Takes more than charm if you're going to get me to confess
So I'm reading a thread about Josephine Tey over at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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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.....
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"No satisfactory account of what happened to her during her month-long absence from home has ever been arrived at, and the case remains an enigma."
Right! So where's the novel?
[edit] You should totally write about the Canning case. Sarah Waters doesn't even mention the calendar change.
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I have heard of that case, but know very little about it. Wikipedia, or have you got better links?
I still think you should write about Elizabeth Canning.
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