truly surprising plot twist at the end. Christie herself spoke of it as one of her personal favourites and it’s one of mine also. There’s not much to it, plot-wise; a wealthy patriarch supports a large family of eccentrics and when he is murdered, there’s a long list of suspects.  It has a similar solution to an earlier Ellery Queen novel that I will not closely identify, just to say that it’s clear that Christie didn’t do this first. But she cleverly uses the reader’s assumptions against him/her.

Death Comes as the End (1945)

This is a historical mystery set in ancient Egypt, and it reads surprisingly well. Christie was at this point married to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, so I’m ready to believe that the details are correct. What is surprising and pleasant about this novel is that it is very restrained about those details; it’s not so much about the details of Pharaoh’s court but more like where and how food is kept in a large household of the period. The mystery is not difficult but the book is quite engaging.

Endless Night (1967)

I’m sure many experienced readers will disagree with this being on anyone’s “best” list. It’s not on mine either. This is, however, a book with a plot twist that is overshadowed by Christie having used it before, but which is still a solid hoodwinking of the reader. It is flawed, partly by Christie having not really understood at this late point in her life what young people were taking for granted and partly by most people having first experienced it through a ghastly filmed version that ruthlessly sucked the intelligence out of the work. But I encourage its naysayers to give it another look; the concept is great, the writing is head and shoulders most books she wrote at this late stage, and it showed she was ready to try something new and different.

Unfinished Portrait (1934)

As by Mary Westmacott. Simply put, this is what an Agatha Christie novel reads like when she hasn’t put a murder into it; a story about a shy girl who is in the middle of a divorce who comes to terms with her past. You may think this has something in parallel with Christie’s own life. I think it’s interesting that she wrote this nearly simultaneously with Murder on the Orient Express. I’m not going to claim that Christie was in any sense held back by writing about series characters, but I think much of her non-series work has a more casual tone that suits her writing skills very well.

Spider’s Web (2000)

As novelized by Charles Osborne. I would actually recommend that you seek out a theatrical production of this play on video, if you can find one; it was originally written as a play specifically for Margaret Lockwood and it’s a wonderful starring vehicle for a 30-something actress. It’s also an interesting experience for a Christie aficionado because it recycles ideas and materials from a handful of other Christie short stories and novels, and it’s fun to think, “Oh, THAT’s from that short story about the movie star…”  The mystery is clever and the characterization is excellent. The Charles Osborne version seems to postpone all the tension in the book to a series of revelations at the end of the novel, boom boom boom like a fireworks display, but the play is balanced and fun. I do regret the addition of the character of the adolescent girl — generally, not an appealing aspect to an on-stage production for me — but apparently Margaret Lockwood’s real-life daughter was supposed to play the role.

The Hollow (1946)

This is a Poirot novel in which Christie later mentioned she wished she hadn’t included Poirot. I’m not sure if this would have made it better or worse. I do think this could have been a magnificent novel if she had taken more care in writing it. The character of Henrietta Savernake is beautifully written and wonderfully realistic; so much better-written than the rest of the novel that it’s quite jarring.  In particular the character of Lady Angkatell is … well, to me, just awful. Cardboard with a sign around her neck that says “eccentric peeress”. One great character, one terrible character, all adds up to a sadly flawed novel. But the central premise, the identity of the murderer, takes me back to an Anthony Berkeley novel I read not too long ago in which the author is playful with the idea of the “least likely suspect”. I think people have overlooked just how clever this novel is in that respect. Robert Barnard joins me in esteeming this one.

The Big Four (1927)

As I noted above, I do like the occasional magnificent failure. This failure isn’t even really magnificent, but it is of interest to the student of vanished literary sub-genres. This is a novel of “international intrigue and espionage”, with which we certainly do not associate Agatha Christie as an expert. But this is a bizarre and highly melodramatic thrill-ride which I don’t believe anyone is meant to take seriously, and this particular type of novel pretty much vanished at about this time. It’s rather like E. Phillips Oppenheim or Edgar Wallace; vast international criminal conspiracies and the highest political stakes, and poor Hercule Poirot seems rather out of place. This is also cobbled together out of a set of short stories, which doesn’t happen much these days; it produces wild shifts in tone and atmosphere and these things disconcert the reader. The high points are the presence of Vera Rossakoff and the only appearance of Poirot’s twin brother Achille.

N or M? (1941)

The material in this novel of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford interests me because it’s one of Christie’s few attempts to deal directly with World War II. Poirot and Marple, we know, did not serve their country in any way other than solving mysteries while the constabulary was at war. The Beresfords did their bit as government agents, however, and this novel contains quite a bit of background colour about daily life in wartime, with rationing and black-out curtains and all. Unfortunately Christie chose to focus on the espionage aspect rather than a straightforward mystery and the result is somewhat tepid and inevitable. (If there is a wartime British novel wherein the triumph over German spies is not a 100% certainty, I’d like to see it.)

Ten Little Niggers (1939)

Let me say right off the bat, I don’t like that word any more than you do. But given the fact that it is the original title of the book that the Christie estate has just finished declaring is the favourite Christie novel (now known as And Then There Were None), and it’s sold 100,000,000 copies, I think it should be a point of honour for the true Christie student to track this down and see how this book originated. I have said elsewhere and will repeat here that I don’t think it is a good idea to censor history. It is important to say, when we are forced to use that distasteful word, that it is merely to remind ourselves that people used to use this word and we do not use it today; simply put, we have to know what we hate about this word’s meaning and history in order to combat it more effectively. If we bowdlerize it out of the literature then we run the risk of future generations thinking of this sort of linguistic bullying as something new and fresh, rather than something that has been disparaged by correct-thinking people in the intervening generations.

