Deadlier Than the Male - Jessica Mann

In 1981, Jessica Mann wrote Deadlier Than the Male. As the subtitle says, it's An investigation into feminine crime writing. Last year, it was released as an eBook with a new Foreward by the author. As I've always been interested in the authors Mann investigates - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham & Josephine Tey - I'm almost sure I read the book when it was first published. However, that was a long time ago & I was interested to see what the landscape of women's crime writing was like 35 years ago & whether I would agree with Mann's opinions on the women known as the Queens of Crime.

The first half of the book is a survey of the development of the crime novel & the different types of hero & heroine. The second half concentrates on the five authors & gives an account of their lives & careers. I found it fascinating to read of the many forgotten novelists whose work had not survived but who have recently been reprinted in series such as the British Library Crime Classics. Mann suggests that their work just wasn't good enough to survive but tastes change & what was seen as irredeemably old-fashioned 50 years after publication is seen as fascinatingly retro after 85 years. The availability of digital publishing has also made the work of a lot of forgotten authors available again & I think that phenomenon helped to create the appetite for Golden Age mysteries that has been satisfied by the many reprints we're enjoying now.

One comment that I had to smile at referred to

... the numerous excellent writers like Margaret Kennedy, E M Delafield, Angela Thirkell and Storm Jameson, to mention only a few, whose sensitive and literate novels are out of fashion now.

All these authors have been reprinted as paperback or eBook editions in the last few years & are enjoying quite a revival. Even more delicious is that the revival of "sensitive and literate" women's fiction owes so much to Jessica Mann's sister, Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books. That's just a tangent but I couldn't resist quoting it as an example of how our reading lives have changed for the better & our access to books has broadened since the 1980s.

Mann discusses the appeal of crime fiction in the twentieth century & argues that the chaos of life leads to a desire for order which is satisfied by a novel that creates order out of strife. The popularity of mystery novels focusing on murder & disruption during WWII would seem counter-intuitive but, on the contrary, there was a feeling of reassurance in reading a novel that tied up all the loose ends & restored normal life at the end. Crime was the most popular genre during the War & the puzzle detective novel was at its height during the 1940s. Exotic settings, in an age when foreign travel was more difficult & unusual, added another layer to the reader's enjoyment. Agatha Christie set her books in the Middle East, Egypt & the south of France as well as in St Mary Mead & London. Closed communities - from a wartime hospital to a fashion house, theatre or Oxford college - were also popular & the authors that used these settings often knew them intimately. If you're a reader of Golden Age crime, you'll recognize those settings & the authors all made use of either personal experience or detailed research to make the books unforgettable.

Mann also contrasts the formulaic novels of the Golden Age with their stock characters & bloodless corpses with the more realistic thrillers that were published in the 1960s & 1970s. She describes the difference as ...between optimism and pessimism, almost, in some cases between hope and despair. Formula may bring a sense of comfort but greater realism was inevitable as society changed after the War. Even Agatha Christie, whose novels relied more on fiendish plotting than on description of either character or place, tried, not always successfully, to move with the times in her novels written in the 1950s & 1960s. The continued popularity of these writers is also remarkable & most of them continued writing after the period that has become known as the Golden Age. Dorothy L Sayers stopped writing detective fiction in the late 1930s but her books have never been out of print & Mann sees them as the books that can be read with pleasure as novels even after the reader knows the denouement of the plot (I agree with that. Sayers is one of the few detective novelists I reread often for the pleasure of revisiting the 1930s). Margery Allingham died in 1966 & Josephine Tey in 1952 but they are still popular, maybe even more so now than in the 1980s when Mann was writing. Ngaio Marsh was the only one of the five authors alive when Mann wrote Deadlier Than the Male (Marsh died in 1982).

In her quest to discover why these "respectable English women" (Marsh was a New Zealander & Tey was Scottish but they both mainly set their books in England) are so good at writing about murder, Mann looks at their lives & careers.

... I believe that their experiences tended to induce in them similar assumptions: that stability was desirable, and when threatened, should be restored; that reason should prevail over violence; that the customs of a secure and unthreatened class had an intrinsic merit. I think that the ethos they expressed in fictional form was acquired during and from their own lives, and was equally attractive and admirable to readers less able to express it.

