A Second Read

Long-time readers may recall that about a year ago, I sat down here and wrote a review of P. D. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. That was quite possibly the most difficult review I’ve ever written in my blogging tenure. I realized at the time that I was probably being very unfair to the book, which was ruined by an inept audiobook recording that cast Cordelia Gray as a mystery-solving Care Bear on drugs, doing its very best to suck out anything interesting or exciting about the book.

Well, I’ve now read the book for myself, in order to give it a fair assessment. And the jury is back with a surprising verdict. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is… quite good! The story revolves around Cordelia Gray, who inherits a private detective agency when her partner Bernie commits suicide. Before long, she is hired by Sir Ronald Callender, the microbiologist, to look into the suicide of his son Mark Callender. The scientist doesn’t doubt the coroner’s verdict that it was suicide, but he wishes to find out why his son committed suicide.

The Care Bears Solve a Murder

I really don’t think I can be very fair to today’s book, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James. I’ve taken James to task on this blog before for spreading the wrong ideas about the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but I approached her book with an open mind and with eager anticipation, since I’d read many positive comments about it. One of the things I love about my job is that I get plenty of time to listen to audiobooks, and I’d managed to find an audiobook version read by one Davina Porter.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman has got a marvellous title and an excellent idea for a plot. Bernie Pryde, from Pryde’s Detective Agency, commits suicide, and leaves the business to his partner, the young Cordelia Gray. Soon afterwards, Cordelia gets her first case, when she is hired by Sir Ronald Callender. His son Mark had recently left college and gone to work as a gardener, and was found hung, an apparent suicide. There seems to be no doubt about the verdict, but Sir Ronald is not happy. He wants to know why Mark killed himself and whether he was responsible for it or not.

A Rant Against the Word "Cozy"

The term “cozy” really rubs me the wrong way. It’s not necessarily the word itself, which describes a niche of the mystery market decently: a book where everyone is nice and polite, the detective has a perfect love relationship, and there are plenty of cats to act as animal sidekicks. What really irks me is how this term is abused and stuck onto books and authors that do not fit the label in the least. As a result of this tomfoolery, many authors are branded with this simplistic and unfair “cozy” label.

Agatha Christie gets the most unfair treatment in this regard. Critics gleefully describe her books as “cozy”, citing her idyllic villages and how order is restored to these idyllic villages after some crime, with life going on as before. (Not to forget the usual snide remark about her upper-class worship.) To this I loudly proclaim: “Bah, humbug!”

The Nine Possible Answers

Most men, they'll tell you a story straight through. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.

—Ed Bloom, Big Fish (2003)

Alfred Walter Stewart had a long career as a professor in chemistry and a university lecturer in Glasgow and Belfast, but more importantly for the purpose of this review, he also wrote detective novels under the name “J. J. Connington”. He was a well-regarded figure in his day, and John Dickson Carr gave him some praise in his famous essay The Grandest Game in the World. One of Dorothy L. Sayers’ better novels, The Five Red Herrings, is an homage to his book The Two Ticket Puzzle.

Unfortunately, academic disinterest and snobbery levelled against the Golden Age of Detective Fiction have seriously harmed Connington’s reputation. If you hear about him at all nowadays, it will be classed alongside the similarly-maligned John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, Henry Wade, or R. Austin Freeman. (None of these writers were mentioned even in passing by P. D. James in Talking About Detective Fiction, and Julian Symons mentions some of these authors only in passing.) He will be called an ingenious technical writer but someone who couldn’t entertain a drunken fish— a Humdrum, in fact. After reading his book The Case With Nine Solutions, two explanations propose themselves to explain this discrepancy: either Connington and the Humdrums have been unfairly attacked, or the academic worth of drunken fish has been sorely underestimated.

Talking about Talking About Detective Fiction

I’d like to welcome readers to this special edition of At the Scene of the Crime, in which I’m joined by a very special guest: Curt Evans, mystery scholar extraordinaire and author of a soon to be published book on “Humdrums”, authors from the Golden Age like John Rhode who are often dismissed despite their importance in the genre’s history.

It seems ironic, now that I think about it, that Curt’s agreed to join me and examine P. D. James’ Talking About Detective Fiction, which is a book that examines the mystery genre. I’ve taken good-natured cracks at P. D. James on the blog before. I haven’t read any of her books, but their size frankly scares me—in the wrong hands, one of her books would make an admirable bludgeoning weapon. But just how well would the Baroness analyse that noblest form of literature, the mystery? The only way to find out would be by reading the book…

Curt, thanks for joining me!

Perhaps I should start by saying that I found this book could be charitably called a train-wreck. I disagreed often with Julian Symons throughout Bloody Murder, but with P. D. James, I rarely got the chance to agree! Her history of the genre is highly selective, going from Jane Austen to the Crime Queens to a cursory glance at modern day, with barely a glance at anything else in between! The entire non-hardboiled American school of writing is treated as a non-entity, as though it never existed! John Dickson Carr is lucky to escape with a mere half-sentence acknowledging him as master of the locked-room mystery, while Helen McCloy, Anthony Boucher, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine are never mentioned!

James also has a curious fixation on Ronald Knox’s “Commandments” of Detective Fiction, treating them as though they were the only set of rules ever written. Van Dine’s Commandments are never mentioned, for instance, and James gets things horribly wrong when she writes: “Rules and restrictions do not produce original, or good, literature, and the rules were not strictly adhered to.” Did you hear that, Bill Shakespeare? You and your silly sonnets are neither original nor good, because you restrict them to 14 lines! The only rule you can really apply to detective fiction is for it to play fair with the clues, which I don’t see as a problem: it’s simply something that defines the genre.

Rules were made to be broken...

[Note: I am trying out something new today on the blog: instead of reviewing a book, I am discussing my impressions on a topic and trying to put them in a cohesive article. Feedback on this experiment is much appreciated, as I would like to include more posts like this in the future and would like to improve them.]

"This means war!"

—Daffy Duck, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

My reaction to James' book...

In her book Talking About Detective Fiction, P. D. James has a curious fixation for Ronald Knox and his “Ten Commandments” for detective fiction. This is one of the many points about the book which rather annoy me. Knox was not the only one to come up with rules, but James never even mentions this. She seems to believe that everyone took these rules as Law, and that any deviation was frowned upon with nothing but scorn. In fact, she goes on to say that “Rules and restrictions do not produce original, or good, literature, and the rules were not strictly adhered to.” This is a stunningly silly statement—if it were true, we might as well throw every book of poetry into the rubbish bin, because they all adhere to one rule: they must not be written in prose. 

If all goes well, you will hear more about James’ book and my problems with it in a few days. But for now, I’d like to examine Father Ronald Knox’s Decalogue. Just how futile is this attempt to define rules for the genre?