Comments on: All Mod Cons

By: harry

harry — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 16:39:47 +0000

Yep, sweet rationing was the last to go—but it was reintroduced almost immediately because of moral panic over the pent up demand! I think of Dickinson as Symons’s successor—really fine stuff (though less sociologically informative). As with Symons, though, I’d avoid the first 3 or 4—they are at best ok. I just finally read JB Priestley’s ‘Salt is Leaving’—I don’t know if he did any other mysteries, but it is quite interesting, and has fine characterisation.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 12:37:55 +0000

I must say I endorse Harry’s recommendation of Julian Symons. Good writing, fine characterisation and atmosphere, subtle plotting. A million light-years away from the appalling Agatha. Kingsley Amis’s detective novel,The Riverside Villas Murders, is equally good on Fifties Britain. Anyone else remember the packets of crisps with a little blue bag of salt? I miss that still. I think sweet rationing was the last to go, and for a London war baby (1941) bombed by Hitler, that was the bitterest pill.

By: Tim Worstall

Tim Worstall — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:51:53 +0000

A few mistakes up there about post war Britain I feel. It is not that we were bombed flat, or bankrupt, or rebuilding. Germany was all of those things and more and yet by the mid 1960’s had surpassed us. And don’t say it’s all Marshall Aid either : the UK got more of that than anyone else. It is precisely becasue we had a socialist Govt which spent the money, what little there was, on things like the NHS, nationalising the commanding heights of the economy ( coal , steel, railways ) and generally insisted on showing that Hayek was right : state planning just isn’t the way to get rich. Corelli Barnett has a number of books on the subject.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 17:29:14 +0000

Let me cast a vote for Peter Dickinson among the cosy crowd. Often he doesn’t bother to reveal the mystery until the last ten pages—I mean reveal what the mystery is, not reveal the solution—but that’s part of his charm. Also, any mystery writer who violates the rule that The Last House Party does deserves major respect.

By: nick

nick — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 06:30:07 +0000

In novels set in the late ‘40’s, people are literally scrounging around for firewood, and everything is rationed. Well, the post-WW2 period is a big cultural/technological separator between the UK and US. While Americans were redirecting the war effort towards producing domestic appliances, the British were generally rebuilding the stuff that got bombed. The result is that Britain took perhaps 20-30 years to experience the cultural shifts that took place in 1950s America: suburbanisation, the interstates triumphing over public transport (Dr Beeching excepted), and so on. And it’s something that I think, as an expat Brit in the US, worked to Britain’s advantage, since we got the NHS, nationalisation, and the reform of secondary education. Plus, rationing actually contributed to decent health, even if in a rather desparate way. In the Rendell book One Across, Two Down, published in 1971, the main characters don’t even have a refrigerator in their flat, and it is a source of friction when the meat in the larder gets high by Sunday (they are meant to be poor, but not abjectly so). This seems bizarre to me. Not so: my American wife and I spent an idle hour comparing the years at which our respective parents got their first phone, colour TV, microwave, washing machine etc. She seemed horrified by such ‘deprivation’. Like I said: Americans got refrigerators and colour TVs, while the Brits got the NHS for when the beef went bad. Britain still pines in a way for a pastoral idyll of the 50s and 60s, when the memory of war (and gently receding hardship) seemed to bind communities together. Plus, for those born in Britain in the 40s, there’s also a nostalgia for cultural homogeneity that’s generally a little hard for their kids to swallow. But that’s why Sunday night on ITV has its perenially popular ‘Back When There Were No Darkies Hour’, as I’ve come to describe the slot reserved for Heartbeat, The Royal and all those other excruciating dramas. So, Britain may have let go of the war, but not the post-war decades.

By: Mr Ripley

Mr Ripley — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 04:09:30 +0000

Never refer to Ross Macdonald as “American” in Canada: they claim his as one of their own on accounta he was brought up there. I guess the English do the same with Raymond Chandler.

By: clew

clew — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 01:54:55 +0000

My mother (born 1945, oil brat) remembers travelling through London as a very small child and meeting another child who had never seen an iced cake; who had never seen that much sugar at once. (They’d brought her one, knowing what it was like in England; I think it made her throw up, though that might be another story.)

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 01:09:52 +0000

Och aye, Chris, Daughter of Time, to be sure. I enjoyed it immensely. But is your fellow CTer Daniel quite happy about its message that Welshmen are evil?

By: Michelle Dulak

Michelle Dulak — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:30:47 +0000

You’re right about Agatha Christie, though — and it’s not only the murderers who do humanly impossible things, either. I think the one that first made me laugh out loud was the novel in which a woman manages to marry the same man twice. Without noticing.

By: Michelle Dulak

Michelle Dulak — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:13:16 +0000

Good heavens, people, nine comments and no one has so much as mentioned Elizabeth George? I mean, no, she isn’t English (I think she lives somewhere near San Diego actually), but I can’t think of another mystery writer more interested in British class issues, or better at taking them on from all sides.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 22:08:34 +0000

Last Good Kiss is of course a classic. Exceptional. Am sitting here looking at about 5000 paperback mysteries. Hard-boiled by preference. But you don’t like the “derivative” stuff. Francis. Stuart Kaminsky. Jane Haddam if you like Christie. Never liked Ross MacDonald. One Freudian plot in six books.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 20:30:28 +0000

I think The Daughter of Time was one of the first adult novels I ever read. My copy is a 1967 printing which puts me at about 8 or 9 at the time. There never was a Wirschaftswunder I’m afraid. There were many desperately poor people then and there are still today. But their location and visibility has changed a lot, as has the way they are connected to the rest of British society. Places like Anfield (Liverpool) or Salford (Manchester) were and are desperately poor. But then they were inhabited by the working poor. Today’s poorest live in sink estates like Hartcliffe or Southmead (in Bristol) and they often aren’t working. If you want to see real crushing poverty go to the valleys of S. Wales around Merthyr – no Wirschaftswunder there! My impression is (I don’t have any figures) that social mobility was higher then too (despite appearances). My partner grew up in Anfield and both she and others who grew up round there made the transition to the middle class via grammar school and university. I think it is much much more difficult for those born in locations of real poverty today to escape in a similar fashion.

By: harry

harry — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 19:11:16 +0000

Reginald Hill — the Pascoe/Dalziel mysteries. Interesting view of Yorkshire. Also sociologically interesting because it spans the period we’re talking about (1969-present), at the beginning of which the war is a close memory, and Britain is not rich. But, the pre-1985 novels are not anywhere near up to the standard of the later ones.

By: cafl

cafl — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 18:40:46 +0000

Reginald Hill—the Pascoe/Dalziel mysteries. Interesting view of Yorkshire.

By: Another Duncan

Another Duncan — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:16:54 +0000

If you want brutal, hard boiled British crime writing you should try Derek Raymond.