Tue 1 Mar 2011
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: LESLIE FORD – Siren in the Night.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[33] Comments
by Marcia Muller
LESLIE FORD – Siren in the Night. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #303, 1948; Popular Library K68, 1964.
Grace Latham, Colonel Primrose, and Sergeant Buck reappear in yet another locale in this wartime story. Grace is spending the spring in San Francisco because her son, a naval air cadet, is stationed there; Primrose and Buck have traveled west because of the colonel’s involvement in the war effort.
The city is at its charming best, except for placards indicating where the air-raid shelters are and “the sudden rising wail of the alert siren, and the lights of that Golden City fading like a million synchronized fireflies dying in the night.”
A blackout, in fact, plays a key role in the discovery of the murder of Loring Kimball, popular resident of San Joaquin Terrace, where Grace has taken a house.
If all the lights in the city hadn’t gone out except for the one in Kimball’s study, no one would have stopped in to investigate, and his body might not have been discovered for some time — thus allowing the killer to escape the scrutinizing eyes of Colonel Primrose.
But the lights do go out; the body is found by neighbor Nat Donahue (who is immediately suspected of the crime); and when all residents of,the small street are accounted for, it turns out that a number weren’t where they should have been at the time of Kimball’s death.
As Primrose probes into the lives of these residents, hidden passions and secrets come to the surface. The suspects are varied and well characterized, and the portrait Ford paints of wartime San Francisco is memorable.
While as mannered as Ford’s other mysteries, there is a dark side to this novel, as exemplified by the blackout and the implied threat of annihilation by the enemy.
The Primrose/Latham series is best read in order of publication, since its chief charm lies in the complexity of the relationships among the main characters. Other notable titles include The Simple Way of Poison (1937), Old Lover’s Ghost (1940), and The Woman in Black (1947).
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 1st, 2011 at 9:35 pm
I’m getting mixed signals here. Not with Marcia Muller’s review, per se, nor Ellen Nehr’s, but I’ve been looking for other appraisals of Leslie Ford’s work, and to my eyes, it hasn’t been until recent years that her books has been classified as politically incorrect, as most observers have put it.
A generally favorable article from the Baltimore Sun in 1997 appears here:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-03-30/features/1997089127_1_jones-brown-annapolis-leslie-ford
But quoting from this recent online article
http://www.girl-detective.net/leslie_ford.html
“Like white gloves and seamed stockings, Leslie Ford is greatly out of fashion these days. Worse, she’s considered politically incorrect–ironic, when you reflect how many of her novels revolved around Washington and politics. The world Ford wrote of, the world of old money and good family, a world where a woman needed education and career training less than beauty, brains and breeding, no longer exists. It had ceased to exist by the 50s, let alone 1962 when Ford wrote her final novel […]
“Speaking of color, Ford takes a lot of heat for her portrayal of blacks (in particular). In Ford’s world, blacks are servants. […] they are never the equal of the white moneyed principals that people Ford’s puzzles. African-Americans are viewed with affectionate tolerance. […] Ford (like all of us) was a product of her generation and background, and her attitudes reflect the social mores and beliefs of her class and era. More importantly, they reflect the beliefs and attitudes of the characters she is writing about […] there is little point in trying to revise history.”
I’ve read only one book by Ford myself, THE WOMAN IN BLACK, reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=262
and which I found only mildly non-PC. As a matter of fact, I ended up saying much the same sort of thing as “Girl Detective” (Diana Killian).
To say more, I will have to read more of Leslie Ford’s mysteries and decide for myself.
As to the other matter we have been discussing recently, is Leslie Ford’s first novel a milestone in the history of mystery fiction? Anyone whose work appeared in THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST consistently through her career may also need some re-appraisal along those lines.
Reference: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/FMI/s1027.htm#A32786
March 1st, 2011 at 9:53 pm
See, these Ford reviews aren’t bad at all. Some (i.e., Professor Nickerson) would note the contrast in tone of these reviews by women compared with the earlier ones by the men. And they may have a point!
I notice older Fords are pretty rare and command nice prices. I suspect there’s a certain market out there (Rue Morgue’s refusal on political grounds despite pleas to reprint Ford’s books on also suggests this).