That being said — once its title was mercifully changed, this is a superb novel. If you have only seen adaptations on television, you’d be well advised to go back and find out how it all got started because, indeed, it was made much more cheery for stage and video productions. In the original, there is no happy ending; there is no love story. And there are more murders committed or disclosed in this one novel than in any other Christie title, or indeed a random half-dozen Christie titles added together. All the characters are unpleasant criminals and there’s a kind of morbid pall, and fear of retribution, that hangs over the novel very effectively.

And so I’ll throw this open to my audience. What Agatha Christie novels do you particularly cherish that have been left off top ten lists? What have we all overlooked in Christie’s work that we ought to have read?

200 authors I would recommend (Part 4)

Another ten authors whose work I’d recommend. You’ll find Part 1 that explains this list here; the immediately previous article, Part 3, is here; I’ll link here to Part 5 as soon as it’s written.

31. Caudwell, Sarah

The late Sarah Caudwell only wrote four novels about a professor of mediaeval law, Hilary Tamar, who is both the narrator and the principal detective, and a group of young lawyers who all investigate crimes together. All four novels have a taste like fine old Scotch whisky. The degree of literacy needed to understand all the offhand references is phenomenal; this style of writing is what was meant by the “don’s delight” mystery, very little practised today. The language is elegant and difficult — so are the plots. The mysteries are frequently based on obscure points of tax law or inheritance law; not especially realistic characters, but quite modern despite the antique flavour of the language. And there’s one tiny but delightful point that it takes a while to grasp — it’s never mentioned what sex Professor Tamar is. 1981’s Thus Was Adonis Murdered is a good place to start, since it’s the first novel of the four.

32. Cecil, Henry

Two legal eagles in a row — Henry Cecil was a British County Court Judge who wrote mysteries and novels in his off-hours. It’s hard to call some of his books “mysteries”, in the strict sense, although they frequently have to do with criminals and legal processes, but his fiction is worth reading whatever you call it. I think I’d have liked to have been in his courtroom; he has a wicked sense of humour and, of course, a huge knowledge of the back roads and byways of the law. Many of his plots have to do with people who go to great lengths to exploit a legal loophole. He was also great at writing mystery short stories that turn on a single point, something like Ellery Queen, and the collections are certainly worth looking into. Even the most serious pieces have a lovely sense of sly fun in them, especially in the language, and there’s a recurring character named Colonel Brain, the world’s most unreliable witness, who is good value whenever he appears. No Bail for the Judge is a story about a judge who finds himself on trial for the murder of a prostitute and can’t remember anything that happened on the night in question; Alfred Hitchcock was going to make a film of it before his death.

33. Charles, Kate

Kate Charles writes quite traditional British mysteries, most of which are based around, or have something to do with, the Church of England, its background, rituals, and people. She started in the 90s, kicking off her first series about an artist with a solicitor boyfriend. I found the first book quite gripping, A Drink of Deadly Wine; it was based around the then-current topic of “outing”. Her second series deals with a woman who is a newly-ordained cleric (with a boyfriend who’s a police officer) and the issues she faces, of course complicated by murders. These books have a uniformly high quality, excellent writing, and are by a writer who has really dug deeply into many issues that crop up when religion intersects with crime.

34. Chesterton, G. K.

Two religious mystery writers in a row! As my readers are almost certainly aware, Chesterton was responsible for creating that well-known figure of detective fiction, Father Brown, a Catholic priest who investigates crimes and saves souls in the process, over a long series of short stories. I was surprised to note that the stories started as long ago as 1911, since the fifth volume came out in 1935; Chesterton wasn’t prolific but the stories are clever and fascinating. Of course these famous stories have formed the basis for films and television series, and there’s currently one in process, but you’ll have to go back more than 100 years to read about the origins of this meek little cleric. I recommend you do just that; each generation that reinvents Father Brown does so in a way that the original stories usually don’t support.

35. Christie, Agatha

There are many well-known names in the mystery field whom you will NOT find me recommending here, but Agatha Christie has sold more fiction than anyone else in the history of the world, and there’s a reason for that. She’s simply a great, great mystery writer. I can’t imagine anyone reading my blog who hasn’t at least dipped a toe into the large body of Christie’s work, so I won’t go on about Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, since you pretty much have to know who they are already. I’ll merely say that if you’re looking for a place to start that is not with the most famous works (Ten Little Indians, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Body in the Library) that have been made into films, some of my favourites are Five Little Pigs, Crooked House, Sad Cypress, and The Moving Finger. And I think Spider’s Web is an excellent play, if you have a chance to see it!

36. Clark, Douglas

Douglas Clark’s series of mysteries about Scotland Yard’s Chief Superintendent Masters and DCI Green is well overdue for a revival or at the very least a complete reprinting, start to finish. These are charming, low-key mysteries of the police procedural variety, almost an 80s take on the Humdrum school exemplified by Freeman Wills Crofts. Masters and Green are friends as well as colleagues, and their respective families are also part of the background; the books have the gentle, nearly cozy, flavour that may remind TV viewers of Midsomer Murders. Clark knew a lot about poisons and frequently each volume’s murder has a rare poison as its cause. Perennial Library printed a lot of these titles in the 80s, and Dell did a couple as part of their “puzzleback” series at around the same time. For a while you couldn’t be in a used bookstore without finding a stack of them, and now they seem to have disappeared. There are a bunch of titles that are all equally good places to start; perhaps you’d like to find out from Roast Eggs why a man seems to have burned his house down in order to kill his wife. (It’s from an old quote about selfishness; “He sets my house on fire only to roast his eggs.”) Any of the Perennial Library or Dell titles will get you started, though.

37. Clason, Clyde B.

Clyde Clason wrote ten novels featuring the elderly Theocritus Lucius Westborough, expert on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus and amateur sleuth, between 1936 and 1941. Quite a pace! These books are intelligent and packed with information, with a very elegant writing style; Professor Westborough sprinkles his observations with classical references. Perhaps the most well-known novel is Murder gone Minoan, which reminded me somewhat of Anthony Boucher‘s The Case of the Seven Sneezes; one of a group of people isolated on an island that can be reached only by speedboat is murdered, and Professor Westborough takes a hand to solve the murder as well to try to restore a millionaire’s piece of Minoan treasure. Many of the ten novels feature a locked-room mystery or an “impossible crime”. Rue Morgue has recently brought these novels back into print, and you’ll have a much easier time than I did in getting hold of them; I envy you the opportunity to stack up all ten and knuckle down, since they’re both pleasant and difficult puzzles.

