Takes more than charm if you're going to get me to confess

[sovay]

So I'm reading a thread about Josephine Tey over at skygiants' where people are anti-recommending Miss Pym Disposes (1946) and The Franchise Affair (1948) and I don't disagree with them in either case—I've read the latter and everyone who has ever mentioned the former to me included the caution that it can turn you off Tey for life. It interests me that this happens with authors, the one or two books out of an otherwise enjoyable body of work that need warning against/exorcism with fire and salt. In the case of The Franchise Affair, it seems fairly clear that the unexamined classism which runs in an undercurrent through all of Tey's work simply rose from the depths and ate the premise alive. That model does not explain Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), since unexamined misogyny does not otherwise afflict the other eighteen Campion novels (but in order to figure out the cause I'd have to re-read the book, so I haven't yet). I recognize that the phenomenon is idiosyncratic—I finally bounced off a novel by Mary Stewart when I read Wildfire at Midnight (1956) because its mystery is perfectly well-constructed but its romance depends on reconciliation between two people who had really good reasons to be divorced. I'm not really asking for a list of books to avoid, but I'm curious about other people's experiences with the outliers that suddenly bit them. Is it usually the case that a regrettable but generally background tendency comes to the fore because of specific plot conditions and there goes the neighborhood? Is it just that the brain-eater stopped by for a midnight snack and left by the next book in the series? Do you have no idea what happened, but for God's sake don't read that one anyway? Inquiring minds! And then, so as not to be totally down on literature, this literary mixtape is pretty awesome.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Dorothy Sayers, Five Red Herrings. It's just dire. I've been told she wrote it on a dare: "I bet you can't write a mystery that revolves around train schedules!" Turns out she could; but even Sayers couldn't make it good.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, *Five Red Herrings* is definitely far more tedious than most of Sayers' other works would lead you to believe possible. But it's more of an isolated clunker than the kind of thing that makes you feel that you're risking having your brain besmeared with something repellent if you ever dare to glance at anything else by her again.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No, it isn't repellent; it's just bad.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I kind of enjoy it now because it's almost the only Sayers I don't know practically off by heart.

[sovay]

I've been told she wrote it on a dare: "I bet you can't write a mystery that revolves around train schedules!" Turns out she could; but even Sayers couldn't make it good.

I don't remember The Five Red Herrings being dire, but I also can't remember anything about its progression or solution, so I suppose that says something.

[edit] Because of the manner in which I read the Wimsey mysteries, I always forget that there are other books going on at the same time as the four Harriet Vane novels. I read all of the non-Harriet books first and was then given the quartet by my parents as successive birthday and holiday presents in late high school. I am also continually surprised that there are only eleven novels in the series plus collected short stories. My brain seems to feel there are, or should be, more.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Apparently Sayers' heirs and publishers felt that way, too, although the relatively recent Jill Paton Walsh Harriet and Peter Wimsey mysteries struck me as rather unsatisfactory attempts to produce them. I think the first one, "Thrones, Dominations," which consisted of an abandoned Sayers manuscript that Paton Walsh completed, was better than the ones Paton Walsh wrote from scratch, but I don't remember anything else about it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I still haven't read all of the Wimsey mysteries, and I've hit them out of order. But I am really really glad I didn't read Five Red Herrings first, and that I read Strong Poison second; Harriet sold me on the series.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

*The Franchise Affair* is definitely best avoided. But the "women's colleges turn women into twisted homicidal maniacs" subtext cited by the skygiants post's first dis-recommender of *Miss Pym Disposes* would never have occurred to me. (Interestingly, Dorothy L. Sayers brings up this very stereotype in *Gaudy Night*, only to debunk it in what struck me as an almost equally problematical way.) Admittedly, there were definitely a few problematical elements in *Pym*, like some of the students' habit of jokingly referring to their (charming and not particularly slutty even by 1940's standards) Brazilian classmate as "the Nut Tart."

(WARNING: Everything from here on is probably a bit spoilerish.)

But I just wrote off the person eventually revealed to be the murderer as a natural-born sociopath whose sociopathology required little or no assistance from the allegedly hothouse atmosphere of a women's college. Although if I'm remembering the plot properly, her ostensible motive was more "feminine" (in terms of not directly benefiting her in the expected way) than those of similarly ruthless male characters, or even the child murderer in the movie version of "The Bad Seed," which I think was made not much later--or at least sometime in the 1950's. Of course, the last time I read *Miss Pym Disposes* was at least twenty-five years ago, so it's possible that I'd interpret it quite differently now.

[sovay]

*The Franchise Affair* is definitely best avoided.

What are your reasons for best avoiding it, if they are not subtext-related?

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

*Franchise Affair* definitely does have a (distinctly classist) "women beware women" subtext that more than justifies avoiding it. It's what one of the commenters on the skygiants post perceived as the "higher education turns women into twisted homicidal maniacs" subtext of *Miss Pym Disposes* that I don't recall seeing at all when I read it. Which, as I said, was at least twenty-five years ago, so my opinion might be different if I reread it now.