I don’t know what percentage of the readers market for classical mystery today is, but I get the feeling it’s definitely more than half women.
I used to have “Ill Met by Moonlight” but the cover fell off and I’m not sure I do anymore.
On the racism angle, I think almost any genre books set in the South at that time are going to be problematic. Eberhart’s portrayals of blacks in her southern setting books can hardly be called progressive and Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase has this gem, uttered by the lovable spinster narrator (expunged from later editions):
“As for Thomas [the black butler] and his forebodings, it was always my belief that a negro is one part thief, one part pigment, and the rest superstition.”
This after Booker T. Washington had been invited to dine at the White House! Blah.
March 1st, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Steve,
I don’t know offhand whether Raymond Chandler ever referred to Ford (he criticized a great many fellow writers at one time or another), but when he condemned the formulaic “slicks” writers I suspect he had in mind people like Rinehart, Eberhart and Ford, who made so much money from serializations in the glossy magazines.
I think the feeling today among women academics is that considerable sexism entered into the appraisals of male critics in dismissing the genre works of women writers, including the Crime Queens. I think the fact that these women often seem more socially conservative had something to do with it though. Someone like a Chandler clearly found these books to indulgent of the wealthy. I know, for example, that the aristocratic detectives of Sayers, Allingahm and Marsh nauseated him.
March 2nd, 2011 at 12:44 am
Funny how people rather ignore history than learn from it.
March 2nd, 2011 at 12:56 am
Well, of course, it’s up to Rue Morgue, but personally I’m all for reprinting as many works from the period as possible.
If the same position were taken by Applewood (I believe that’s the name), the early Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books would not be reprinted; and I have found those books fascinating, much more interesting than the bland modern rewrites).
But the censorship game has been going on for some time. American publishers got rid of anti-Semitic references in Agatha Christie books in the 1940s (and of course Ten Little Ahems! was changed to And Then There Were None and the poem to “Ten Little Indians”–the latter word itself an endangered word now).
Modern editions of The Circular Staircase changed the sentence I quoted above. Modern editions of Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue changed her detective’s use of the word “dago” to the use of the word “Levantine” (is this much of an improvement?).
Raymond Chandler’s gay slurs in The Big Sleep, on the other hand, have been left untouched, I believe. Double standard, or is he considered “literature” and not touchable?
The historian in me would like to see all left alone, but publishers do have to worry about offending audiences, particularly today, when so much offense is so readily taken.
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:10 am
After watching HOWL last night – a docupic using as dialog the exact words in the courtroom transcript of the obscenity trial for Ginsberg’s landmark poem – it’s interesting to see that we still live in an age of passive agressive censorship. There is that edition of Huckleberry Finn that is being published with all traces of the word “nigger” expunged, too. I doubt we will be seeing a huge removal of the words “fag” and “faggot” from fiction in the decades to come. Double standard indeed!
Intelligent readers understand the printed word both in its historical context and at a subjective level. Publishers only worry about offense if it cuts into their profits. I doubt many are worried about their reputations these days – nearly every publisher is owned by Random House, Penguin or Doubleday. There are few reputations to be preserved when most of them have been swallowed up by media conglomerates.
I receive Rue Morgue’s catalogs all the time and never heard of this conscious decision not to reprint Ford because she might be offensive to the modern reader. Sounds exactly like what the prosecution was trying to do to Ginsberg’s book. I’m disappointed in the Schantzes. But I guess I should have known better. Their choices in reprints do tend to be those that will sell and many of them are rather generic and bland IMAO.
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:24 am
John
Says Rue Morgue Press:
“Then there are writers like Leslie Ford, whose ubiquitous and unconscious racism automatically eliminates her from our consideration, customer requests notwithstanding.â€
http://www.ruemorguepress.com/about.html
March 2nd, 2011 at 1:28 pm
I checked Haycraft’s comments on Zenith Brown’s “Leslie Ford” books and he’s not really hostile. I think he calls the Ford books pleasant and entertaining, or words to that effect. He definitely prefers Zenith Brown’s David Frome books, however (he suggests that the plots of the Ford books leave something to be desired).
But you can be pleasant and entertaining and not necessarily “landmark.” There are a lot of pleasant and entertaining writers back then.