The biographical details of the writers' lives are briskly told. She looks at the trajectory of each author's career, from Dorothy L Sayers quite openly admitting that she wrote the Wimsey books for money & stopped when she discovered something else that she wanted to devote herself to (her translations of Dante) to Margery Allingham's pragmatic desire to write books that will sell (she came from a family of writers). Josephine Tey & Ngaio Marsh were much more interested in the theatre. Tey wrote some successful plays & referred to her detective novels as her knitting while Marsh wrote to finance her theatrical work, producing plays, especially Shakespeare & her crime fiction was very much in second place. Mann knows the work of all these writers well & can discuss plot & the development of character. The reticence of these five writers about their personal lives may have led them to write detective fiction with its strict rules & conventions rather than more personal forms of fiction. They would be unlikely to be completely comfortable writing thrillers like Patricia Highsmith, with her fascination in the character of the criminal or like Ruth Rendell & P D James, who write much more realistically & graphically about murder & about the effects on those who come into contact with it. She sees writers of romantic suspense, like Mary Stewart & Helen MacInnes, as the heirs to the Golden Age writers, rather than crime writers who tear away the veil of respectability & look at evil so directly.

Deadlier Than the Male is a great overview of the development of detective fiction & the work of these five women writers in particular. Although there have been many biographies & critical volumes devoted to these writers, Mann's insights into the influence of the life on the work & her judgements on the work, are still very relevant today.

Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction - Melissa Schaub

If ever there was a book title that ticked all my reading boxes, this would have to be it. The combination of middlebrow fiction with the Golden Age detective novel is irresistible. The intriguing subtitle of the book is The Female Gentleman, & I was curious to find out what this meant.

Schaub places the detective novels of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham & Georgette Heyer (she also discusses Heyer's romances) in a line leading from the Victorian Angel in the House & the New Woman texts of the 1890s through to the novels of the feminism of the 1970s & 1980s. The disdain of Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf for these middlebrow writers & their audience intrigues Schaub. All these writers are still in print & their work is enjoyed today when the equally revolutionary novels of the New Woman writers - Mona Caird, George Egerton & Sarah Grand - have been largely forgotten. Schaub discusses the "boomerang" nature of many of the plots of New Women fiction. The authors allow their heroines considerable freedom until about the halfway point of the novel & then they have to be reined in & usually punished by the end of the book for their temerity in pushing the boundaries of convention.

The popularity of detective fiction has been apparent since Victorian times & Schaub briefly discusses characters such as Rachel Verinder in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone & Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, but it was only in the post WWI era, when education & political change led to women gaining the vote, that women could realistically take on the role of sleuth, becoming female gentlemen, with the same codes of honour as their male counterparts.

... the core of the ideal is a woman who is competent, courageous and self-reliant in practical situations, capable of subordinating her emotions to reason and the personal good to the social good, and possessed of 'honor' in the oldest sense of the term. These are personality traits, corresponding with the moral aspect of Victorian gentlemanliness. Most of the characters who fill the Female Gentleman role also fulfill the more archaic class aspect of gentlemanliness through birth or breeding, but with significant revision consistent with the class negotiations performed by the middlebrow novel as a whole.

After WWI, many of the male fictional detectives were scarred by their experiences in the trenches. Lord Peter Wimsey is probably the most famous example, suffering shell shock & eventually finding stability in his work as a detective. Even then, he's prone to emotional collapse at the end of a case when he has to confront the fact that his actions have led to a murderer's execution. He's just one example of the effete young gentleman contrasted with the women in detective novels of the period who take on masculine traits almost in compensation. Emotional self-control is crucial & the heroes & heroines of these novels often display a detached ironic form of speech, Lord Peter & Harriet's piffle is the best example.

The loosening of social conventions is also important here. Women had experienced a measure of freedom during the war, working as nurses or in munition factories. Suddenly young women could walk through London alone, without a chaperone, without the threat of being taken as prostitutes. Elizabeth Dalloway, in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, takes a walk through London, unchaperoned, riding on a bus, which is even more radical than her mother's stroll to buy flowers. Women were shortening their skirts, even wearing trousers & ties, smoking in public, voting & earning a living. Although middlebrow novels are often seen as conservative, the examples here show the rewards of feminism as women became better educated & more politically active.

The Female Gentleman is characterised by her sense of honour, physical & moral courage, self-reliance, sense of submitting her personal desires to the greater good & usually belonging to the upper middle to upper classes. Often she has become an outcast from her social class because of the need to earn a living or because she has gone outside the accepted conventions of the class she was born into. Critics have called these novels conservative because of the predominance of upper class characters & the often casual racism & anti-Semitism of the times but highbrow & Modernist fiction wasn't exempt from these attitudes & the authors often treat characters of different races with sympathy.

