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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: HEAVEN: Jan 2016 Book Discussion: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
The Nine Tailors is one of my very favourite books. But I’m not that bothered about the character of Wimsey. I’ve read Bellona Club in the past and can’t remember much about it other than it’s set in a conservative London club. Recently I read Five Red Herrings and was very disappointed. I couldn’t tell one of the five suspects from another and the solution with clipped railway tickets was far too complicated for me to follow. Any recommendations?
Come to think of it, I don’t read whodunits for the puzzle, which I’ve never a hope of working out. And Nine Tailors is brilliant because it fits a human story into the format of the whodunit. It is also the only Golden Age of crime writing book where, with Will and Mary, there is a genuine sense of tragedy. There’s no more tragedy in Agatha Christie than in a game of Cluedo.
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Jane R
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# 331
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Posted
Brenda: quote:
It is this which forms one of the roots of my problems with the Jill Paton Walsh books. I just do not believe Bunter, and the Bunter-Peter relationship, in those books.
Yes, that's one of the things I don't like about Jill Paton Walsh's continuations. She doesn't seem to have grasped the idea that Peter and Bunter can have enormous respect for each other and work well as a team *while at the same time* recognising that they are not social equals and never will be. It's just about conceivable that Bunter's son might attend the same school as Peter's (if Bunter had a son I can imagine him being bright enough to win a scholarship) but everyone would have found this rather embarrassing and not known how to deal with it.
[ 02. February 2016, 08:33: Message edited by: Jane R ]
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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BroJames
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# 9636
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
<snip>Recently I read Five Red Herrings and was very disappointed. I couldn’t tell one of the five suspects from another and the solution with clipped railway tickets was far too complicated for me to follow. Any recommendations?
Come to think of it, I don’t read whodunits for the puzzle<snip>
IIRC, in a foreword to Five Red Herrings Dorothy L Sayers says that it is avowedly a 'puzzle story', written to prove that she could write that sort of thing. Of its kind it's good - but not if you don't like that sort of thing.
IMHO, of those that do not include Harriet Vane, the more fully drawn novels are (in ascending order) are: Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, and Murder Must Advertise. But ISTM that Dorothy L Sayers really only properly attends to Wimsey as a fully rounded person as she begins to develop his relationship with Harriet. Once Busman's Honeymoon is over we only glimpse Wimsey again a couple of times (IIRC) once in "The Haunted Policemen" on the evening of the birth of Harriet's and his firstborn, and later in "Talboys" (set in 1942) (both published in a collection called Striding Folly) when they have three children aged 6, 4 and a toddler/baby. In each of these, I think, there is quite a feel for him as a person, and in the latter for his and Harriet's relationship.
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Trudy Scrumptious
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# 5647
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
Brenda: quote:
It is this which forms one of the roots of my problems with the Jill Paton Walsh books. I just do not believe Bunter, and the Bunter-Peter relationship, in those books.
Yes, that's one of the things I don't like about Jill Paton Walsh's continuations. She doesn't seem to have grasped the idea that Peter and Bunter can have enormous respect for each other and work well as a team *while at the same time* recognising that they are not social equals and never will be. It's just about conceivable that Bunter's son might attend the same school as Peter's (if Bunter had a son I can imagine him being bright enough to win a scholarship) but everyone would have found this rather embarrassing and not known how to deal with it.
I think part of the point of the Bunter-Peter relationship in the JPW sequels, though, is how that relationship has changed over time, both because of the close relationship between the Wimsey and Bunter families, once both men have married and had children, and because of changes in society, so that class divisions are not as clearly drawn in the 1950s (when the latest of the "new" Wimsey novels are wet) as they would have been in the 1920s when the first of the original novels were set.
However, not having been a member of the English aristocracy in the 1950s, I have no idea whether this blurring of class distinctions is realistic or not.
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Sarasa
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# 12271
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Posted
Venbede said:
quote:
I’ve read Bellona Club in the past and can’t remember much about it other than it’s set in a conservative London club.
I feel far more for Sheila and George in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club than I do for Will and Mary. It feels far more realistic to me.
Five Read Herrings is fun, once you get past the dialect, but it is more about the puzzle than the characters.
To get back to NT. I've been puzzling about Deacon. He was obviously intelligent, probably a scholarship boy at a Grammar school/minor public school as he has a basic grasp of French, but if so why did he end up in service, rather than say, a clerk in a law firm?
