In general I prefer the American, hard-boiled mystery to the cosy English one. Ross Macdonald is my god. I still enjoy a “cosy” murder however, and there may be more well-written ones of this type. Perhaps it’s just that I find derivative “cosy” mysteries tolerable, if kitsch, while derivative hard-boiled mysteries are just brutal. See the works of Mickey Spillane, passim. Josephine Tey, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh (not British, really, but it comes to the same thing) — I enjoy all these, Tey particulary. P.D. James is a little precious and over-intellectualized, but that’s not to say I haven’t read them all. I even like Agatha Christie, though her works form their own peculiar class; the puzzles are insoluble because they require characters other than human beings to carry them out. The Christie murderer is someone of insane cunning, capable of planning things to the minutest detail, and simultaneously posessed of incredible, reckless daring, which allows them to seize a random, propitious moment for their scheme.
One thing that always strikes me in reading post-WWII novels set in England is just how incredibly poor it was (yes, and in the few set in Scotland, it’s worse). In novels set in the late ’40’s, people are literally scrounging around for firewood, and everything is rationed. Everyone has that one annoying cousin who married a Yank and sends envy-provoking postcards about their new washing machine. 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. Nor do I think of the 1970’s as a time of rocketing prosperity for Britain. So, when was the Wirtschaftswunder? When did the UK get to be the rich place it is today? Or should I stop trying to glean reliable sociological details from murder mysteries?
{ 20 comments }
John Isbell 02.28.04 at 11:33 am
England let go of the war under Thatcher. Much as I have hated her. Listen to Tommy and Dark Side of the Moon (and The Wall), and you’ll see how easily current issues slide into WW II, alongside Dad’s Army, even for hip UK rock singers.
Abiola Lapite 02.28.04 at 12:52 pm
“Or should I stop trying to glean reliable sociological details from murder mysteries?”
Yes.
On a more serious note, I think a lot of the post-war rationing in Britain had to do with feeding the starving masses on the Continent, rather than with British poverty per se.
harry 02.28.04 at 2:54 pm
I think the turn preceeds Thatcher, but not by much, and john is probably right that the Thatcher years were when people really let go. Listen also to post-1969 Kinks. Britain was bankrupted by the War, which led to the suddenness of the dissolution of Empire, and the recovery didn’t come to till the mid-to-late 50’s. If you watch episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (made in the early 70’s) you will see still-existing bomb-sites in the opening sequences. The last bomb-sites were built over in the late seventies, and live bombs were still being found at that time. On the east coast — Lowestoft, Pakenham, etc, concrete pill boxes built into the beach were still there in the 1980’s, and may be there still for all I know.
The housing stock wore out, and until the slum clearances of the 60’s people routinely lived in houses without hot water or inside toilets. I heard somehwere that even in 1970 15% of households did not have an inside toilet. I remember (as a child in the 60’s) visiting relatives with outdoor loos, and no-one thinking this was a sign of deprivation (though it was not fun!). My elder relatives still wax nostalgic about the war to be honest.
I like all the people you mention — apart from Christie, whom I’ve never been able to get into. But Tey — I didn’t realise anyone else still read her. She’s terrific.
You want a recommendation? — Julian Symons (read anything with a copyright date of 1954 or later). Not just for the effrotless writing, but also for the extraoridnary sociological deatil — you get a sense, eg, of how commerical TV had an impact on london life in the late 50s early 60’s, and a sense of the dreariness of suburban life in the late 60’s… He’s far the best British male crime writer of the century (well, excluding Chandler, but he’s an honorary American, surely).
bryan 02.28.04 at 2:56 pm
‘ Everyone has that one annoying cousin who married a Yank and sends envy-provoking postcards about their new washing machine. ‘
sounds like a very inbred people.
Henry 02.28.04 at 3:13 pm
I like Macdonald too, but prefer the James Crumley of _The Last Good Kiss_ and _The Wrong Case_. On sociology and detective novels, I’m fascinated by P.D. James Adam Dalgleish novels, even though they’re objectively dreadful and pretentious. They read like the last sclerotic wheeze of a dying class. Fiction for upper middle class church going Tories, suspicious of the rich and the nasty aristocrats above, terrified of the squamous, heaving masses below, grudgingly coming to accept the Thatcherite precept that ‘deserving’ members of the lower orders can occasionally be allowed to rise in life (as long as they foreswear their earlier allegiances and tug their forelocks with sufficient sincerity). Michael Dibdin has a good Rendellian novel (set in the early 1980’s as far as I remember), about murder and the squalidities life as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Cambridge. _Dirty Tricks_, it’s called.
Another Duncan 02.28.04 at 3:16 pm
If you want brutal, hard boiled British crime writing you should try Derek Raymond.
cafl 02.28.04 at 6:40 pm
Reginald Hill — the Pascoe/Dalziel mysteries. Interesting view of Yorkshire.
harry 02.28.04 at 7:11 pm
bq. 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.
Chris Bertram 02.28.04 at 8:30 pm
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.
bob mcmanus 02.28.04 at 10:08 pm
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.
Michelle Dulak 02.28.04 at 10:13 pm
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.
Michelle Dulak 02.28.04 at 10:30 pm
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.
Mrs Tilton 02.29.04 at 1:09 am
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?
clew 02.29.04 at 1:54 am
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.)
Mr Ripley 02.29.04 at 4:09 am
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.
nick 02.29.04 at 6:30 am
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.
Matt Weiner 02.29.04 at 5:29 pm
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.
Tim Worstall 02.29.04 at 6:51 pm
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.
Dave F 03.01.04 at 12:37 pm
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.
harry 03.01.04 at 4:39 pm
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.
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