calimac | it's a mystery

peake says, apropos of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, that when he was a young crime-fiction reader, he "found it a tremendous disappointment. Now I understand why, it is barely a crime novel at all. That is just the excuse for a novel about the social consequences of the First World War, which is fascinating but not what I expected back then."

My comment was that I find this interesting, because the only thing that can make a murder mystery palatable to me is for the mystery to be the least important part of the plot. Which is why I like Sayers. It was many re-readings before I could even remember whodunnit in a Sayers novel.

I think the reason is that the necessity, in a classic by-the-rules mystery, to try to hide the culprit's identity from the reader means that that identity is not contingent. By merely jiggling the clues a little, it could just as easily turn out to be someone else (or mere happenstance) without altering the book much at all. The murderer could have been innocent, or an innocent person the murderer, without changing their observed behavior or personality. Consequently it doesn't matter emotionally who the murderer is, and I can't bring myself to care.

I realize this makes me sound like Edmund Wilson, a fate normally to be avoided, but honestly ...

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Interesting point. I recall reading that Unpleasantness was also one that Sayers herself was not happy with, what with the induced confession, followed by suicide. That later, she wasn't pleased that that's the way she had it play out.

But your observations intrigue me. I think it explains why I like P.D. James. The people in her stories are intriguing as personalities. The first book of hers that I read was Death of an Expert Witness, and the way people reacted to Dalglish interested me.

I'll have to go think about this some more.

*nodding*

Two things I tend to skim in murder mysteries: long descriptions of the dead person (fromwhich no doubt clues will be built on) and discussion of clues, with personality and character left out. I read them for the social interaction, I have no interest in forensics & puzzles.

Yes, and there's two things you always learn from those descriptions of the dead person.

1) Murder victims are people whom either everyone loves (thus giving nobody a motive) or everyone hates (thus giving everybody a motive, a tack culminated in some ridiculous Agatha Christie story in which it turns out that everybody did it).

2) Murder victims are people of precise habits. Always down for breakfast at exactly 8:15 a.m., you could set your watch by it, always have exactly the same meal, etc etc bloody etc.

That was "Murder in the Calais Coach," a.k.a. "Murder on the Orient Express," on film. Not quite so unlikely when you consider that the "victim" was drawn on the Lindberg baby kidnapper, who was for a time certainly the most hated being in America. You could have found hundreds of good citizens who would have lined up for the privelege of sticking a knife in such a creature. I give Christie credit for the audacity of the idea. I'm sure that after having written so many mysteries, she must have had a list of "bet you can't" ideas, such as the one where they all did it, the one where the detective is the murderer, etc.

The ridiculousness wasn't in conceiving a character whom everybody hates, but in having everybody kill him, in a kind of ritualized firing squad except with knives.

I give Christie credit for the audacity of the idea. I'm sure that after having written so many mysteries, she must have had a list of "bet you can't" ideas, such as the one where they all did it, the one where the detective is the murderer, etc.

Or the one where the narrator is the murderer.

I don't give her credit. What she should have realized is that if she had to come up with so many contorted ideas, she was writing too many mysteries.

While Christie wrote all the way into the 1970s, most of the really audacious ones date from the 1920s and 30s. So they were height-of-her-power ideas, not what-am-I-going-to-do-now ideas.

I know you'll say that that means the height of her powers was pretty low, but at a time when many top mysteries were about train schedules, her books really did stand out. And to say she wasn't as good as Sayers, well, there was only one Sayers. Other composers weren't as good as Beethoven, either.

It's really unimportant that the crime in Murder on the Orient Express would be ridiculous in real life. It's only important that it be interesting in the context of the novel itself.

It's ridiculous in the novel too. (Note that it wasn't me who came up with the "Christie had run out of ideas" defense.)

Sayers' crimes often don't make any sense either. What makes her a better writer is that her novels are also about something else, so the reader can ignore the parts that don't work and still get a good story.

The difference between "not as good as Beethoven" and "not as good as Sayers" (or at least "not as good as Sayers at crime plotting") is that "not as good as Beethoven" can still be pretty good.

There do seem to be two types of mystery readers: the 'armchair detectives', who like to try to puzzle out the mysteries (me), and those who like to read for character and setting and don't so much care whodunnit (Georgie). Our tastes do overlap quite a lot, though.

When Agatha Christie wrote plays beased on her novels, she sometimes changed who the killer was -- because it was as easy to do as you observe. (I nonetheless have a tremendous weakness for her novels, and have recently reread 15 (!) of them, with no end in sight.)

I of course also love the Sayers books. Another classic British mystery I admire tremendously is Green for Danger by Christiana Brand -- great setting (rural hospital during WWII), and I liked all the characters so much I was quite distressed that one of them would have to turn out to be the killer.

it's a mystery

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