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Jane R
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# 331
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Posted
Trudy: quote:
However, not having been a member of the English aristocracy in the 1950s, I have no idea whether this blurring of class distinctions is realistic or not.
I wasn't either, but I should imagine it depended who you asked. Older people would have been more likely to stick to the patterns of behaviour they learned as children and young adults, and Peter was over 50 at the *beginning* of the Second World War. Admittedly he was more progressive than many of his contemporaries in the 20s-30s (marrying a middle-class career woman, for example) but there's just something off about the Bunter-Wimsey relationship in the JPW sequels. It jars with my understanding of the characters as Dorothy Sayers wrote them.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
The artist in me says that a bad break sets Deacon off wrong. A minor peccadillo keeps him from getting a clerical job, for instance. Or he is looking for work just at a moment of economic downturn.
The Harriet novels are core, of course. But if you consider the non-Harriet works the greatest one is Murder Must Advertise, in which DLS happily draws upon all of her working-career expertise and merrily cannibalizes the entire setting from her former employers. (Who adored it. I am told there is a plaque in that office, commemorating the stair down which the victim falls to his death.) We get a great sense of Peter's real brilliance, the ability to juggle not one but two thrilling and quite different secret identities. It's deliciously entertaining.
I do like Bellona Club, but I'm a sucker for interesting social settings. I agree that Five Red Herrings is the least successful of the non-Harriet works. Notice how all three of these works adhere to the traditional mystery format: a separate and (more or less) happy world, into which first evil intrudes, and then the detective parachutes in to drive the serpent out and redeem the world back to its Edenic bliss. As Sayers herself noted, mysteries are possibly the most Christian form of fiction there is.
Whose Body has all the flaws of the first novel, but it was justifiably a hit and the Wimsey fan cannot miss it -- it's notable for how many of the essential bits of the mythos are already in place at that early date. The Dowager Duchess, Bunter, the flat, Parker, Sugg -- all the furniture is recognizable. Sayers knew what she was doing even then. That's very unusual for a first novel.
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Trudy Scrumptious
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# 5647
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Posted
And although the characterization is thinner in Whose Body, it does have, near the end, Lord Peter suffering a breakdown and having flashbacks to the war, and having to be taken off the case (by his mother!) for a rest. Given that the first part of the novel might have set us up to expect Lord Peter as a more fun-loving Sherlock Holmes -- the brilliant detective who knows all, is good at everything, and always solves the puzzle -- bringing in the shell shock near the end of the novel gives the reader a good clue that he is going to develop into a much more complex and multilayered character.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
Wimsey's core skill may be the man-with-a-foot-in-each-world thing. When you look at the novels, you can see him doing it over and over. In Bellona he is comfortable both in stuffed-shirt club-land and in Bohemian artistic circles. In MURDER MUST ADVERTISE he slides seamlessly into advertising, and also into the set of louche druggies. Even in FIVE RED HERRINGS he fits into rural Scotland and its artists without fuss.
I wonder if that is not a fantasy we consistently demand from our fiction -- the ability to enter into a new world, and immediately fit in. The Cinderella thing. We can't do it in the real world. Look at the difficulties refugees are having. But we fantasize about it. The number of novels in which the protagonist arrives someplace and (either immediately or very soon) wins a comfortable place is huge.
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Eirenist
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# 13343
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Posted
IIRC, I read in a biography of DLS ('Such a Strange Lady', I think), that 'Five Red Herrings' was written by request to popularise the Galloway region of Scotland as a tourist destination. That is probably why it is less convincing than some others. Lord Peter even tampers with the evidence, I believe.
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Trudy Scrumptious
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# 5647
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Posted
I just reread 9/10 of the novels and skipped Five Red Herrings. I've read it once and honestly don't think I will ever have the desire to read it again. But I love all the others.
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Penny S
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# 14768
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Posted
In the 20s my mother, as a child, would talk to men who were employed to build roads in Sussex. There would be university graduates, there were people who should have been in professional jobs, well educated. But unemployed, otherwise, because of the Depression. The road building was a job creation scheme.
There were large issues which could have led to Deacon having failed to achieve in life.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
George Orwell is on record going to pick hops, in Kent. I think this was after Deacon's period, however.