What Professor Nickerson does is single out this feminine domestic/Gothic novel tradition in opposition to the hardboiled tradition and she picks a few writers as important examples of it: Green, Rinehart, Eberhart, Ford, Seeley.
This all done while the non-hardboiled/non-Gothic tradition, the Golden Age puzzle, is mostly ignored in its American setting. David is right that this exclusion embraces women writers who didn’t write in the Gothic mold, like Craig Rice (who arguably could be included in the hardboiled discussion), Phoebe Atwood Taylor (even though she had spinster narrators in her early ones), and “David Frome.”
Is Leslie Ford really more important than David Frome? Let alone Rex Stout or Ellery Queen or Erle Stanley Gardner?
Like I said, I have no problem bringing attention to any Golden Age writer (I think every single one, even the alternative classics, makes a bit of the “gorgeous mosaic” of the Golden Age and helps us better understand the period). Howard Haycraft certainly should not be treated as the final word on everything. But, say what you will about some of his judgments, he mentioned practically everybody! The sort of modern selective exclusion of certain writers that we are seeing is unfortunate.
March 2nd, 2011 at 1:36 pm
On Rue Morgue, yeah, my understanding is they are not worried about the sales issue here–when they see something as “racist,” they simply will not reprint it, whether they think buyers would mind the references or not.
I don’t always trust their judgment, however, because they made a comment on their website indicating they found Bruce Hamilton’s To Be Hanged to be anti-Semitic because it had a reference to a character’s being a “little Jew” (the speaker means that literally: he is talking about a diminutive Jewish person). I thought this was being pretty hypersensitive. This was hardly Sydney Horler and Bruce Hamilton was, like his brother Patrick, a very intelligent and interesting writer.
On Rue Morgue’s reprints, they really do tilt to the “zany ladies,” don’t they? They did reprint some Glyn Carr, which was nice. Also a couple Carrs and Baileys (though I much prefer the Bailey stories to the novels).
March 2nd, 2011 at 3:51 pm
There is certainly no obligation by the Schantzes to reprint anything they don’t wish to, no matter what reason. I’m completely happy with everything they HAVE published, and if anything, “happy” is an understatement.
I think, though, that when they made the statement above, that’s when Leslie Ford’s reputation started to get tarnished.
No one, as far as I know, had made an issue of her “unconscious racism” before. Neither of these two reviewers from 1001 MIDNIGHTS, for example, thought it important enough to mention. The time-line on this is worthy of further investigation, it seems to me.
One other thing. Note the phrase “customer requests notwithstanding” in the Rue Morgue statement. That Leslie Ford is being requested is a key revelation. She may not have written mysteries geared to my tastes, but quite obviously she still has readers.
March 2nd, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Despite the fact I don’t much care for Ford as Ford, I have no problem with reprinting her, or any once popular writers work. My only argument ever was the idea of placing her on a pinnacle her work just didn’t deserve.
Frankly I find Ford’s casual racism worse than some of Sapper’s ignorance, Horler’s vehemence (his bad writing is a bigger problem), or some other popular writers.
I can usually overlook — or at least understand — some of the racism in earlier books, though Sayers always struck me as a bit vicious with hers — perhaps because I expected more of her. To my mind it is always worse from someone who knew better.
Ford, at least writing as Ford, wrote a slick, not particularly well plotted, and rather painless form of mystery that are in many ways the literary equivalent of MURDER SHE WROTE.
Nothing wrong with Jessica Fletcher, but it isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe either.
Re the racism and other flaws in Chandler, there is a difference between rewriting him and rewriting other writers — even famous ones — who are not known for their literary style.
And the male hard boiled writers weren’t immune to being rewritten. Any scan of some of the reprints of Jonathan Latimer’s novels from the 1960’s will show you that. Many of them are extensively rewritten in regard to Latimer’s ‘lively’ unblinking view of Chicago’s shadier environs.
Chandler is above the fray in that department. Hammett too. MacDonald and Macdonald may both have the same grace, but there is nothing in their work to censor in that regard for the most part.
Important as Christie or some other writers might be, their import is not for their literary style, so there is more leeway in correcting little things than with some more well recognised literary icons.
But let us put to bed this idea that the male reviewers of Ford, Eberhart, and Seely missed some great literary quality in their work through gender bias. They may well have missed why those ladies were so popular with their audience, but for the most part they gave them their proper place in the genre.