38. Cleeves, Ann

Ann Cleeves is the author of the novels upon which the currently popular television series Vera is based, about a dogged and emotional Scotland Yard DI in Yorkshire; there are six original novels and they’re all in print. My exposure to this writer came long before, when I picked up the eight novels about George Palmer-Jones and his wife Molly. George and Molly are from the cozy amateur school, but Ann Cleeves has a lot more up her writing sleeve than can be covered by the word “cozy”; she has a great deal of insight into how people’s minds work and why they do what they do, and her art makes George look as if he’s quite intuitive. I really enjoyed this series; the other three Cleeves series are a bit harsher, but not really hard-boiled. I recommend the first George and Molly story, A Bird in the Hand, as a good place to start.

39. Clinton-Baddeley, V. C.

Another “don’s delight” writer, although not so much for the erudition as the attitude and background. The author wrote many things, including film scripts as far back as 1936, but produced this lovely set of five mystery novels featuring Dr. Davie of St. Nicholas College, Cambridge, between 1967 and 1972 at the end of his life. Dr. Davie is an elderly don with an almost childlike delight in the wonders of everyday life, and a general unwillingness to do much in the way of exercise. But his bright, intelligent eye takes in everything around him and he finds himself in the middle of mysterious murder cases that only he is able to solve. Death’s Bright Dart mixes a stolen blowpipe with the murder of an academic — in the middle of giving an address to the college — and Dr. Davie takes a hand, mostly by pottering around and chattering with people. All five novels are good fun and contain interesting puzzles at their core. The writing has a great deal of gentle humour of the observational variety. I’ve always felt Dr. Davie was gay, mostly due to a brief passage in one of the books where he observes what must be a group of gay men chattering over drinks, but it’s never mentioned and not really relevant. Any of the five books is a good starting point.

40. Cody, Liza

Every so often I find a book that just sets me back on my heels, it’s so powerful and strongly observed. That’s how I felt about Bucket Nut, the first Eva Wylie novel about a young woman wrestler/security guard/minder in 90s England who goes about her business as best she can despite being what I think of as an emotional basket case. She is rude and crude and powerful and very damaged by her past, and you won’t forget her in a hurry. I’d been following Liza Cody’s work from a previous series about Anna Lee, a woman PI, but the “London Lassassin” stories are, I think, Cody’s best work. There are three Eva Wylie stories and six Anna Lee novels; Anna Lee is a great private eye and worth your time, but you must read the Eva Wylie novels. (I’ve been told by some that they had the reverse of my reaction; they couldn’t get beyond a few pages because the character was so unpleasant. Your mileage may indeed vary.)

 

 

Static detectives and evolving detectives

A question popped up today within the pages of my favourite Facebook group, Golden Age Detection; a gentleman has been asked to lecture to a group of writers about series mysteries and asked for our thoughts.  Thanks, Dan Andriacco, for prompting my thinking processes; I had more to say than would be appropriate in that terse context, and so I’ve moved my efforts here.  I hope my thoughts will be useful to you and your group. I am assuming that this group intends to write mysteries that are sold to publishers for large sums of money, and thus my considerations are addressed more to marketability than to artistic considerations.

First of all, one ground rule; I believe that “series mysteries” require “series detectives”, so I’m going to address the idea of series detectives and use them interchangeably with series mysteries. Series mysteries, of course, are pretty much written by the same author about the same protagonist(s); some sort of detective figure who solves various cases (exceptions definitely exist for any of these terms).  A few names at random are Jane Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, and Ellery Queen. The most important thing in a series is its detective character; if that doesn’t catch the interest of the reading public, you won’t be selling a very long series.

I can certainly understand why writers would want to know more about series detectives. As I understand it, no major publisher will currently look at a stand-alone mystery from a fledgling author. One author told me that she had been told that she’d better come in with a written outline for at least an eight-book series, and that package should contain a publishable manuscript for volume 1, detailed outlines for volumes 2 and 3, detailed character sketches for the detective and any continuing characters, and a sketch plan for where volumes 4 through 8 should take the protagonist. My first reaction was, “Wow.” My second reaction was, “Thank goodness.”

I’ll explain that last snarky remark 😉 but first I have to divide series detectives into two major groups, because the two groups have different characteristics and are treated differently. I’ve invented these terms, but let’s call them static detectives and evolving detectives.

Static detectives are how series detectives began in the earliest days of detective fiction; back in the days when writers were staking out the basic principles of detective fiction by making it up as they went along, the reading public wanted exactly the same experience of the detective character in each story. The detective is pretty much the same person at the same level of personal development at every stage of every novel. Sherlock Holmes never changed in any major detail. He did not apparently age. He did not fall in love, court the object of his affections, and get married, and produce children who enter the family detective business.  He never suffered any major trauma that caused him to renounce his former avocation halfway through his series and devote his further efforts to being a storefront social worker, or move to Paris. Or, indeed, change his apartment or his deerstalker or his Persian slipper or have those bullet holes in the walls filled in.  Nothing ever changes. Occasionally a continuing character like Watson gets married, but their relationship does not change much.

In many instances other than Holmes’s, the life events of subsidiary characters in the lives of static detectives sometimes form the basis for specific novels — the detective is the maid of honour at her girlfriend’s wedding at which the best man is murdered. One of Nero Wolfe’s detective assistants is accused of murdering his girlfriend, and Wolfe must take the case.