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
So which are the Harriet Vane ones? Strong Poison, Gaudy Night?
I read a few short stories from Hangman's Holiday but didn't want to finish it. (I'd got on to the Montague Egg stories before I gave up.)
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
Yes, and Busman's Honeymoon. We now can just zip through all three, but they were actually published at long, lugubrious intervals, with other Peter novels in between (there is a teeny hint of Harriet in Murder Must Advertise but you have to be sharp to spot it). The frustration and misery of the original readers must have been fantastic.
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Trudy Scrumptious
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# 5647
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Posted
Don't forget Have His Carcase, which fills in the gaps between Strong Poison and Gaudy Night, and has some lovely Peter/Harriet conversations as they solve the case together.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
Right, thank you! I knew I was leaving something out. Harriet's addition to the cast allows Lord Peter to have essentially another investigator, with a different point of view and set of talents.
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
There were reviews, and I have heard someone say this on a book programme (A Good Read?), who hated the Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane stories. The phrasing I heard was that Sayers did the unforgiveable in falling in love with her detective hero; that Harriet Vane was her writing herself into her books.
I am sure the panel were discussing Gaudy Night, because I'd read it and enjoyed it, but the panel were divided between the person who'd brought it along to discuss and those who found it impossible to read, calling it things like self-indulgent and overblown.
Lucy Worley loves Sayers too.
[fixed link...oops! See you did just that below!]
[ 03. February 2016, 15:10: Message edited by: jedijudy ]
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BroJames
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# 9636
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Posted
Yes. The creator of this web page generally isn't very interested in the Wimsey/Vane relationship, or Harriet Vane. He often finds the novels too long. Also Dorothy L Sayers herself makes some kind of apology for it at the beginning of Busman's Honeymoon quote:
It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story. This book deals with such a situation. It also provides some sort of answer to many kindly inquiries as to how Lord Peter and his Harriet solved their matrimonial problem. If there is but a ha'porth of detection to an intolerable deal of saccharine, let the occasion be the excuse.
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
Oops - I'll correct my own stuffed up coding. That should have read:
Lucy Worsley loves Sayers too.
Should not post at stupid o'clock so I am properly awake to check in preview post, which I used to check the italics.
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
Somebody who doesn't like Sayers. is here
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping1
Quote:
Sayers's fiction is made hard to read by her snobbery and racism. She quite patently saw working-class people as lesser beings than the effortlessly superior Lord Peter, and she was profoundly anti-semitic.
I don't think that is fair, but I thought I'd mention it.
[ 03. February 2016, 07:14: Message edited by: venbede ]
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
Lucy Worsley loves Sayers too.
Just read that. It is the reply to the link in my last post.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
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Thro' the world we safely go.
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Bibaculus
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# 18528
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Posted
Oh how dull this desire is to reread our 21st century values into past writers. Sayers was a snob, Augustine was a misogynist, Anselm was gay. No, they were people of their time, and if you cannot appreciate the context, thne frankly you have nothing useful to say.
And with Sayers it isn't even true, not in the crude way suggested. As so many people have pointed out on this thread, the Thodays are sympathetically drawn. The dreadful snobbish housekeeper is hardly held up as an ideal.
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
Thank you. Quite.
(I didn't know about Anselm. I thought it was Theodore of Tarsus.)
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
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Eirenist
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# 13343
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Posted
Two Jews appear in 'Busman's Honeymoon', one a traditional 'Oy-vey' caricature,the other young, bright and more sympathetic. In other books (Bellona Club for example), there are references to 'Scotch' loan sharks who are fairly obviously Jewish - maybe DLS had had some unpleasant personal experience in this regard, or knew people who had. None of this, however, makes her more or less anti-Semitic than inter-war Britain in general.
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BroJames
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# 9636
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Posted
There is often a degree of caricature about Dorothy L Sayers minor characters - all of them, even the redoubtable Miss Climpson, and this applies to Jews as well. Also I suspect that she would have subscribed to a some aspects of theories of racial types which were common currency at the time. Some of her portrayal of Jews, therefore, makes uncomfortable reading in a post-holocaust age with a very different view of 'racial' distinctions between human beings. That said, I don't think she believes that a person is better or worse because of their race, and Peter doesn't hesitate, for example, in abetting his friend Freddie Arbuthnot's wooing of Rachel Levy. The issue is epitomised in Peter's description of one of his tenants in Busman's Honeymoon quote:
[of Noakes] ‘All sorts of little enterprises, h’m? Picking things up cheap on the chance of patching ’em up for resale at a profit-that sort?’