There doesn’t seem to have been much gender bias when it came to Dorothy B. Hughes, Craig Rice, Leigh Brackett, or Patrica Highsmith, and even more traditionally ‘women’ writers like Charlotte Armstrong were consistently well reviewed and praised by male critics.
There was enough real gender bias, women held back, and held down, women who suffered because of it and did not recieve the recognition they deserved, without manufacturing a controversy to prove a false hypothesis that somehow Leslie Ford was a great undiscovered genius of the genre.
There are unrecognised women writers out there who deserved more attention than they recieved as a result of gender bias. Leslie Ford is not one of them however. Study her by all means, and if you like her work say why — you might even convince me to take another look at her — but don’t try to tell me tuna is caviar — even my nose knows better.
March 2nd, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Yikes!
I never suggested that Leslie Ford was a mystery genius. Just that she sometimes wrote some decent stories. And that quite a few critics are on record as enjoying her better works.
As Marcia Muller says, Ford had good descriptive powers. Her books often went to different locales.
Steve raises important issues about Ford’s treatment of race.
I can’t answer his questions, or give a systematic history of Ford’s racial views.
I seem to recall some ugly slurs in a few early (and pretty bad) novels.
But this seems to subside – mercifully.
Steve’s review of THE WOMAN IN BLACK agrees with my memory. The black maid in the book speaks in dialect – but otherwise is a decent, sensible and hard working person – with NO negative stereotypes.
Ford’s most positive work on black people: MURDER WITH SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY, a non-series book in Natchez, Mississippi. This has a devastating critique of the mistreatment of an honest black chauffeur by the local police. They immediately try to pin the murder on him, as the nearest black man in the vicinity. This whole critique seemed unexpected in Ford!
Ford also praises Natchez for the beauty of its gardens. But satirizes the way some (unsympathetic to her) Southerners cling to memories of the Confederacy. She thinks they ought to forget it, and try to build a future. The book is often funny.
March 2nd, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Mike
I was hoping you’d have more to say about Leslie Ford, and I think you’ve summarized her work quite well.
After considerable thought about it, I’m going to disagree with David and say that I find Ford’s “unconscious racism” less pernicious than he. It reflects on the time and place, and even though Ford was writing mysteries, her books are also time capsules of the period in which she was writing, warts (and worse) and all.
If I were a reprint publisher and wanted to reprint them, I’d certainly go ahead, but I’d also include a foreword to explain what I’m thinking and trying to express right now.
March 2nd, 2011 at 7:31 pm
David
I won’t address the racism issue myself until I have read more than I have, but you’re quite right to turn the topic back to where we came in on this: whether Leslie Ford is worthy of Landmark status in the Cambridge book on American crime fiction.
Right now I’m of the opinion that Mary Roberts Rinehart is, but Leslie Ford is not. She was a popular writer for the slicks in her day, and I imagine her books did well in hardcover.
And even more, her books sold in paperback well after she stopped writing, essentially 1957, with one last book in 1962.
If I had to rate her mysteries right now as to historical significance, using a letter grade, comparing her with the obvious giants of Queen, Christie, Carr, Stout and Gardner, I’d be hard-pressed to go as high as a “B.” A “C plus” is more like it.
Charlotte Armstrong: B
Dorothy B. Hughes: B minus
Craig Rice: B plus
Leigh Brackett: C
Patricia Highsmith: A minus
Mary Roberts Rinehart: A
Mignon G. Eberhart: B plus
Jessica Fletcher: D
Mabel Seeley: ??
This is totally subjective. I can’t back these “letter grades” up with anything but my own gut feeling. They also have nothing to do with literary quality or my own personal enjoyment of their work.
March 2nd, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Steve,
I have no problem with a C+ or B- for Leslie Ford.
An important writer we should not forget: Dorothy Cameron Disney .
She’s a B+. And probably might have been an A- if she wrote more.
I’m still exploring Mabel Seeley. (And Leslie Ford too, for that matter).
March 2nd, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Mike
I was refering back to the article on the Nickerson book — sorry I didn’t make that clear. I have no problem with your comments on Ford — I respect your opinions even when I do disagree because they are well founded.