Harriet Vane has been to Oxford, earns a living as a writer & lived with her lover, Philip Boyes, without expecting or wanting marriage. It was only when Boyes humiliated her by offering to marry her once she had passed his "test" of devotion, that she left him & was then accused of poisoning him with arsenic in Dorothy L Sayers's Strong Poison. Lady Amanda Fitton, in Allingham's novels, designs airplanes & Agatha Troy, in Marsh's novels, is an artist. All these women have the attributes of the gentleman & they are portrayed as the intellectual equals of the men they marry. It's significant that the novels of women writers like Allingham, Marsh & Sayers all depict such an equal relationship. There may be an element of wish fulfillment here but the concept was certainly not so outrageous as to be unbelievable in the context of the times. Along with the more traditional spinster amateur sleuths like Christie's Miss Marple & Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver, there were other single women like Sayers's Miss Climpson & Miss Murchison, who represented another reality of post-war society, the surplus women who overturn the stereotype of catty old ladies in boarding houses & country villages, using their considerable skills to pursue justice & outwit villains.

I feel that I've only skimmed the surface of this book. I found the idea of the Female Gentleman to be thought provoking & intriguing. I've read nearly all the novels discussed (there are some inevitable spoilers when discussing plots but I would think most readers of this book will be fans of the authors discussed & will already know the plots backwards) & Melissa Schaub's prose is readable & blessedly free of jargon. The discussions of the books, their plots & characters are guaranteed to make you want to read or reread one or more of these books immediately. 

The Late Scholar - Jill Paton Walsh

Jill Paton Walsh has written several novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane, the characters created & made famous by Dorothy L Sayers. The Late Scholar is the latest of these & it's a real treat for anyone whose favourite Sayers novel is Gaudy Night (as mine is).

It's the 1950s & Peter is now Duke of Denver, inheriting the title from his brother, Gerald. Among his many duties, Peter discovers that he is the Visitor of St Severin's College, Oxford. The Visitor of an Oxford college has mainly ceremonial duties - installing the Warden, for example. However, the Visitor can also be called upon to resolve disputes &, in this capacity, Peter has been asked to resolve a dispute which has turned very nasty indeed.

The College is in debt & the fellows are split on the course to pursue to pay off the debt & put the College on a better financial footing. The College owns a valuable Anglo-Saxon manuscript that may have been annotated by Alfred the Great. The fellows have an opportunity to purchase some farmland that has opportunities for development but to buy the land, they must sell the manuscript. The college is locked in a bitter dispute with the votes on either side evenly divided. The casting vote belongs to the warden of the College, who has disappeared. Then, the murders begin. Peter & Harriet are dismayed to realise that the methods used by the murderer have been suggested by the murders in Harriet's books which were, in turn, based upon some of Peter's cases. Harriet & Peter go to Oxford hoping to relive happier times but find themselves hunting a murderer.

I enjoyed The Late Scholar very much. Dorothy L Sayers is my favourite novelist of the Golden Age & I have reread her books many times. I've also enjoyed all of Jill Paton Walsh's continuations & new novels as she obviously admires Sayers & has an immense fondness for the characters. There are many echoes of Gaudy Night in this book & Miss Lydgate & the Warden of Shrewsbury have cameos as well as favourite characters from the Wimsey novels - Bunter, of course, Uncle Matthew & the Dowager Duchess, a little frailer but still as loquacious as ever.

The novel isn't just a wallow in nostalgia, though. The plot is satisfyingly full of clues & possible suspects as well as the obligatory red herrings. I especially enjoyed the discussions about the authenticity of the manuscript & its annotations (Bunter's photographic skills come in handy, here) & the young scholar Jackson whose enthusiasm for the manuscript is based on his hopes of basing his career on studying it. The dons are a mixture of the noble & the venal & the atmosphere of Oxford is as seductive as ever. I'm not usually a fan of authors adapting or continuing the series of others but I think this is the exception. Jill Paton Walsh has done a fine job & fans of Peter & Harriet are in for a treat.

Conundrums for the Long Week-end - Robert Kuhn McGregor with Ethan Lewis

... the fictional history of Peter Wimsey has become emblematic of its time. Unlike practically any of the other famous fictional detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey's career was fully defined by a single epoch. He came to life as the long week-end began in the wake of the Great War; he disappeared as World War II sealed the week-end's close.