And of course evolving detectives are the other ones. I can’t precisely identify the first evolving detective, but I think there’s a strong case for the first important one to have been Lord Peter Wimsey. In the course of Dorothy L. Sayers’s oeuvre, Wimsey started as a single dilettante / wealthy aristocrat / Wodehouseian Silly Ass, met Harriet Vane, had a number of exciting adventures with her, grew as a human being and a fallible man, and finally married Harriet and produced children. I believe that one of the reasons why this series has had an enduring major presence in the history of detective fiction is that readers, many of whom seem in my experience to be female, enjoy very much the process of watching the romance, proposal, and honeymoon and are prepared to experience it again and again, re-reading the books again and again. Peter and Harriet are a great love story with detective interruptions, to misquote the subtitle of Gaudy Night, and the readers loved to see him change. He grew more subtle and more powerful as time went on. Today’s champion of the evolving detective is Elizabeth George, but Anne Perry is giving her a run for her money, and I bet a bunch of other authors with whom I’m not familiar are also on the best-seller list with this kind of Great Big Romantic Series.

In Lord Peter’s case the subsidiary characters did not change much at all; Bunter doesn’t change one iota during the course of the novels. People get older, like Viscount St-George, and the characters react to world events. But the subsidiary characters are used to serve the development of the character of the detective. Either they remain absolutely static, like a rock of stability to whom the detective turns in times of personal crisis, or they have dramatic things happen to them, like being murdered or accused of murder.

So those are the definitions, and you can probably at this point pick up any mystery novel with which you’re reasonably familiar and say, “Oh, this is a static detective,” or “This is an evolving detective.” At least I hope so; it’s pretty straightforward. Occasionally a static detective makes the jump to an evolving detective, like what happened when Dorothy L. Sayers decided to give Lord Peter some “guts”, as I remember she put it.

What’s interesting for a writer is, first of all, that the choice of a static or an evolving detective affects the way that the book should be structured; and second, that certain kinds of detectives require certain kinds of plot structures.

As far as how the book should be structured — I’ll suggest that my friend, above, got the right advice from her agent. If you are trying to sell a series detective today, it doesn’t really matter if it’s static or evolving, but you have to demonstrate to your prospective publisher that you know what you’re going to be doing eight books from now and are capable of committing to it. There’s no point in them putting together huge cardboard displays for bookstores that say, “The latest Harley Footsnoot mystery!!” if there are only ever going to be two Harley Footsnoot mysteries because you’re out of ideas. And the reason why they want the last five roughed out for them is, perish forbid, you get hit by a truck and they have to hire Eric van Lustbader to finish the series 😉

If you’ve decided you want to write an evolving detective, you absolutely must know what’s going to happen eight books from now; this is what the publisher will want to know. It’s also the kind of thinking that the reader has a right to expect that you’ve done when you start. If you want to tell the long story of a slow courtship, or how detective Harley Footsnoot realizes that her first husband is wrong for her but his best friend is her true love, over a dozen novels, I want to know that you know what happens in the long story arc and how it happens. You have to structure the first eight books before you write the second one; that way, if you need something to happen in book two that reverberates in book six, you’re always there in advance.  You cannot just make it up as you go along; you’ll produce an unsatisfying series.

And if you want to write a static detective, these days, that’s just fine too. Despite my saying above that it was a tradition from the beginnings of the genre, it’s still very much used today in the entry level of series cozies. Harley Footsnoot is a single mother, she runs a yarn store, and seems to get involved with a lot of local murders that somehow involve yarn. One of her two boyfriends is a cop and the other one is a handsome professor.  Can you see how this goes?  The books are always the same, Harley never changes, she can’t decide between her two boyfriends who themselves never change, and the yarn store rolls along at the same level. So what the publisher wants to see is how you’re going to come up with eight vaguely reasonable murder mystery plots that have something to do with yarn.

The idea that certain kinds of detectives require certain kinds of plot structures works this way.  First, for an evolving detective; you have to know where you are in the character’s development over a dozen novels.  For instance, the one I invented, the detective divorcing her first husband and marrying his best friend over a dozen books — somewhere around book three or four, you need a book where the detective’s husband does something untrustworthy that causes her to first consider that she might end up divorcing him. How that affects the structure of the book is that you have to have a murder plot that is based around trustworthiness.  Say, a small software company turns out to have someone unexpected looting its bank accounts from the inside. The evolving Harley Footsnoot gets to think about trust while she’s solving the case, and how it has reverberations in her own life, because she might be just as oblivious to untrustworthiness as the CFO whose husband stole her passwords.  And readers like this sort of thing very much; they will be pleased that you have created these interconnections between the detective’s personal life and her cases.

For a static detective, you need to give a different kind of consideration to structuring the plots. Brainstorm for a minute and see if you can think of eight different murders that have something to do with a yarn store. Well, an employee of the yarn store has a double life and gets murdered and Harley is suspected … someone opens up a yarn store across the street and gets murdered and Harley is suspected … a noted yarn collector comes to town to sign her book about yarn, gets murdered, and Harley is suspected … that’s three, and I’m fresh out. My point is that it gets more and more ridiculous that eight mysteries should happen in the same little town and all of them connected with yarn. Just like the good people of Cabot Cove should have been very, very reluctant to have dinner with Jessica Fletcher, it’s nearly impossible to keep doing the same type of plots over and over. She might be static as a character, but she can’t be as a detective.

If you’re going to write eight books or more about a static yarn expert, you have to structure the life of the detective so that she moves around. Don’t put her in a yarn store — that’s your fantasy life talking, not novelistic necessity. Instead, think of a reason why she interacts with different yarn situations. For instance, she is in charge of acquisitions for the world’s only yarn museum, run by a wealthy eccentric. So she goes to San Francisco and visits a yarn collector, she goes to London for a yarn exposition, she goes to rural Louisiana to acquire a collection of antique yarn. The structure doesn’t have to involve physical motion; for instance, one great static detective was Emma Lathen’s Wall Street banker, John Putnam Thatcher. Each book took him into a different area of business; automobiles, biotech, real estate. He was always meeting new groups of people who had a murder to deal with, but at the same time his group of workers (perfect secretary Miss Corso, and his three wildly different subordinates Trinkham, Bowman, and Gabler) remained dependable and unchanging subordinates.

