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

[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.

[sovay]

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

Must have hit it, then, and it left an impression. Thanks.