The subtitle of this book is England, Dorothy L Sayers & Lord Peter Wimsey. The authors have combined literary criticism & social history to place Peter Wimsey & Dorothy L Sayers in the England of the interwar period. As Sayers is my favourite Golden Age detective novelist, this book was always going to appeal to me. It was written in 2000 & I'm almost sure I read it back then. However, seeing it in a recommended list of e-books on Amazon was enough to inspire me to download it & read it again over the last few days.

McGregor & Lewis have looked at the life of Dorothy L Sayers & tell the story of how she came to write the Wimsey books. At first, she wrote them for the money. She was an avid reader of detective stories & thrillers & throughout the series she makes some quite pointed comments about other writers. She was also unhappy in her personal life with several frustrating & unfulfilling relationships & the birth of her illegitimate son, John Anthony. She kept her son's existence a secret from almost everyone & especially her parents. She worked as a teacher &, more famously, at Benson's advertising agency, until the success of the Wimsey novels enabled her to concentrate on her writing.

The other focus of the book is the political & social history of the period between the wars. Famously called The Long Week-end by Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in their book of this name, McGregor & Lewis trace the preoccupations of Sayers & her world in the themes & settings of the novels. Each chapter begins with an overview of the political & social situation in England & Europe & then the discussion moves on to Sayers's life & the novels she was working on. This certainly focuses the reader on the topicality of many of the plots & social settings of the books, especially the far-reaching impact of the Great War on England. Peter Wimsey suffered from shell-shock & the after-effects of this are evident in the early books of the series. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club begins on Armistice Day & features several characters who have been damaged by their war service. Have His Carcase is set at Wilvercombe, a watering place where middle-aged women fall in love with gigolos & the agricultural slump leads to the commission of a horrible murder.

Sayers had an intellectual interest in the writing of detective fiction & wrote Introductions to several collections of stories by the best-known authors in the genre. She especially acknowledged the influence of Wilkie Collins & Sheridan LeFanu, the 19th century writers who paved the way for Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace & the Golden Age writers. As a graduate of Oxford, Sayers was also interested in the role of women in society & her creation of Harriet Vane, detective novelist, accused murderer & the woman Peter Wimsey wants to marry, allows her to explore this theme. Through Harriet, Sayers is able to discuss the writing of detective fiction as well as provide a compelling portrait of a professional woman. My favourite novel in the series, Gaudy Night, is the least conventional as a detective novel. Set mainly in a women's college at Oxford, Harriet takes centre stage as she tries to discover the identity of a malicious poison pen. Discussions about the place of women in society & the importance of the intellectual life are just as important as the detection.

The final book about Peter & Harriet, Busman's Honeymoon, started life as a play &, apart from the beginning of a novel, Thrones, Dominations (later finished by Jill Paton Walsh in 1998) & a few short stories written during WWII, that was the end of the story. McGregor & Lewis examine the reasons behind Sayers's decision to abandon this unfinished novel. Apart from having finally married off her two leading characters, Sayers was writing Thrones, Dominations during the period of the death of George V & the Abdication crisis of 1936. Suddenly the theme of marriage was just a little too delicate. Sayers was also becoming interested in other work, including her plays on religious themes & so the novel was put aside & never resumed.

Conundrums for the Long Week-end is a book for Wimsey fans who have read all the books as the plots are fully discussed & the murderers are named. You have been warned! I enjoyed it because of the way that the authors tied together the wider social history of the period with Sayers's life & the progress of her creation of two of the most intriguing characters in detective fiction.

Back to Work

Back to work this morning after a lovely week off. The tomatoes, basil & lettuce have been planted, the vegie garden mulched, the Christmas cake made & lots of reading, walking & playing with the cats has been done. A perfect holiday, in fact.

At one point last week, I had four books on the go, which is a lot, even for me. I reread Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers & then realised that it's less than a year since I last reread it. I finished two other books that I'll be reviewing later this week. And I've been dipping into Persephone no 100, The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is a celebratory collection of short stories because one of  the specialties of Persephone Books is the short story collection. About a third of these stories have been published in short story collections in the Persephone collection, another third have featured in the Persephone Quarterly & Biannual & the rest are stories by authors not published by Persephone. The authors include Persephone favourites Dorothy Whipple, E M Delafield, Mollie Panter-Downes & Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The "new" authors include several who would be perfect for Persephone's list in the future - Phyllis Bentley, Malachi Whitaker & Helen Hull (who is about to become a Persephone author when her book, Heat Lightning, is published next year).