So both evolving and static detectives have sets of static subsidiary characters who rarely change. The difference is that in a static book, the excitement and emotions come from strangers, and the continuing characters are the refuge (and the readers’ favourites). In an evolving book, the excitement and emotions come from continuing characters, and frequently the strangers are the refuge (the bitter unhappy detective throws herself into her work).

But it’s important to note that your static subsidiary characters need to have a constant utility in the plot; you can’t just give your detective a best friend because everyone has a best friend. Remember how Static Harley had two boyfriends, a cop and a professor?  That’s because the professor is always doing research for her and coming up with crucial information to move the plot forward, and the cop bends the rules and gets her information she shouldn’t be able to access (arrest records) and protects her physically if people get violent. Holmes had Watson because he needed someone to whom to speak aloud, so that the reader could follow his thoughts to some extent. But Watson was also a doctor, and that occasionally came in handy with fainting clients or on-the-spot autopsy reports.

There’s one other crucial difference between static and evolving detectives that may affect a writer’s decision to focus on one or the other style; it might depend on how generally cheerful a person she is. That’s because static detectives are allowed to be happy — evolving detectives cannot be. Even Harley Footsnoot’s switch to marrying her first husband’s best friend cannot be allowed to flourish in perfection; either he gets killed in book eight (which results in her third marriage in book sixteen), or she discovers that he too has terrible flaws that cause her to be agonized for another eight books before deciding to go it alone and lonely.  If you run a yarn business, though, you frequently get the opportunity to spring your brother-in-law from jail in the second-last chapter and then the book ends as you explain at a jolly family picnic how you figured it all out from the mismatched yarn strands. If you’re naturally a depressive type, you might want to do your mental health some good by working on books where people are occasionally happy.

So why, when my friend told me she’d been asked to plan eight books in advance, did I think, “Thank goodness!”?  Because I read — until I pretty much gave up reading most modern mysteries, for reasons not unconnected with these ideas — far, far too many books where the author lost his way. Evolving detectives who just sit around and are gloomy without learning anything from it (I’m talking to you, ScandiNoir authors). Static detectives where the 32nd consecutive murder at the same charming Cape Cod B&B should have had the proprietor locked up on general principles years ago.  Evolving detectives who hardly bother with the murder plot because they’re too busy quarrelling with their romantic partners; static detectives who apparently ignore the necessities of everyday life at the drop of a hat to go off and track down a clue. Evolving detectives with personal lives that make Dynasty look sedate, and which would likely get them suspended from the police force; static detectives whose perfect lives are wish-fulfillment fantasies of motherhood, business ownership, and the Kama Sutra with her chiseled cop hubby. And very particularly the protagonist’s best friend who is chubby and a figure of fun, but at the 2/3 point of the novel says something witty that turns out to give the detective the idea needed to solve the case. Because every subsidiary character will have a strong function in the plot that will allow them to be memorable without making them two-dimensional. Not like the works of some authors (I’m talking to you, Charlaine Harris) whose books are so cluttered with subsidiary characters left over from other books, and with no functions at all, that there’s barely room for anything other than a round of howdy-dos.

If you plan eight books ahead, you will know where you are at all times in the progress of your evolving detective’s tumultuous life, and you won’t clutter the books with vivid but useless characters. And in the progress of your static detective, you’ll have arranged to have plots that naturally take the protagonist into contact with lots of strangers who murder each other, while the detective’s home life remains non-violent and cozy. You will have planned out the continuing characters so that they’ll be useful and consistent and do what you need them to do. And you might actually get my $8.95 in a bookstore — times eight.

October 8 Challenge

Whoops! Some hours ago when I posted this, I forgot to claim it for a square in my own challenge; see below.  This is about square 2D, a group of GAD mysteries linked by a style of detective or detection.  (In fact, two different styles.)

 

Top 10 Women Detectives in Books

In the context of a recent exchange on Facebook with some fellow GAD (Golden Age of Detection) aficionados, the idea of a list of “Top 10 Women Detectives in Books” was conceived, and I incautiously came up with such a list in order to contribute the discussion.  It occurred to me that this would cause people to think of their own lists, which perhaps differ with mine; it seemed more useful to provide an annotated list, giving some reasons. So I thought I’d post here about my suggestions.

Although I came up with this list in a remarkably brief period of time, it seems to hold up; I tried to pick my favourite detectives who stand for a certain style and/or period. I’ll say in general that my list seems to be skewed towards women detectives that I think are “important” in the detective fiction genre, rather than women who are good detectives. Bertha Cool is a fascinating character but not a great detective. I’ll say here, as I said in the context of the Facebook exchange, that I am not very knowledgeable about Victorian-era women detectives and my limited experience may have led me to a faulty conclusion; I’m prepared to accept that Loveday Brooke is not the symbolic figure I imagine her to be from my limited knowledge.

I also wanted to say that I regarded it as important that the characters I suggest are ones who have a reasonably significant presence. Rex Stout‘s creation of private investigator Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner I regard as significant to the genre, but one novel and a couple of guest shots in Nero Wolfe novels are not sufficient to really have an effect. There are others; I chose with an eye to recommending women detectives whose work you can reasonably find in reasonable quantities.

And finally, this list is truly in no order other than when they came to mind. I actually did an initial list of 15 and regretfully omitted some names. In case it’s not clear, these are detectives in books and not television; Jessica Fletcher is in enough books to qualify, but she didn’t make the cut.

