Who Cares Who Killed ... Whoever It Was?

I've just finished reading the latest releases by two of my favourite mystery novelists, P. D. James's The Private Patient and Elizabeth George's Careless in Red. (I know they've been out for a while; I was waiting for the paperback editions.) Both books are better than fine as examples of their type--though George is in fact American, both authors write what we could call highbrow British police procedurals, leisurely in pace, attentive to setting, driven by character more than plot. Both write well; James's prose is more economical, while George's would (IMHO) benefit from more stringent editing, but both offer their readers intelligent complexity of language and thought. The depth of character and theme both achieve justifies James's repeated assertion that crime fiction provides a useful structure for the novelist without necessarily limiting the literary potential of her work.

Yet for all their virtues, I found myself unexpectedly dissatisfied with both of these novels, for reasons that are based in their form. Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of 'puzzle mysteries,' such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly "whodunnit." (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character's outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives--which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.

That, I think, is very much what has happened with both James's Adam Dalgliesh and George's Thomas Lynley. Every one of their books is populated by a new array of people, but they are the ones with whom we have longstanding relationships--remarkably longstanding, indeed, as James has been publishing Dalgliesh mysteries since Cover Her Face in 1962, and the first Lynley novel, A Great Deliverance, was published in 1988. And though Dalgliesh and Lynley have always been complex and interesting protagonists, in recent books so much of significance has happened in their lives that I turned to these latest instalments motivated far less by curiosity about the latest corpse than by the desire to know how things are going with them. While actually reading the books, I took a fairly perfunctory interest in the investigations but I was keenly interested in what came to seem the regrettably few sections focusing on, for instance, Dalgliesh's relationship with Emma Lavenham (and not just because it's a little victory for English professors everywhere). The real novelistic potential of The Private Patient emerges, I think, in the scene in which Emma confronts Dalgliesh in his professional capacity and we see, fleetingly, the difficulty that even these two extremely intelligent and independent people might have reconciling law and love, justice and humanity. But this material is not developed, and in fact the novel in which it does become the focus would have to leave the genre of detection quite far behind. (Gaudy Night is a rare example of a novel that I believe successfully balances human and literary interests with mystery elements, partly by integrating the case so thoroughly with the personal aspects of the story and making both the detection and the romance converge on the same themes.) Careless in Red spends more time on Lynley's personal situation, but again his struggle to move forward after the tragedy of two novels ago (see how I'm avoiding spoilers, in case anyone hasn't already read this excellent series?) is subordinated to the case at hand--though George does set the case up with thematic echoes of his tragedy.

I can hardly fault either author for the relative weight they give to the professional, rather than personal, business of their characters. That's the kind of book they have undertaken to write. Also, as their protagonists are professional detectives, policing is integral not just to their work, but to their identities. But I do wonder if even James, the acknowledged Grande Dame of the genre, hasn't finally shown us the end point (dare I say the dead end?) of a commitment to this genre. Just introducing the kind of story arcs they have given their protagonists recently suggests that James and George might be chafing at the constraints of detective fiction, wanting to write a straight novel of psychological and moral development, a novel in which incident is second to character, a novel squarely in the tradition James has always claimed as hers--that of Austen and George Eliot and Trollope. At any rate, that's the kind of novel I find I wish they would write. Over the years they have succeeded in getting me quite emotionally involved in the lives of their main characters (and not just Dalgliesh and Lynley, either, but Kate Miskin, Barbara Havers, Simon and Deborah St. James...). The corpse and suspects, however, are never more than passing acquaintances.

On a somewhat tangential note, I was struck reading The Private Patient by the elegaic note on which it ends, in a passage which also echoes the wonderful 'squirrel's heartbeat' passage from Chapter XX of Middlemarch:

She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defense against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.

Though of course I would not rush to assume that a character's views are those of the author, it is hard not to read this final paragraph from a novelist who has spent nearly five decades telling us about "deeds of horror" as a reminder, even a consolation, that even in a murder mystery, death need not define life.