Two of my favourite short stories are in the collection. Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes is the title story of the WWII short story collection that was one of Persephone's early successes. I love this poignant story of a woman who is a mistress, not a wife. She has met her lover every Thursday night but when war breaks out & he's posted overseas, she realises that she will have no right to be told if he's wounded or killed. Roman Fever by Edith Wharton is a story of secrets & misunderstandings between two women who meet again after many years on a visit to Rome. It's a beautifully subtle story with an ending that you will never forget. I've read it many times & I'm always moved by the last few lines.

I've bought several cookbooks lately & this lovely book about baking was one of them. I couldn't wait to try a recipe so I chose the Marbled Chocolate Crumble Cake.

Whether it looks like the picture in the book will have to wait until morning tea time when I see if I followed Rachel's directions properly or overdid the swirling! The recipe called for two bowls of cake batter, one plain & one chocolate. Spoonfuls of each mixture are placed in the tin & then it's swirled together with a skewer to give a marbled effect when it's cut. It's so easy to give the mixture one more swirl but it looks alright from the outside. Fingers crossed!

Gaudy Night - Dorothy L Sayers

I've been watching the latest series of Lewis with Kevin Whately & Laurence Fox. One episode was set at a Gaudy at an Oxford women's college & as soon as the program finished, I grabbed Gaudy Night & started reading it for the umpteenth time. This is one of my favourite books. Dorothy L Sayers is one of the few mystery writers I can reread. Even when I know whodunit, I read her books for the atmosphere & flavour of England in the 1920s & 30s. As P D James has said, if you want to know what it was like to work in an advertising agency in the 20s, you read Murder Must Advertise. Sayers worked in such an agency & she gets the office politics just right. The Nine Tailors is a loving portrait of life in a village in the Fens, the same kind of place where she grew up. Have His Carcase is a portrait of a seedy watering place where rich widows are seduced by gigolos. In some ways, the investigation takes second place for me to the evocation of a period that has gone.

Harriet Vane is one of my literary heroines & Gaudy Night is her story. Peter Wimsey makes only fleeting appearances until quite late in the book. Harriet is a successful detective novelist. It's five years since she was tried for the murder of her lover, Philip Boyes, & acquitted with the help of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was convinced of her innocence from the moment he first saw her. Wimsey has pursued Harriet with proposals of marriage ever since & she has done her best to reject him. When she is invited to her old college's Gaudy, she decides to go, if only to meet a friend who is now ill & wanting to see her. Harriet has avoided Oxford since she went down. She had to work hard to make a living & then her notoriety made her wary of going back. Now, she's made a success of her professional life, however unsatisfied she may be personally, & she returns to Oxford.

The Gaudy reunites Harriet with old friends, some of whom she's happier to see than others. She finds she grown apart from Mary Stokes, the friend she came to meet, but is happy to be reacquainted with others, including the Dean, Miss Martin, & her English tutor, Miss Lydgate. Some of the other dons, including spiky Miss Hillyard, are less pleased at Harriet's return. When Harriet finds an anonymous letter in her gown, accusing her of murder, she thinks nothing of it. There have been many such letters & she returns to London after the Gaudy reflecting on how soothing a little time at Oxford pursuing some research would be.

A letter from Miss Martin, asking Harriet to visit Shrewsbury College for the opening of the new Library, awakens Harriet's desire to retreat to academe for a while. The Dean & the Warden of the College want to consult Harriet about a spate of unpleasant practical jokes & anonymous letters that have been sent to dons & students. The letters are explicit & very nasty, accusing people of disgusting crimes & unnatural acts. They all seem to be against the idea of women intellectuals, seeing an unmarried woman as an abomination against nature. Harriet realises that the letter she found was part of the same campaign & therefore the culprit could only be a don or one of the college servants as very few students were in college during the Gaudy.

Harriet agrees to investigate & returns to College to research the life of Sheridan LeFanu as well as helping Miss Lydgate with the proofs of her new book as a cover for her investigations. While there, she makes the acquaintance of Peter Wimsey's nephew, Lord St George, & is pursued by Reggie Pomfret, a young undergraduate who she discovers helping a very drunk Shrewsbury student over the College wall in the middle of the night. The incidents & letters keep coming, including the vandalising of the Library the night before the official opening & letters being sent to a vulnerable student who attempts suicide as a result. As the atmosphere among the dons grows more poisonous, Harriet realises that she needs help & decides to consult Peter.