You are making an attempt to take a very broad view of the genre and find the best of writers at every level. I applaud that effort. But I do think you would agree that the ‘best’ of Ford or even Seely isn’t really comparable in literary terms to the best of Chandler or Queen either historically or in critical terms.
But there have been several broad statements suggesting that Nickerson and others thesis that male gender bias somehow repressed Ford et al, and I don’t think the evidence bears that out.
Ford, Eberhart, Seely and others sales certainly weren’t hurt, and I don’t really think there was a large male audience out there who would have been reading them if gender bias was taken out of the equation.
The more romantic woman’s mystery, sometimes unfairly branded HIBK (and that was pretty much male and female critics) had an audience just like the hard boiled school or the classic detective tale.
As far as I know, unlike the hard boiled and the classic American version no one within the bounds of the HIBK school made a conscious effort to elevate the genre or mystery literature in general by a higher standard of writing. The women who did make that effort were not writing in the HIBK school, at least not the ones I’m familiar with.
Contrary to the idea claimed here by some, or at least suggested, mystery fiction was one of the few genre’s where women — even in the American venue — competed on a much more even field than women and men in other areas.
Not that no one tried to write better HIBK novels. Several even succeeded. But there is no Chandler or Hammett, no Ross Macdonald or John D. MacDonald and no Van Dine, Queen, or Stout either.
If the HIBK writers were trying to make a literary statement they were curiously quiet about it. For the most part they seemed perfectly happy to mine the particular niche they worked in, like the majority of writers in all the other sub genres.
I think what everyone may be missing is the greater tragedy of the insidious gender bias, that many women of the era, well into the 1950’s, may not have seriously tried to work beyond their comfort zone because of the effect of that bias on them.
It would not be long before a generation of fine American women writers came along and felt no desire or need to linger in the HIBK school. They emulated both male and female writers who they felt offered both entertainment and literary value.
But what may be the far more insidious and sad fact about many of the women who wrote in the HIBK school is that because of cultural factors, the gender bias they grew up in, and their own acceptance of gender based imperatives it never occurred to them to stretch, experiment, and expand their efforts the way some writers in the hard boiled and classic genre did.
Nor am I entirely convinced the reason there is no equivalent to the British Crime Queens in the states has that much to do with gender bias on the part of male critics.
Is anyone — other than perhaps Nickerson — really arguing that Ford, Eberhart, or Seely might have been Christie, Sayers, and Allingham if American critics had been less gender biased?
I don’t know why the American Crime Queen didn’t make a real appearance until Grafton and Paretsky or why even as late as Mary Higgins Clark so many women writers feel more comfortable writing books designed mostly for women readers and are so happy to remain there regardless of talent.
I’m not suggesting male based fiction is any better — it isn’t, but neither does it suffer the epithet ‘women’s books.’ I have to say that it looks as if the writers in that school then and now are doing exactly what they want for the audience they want to write for, and as for respect they don’t seem to be any less respected than male writers mining their own sub genres.
Were there American women wanting to write in the hard boiled school who were kept from it by critics or editors biases? Was the critical acceptance of the hard boiled school the result of gender bias? Didn’t Dorothy Parker write a glowing review of THE GLASS KEY in THE NEW YORKER? Did she also write a glowing review of Leslie Ford that Harold Ross repressed?
I would suggest that the HIBK school wasn’t getting much in the way of respect from anyone — not even most of the women who wrote in it. It was a niche, and in that niche there were those at the top and in the middle and at the bottom, but even at the top I think you can make a totally non gender based argument that the best of the HIBK school came nowhere near the best of the hard boiled or Classic Mystery school.
It’s something like trying to compare TOM SAWYER to the Hardy Boys, because after all they are both books for boys. Not all things that are related are similar. Champagne and muskatel are both made from grapes, but there aren’t many muskatel tastings held outside of some of the seedier alleyways.
There is such a thing as objective judgments regarding quality, and without them criticism is pointless. Objectively the HIBK school did not reach the level of the best of the hard boiled school or the Classic Mystery.
March 2nd, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Mike
I agree with your grade for Ford and certainly for Dorothy Cameron Disney, who is underappreciated regardless of what category you put her in.