‘Rather that sort.’
‘Um. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. There’s a London tenant of mine who started twenty years ago with a few second-hand oddments in a cellar. I’ve just built him a very handsome block of flats with sunshine balconies and vita-glass and things. He’ll do very well with them. But then he’s a Jew, and knows exactly what he’s doing. I shall get my money back and so will he. He’s got the knack of making money turn over. We’ll have him to dinner one day and he’ll tell you how he did it. He started in the War, with the double handicap of a slight deformity and a German name, but before he dies he’ll be a damn’ sight richer than I am.’
I wince at the stereotype of the Jew and money, but I also note that there's no sense of the social exclusion which would have been commonplace in England at that time. I don't know whether Dorothy Sayers was snobbish or not. I suspect intellectual snobbery was a more likely trap for her than social snobbery. She goes to some pains to show that Lord Peter is not in, e.g., a discussion about schools and universities in Murder Must Advertise, in his willing endorsement of middle-class Parker the policman's marriage to his sister, and in his dealings with the off-duty PC in 'The Haunted Policeman'.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
Yes, it's a pitfall for both the reader and the writer. The readers set up a howl about the sexist or racist attitudes in the book which were utterly unremarkable for the time. (Look up the discussion of Huckleberry Finn and let it run until you have a bath full.) And from here it is a very short jump to Bowdlerizing the works, rewriting them for the modern taste. Poor Shakespeare has to take his lumps, but I was horrified to discover that there's a Christian publishing house merrily rewriting the adult novels of George MacDonald (more famous for his children's work Princess and Curdie, the Light Princess), bobbing out all the dull sermony bits and shortening each one by a good several hundred pages.
But the writers themselves are often no better. We have been having discussions elsewhere, about how the Georgette Heyer novels are in many ways entirely false to their Regency setting. Heyer was a stone researcher and a maniac for voice, but she could never grasp religion, and that lends a falsity to all her historicals. And her work is so influential in the romance genre that you get writers essentially xeroxing her xerox, getting further and further away from what the past must have been really like.
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
One of my favourite bits is how on New Year’s Eve, Mrs Venables manages to get Lord Peter to escape her husband to have a few hours’ rest in bed before the midnight service. She has prepared a bedroom where he sleeps like a log for a few hours with a burning real fire.
I’ve never slept in a room with a real fire alight, but on a cold winter’s night after a trying drive in the cold it sounds blissful.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
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Athrawes
Ship's parrot
# 9594
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by BroJames:
There is often a degree of caricature about Dorothy L Sayers minor characters - all of them, even the redoubtable Miss Climpson, and this applies to Jews as well. Also I suspect that she would have subscribed to a some aspects of theories of racial types which were common currency at the time. Some of her portrayal of Jews, therefore, makes uncomfortable reading in a post-holocaust age with a very different view of 'racial' distinctions between human beings. That said, I don't think she believes that a person is better or worse because of their race, and Peter doesn't hesitate, for example, in abetting his friend Freddie Arbuthnot's wooing of Rachel Levy. The issue is epitomised in Peter's description of one of his tenants in Busman's Honeymoon quote:
[of Noakes] ‘All sorts of little enterprises, h’m? Picking things up cheap on the chance of patching ’em up for resale at a profit-that sort?’
‘Rather that sort.’
‘Um. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. There’s a London tenant of mine who started twenty years ago with a few second-hand oddments in a cellar. I’ve just built him a very handsome block of flats with sunshine balconies and vita-glass and things. He’ll do very well with them. But then he’s a Jew, and knows exactly what he’s doing. I shall get my money back and so will he. He’s got the knack of making money turn over. We’ll have him to dinner one day and he’ll tell you how he did it. He started in the War, with the double handicap of a slight deformity and a German name, but before he dies he’ll be a damn’ sight richer than I am.’
I wince at the stereotype of the Jew and money, but I also note that there's no sense of the social exclusion which would have been commonplace in England at that time. I don't know whether Dorothy Sayers was snobbish or not. I suspect intellectual snobbery was a more likely trap for her than social snobbery. She goes to some pains to show that Lord Peter is not in, e.g., a discussion about schools and universities in Murder Must Advertise, in his willing endorsement of middle-class Parker the policman's marriage to his sister, and in his dealings with the off-duty PC in 'The Haunted Policeman'.