Gaudy Night isn't just a mystery novel though. It's really Dorothy L Sayers's love letter to Oxford. She writes so lovingly about Oxford, the University life, the College & all the personalities who inhabit it. The dons are beautifully drawn. Miss Martin is a delight as is Miss Lydgate, a scatty, lovable woman who is devising a new theory of prosody that requires her to rewrite her book endlessly while driving the printers mad with her use of different fonts & notation styles. The clash of personalities among the dons is convincing & Harriet discovers the downside of community life as well as the joys of scholarship & the ordered beauty of a life devoted to the mind rather than the messiness of personal relationships. This description of Oxford is idyllic & full of nostalgia for the days of Sayers's youth,

April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamour of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turl; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don; even in the High, the roar of car and charabanc seemed minished and brought low, for the holiday season was not yet; punts and canoes, new-fettled for the summer term, began to put forth upon the Cherwell like the varnished buds upon the horse-chestnut tree, but as yet there was no press of traffic upon the shining reaches; the mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.

Harriet pursues her investigations & comes to terms with her feelings for Peter, finally seeing a way forward  that will allow her to preserve her hard-won independence while allowing someone else into her life. I always find the last few pages, as Peter & Harriet stroll through the College grounds after hearing Bach's Double Violin Concerto, very moving.

The pictures by Natacha Ledwidge are from my lovely Folio Society edition of Gaudy Night. I don't feel I'm done with Dorothy just yet though. In the middle of a hot Melbourne summer, maybe The Nine Tailors should be next or The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club?

The Attenbury Emeralds - Jill Paton Walsh

A new Lord Peter Wimsey novel, what a treat! Jill Paton Walsh has successfully completed a couple of manuscripts left by Dorothy L Sayers & now she has created a completely new story using Sayers’s familiar characters. The previous Wimsey story, A Presumption of Death, was set during WWII. Now, in The Attenbury Emeralds, it’s 1951. Peter Wimsey is 60, still blissfully happy with Harriet, his detective writing wife. They have three sons, live in London & still own the country house, Talboys, that Peter bought for Harriet as a wedding present & where they spent their honeymoon in Busman’s Honeymoon. Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, is still her inimitable self at 85. Bunter hasn’t changed a bit or grown a day older & lives in with his wife, Hope, & son Peter, known as PB.

Peter is reminded of his first case, the disappearance of the Attenbury emeralds, by the obituary of Lord Attenbury. It was 1921, Wimsey had returned from the trenches in a nervous mental state & the house party at the Attenburys was to be his first foray into Society. The Attenburys were family friends & it seemed to be the perfect opportunity to test the extent of Wimsey’s recovery. The occasion for the house party was the announcement of the engagement of the eldest daughter, Charlotte, to Reggie Northerby. At dinner on the first evening, Charlotte was to wear the family jewels, a suite of emeralds with an enormous square-cut emerald as the centrepiece. The emerald could be worn as part of a necklace or as a tiara & had a Persian inscription on the back. The Attenburys are surprised to receive a visit from Mr Nandine Osmanthus, an envoy from an Indian Maharaja wanting to buy the emerald. The Maharaja owned the pair of this one & Wimsey sees the jewel, almost identical to the Attenbury’s emerald except for the inscription on the back. Lord Attenbury refuses to sell & sends Osmanthus off pretty smartly.

That night, when Charlotte goes to her room to dress for dinner, she discovers the emerald is missing. She appears at dinner wearing the paste replica of the jewels that was kept in the house as the real emeralds were kept at the bank & only brought out on special occasions. But, the theft can’t be kept secret & Wimsey begins investigating, hindered by heavy-footed Inspector Sugg & helped by Charles Parker, later an Inspector at Scotland Yard & brother-in-law of Peter. Peter eventually tracks the jewel down to a pawnbroker & discovers that Reggie Northerby had pawned it. Charlotte breaks her engagement but Northerby isn’t prosecuted for the theft & everything seems to have been successfully hushed up.

A few days after Wimsey & Bunter have told Harriet the story, the present Lord Attenbury, grandson of the old Lord, appears asking for Peter’s help. The authenticity of the emerald in the bank has been questioned. Attenbury is desperate to sell the emerald to save the family home but nothing can be done until the disputed provenance is settled. Peter agrees to investigate as someone has turned up claiming that the emerald in the Attenbury’s bank is not their emerald & can prove it. The emerald is certainly authentic but how could it have been swapped for another? Is this the Maharaja’s emerald that Peter saw all those years ago? There was no opportunity for Mr Osmanthus to have swapped the stones & the emerald has only been out of the vault a few times since.