1. Sharon McCone

For those of you wondering why I haven’t included Sue Grafton‘s Kinsey Millhone on this list, that’s because Marcia Muller got there first. I regard the first Sharon McCone novel, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, (1977), as the first contemporary woman private eye novel — the one that started Sue Grafton and Karen Kijewski and a host of other novelists down the path of the spunky, flawed, and loveable modern single woman private eye. It’s sobering to think, indeed, just how many books and writing careers are dependent upon Marcia Muller’s invention of Sharon McCone. Sometimes the spunky is foremost (V.I. Warshawski, by Sara Paretsky), sometimes the flawed is more prominent (Cordelia Gray, by P.D. James), and sometimes the loveable (any number of modern cozy series) takes over.

It’s interesting to go back to the beginnings of the woman private eye novel of the 80s and 90s and remember that when these books were written, the things that Marcia Muller was writing about were not yet cliches. She was inventing the essential boundaries of the genre, perhaps without realizing it. Her work was obviously successful in that it both sold well and spawned a host — a “monstrous regiment”, as it were — of imitators and people who extended the genre. But Sharon McCone was first.

2. Jane Marple

I’ll be brief about Agatha Christie‘s Miss Jane Marple (1920-1972); she is one of the finest literary detective creations of all time, male or female. Although I don’t suggest that Christie was influenced by Dorothy L. Sayers, Sayers wrote about the character of Miss Climpson and other elderly women in Unnatural Death: “Thousands of old maids simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and … posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community … She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush.”

Miss Marple solves mysteries by sorting through her great experience of human nature to find parallels. She is a keen observer of events going on around her, and she has learned that people are quite similar; they do the same things for the same reasons in the same situations. And as an elderly woman, she seems to be able to ask questions that the police cannot, or that they cannot even conceive of asking. She receives the confidences of other women, and taps into a network of female observers the existence of which most males are not aware; she gains the confidence of servants about the inner workings of households. Lower-level members of Scotland Yard routinely discount her efforts but fortunately she has demonstrated her abilities to very highly placed officers, which is why she gets to sit in on crucial interviews. In a way, Miss Marple could be thought of as the head of a bizarrely parallel Scotland Yard, one run and staffed by women.

3. Maud Silver

Miss Maud Silver is the creation of Patricia Wentworth, and she appeared in 32 novels between 1928 and 1961. There are many superficial similarities between Miss Marple and Miss Silver. Both are elderly British gentlewomen of the upper-middle or lower-upper classes. But where Miss Marple is anchored in the realities of everyday village life, Miss Silver is operating more at the comic-book level. To begin with, she is a retired governess who went into business for herself as a private investigator — rather like Miss Marple for hire, and that’s a very unrealistic concept at the outset. But the unrealities concatenate. Miss Silver can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and controls every situation in which she finds herself with her steely gaze and frequent reproving cough; she insists upon Victorian-level manners from everyone with whom she interacts. No one ever asks her to leave, no one ever manages to dissemble or prevaricate. In short, she’s a kind of super-hero who inevitably homes in upon the truth and solves the case where Scotland Yard is baffled.

Why I think she’s important to the mystery genre, and not just an ersatz Jane Marple, is that Wentworth had a wonderful skill at creating a certain style of novel that stood as a model for a huge mass of cozy mysteries and even non-mysteries; a series of novels where the repetitive elements overwhelm the individual ones. Every Miss Silver novel contains the same elements repeated again and again, novel after novel. We have a description of Miss Silver’s sitting room, right down to the individual pictures on the walls. Miss Silver’s clothes. Miss Silver’s cough, and her family members, and her faithful servant Hannah. A beautiful young woman with long caramel-coloured eyelashes, who is torn between her love for a handsome young man and something else that underlies a murder plot. There is always a little bit of romance, there is always a foolish character to whom the reader feels superior. There are upper-class people and the servant classes, and Miss Silver travels easily between each. (She usually gets vital information from servants that no one else can obtain.) I think Wentworth led the way in a certain way that many people mistake for what’s called a “formula”. A formula, to me, is where the same plot recurs again and again. Instead this is a way of accreting detail that makes the reader feel comfortable and knowledgeable about what she is reading. “Ah, yes,” we smile to ourselves, “there’s Randal March, I know him, he’s nice. There, she’s quoting Longfellow again. Gosh, I hope Miss Silver’s cough isn’t serious.” I think this accretion, like a nautilus building its shell, is what led the way for other lesser practitioners — many, many lesser practitioners — to write long series of novels that have little content but always the same background details that make the reader think creativity has been exercised. Charlaine Harris is perhaps the most prominent practitioner of that style these days, but there are hundreds of others.

4. Mrs. Bradley

I have to confess, in the past I haven’t really enjoyed many of the novels by Gladys Mitchell about Dr. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley — 65 of them, written between 1929 and 1984. I’ve found them very uneven, varying wildly between farce and Grand Guignol, and I don’t seem to be one of the people who is charmed by her humour or her cackling manner. But I do know that she is a significant woman detective in the history of the genre. For one thing, she’s a psychiatrist. This is, in 1929, at a time when there weren’t many women doctors of any description, and not many psychiatrists either. The creation of a highly-educated psychiatrist was, in and of itself, a signal that women were to take a significant place in detective fiction and almost a prefiguring of the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s.

Mrs. Bradley is powerful in ways that not many women detectives are. She is constantly described as significantly ugly, with yellowish skin and unpleasant features and a cackling laugh. This is quite a change from a mass of women in detective fiction who rely upon their looks to get their jobs done, or who merely support the male detective; she doesn’t care what men think of her, and that’s a significant development. She is also what we might call morally unsound; I’m only aware of one other famous detective, Philo Vance, who has no compunctions about bringing about the death of murderers to save the hangman, as it were. She doesn’t wait for men to tell her what the right thing to do is, she merely does it herself. She relies on women to help her solve mysteries; a woman with a woman sidekick, Laura (although her chauffeur George is frequently useful as well) was fairly groundbreaking in mysteries. All things considered, I have to recommend that you consider this long series of books as significant even though I don’t enjoy them myself.