This is interesting. I remember the BH quote quite well, but I always saw it as a complement on ability and competence, rather than a stereotype on Jews and Money. Sort of ,' He has the knack of making money because Jewish people tend to be good at what they do' - it's still a stereotype, but a different one. I wonder if it is because the Antipodes don't have the long association of Jewish people and money that went on in Europe for centuries.
As for the snobbery, I think it grated more with the treatment of Haleluja Dawson. Peter's attitude to him is pretty paternalistic, where I don't get that with his interactions with, say, Bill Rumm. Still, it is certainly more positive than many authors writing at that time.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
One of my favourite bits is how on New Year’s Eve, Mrs Venables manages to get Lord Peter to escape her husband to have a few hours’ rest in bed before the midnight service. She has prepared a bedroom where he sleeps like a log for a few hours with a burning real fire.
I’ve never slept in a room with a real fire alight, but on a cold winter’s night after a trying drive in the cold it sounds blissful.
Since it was considered healthy/thrifty to -not- have a fire in the bedroom (do you remember Charles Parker waking up with a raw fog rolling int from his window, left hygienically open top and bottom?) that shows you that Mrs. Venables was really pulling all the stops out for her guest.
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Penny S
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# 14768
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Posted
Bit of a snag, though. I think the change from De'Ath to Death usually goes the other way, starting with the pronounciation. I had one in my class, from a wholly different class from either the laird or Wimsey, though. People don't like the remarks that tend to get made. For British members, it's a bit like Hyacinth Bucket pronounced Bouquet.
Though I suppose Pratchett readers might take a different position, they probably wouldn't when aged 8.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
I was hoping to find somewhere on line material from The Wimsey Family by C. W. Scott-Giles but it seems to be only available as an illegal pdf from a site I suspect is a book pirate. (This is always dangerous because free files is how hackers can smuggle malware into your systems.) If you can find the book legally somewhere it is well worth reading.
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Eigon
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# 4917
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Posted
I love that link, Brenda! And Steed and Wimsey would surely have met at some point!
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venbede
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# 16669
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Posted
Thanks to my local council, I have access online to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I thought the two following quotes might be interesting:
Dorothy Sayers began life amid the bustle of Oxford, where her father was choirmaster at Christ Church, but when she was four years old Henry Sayers accepted the more remunerative living of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in the remote fen country of East Anglia, which would later provide the backdrop for one of Sayers's finest novels, The Nine Tailors (1934)
I don't know Blutisham but I'll look it up. The other quote is relevant to the snobbery question.
Sayers's novels consider the themes of individual responsibility, order versus anarchy, the spectre of consumption and waste in the modern world (Murder must Advertise), the situation of women (Unnatural Death, and all the Harriet Vane books), the devastating effects of war (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Wimsey's character generally), the meaning of work (in the characters of Wimsey, Vane, Miss Climpson, and Jack Munting), and the modern argument between science and religion (see especially The Documents in the Case). In all her fiction, she examines the implications of the class system.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
Posts: 3201 | From: An historic market town nestling in the folds of Surrey's rolling North Downs, | Registered: Sep 2011
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Marama
Shipmate
# 330
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Bibaculus:
Oh how dull this desire is to reread our 21st century values into past writers. Sayers was a snob, Augustine was a misogynist, Anselm was gay. No, they were people of their time, and if you cannot appreciate the context, thne frankly you have nothing useful to say.
Speaking as a historian, this is one of my bugbears. It is IMHO perfectly acceptable to judge an author, or any historical figure on the position they held/portrayed within the range of opinions held during their lifetimes, to critique them with reference to their contemporaries. But of course this demands doing considerable work in researching the contemporary debates and context.
Having read some of the truly appalling stuff on race written in the 1930s (and I've not going to advertise it) it seems to me that Sayers comes out of such an analysis reasonably well.