Peter follows the trail back over the years, talking to the family & anyone else who had access to the jewel. He discovers some accidental deaths that now seem less accidental & more sinister. Then he discovers that there were originally three emeralds & the Maharaja will do anything to reunite them.

This is a wonderful mystery story. I loved meeting up with Peter, Harriet, Bunter, Charles Parker, the Duke of Denver & his snobbish Duchess. Jill Paton Walsh has immersed herself in Dorothy L Sayers’s work & doesn’t strike a wrong note throughout. Peter & Harriet trade quotations & sleuth as energetically as they ever did. This is a real treat for fans of the Wimsey stories who have read the series over & over again (as I have) & are thrilled to have a new story to enjoy.

This is my last post for 2010. Happy New Year to everyone who visits the blog. I'll be back tomorrow with some reflections on my first year as a blogger & some reading resolutions for 2011.

Death of an Expert Witness - P D James

P D James has just celebrated her 90th birthday and, as she is one of my favourite mystery writers, I thought I should celebrate too. I’ve reread Death of an Expert Witness and, as it’s been many years since I read it, it was just like reading a new book as I’d forgotten all the details. Death of an Expert Witness was published in 1977. P D James was a well-established writer by this time. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962 & her latest novel, The Private Patient, was published in 2008. I hope it won’t be the last, although there was certainly an elegiac feel about it. Lots of loose ends in the personal & professional life of her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, were tied up & it was a fitting end to the series if it is the end.

Adam Dalgliesh is one of the most enigmatic detectives in crime fiction. Like all the best detectives – Wexford, Poirot, Jane Marple – he arrived on the scene fully formed & has aged so slowly that he seems scarcely older in the latest book than he did in Death of an Expert Witness, published over 30 years before. Dalgliesh grew up in a Norfolk rectory; lost his wife & only child in childbirth just before the first book was written; has had several unsatisfactory relationships since but has only recently met the right woman, Emma Lavenham, proposed to her & been accepted. He is also a poet & this only adds to his air of mystery & detachment.

P D James is the heir of the great Golden Age writers, especially Dorothy L Sayers, who she greatly admires. I have a BBC audio production of Gaudy Night & at the end of the story, there’s an interview with P D James & Jill Paton Walsh, a novelist who has written continuations of some of the Wimsey novels. She has a new book coming out very soon, The Attenbury Emeralds, that I’m looking forward to reading. The interviewer was quite out of her depth, obviously knew very little about Sayers, but James & Paton Walsh were marvellous in their depth of knowledge & their enthusiasm for Sayers as a woman & for her work. That knowledge & enthusiasm for the Golden Age conventions of mystery fiction is obvious in her work.

P D James works within the conventions of the traditional murder mystery. Her books often have a closed circle of suspects like the stately home mysteries of the 30s. The locations are closed communities such as religious institutions, schools, hospitals, legal chambers or a publishing house. In Death of an Expert Witness, it’s a forensic laboratory in the fens of Norfolk. Place is very important to James. She has said that her books often begin with a place, a landscape. She builds up a picture of a group of people. Murder shockingly intrudes on the lives of the characters & Dalgliesh & his team must bring order out of chaos. In Death of an Expert Witness the first 50pp introduce the reader to the scientists, pathologists, police officers & clerical staff of the Hoggatt’s Forensic Science lab. Edwin Lorrimer, the Senior Biologist, is a stern, secretive man. He was overlooked for the post of Director of the lab, he’s tormented by the end of a love affair & he is unforgiving in his treatment of any of his staff who can’t meet his high professional standards. When he is murdered in his laboratory there are many suspects & Dalgliesh needs all his skill to discover which of these people was driven to murder.

Much as I enjoy a good murder, I think my favourite book by P D James isn’t a murder mystery at all. In 1999, she published Time to be in Earnest, a diary of her 77th year. I found this book fascinating. I love diaries & letters but this was more than just a diary. It’s the closest thing to a memoir or autobiography we’re likely to get from P D James. She knew she was writing for publication & so she uses the diary to look back over her life. She talks about her childhood, her marriage, her work in various government jobs, all of which gave her valuable material for her books & her thoughts about life in Britain in the 1990s. She talks about her favourite writers, how & why she writes, her long relationship with her publishers & agents, all the minutiae of a writer’s life. She is also an incredibly busy woman, attending meetings & events connected with her work for the Society of Authors, the BBC, House of Lords & the Church of England.