Steve
I grew up around Grace Latham’s social class, certainly the Southern version, and I admit that unconscious racism and air of superiority probably annoys me more than people who did not grow up around it. I’m not as forgiving of Scarlett O’Hara either. I knew too many of them.
Ford sometimes reminded me of people who set my teeth on edge who I had to see on Sunday for brunch.
Admittedly no one ever died at those brunches, even though I fantasized a few mass poisonings in a Thurberesque mode.
Grace Latham always reminded me of the “Church Lady” who wouldn’t let anyone sit where they wanted too.
March 2nd, 2011 at 9:40 pm
When I said I found Ford’s “unconscious racism†less pernicious than you, David, I did not have to grow up with it the same way you did. There were no blacks nor Southern gentility in the town in northern Michigan where I grew up. But racism? I’m afraid so, and there’s no going back to change or deny it.
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:32 pm
This is a very interesting discussion. One funny byproduct of it is that, since I could only find one Leslie Ford book around here, I ended up ordering several! Just what I needed, more books!
David–
On the critical respect for HIBK, Mary Roberts Rinehart, at least, wanted to be a serious novelist and hated being called a mere “mystery writer.” Professor Nickerson, at least, seems pretty convinced that Rinehart is a significant “middlebrow” writer historically (not “just” a genre writer).
Personally I enjoy some of Rinehart’s earlier work, but find many of her later books bloated and dull (in The Web of Iniquity, Nickerson gives this huge analysis of Rinehart’s The Album that might leave you thinking it’s on the same level with Edith Wharton or something–it’s not! it’s not even on the same level with Ruth Rendell).
But Nickerson’s effectively urging that the female neo-Gothic (HIBK) writers can be bracketed with Chandler and Hammett as important voices in American literary history.
On the other hand, her comments about the clue puzzle sort of mystery, which she always seems to denote as “British,” is very dismissive. She often makes throwaway comments that suggest she seems to think they all take place art weekend country house parties where the guests sit around and exchange witty banter in between murders. It’s such a caricature, it makes me wonder how many of these books she has actually read.
But given that view you can see how she might give short shrift (or no shrift) to American clue puzzle writers.
Leslie Ford (Zenith Brown), who was married to an English professor, specifically said she didn’t view her work as literature of lasting value (see the newspaper article Steve linked).
But she also said she liked getting the murder out of the way and dealing with “the emotional complications.”
There’s the rub.
I think a lot of academics are coming around to embracing even second- or third-rate melodrama as worthy literature (East Lynne has been reprinted by Oxford University Press, for example), superior to the mere puzzles of people like Van Dine and Ellery Queen (at least in his earlier period–presumably Nickerson should be able to relate to the Hollywood period books–also Van Dine’s books are sometimes are rather Gothic themselves).
Nickerson takes the position that the female neo-Gothics tell you about society and the clue puzzles don’t. They are “artificial.” Of course all these books-clue puzzles, neo-Gothics, hardboiled–are highly stylized. I’ve actually found you can learn about society from “mere puzzles.”
Not to mention the books are often amazing accomplishments structurally! But academics like Nickerson aren’t interest in assessing these books for their merits as detective novels.
In Haycraft’s day, I think there was a lot of respect for structural skill in the detective novel, and less patience with what is often the formulaic emotionalism of the women’s suspense novel (unlike with a Margaret Millar or Celia Fremlin tale, say, you know nothing really bad is going to happen to the heroine in a HIBK book, however much she agonizes).
But the Nickersons don’t care about puzzles. And that’s okay, but they need to get past their own feelings and try to portray the period more objectively. Van Dine and Ellery Queen are huge factors in the period, whether you like them or not.
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Oh, Mike Grost, I certainly wasn’t meaning with anything I wrote to convey any disrespect to all your work on your website. I enjoy it very much and find it really quite impressive.
Indeed, Cambridge would have been better advised having you do their American book than the fourteen academics they collected for the project.
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:24 am
Curt
I’ll second that idea of Mike doing the Cambridge book. Even when I disagree with him it is always on the level that Mike knows whereof he speaks.
The same goes for you by the way.
And Steve, don’t feel left out, you too, though you aren’t as cantakerously opinionated as we three can be. Editorial restraint I suppose.