Weekend Miscellany: P. D. James, Persephone Books, James Wood

Some articles and reviews of interest:

At The Times, there's an interesting interview with P. D. James, who has a new Adam Dalgleish novel coming out. James has often remarked that she sees herself working in the tradition of 19th-century domestic realism as much as the detective novel; her interest in the Victorians shows up again here, as does her conviction that writing mystery fiction frees up an author to focus on character and theme:

“There’s huge fascination in examining the human personality under the trauma of a murder investigation. All of us present a carapace to the world that conceals things we wish to keep to ourselves. In a murder investigation, these defences are often torn down.” This gives a novelist “a huge opportunity”, one particularly valued by this writer, who, besides filling notebooks with “plotting and planning”, sets store by knowing her characters intimately. “I move in with them. I sympathise with the view Trollope expressed that you have to get up with your characters and live with them all day.” (read the rest here)

Also at The Times, there's a piece on Persephone Books:

There can be little doubt that Persephone, which reprints lost or forgotten women's classics, has filled a gap left by the bigger Virago. Quieter, more interior and less obviously feminist than the latter, it celebrates its first decade as the champion of the kind of book trendy that literati like to dismiss as dull and domestic.

Virago's founder, Carmen Callil, when recently describing how her team chose whether or not to reissue a particular author, would dismiss rejects as “below the Whipple line”, referring to what she called, with withering dismissal, “a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us”. Persephone, as it happens, has Dorothy Whipple as one of its star authors, alongside Virginia Woolf, Mollie Panter-Downes and classic children's authors such as Noel Streatfeild and Richmal Crompton, whose adult novels have long been out of print.

“I think Dorothy Whipple is compulsively readable and perceptive, and the 20th-century Mrs Gaskell,” Beauman says. “I'm passionate about her work.”

So, indeed are Persephone's customers, who have fallen upon its 78 reissued novels with joy and ensure sales of between 3,000 and 10,000 a book. As the shop - which sells Persephone mugs, dressing gowns and cards behind a window dressed with a felt cloche hat and an old typewriter - suggests, being a Persephone reader is almost a lifestyle choice for intelligent women who want to settle down with what has been described as “a hot-water-bottle novel”.

Yet alongside bestselling nostalgia collections such as Kay Smallshaw's How to Run Your Home Without Help are darker tales, such as Penelope Mortimer's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, and wholly enchanting adult fairytales such as The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

These are the kind of tremendously English books often enjoyed (and parodied) by the heroines in Nancy Mitford and Stella Gibbons. They do, however, have a serious readership, and Persephone's list of those who have written prefaces for the reissues include Penelope Fitzgerald, P.D. James and Valerie Grove. (read the whole story here)

I don't remember seeing any Persephone titles in bookstores here, but now I'll have my eyes open. And if they don't have Canadian distribution, there's always the excellent Book Depository (free international shipping!).

Better late than never: the New York Times weighs in on James Wood's How Fiction Works:

The grosser elements of fiction — story, plot and setting, as well as the powerful drive of certain authors to expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular, absorbing the anarchic and ennobling the vulgar that has impelled such messy master­works as “Huckleberry Finn,” “On the Road” and Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” — intrude not at all on Wood’s presentation, which proceeds in the steady, dark-gowned, unruffled manner of a high-court judge. Wood seems firm in his conviction that accounting for How Fiction Works needn’t involve bewildering digressions into Why Writers Write or Why Readers Read. For him, that matter seems settled. They do it to perfect the union of Wood’s vaunted “artifice and verisimilitude,” two virtues he treats as though carved on a stone tablet, and thereby to promote the cause of civilization; not, as is so frequently the case outside the leathery environs of the private library, to escape the constrictions of civilization, redraw its boundaries, decalcify its customs, or revive the writer’s or reader’s own spirits by dancing on its debris. (read the whole review here)

This review (which concludes with blog-worthy snarkiness, "there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap") is not nearly as favorable as Frank Kermode's in The New Republic a little while back. How Fiction Works has certainly received a great deal of attention, in print and on blogs: here are a few more links, in case you just can't get enough criticism of criticism. You have to give the man credit for getting a lot of people talking about what makes good literary criticism.