(WARNING: More potential spoilers.)

My impression is that the traditional objection to *Miss Pym* regards a particular ethical decision made by one character towards the end of the book, which has disastrous effects for at least one other person.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It has an absolutely unavoidable "bad blood will tell".

Because the character was adopted as a baby, there's no getting around it.

Nevertheless, I still kind of like it. And I love Miss Pym Disposes, which is not to say it's not deeply problematic, but I love it anyway.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I hated "The Franchise Affair" with a passion, because it seemed to me to be purely an exercise in snobbery, with no redeeming features; but on the other hand I loved "Brat Farrar" at first touch and still do (it sits as a pair in my mind with Mary Stewart's "The Ivy Tree", which is why I have the unwritten third of the triptych in my head: it's one of those either/or set-ups where those two examine either side, and I want to write the third alternative).

[sovay]

which is why I have the unwritten third of the triptych in my head: it's one of those either/or set-ups where those two examine either side, and I want to write the third alternative

I know! I want to read it!

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Having followed the link to your earlier post on The Franchise Affair and from there gone to Sarah Waters' article about it, I'm now really interested in the original 18th century case, especially since all parties involved apparently went to their graves insisting their version was the truth and there's no consensus on who was lying; I suppose it's even possible nobody was, that the girl was abused by an entirely different pair and just had a bad memory for faces or something.

ETA -- just skimmed the wiki entry on the case and oh hell yes, it could have been truthful but confused witness and mistaken identity: girl with a head injury, kept in a boarded-up (and therefore probably dark) hayloft for a month, and then the authorities show her a widow who owns a hayloft and say "this is the woman who did it, right?" Then various groups take up the case for their own various political reasons, and just to add to the confusion, this was right around the time the calendar changed, so some witnesses as to the whereabouts of the accused at the time were eleven days off.....

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm sure I have examples of this but i'm finding it hard to come up with a title. In the case of Madeleine L'Engle, I like some books very much and others not at all, but that's not quite the same...

Why should the couple get divorced in Wildfire at Midnight?

By the way, I just heard from the lugubrious Garrison Keillor over at The Writer's Almanac that it's Wittgenstein's birthday. Make sure you drape yourself with garlic. If you feel anything settling on your shoulder, brush it off.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I grew up on Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, and am very fond of parts of the posthumously published sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, but the third takes a particularly nasty left turn that I don't understand at all.

[sovay]

I grew up on Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, and am very fond of parts of the posthumously published sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, but the third takes a particularly nasty left turn that I don't understand at all.

I don't think I know Rebecca West at all. What happens with the books?

[sovay]

Why should the couple get divorced in Wildfire at Midnight?

They are divorced when the story begins. The reasons make very good sense to me—they married after knowing one another for three months, in 1945 when she was a nineteen-year-old model making a sensational debut and he was a rising young author ten years her senior and neither of them had any real idea of the person they were falling in love with. "What he had meant to marry was a modern-day Gianetta Fox, a composed young sophisticate who would hold her own in the fast-moving society to which he was accustomed; what he'd actually got was only Gianetta Brooke, not long out of school, whose poise was a technique very recently acquired in Montefior's salons and the Mayfair mannequin factory . . . The times were out of joint for us, the gap too wide—not the ten years' gap between our ages, rather, the thousand-year-old stretch of a world war that to me was only an adolescent memory hardly denting the surface of my life, but to Nicholas was a still-recurring nightmare agony leaving scars on the mind which were then only precariously skinning over. How was I, untouched nineteen, to apprehend the sort of stresses that drove Nicholas? And how was he to guess that, deep down under my precarious self-confidence, lurked the destroying germs of insecurity and fear?" He has affairs, they have fights, the relationship devolves into one of those emotionally brutal who-loves-least-wins competitions, and after three years they break up. Four years after that the narrator takes a holiday and runs into Nicholas among the guests at a remote Scottish hotel who shortly become the suspects in a series of weird murders and red herrings. I'm not sure it's one of Stewart's best novels no matter what—which is a shame, because the plot turns out to involve pagan human sacrifce—but my real problem was the plot insisting on reconciliation and remarriage between Nicholas and Gianetta without taking the time to demonstrate that they have either repaired their relationship or rebuilt it from scratch in a way that won't cause the same problems a year or so down the line. The narrator explicitly mentions that being around Nicholas causes her to fall into the old familiar patterns of their marriage, patterns which were expressly terrible for both of them. We don't see either of them figuring out how to break the mold. I'd have been fine with an ending that saw them as friends, having each figured out how to like and trust the other person without replicating the old hurtful behaviors. Instead we are somehow meant to believe that everything will be different and wonderful just because they've been through a murder case together and I couldn't. It was the first time I'd left a Stewart novel actively hoping against the romance. It was a little demoralizing.