[ 05. February 2016, 00:08: Message edited by: Marama ]
Posts: 910 | From: Canberra | Registered: May 2001
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John Holding
Coffee and Cognac
# 158
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by venbede:
Thanks to my local council, I have access online to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I thought the two following quotes might be interesting:
Dorothy Sayers began life amid the bustle of Oxford, where her father was choirmaster at Christ Church, but when she was four years old Henry Sayers accepted the more remunerative living of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in the remote fen country of East Anglia, which would later provide the backdrop for one of Sayers's finest novels, The Nine Tailors (1934)
I don't know Blutisham but I'll look it up. The other quote is relevant to the snobbery question.
Sayers's novels consider the themes of individual responsibility, order versus anarchy, the spectre of consumption and waste in the modern world (Murder must Advertise), the situation of women (Unnatural Death, and all the Harriet Vane books), the devastating effects of war (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Wimsey's character generally), the meaning of work (in the characters of Wimsey, Vane, Miss Climpson, and Jack Munting), and the modern argument between science and religion (see especially The Documents in the Case). In all her fiction, she examines the implications of the class system.
So even Oxford can err. DLS's father was not choirmaster at ChCh, but headmaster of the choir school -- a very different matter.
John
Posts: 5929 | From: Ottawa, Canada | Registered: May 2001
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
Sayers really was questioning those attitudes compared with other books of the time. I read her as a teenager alongside Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie and found Sayers' books far better at questioning attitudes. And for other books from the 30s, I recently gave up on an EE Benson Mapp and Lucia book because the inherent beliefs and attitudes grated too much and I just didn't find it funny.
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
Posts: 13794 | From: outiside the outer ring road | Registered: Aug 2006
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Bibaculus
Shipmate
# 18528
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Posted
I think 20th century books can be the most difficult. When you are reading, say, Augustine, you know (or should know) that he is writing in a late antique context very different from our own. 20th century authors seem more 'modern', and one can be shocked by what seem like lapses.
I find myself growing more intolerant (or maybe just more aware). When I was younger I loved Saki. I tried to re-read him recently, and could only think 'What an unpleasant man'.
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A jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place
Posts: 257 | From: In bed. Mostly. When I can get away with it. | Registered: Dec 2015
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Marama: quote:
Having read some of the truly appalling stuff on race written in the 1930s (and I've not going to advertise it) it seems to me that Sayers comes out of such an analysis reasonably well.
Yes. You don't even have to read the really horrible stuff to get this; just cast an eye over Margery Allingham's work. Every now and then you come across something that makes you think 'WTF?' A female character who is advised by her brother 'You need a good rape'. A sweet old lady who thinks the threat of having the 'touch of the tarbrush' in her family tree exposed so shameful that it's a reasonable motive for murder. A man who tells the woman he loves (a successful businesswoman) that if she wants to marry him she will have to give up her career.
ISTR we had a very similar conversation when we discussed Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad . Somebody (can't remember who) was complaining about the way the black characters were portrayed, and I pointed out that the book had been published over 25 years earlier. I wasn't trying to argue that he/she was wrong to find the characterization of Mrs Gogol (for example) uncomfortable from a 21st century perspective; just that that's what anti-racism looked like 25 years ago. You can see the way Terry Pratchett's ideas about race and gender have moved with the times if you look at all his books in context, just as you can see how radical Dorothy Sayers was in the 1920s/30s by comparing her with her contemporaries.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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venbede
Shipmate
# 16669
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Posted
That's interesting about Margery Allingham.
The quote I gave above about Sayers being anti-semitic was from an article (I gave the link) arguing Allingham was a more worthwhile author because she wasn't a snob like Sayers.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
Posts: 3201 | From: An historic market town nestling in the folds of Surrey's rolling North Downs, | Registered: Sep 2011
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I complained to my county library about a detective book which I felt really went too far to come under the "it was a work of its time" umbrella. It was in a reissue of classics as ebooks range, and I feel should have been left in the past. One of the characters was black, and was made to speak like the chemist in the film "Finian's Rainbow" did when he was forced to wait on the white senator who expected "massa boss" drivel, and had ideas about ghosts attributed to him as an ignorant n-word who couldn't be expected to know better. (Gladys Mitchell - "The Saltmarsh Murders" I've taken time to find it.) I think it even got into what you could and couldn't see of him in the dark.
So I wrote to the chief librarian, and was properly put in my place for being a silly little woman who didn't know what she was on about. Pity it's an ebook and I can't lose it down the back of the shelves as I used to do with the Odinic creationist book in the physical library (Odin put the different races in different places be design and they should all go back where they came from.)