5. Bertha Cool

Bertha Cool was a professional private investigator (and business partner of Donald Lam) in a series of 29 novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, published between 1939 and 1970. She is significant as a detective not for her skills, which were ordinary, but for the type of person that she was, at a time when there were no other such positive characters in any kind of genre fiction. Bertha was big and fat, swore like a trooper, was aggressive and demanding in business dealings, and wasn’t afraid to get into physical fights with other women. (I am unaware of any instance where she gets into a fistfight with a man, but my money’s on Bertha.)

Bertha Cool is a rich and deep character and in order to last 29 volumes she must have had some resonance with the reading public. I think she’s a very unusual character for her time and place and deserves her place among great detectives — she alone could manage the antics of Donald Lam, keep him focused and driving towards a goal. And at the same time she “acted like a man” at a time when few women stood up for themselves in business, especially something like the private eye business.

The accompanying photograph is of actress Benay Venuta, who once made a pilot television programme for a proposed Cool and Lam series which never made it to air. She’s not quite as hefty and aggressive as my vision of Bertha, but there’s little appropriate visual reference material available that suits me.

6. Hilda Adams

Hilda Adams, R.N., is the creation of Mary Roberts Rinehart; she first came to the public’s attention in Miss Pinkerton, published in 1932, although I note she was actually part of two pieces from 1914 (see the bibliographic listing here). Miss Pinkerton was made into a successful film in 1932 as well, starring Joan Blondell as the crime-solving nurse. Here, she stands as a better example of a certain type of woman detective than Mignon Eberhart‘s Sarah Keate, but I value both these series for the same reasons (I’ve talked about the Sarah Keate films elsewhere). Prominent critic and blogger Curtis Evans suggested that Hilda Adams or Sarah Keate “are somewhat problematical (especially the latter)”. But I think I can make a case for their inclusion that might surprise him.

This idea could be explained at length in a blog post all its own, but I’ll try to make a long story short. My sense is that the creation of a crime-solving nurse character was an attempt, either conscious or unconscious, to bring into detective fiction an underserved market of young women of the lower and middle classes. In 1932, “nurse” or “teacher” were, for most women, the highest-status occupations available; “nurse romances” have been in existence almost since the days of Florence Nightingale, and they were meant to feed fantasies of lower-class women meeting and marrying higher-class men (by being as close as possible to the men’s status). But there had not yet been a mystery series character with whom these young women could identify, and of whom they could approve. Miss Pinkerton crossed the nurse romance with the detective novel, and the idea took hold. Nurse Adams might well be the long-ago ancestor of an immense number of modern-day light romantic cozy mysteries with simplified plots and I think for that reason she is a significant figure in the history of the woman detective. (I believe there are earlier “nurse mysteries”; for instance, 1931’s Night Nurse, with Barbara Stanwyck, might barely qualify, since there’s a crime involved. But the focus is on nurse rather than detective in most of them; Miss Pinkerton focuses on the detection. I’d be willing to believe there are earlier examples with which I’m not familiar, but Nurse Adams was the most successful.)

7. Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew, written by the dozens of men and women who were published as Carolyn Keene, just about has to be on any list of great women detectives. I’ve said elsewhere that I have issues with this character. She exhibits all the moral certitude of a homeschooled member of a religious sect; she bullies her friends into doing dangerous things, and constantly sticks her nose in when it’s not appropriate or even polite. And she treats Ned Nickerson like crap, considering that it’s so painfully obvious that she’s a virgin that it’s not even worth mentioning. Ned never gets to third base as a payoff for picking up Nancy at the old haunted mansion on the outskirts of town, time and time again.

But Nancy Drew, bless her interfering heart, is on the side of the good guys and was responsible for making multiple generations of young women believe that they, too, could be detectives, or indeed anything they wanted to be. Her simple message, that a logical approach coupled with dogged perseverance solved all problems, echoes today. And if you asked 100 passers-by for the name of a female detective, I think you’d get about half “Miss Marple” and half “Nancy Drew”. That alone makes her worthy of inclusion on this list.

8. Loveday Brooke

Loveday Brooke was a “lady detective” created by Catherine Louisa Pirkis whose stories appeared in the Ludgate Magazine in and around 1894. I have to say that my scholarship is not sufficient to be able to say anything truly original about this character; I’ve certainly read the stories and enjoyed them. I know that a Victorian-era woman detective has to be on this list as the precursor of all the others, but I’m not sufficiently widely read to know if Loveday Brooke is truly the one that should stand for the others, and I’m prepared to be corrected by people who know more about this topic than I do.

I do think that Loveday Brooke was created as a kind of curiosity for the reading public at the time, but the ramifications of such a creation have been truly extraordinary. In 2014, when this is being written, I believe there are about twice as many novels published every year in the mystery genre that have female detectives rather than males, and many thousands of them; all of this flows from the efforts of Ms. Pirkis and her fellow writers and we have to honour them by an inclusion in this list. I’ll look forward to the comments of others upon my choice.

9. Flavia de Luce

I’m not sure how to categorize or describe Flavia de Luce, except perhaps as an “original”. Flavia is the creation of Alan Bradley and has been the protagonist of six novels between 2009 and 2014; in the first book (winner of multiple awards, including the Agatha, Arthur Ellis and Macavity) she is eleven years old, in 1950, living in the village of Bishop’s Lacey in England, and aspires to be both a chemist and a detective. A “child detective” in itself is sufficiently unusual in the history of detective fiction as to be significant. The fact that the books are charming, delightfully written, intelligent, and frequently powerful — and completely avoid the saccharine or mawkish tropes that frequently crop up when adults write in the voice of a child — makes them even more valuable.

I have to say that Flavia de Luce is perhaps the least solid entry in this list; I’m not actually sure that she contributes anything to the history of women detectives in and of herself. But the books are so charming and well-written and intelligent, and Flavia herself is such a complete and fully-rounded character, that I could not resist including her. If she’s displaced a more worthy candidate, so be it; read these books anyway.