I love reading about detective fiction as much as I enjoy reading the novels themselves. P D James wrote a wonderful book last year called Talking About Detective Fiction. It was written to raise funds for Oxford’s Bodleian Library. This little book, only 150pp, is a history of the detective novel with special emphasis on the writers James most admires. The core of the book for me was her discussion of the four great women writers of the Golden Age – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham & Ngaio Marsh. She feels an obvious affinity with these writers & has an appreciation of their strengths & the appeal they had in their own time & analyses the influence they’ve had on the writers who came after them. If you want a concise history of the best detective fiction of the last century, there could be no better guide than P D James.

A Busman's honeymoon & the delights of audio books

I’ve just finished listening to Ian Carmichael reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon, the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey books. This post isn’t really about the book or Sayers or Wimsey, but about the delights of audio books. The book is wonderful, the culmination of the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane, the woman he saved from the hangman in Strong Poison & pursued for five years until they finally came together in an equal, loving relationship at the end of Gaudy Night. Busman’s Honeymoon is really one for the Wimsey fans though. It’s been described as a love story with detective interruptions which pretty much sums it up. The book begins with Peter & Harriet’s wedding & takes them on their honeymoon to Tallboys, a Tudor farmhouse in the village where Harriet grew up. The bliss of the honeymoon is disturbed by the discovery of the body of the former owner in the cellar & the Wimseys investigate. There’s a wonderful cast of eccentric villagers, from Mr Puffett the chimneysweep to Miss Twitterton, the victim’s niece, a spinster who keeps Buff Orpington hens. I’ve read the book probably half a dozen times & listened to the audio book at least as often.

My library had all the Wimsey books read by Ian Carmichael on cassette & recently they’ve been released on CD so I’m taking the chance to listen to them again. To me, Ian Carmichael is Peter Wimsey. Whenever I read the books, I hear his voice. He played Wimsey on television in the early 70s & you can see a photo of my old video copies of some of the series above. That series didn’t include any of the Harriet Vane books & in the 80s, Edward Petherbridge & Harriet Walter starred in a new TV series of Strong Poison, Have His Carcase & Gaudy Night, all excellent adaptations. Ian Carmichael died at the great age of 90 earlier this year & I was interested to read that he had also played Bertie Wooster on TV in the 60s. As a recent Wodehouse convert, I think he would have been perfect in the role.

I’ve ended up writing about the book after all but it’s the fortunate combination of book & narrator that I really want to emphasize. Elaine’s post at Random Jottings about the delights of listening to Richard Armitage reading Georgette Heyer led me to reflect on my own love of audio books. I always listen to an audio book in the car on my daily drive to work. My library has a great collection of unabridged audio books & I look forward to each new delivery. Abridged vs unabridged is another point. I prefer unabridged recordings because I wouldn’t want to read an abridged version of a book so why listen to only part of the book? I’m lucky to have had access to a wide collection of unabridged audio as I certainly couldn’t afford to buy them. I also enjoy radio productions. The BBC have done hundreds of full-cast recordings of classics, Shakespeare, fiction, mysteries, anything you could think of. But, I mostly listen to unabridged audio books read by one narrator.

Some of my favourite listening experiences have been Harriet Walter reading Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, Gwen Watford reading some of the Miss Read books, Christian Rodska reading the C J Sansom Shardlake mysteries, Cornelius Garrett reading Anne Perry’s WWI series (I loved his reading so much that I would wait for the audio book to come out rather than reading the book), Bill Wallis’s gruff, smoky voice reading the Ruth Dudley Edwards mysteries, Samuel West reading Mary Wesley & Iris Murdoch, Robert Glenister reading The Fall by Simon Mawer. My absolute favourites though are the Barbara Pym recordings done by Chivers Audio many years ago. I listened to the cassettes until they were nearly worn out & I do hope they release them on CD as part of their current program of Bestsellers on CD. Juliet Stevenson reading Excellent Women, Susan Jameson reading A Glass of Blessings & Julia McKenzie reading Some Tame Gazelle were my favourites. I still hear their voices when I reread the books.

Of course, not every listening experience is a stand-out. There are some narrators I avoid like the plague because their reading is so dull it puts me to sleep. Not a good idea when driving! Audio books are another way of reading for me. I never have enough reading time but at least I can have a book read to me when I’m driving, ironing or cooking. Now if I could only work out a way to read in my sleep, I might have a chance at getting through my tbr shelves before my 100th birthday.