I have no problem with embracing secondary or even lower level writers. You can tell a lot about society from books like Ford’s and others. But because it has value as entertainment and sociological value doesn’t mean it can be placed with the best that the genre has to offer.
To use another of my endless analogies you can really compare Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase to Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh, but both Cheyney and Chase say a great deal about the British reading public in that era and are actually more influential on literature in general in France where along with the American hard boiled school they inspired the Serie Noir books that in turn inspired so many important French film directors.
For that matter you can learn a great deal from disposable literature in general — from Varney the Vampire to Tom Swift to Mack Bolan. Just don’t make the mistake Nickerson makes of trying to elevate them in the literary pantheon. I like Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Achmed Abdullah, and Mark Channing, but I make no claim that they belong with Hemingway — or even Hammett and Chandler. They were just the best of a school of fiction I enjoyed.
If Nickerson and her fellow academics had said that of Ford and company I would have no problem. I can even tell you which I think are the best Sydney Horler novels — and Sydney may be the most repugnant man to ever pen a thriller. Compared to him Ford could qualify for an award from the Martin Luther King Foundation.
That still doesn’t mean they are as good as the more important writers.
Rinehart entertained me in several books — THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE, THE MAN IN LOWER 10, and she is highly important, but if the HIBK thing was dismissed and made fun of, Rinehardt did get credit for what she did. Her best work is singled out by most critics in the genre — if it hadn’t been I likely would never have read her.
That said, if Rinehart is the literary pinnacle of your school of writing it does not speak well for that school in general. I think she is more the pinnacle of success than style — overall Eberhart is more engaging — but at least one Rinehart would be on my list of the most important American mystery novels.*
Despite my dislike of Ford (and it is a mix of finding her an indifferent mystery writer and much of her milieu a stifling mix of lavender and old lace, mint julieps and self delusion), she is a major voice in the field and in her niche — but not in the first class of genre writers and toward the bottom of the second level even if you limit yourself to women writers. Eberhart is much more entertaining (I liked several of Eberhart’s novels) and lively and Seely has a firmer hand of the essintials.
I’ll go farther, I can and do enjoy a good HIBK once in a while for the thriller elements and the suspense many of them engender. I’m not sure that a little of that would not have benefited some of the drier Classic tec school at times.
I even liked many writers of the gothic revival — Mary Stewart did the classic chase and pursuit novel as well or better than many men and I enjoyed and admired several of Phyllis Whitney’s books. A few of the gothics were well written indeed.
I’m also a fan of Dorothy Cameron Disney, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Saxnay Holding (THE BLANK WALL is a fine book made into a first class film as RECKLESS MOMENT), and several others who wrote some first class books that I would not hesitate to put into my ‘damn good book’ category.
* My ten most important American Mystery Novels from 1841 to about 1941 in more or less order of publication (and not always the author’s best novel).
1. THE LEAVENWORTH CASE — Green
2. THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE — Rinehart
3. THE BENSON MURDER CASE — Van Dine
4. HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY — Biggers
5. THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY — Queen
6. THE MALTESE FALCON — Hammett
7. FER DE LANCE — Stout
8. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE — Cain
9. THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS — Gardner
10. THE BIG SLEEP — Chandler
Short Stories:
1. TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION — Poe
2. THE GENTLE GRIFTER — O Henry
3. UNCLE ABNER — Post
4. THE THINKING MACHINE — Futrelle
5. THE SILENT BULLET — Reeve
6. THE AFFAIRS OF O’MALLEY — McHarg
7. BOSTON BLACKIE — Boyle
8.THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF LUTHER TRANT — King
9. CLUES OF THE CARIBEES — Stribling
10. THE ADVENTURES OF ELLERY QUEEN — Queen
And I should note I consider W. R. Burnett to be more a crime novelist than a mystery writer or LITTLE CAESAR or HIGH SIERRA might have crowded out someone.
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:41 am
Everybody,
Thanks for the kind words!
March 3rd, 2011 at 2:47 pm
So the discussion of the Cambridge Book continues. My problem is not with Nickerson. Considering her publishing background, what other kind of book did the publisher want when it hired her?
For a woman’s point of view there is a very interesting letter about forgotten women writers over at Persephone Books website. Its date is 2/15/11.