P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

It's Reading Week here, which means a slight break from the day-to-day pressures of the term. Still, one's pedagogical conscience is never easy, so I've been balancing work and relaxation by reviewing P. D. James's memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, with an eye to teaching An Unsuitable Job for a Woman again in a week or two. James's subtitle is "A Fragment of an Autobiography," which rightly suggests a work that is neither tightly crafted nor expansive; it is an uneven but ultimately, I think, engaging mix of simple diary entries (her success has made her a very busy woman, we learn), recollections of her earlier life, and reflections on subjects of interest to her, from the history of crime fiction (of course) to current events such as the death of Princess Diana (the memoir begins in August 1997) or her experience serving on the jury for the Booker Prize, about which she is certainly frank ("Our final choice of Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger was only arrived at after a long argument which nearly made us late for the Guildhall dinner, and the choice was not unanimous"). (For what it's worth, Moon Tiger is one of my favourite books, and would probably have gotten my vote!) Throughout, her strong, if slightly crotchety, personality provides the unifying thread; she is opinionated and decisive, especially in her literary judgments (on The God of Small Things, for instance, she remarks that "it seems to me somewhat lush and overwritten, a beginner's attempt at a Naipaul or a Rushdie"), impatient with pretense and show, and unapologetic about her own chosen form:

I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer's internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn't expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution. (12-13)

She talks often, actually, about the particular importance of setting in her novels; this is a topic we will address at length in class as we work on Unsuitable Job, in which the beauty of Cambridge provides a particularly poignant (as well as thematically significant) backdrop for the horrors of the story. An expert on the history of her own genre, James is also widely read in Victorian and contemporary fiction, though she is generally more enthusiastic about the former than the latter. Here, in a passage that exemplifies the bookish, even erudite, yet somewhat meandering or incidental quality of the book, she quotes one of my own favourite lines about the novel, Henry James writing on Trollope (an unlikely alliance, perhaps?) then finds herself meditating on the changing role of fiction in society:

One quotation I would most like to see in any revised edition [of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, which she was reviewing for the Sunday Times] are the words of Henry James, writing of Anthony Trollope, "We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities." It is an elevanted ideal of fiction, but, thinking it over, I am not sure that it is any longer true. Dickens could write a novel which would move his readers to pity or outrage and act as a spur to action, but surely today it is television which, sometimes powerfully, sometimes superficially, examines for us the dilemmas and concerns of our age, reflects our lives and opens us to the lives of others. . . .

In particular, the so-called literary novel too often seems removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. The very description 'literary novel' is, for many readers, an indication that the work is not intended for them. With some notable exceptions--David Lodge is one--the worlds of industry and commerce, the very means by which society gains the wealth which supports our art and literature, are alien to the modern novelist, perhaps because they are worlds few of us have experienced. Have we a responsibility to break free from our cabined preoccupations, our fascination with history and our literary exploitations of the evils of the past and address ourselves to more contemporary themes? Is there a novelist today who could write--or would try to write--War and Peace or Trollope's The Way We Live Now with its brilliant portrayal of the financier Melmotte, the nineteenth-century Robert Maxwell?

Unless the novel, particularly the so-called literary novel, can reach the hearts and minds of ordinary people, reading will increasingly become a minority interest. . . It would be futile, and indeed silly, to suggest that novelists today can recover the hierarchical and moral certainties of Victorian England. Some writers would argue that we can no longer comfortably write in the tradition of social realism because we no longer know what we mean by reality. I suppose the extremes of literary experimentation are some novelists' ways of explaining the arbitrariness and chaos of human existence, an attempt to express the inexpressible. Thomas Hardy wrote that the secret of fiction lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal. But what adjustment can a writer make if, in a world governed for him by chance and chaos, he is no longer able to believe in things eternal and universal? (77-78)

On that note, it's interesting to note that James herself is a devoted, but not pious, Anglican, meaning she appreciates and participates in religious ritual but finds that compatible with what seems a fairly loose commitment to specific doctrines.

There's much more of interest in the book, especially for fans of her novels or of detective fiction more generally. I'll end here with some of the rules she provides, first for reviewers, and second for those adapting books for television. First, from her advice for reviewers:

1. Always read the whole of the book before you write your review.
2. Don't undertake to review a book if it is written in a genre you particularly dislike.
3. Review the book the author has written, not the one you think he/she should have written.
4. If you have prejudices--and you're entitled to them--face them frankly and, if appropriate, acknowledge them.
   

And some sage words for TV people:

1. [her #6] Must we always have a car chase? Men may like them (although I can't think why); most women find them boring in the extreme. And if you must have a car chase, must it go on for so long? It need last only as long as it takes us to go and make the tea.

The book itself ends with her engaging address to the Jane Austen Society of North America on "Emma Considered as a Detective Story," well worth reading. Finally, if you want to listen to James speak for herself, try this excellent lecture on "The Craft of the Mystery Story," which she gave at the Smithsonian in 1995.