By the way, I just heard from the lugubrious Garrison Keillor over at The Writer's Almanac that it's Wittgenstein's birthday.

So it is! I should do something with language.

If you feel anything settling on your shoulder, brush it off.

Thank you.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The narrator explicitly mentions that being around Nicholas causes her to fall into the old familiar patterns of their marriage, patterns which were expressly terrible for both of them. We don't see either of them figuring out how to break the mold.

That does not sound like a recipe for success, no.

[larryhammer]

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer. If you can read her at all, you're probably immune to her pervasive idolatry of the aristocracy, but this is the one book with a sudden appearance of Awful Antisemitism (complete with a coded reference to the blood libel). Which is a dang shame, as without that really ugly chapter, it would be one of her best, most sparkling books.

Avoid, avoid -- there's enough other good ones anyway.

---L.

[sovay]

but this is the one book with a sudden appearance of Awful Antisemitism (complete with a coded reference to the blood libel).

I can't remember ever reading The Grand Sophy by name, but I do associate Heyer with the possibility of random anti-Semitism in the middle of otherwise frothy romances, so I wonder if I tried it once, hit that scene, and fled. Thanks for identifying it, anyway. My favorite of hers—both the one I re-read most often and remember best—is Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle (1957) because of the metafiction and the eyebrows.

That reminds me of E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1906), which I have never re-read because even in childhood I was not all right with the chapter full of random anti-Semitism. I'm glad it exists in the sense that C.S. Lewis used it as inspiration for the scenes of Jadis in London in The Magician's Nephew (1955), but otherwise it is a terrible waste of a premise I should otherwise love, what with the time travel and the ancient Near East and all.

[larryhammer]

It's the only random anti-Semitism I can recall in Heyer, and I've read most of the non-mysteries.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I'd never have read any more Tey if the first one I'd picked up had been The Man in the Queue-- between a plot that evidently doesn't really mean to be a conventional mystery, and the detective referring to the main suspect as "The Dago" for most of the book (only partly undercut by the last-minute revelation that the guy is totally innocent), it's definitely not one of her more enjoyable books.

Regarding Fashion in Shrouds -- the weirdest part is that right up until the ending, it's not only a pretty good story, but one that arguably revolves around a woman who is hella controlled by various men and how that's Not a Good Thing for Anybody. The smart sympathetic character suddenly swooning and saying "ooh, yes darling, forbid me to have a career" really comes out of the blue -- well, she'd mentioned a couple of times that she found it wearing to feel responsible for everything at work, but I think I posted somewhere that the situation would have been better resolved with intermittent recreational BDSM rather than giving up one's day job.

[sovay]

and the detective referring to the main suspect as "The Dago" for most of the book

I read a later edition in which all instances of "dago" were replaced with "Levantine" and guess what? It doesn't help!

The smart sympathetic character suddenly swooning and saying "ooh, yes darling, forbid me to have a career" really comes out of the blue -- well, she'd mentioned a couple of times that she found it wearing to feel responsible for everything at work, but I think I posted somewhere that the situation would have been better resolved with intermittent recreational BDSM rather than giving up one's day job.

You did!

I discovered last night while reading some biographical material about Allingham that she wrote The Fashion in Shrouds while almost having an extramarital affair with a man to whom she was passionately, unnervingly sexually attracted; in the end she didn't, but it required a conscious decision, and making it seems to have given her a lot of trouble. The author quoted a letter detailing Allingham's belief that sexual and artistic passion were merely different expressions of the same creative energy, meaning she actively worried that if she gave her spare time and attention to another partner, she wouldn't have anything left over for her work. Her resources were genuinely low at the time; she was under a lot of emotional strain and her health kept crashing. She broke the relationship off and finished the book. So with this information in mind it looks to me like Allingham gave Val her dilemma, but decided for the character in the opposite direction than she did for herself. I feel much more comfortable viewing the ending of Shrouds as a fictional road not taken, maybe even an exploration of wish-fulfillment, the hot guy rather than the hard work. The problem remains that (a) the statement "femininity unpossessed is a femininity unprotected from itself, a weakness and not a charm" is too much of a generalization to sound like Val's opinion as opposed to her author's (b) it's not true even within the world of the novel, because Amanda will marry Campion and they will have one of the great marriages of detective fiction and she will keep on working in aeronautics so professionally that, if I am remembering correctly, Campion refuses an assignment overseas because it would require her to leave her job. So your solution continues to make much more sense to me.

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

I was addicted to M.S. in my early teens when Wildfire was a few years old [tho it was one of her more creepy books!], but nowadays, as an adult with young daughters, and feminist, I often wonder at the chancey conciliations, and reconciliations, that occur in romances.

Was it You've got Mail where Meg Ryan falls for the basti'd that put her bookstore out of business? That wasn't a romance, it was a tragedy!

These days, "kick the bum out" is my motto...