10. Kate Delafield

This detective might be the least familiar name on my list. Kate Delafield is a lesbian homicide detective in Los Angeles, created by Katherine V. Forrest, and the protagonist of nine detective novels between 1984 and 2013. It has to be said that these books are not the best-written entries on this list; they have a certain awkwardness and emotional flatness that is sometimes hard to ignore. Why they are significant is that they are a ground-breaking look at the lives and social milieu of lesbians, written by a lesbian for a lesbian audience, and they are in polar opposition to the meretricious “lesbian confession” paperback originals written mostly by men in the 1950s and 1960s. Those books were ridiculous; these are realistic.

Katherine Forrest was among the first writers to realize that the mystery genre could be used to tell the stories of social minorities by making the detective an insider in that minority. Just as the books of Chester Himes gave readers the opportunity to see what it was really like to live in Harlem as a person of colour, and the Dave Brandstetter novels of Joseph Hansen did the same for gay men, so Kate Delafield’s investigations reveal how lesbians live, work, think, and love. They are important because they were among the first such novels to merge the story of a female minority with the genre traditions of the mystery, and they revealed to many other writers (the entire huge output of Naiad Press, for instance) that it was possible to legitimately tell real lesbian stories using the mystery form and other genre traditions. These days, this has been widely imitated by writers within many other minority traditions, some parsed very finely; Michael Nava tells the story of a Hispanic gay man dealing with HIV issues within the larger gay community, for instance, in a series of powerful mysteries. But Katherine V. Forrest broke this ground for lesbians and became a model for many other minority voices.

October 8 Challenge

I’m submitting this for my own “October 8 Challenge” under the heading of “Write about a group of GAD mysteries linked by authors of a single sex.” Yes, I think it bends the rules; if you wish to put a semi-colon after the word “authors”, feel free.  This piece is about GAD and gender, so since I’m in charge, I’ll accept this. 😉  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m trying to stimulate creativity, not strict adherence.

The Pale Horse – with Miss Marple?

I watched Masterpiece Mystery last night, featuring their new production of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse. And I am very, very sorry to say that the producers have wedged Miss Marple into the story and removed Ariadne Oliver (whom I saw in Hallowe’en Party last week on PBS), Colonel and Mrs. Despard (last seen in the novel Cards on the Table) and Mr. and Mrs. Dane Calthrop (last seen in the novel The Moving Finger).  They have also invented a couple of characters out of whole cloth and sprinkled them over the production like dog turds on a freshly-cut lawn.

What on earth are they thinking? Russell Lewis, given credit for the screenplay, has a number of excellent credits to his name, including episodes of Inspector Morse, Wycliffe, Cadfael, and Lewis.  (Oddly enough he also has numerous acting credits to his name, including portraying Lucius in I, Claudius. ) Some of his work has been the creation of a screenplay from an existing work — Cadfael, Morse, Wycliffe — and others have him creating an original story in an ongoing series.

The point is, Mr. Lewis knows the difference between adaptation and creation; I can only assume that this production’s producers are to blame for this ghastly slumgullion.  Although I find it difficult to believe that the character of Jane Marple has to be added to an Agatha Christie story for its adaptation to television to be saleable in the United States, I can barely accept it. But why on earth did they need to tamper with the work of one of the best-selling writers in history in a completely unnecessary way?  It’s not as if they didn’t have Ariadne Oliver on tap — she was in the previous production that I saw a week ago.  Why strike out Christie’s characters and substitute your own?  I mean, Mr. Lewis is a good writer, but he’s no Agatha Christie.  In fact, nobody is Agatha Christie.  She sold well for a reason, and to simply substitute your own judgment about what the audience will like to see is both sublimely arrogant and horribly mistaken.

I have seen productions in this series that have slightly changed the motives of the murderer(s) in order to make them more interesting to a modern audience; for instance, adding a homosexual affair to the events of The Body in the Library and changing the identity of one of the murderers. I actually enjoyed that production because, frankly, I’ve read the book a number of times and seen the original TV production with Joan Hickson, my favourite Marple, perhaps half-a-dozen times also.  It was amusing to have my expectations derailed slightly, and I am not one who regards every word that drops from any author’s pen as sacrosanct.  But subsequent productions have been pretty much a disorganized gang-bang in which anything is fair game.  This specifically includes any story Christie wrote which contained neither Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, all of which seem to be determined to add Marple during the TV process.  Miss Marple now has a history of unrequited love which is nowhere in the books and seems determined to pop up everywhere, in any context, like Russell Brand on talk shows. I mean, why stop there?  Why not re-purpose a few old creakers by, say, Freeman Wills Crofts or Ellery Queen, take out the detectives and add Jane Marple?  Why not re-make the entire Perry Mason series with her instead? Murder, She Wrote? The Sopranos?  Where in the World is Carmen Santiago?  Apparently the new watchword is, add a dash of Marple to any bloody thing, like onion salt.  Next they’ll be bringing in Chloe Sevigny to play her as a young woman, or Emma Watson, or Boy George.

Sorry for the outburst.  I actually had to stop watching this ghastly travesty last night because I was falling asleep and kept being awakened by a burst of anger as I realized the producers had made yet one more alteration to a perfectly good novel that deserved better.  I may go back to it, or I may just save my eyes. The acting and production values are certainly very high quality work. Jonathan Cake as Mark Easterbrook, the original protagonist, is very good, as is J.J. Feild as Paul Osbourne. And if the producers ever produce an Agatha Christie vehicle that sticks reasonably closely to the original material, I’ll be there.  But I cannot recommend this one.  Go read the book.

I am told that next week is The Secret of Chimneys, an adaptation of another novel which did not feature Jane Marple.  I rather liked that novel and will be watching to see how they mangle it with horrified fascination.