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
You could and should post a complaining review of the work on Amazon or Goodreads. But there is such a flood of crappy fiction out there these days, that there is good hope that nobody much will read it.
IMO it is important that these older works are preserved as they are, and read. We forget, how it used to be. Only when we read about mixed-race children being ostracized, or women being forced to quit their jobs the moment they begin to 'show', do we realize how far we have come. And we can't forget. Otherwise we'll slip back. (American women reading this? Vote. Go and check your registration today, to be sure you are eligible to vote. They've tinkered with the regulations, so this is important.)
And IMO it is a grave disservice, to remodel the works to make them more acceptable to finicky modern tastes. That they would renovate George MacDonald's novels and reissue them under his name is a travesty. You can bet that if he were alive he would sue.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Bibaculus
Shipmate
# 18528
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Posted
A bit of speculation.
i wonder if Sayers snobbery, if snob she was, had anything to do with her being a clergy daughter? Like the Venables, she would have come from a family which considered itself the social equals of Lord Peter, but lacked the means to live like him. Snobbery is generally based (like most prejudice) on insecurity, cf the housekeeper.
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A jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place
Posts: 257 | From: In bed. Mostly. When I can get away with it. | Registered: Dec 2015
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I agree about not changing things - but perhaps a comment in the introduction about Mitchell being a forgotten author of the golden age and reflecting her times would mean that modern readers wouldn't come up against something by surprise. It wasn't as if the words were in the mouth of an objectionable character.
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
A sweet old lady who thinks the threat of having the 'touch of the tarbrush' in her family tree exposed so shameful that it's a reasonable motive for murder. A man who tells the woman he loves (a successful businesswoman) that if she wants to marry him she will have to give up her career.
Neither of these would be a particularly unusual opinion for the time in which the stories were set. What would be anachronistic would be to write a set of stories set in Edwardian England, say, and populate them with characters with modern views on racial and sexual equality.
You might choose not to read historical fiction because you don't want to encounter historical opinions, and that's fine. You might decide to take the plot of a historical novel and re-imagine it in a modern setting to allow you to write it without all the objectionable opinions, and that's fine too.
I've read some of MacDonald's children's stories, and would rate them good, but not great. E. Nesbit is significantly better. I haven't read any of his adult books, but utterly oppose any kind of "rewriting" of some book or other that attempts to pass of the "modernized" version as the original. If you market it as "Some Novel, by J. Christian Bowdlerizer, based on the novel of the same name by George MacDonald" then I have no issue.
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
I recollect in one of Buchan's Hannay books the hero is urged to overcome his reluctance to help a kidnap victim by being told their father 'is the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul'. And of course Chesterton is unreadable now for his monomaniacal anti-Semitism.
In fact, it's difficult to think of any popular genre author in which there is not casual prejudice against Jews (oily, money-grubbing) negroes (eye-rolling idiots or savages) Irish catholics (lazy, drunken, priest-ridden and treacherous) Germans (the Hun!), anyone either southern European or South American or generally olive-skinned (excitable, murderous) and Chinese (the Yellow Peril)
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I don't need to post anything on Goodreads or Amazon, as others have. And split the other reviewers into those who don't notice, and those who regard the complainers as the PC brigade and to be despised.
Mitchell should really have left out the idea of the black guy. There are children's toys that she may have used as models for someone she had no idea about. Mrs Bradley's enlightened ideas about colour would have come much better if the author's voice was describing a real person.
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Leorning Cniht: quote:
You might choose not to read historical fiction because you don't want to encounter historical opinions, and that's fine.
That was in fact my point; modern reviewers are comparing Sayers with writers such as Kerry Greenwood (author of the Phryne Fisher mysteries), whose books may be entertaining (although I still want to slap Miss Fisher for being so perfect) but are written from a 21st century perspective and effectively bowdlerized for modern taste.
venbede: quote:
The quote I gave above about Sayers being anti-semitic was from an article (I gave the link) arguing Allingham was a more worthwhile author because she wasn't a snob like Sayers.
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif) The only reason why the class system is not so obtrusive in Allingham's books is because she hardly ever mentions it! Albert Campion is the son of a duke who marries an Earl's sister - you don't get much more snobbish than that.
Oh, and what Brenda said about religion in Georgette Heyer.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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