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/letter/index.asp?LetterID=162
Have a happy Women’s History Month.
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:29 pm
Interesting that the writer of the letter thinks Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie are “feeble choices” for reprinting. I wonder what she would think of Anna Katharine Green, now enshrined as a “Penguin Classic”?
There are so many women involved in publishing and academia now, particularly in the field of literary studies, I really have great difficulty accepting the idea that male gender bias is blocking reprinting of their works. Look how Wharton and Cather, for example, have been elevated (rightly so, in my view) in the last forty years.
In the mystery genre, books by women writers have received a great deal of puffing in the last decade or two. And that’s great, I’m all for more reprinting of everyone. Leaving a lot of the men out isn’t the right approach.
Michael:
I hope you have a whole year of happy history, men’s and women’s. It’s all interesting, actually!
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Curt:
Since I am a white fifty six year old white male who was raised in the Christian upper middle class, I have to cover all bases before the revolution. In fact I plan to start using a female pen name so if I ever see a book I will not be forgotten.
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:53 pm
I am sooo white I had to say it twice.
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:59 pm
By the way, I would much rather read every single HIBK (so-called) work five times over than anything else by Ivy Compton-Burnett! And I suspect I speak here for most men and most women.
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Oh, another “by the way.”
I sent an email to Persephone suggesting the reprinting of Winifred Peck’s crime novel The Warrielaw Jewel (reviewed here on mysteryfile) and they acknowledged receipt of it, but I never heard back from them after that. They had published a non-criminous work by Lady Peck, so I thought they might be interested (maybe not, given the Sayers comments!).
So I hope that might at least suggest that I’m fair-minded in my commentary.
Also, Saul Bellow’s dismissive “rattle of teacups” comment about Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont can be seen as much (or more) a classist comment as a sexist one. It’s the same thing with objections Graham Greene, Edmund Wilson and Raymond Chandler made to works by the Crime Queens. There’s a huge class element in their critiques.
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:36 pm
Excuse me! “Clinking” of teacups. One would have to be an awful bounder to “rattle” a teacup, I know.
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Women writers have been being re-evaluated for two or three decades now (how old is Virago Press?), and certainly there are wrongs to be redressed, but I hate the Orwellian tendency to re-write history to fit modern prejudice or political correctness.
I’m not sure Wharton or Cather were ever all that obscure — certainly not hard to find in print, unlike Kate Chopin, Katharine Anne Porter (to some extent), or others — all who deserve elevation alongside their male brethren, but most of whom never lacked for critical appreciation.
But in all those cases, you first have something to work with.
There seems to be a backlash against Christie and Sayers and the Crime Queens that I suspect is politics again — they were all pretty conservative in their views, and not exactly libbers.
Also, no one ever made a reputation as a literary critic by writing yet another appreciation of someone already famous. By far the quickest way to respect and tenure is to find someone obscure and make extravagant claims about them that most people really can’t refute because they never heard of or read the person or school of fiction you are elevating.
Michael
Whenever I look at the shelves of mystery at Barnes & Noble, century of women writers instead of year might seem more accurate.
Between the cozy and historical school I’d say male mystery writers were the minority.
Curt
A bounder?
Never — even if you do rattle tea cups.
Perhaps, like me, you are merely on the boundary line.
March 4th, 2011 at 1:16 am
There are a number of small presses that cater mostly or exclusively to reprinting female middlebrow writers. What are the counterparts devoted to reprinting male middlebrow writers? You can’t tell me all male middlebrow writers are part of the canon.
Were Fergus Hume named Fergusina Hume, I suspect this writer would have been revived in the last two decades, or at least drawn some scholarly interest. There would have been at least some articles in Clues discussing Miss Fergusina Hume’s views on gender.
I suppose one could argue that middlebrow men are represented by canonical men, but then can’t we say the same thing about middlebrow women and canonical women? Or, conversely, no in both cases?
In the mystery field, Raymond Chandler can hardly be said to mirror John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen or Freeman Wills Crofts, any more than he does Mary Rinehart, Mignon Eberhart or Leslie Ford.
I’ve written a whole chapter on Crofts and, believe me, he had a distinctive voice as a writer (and a human being), even if he was a male “humdrum.”
March 4th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Fergusina Hume?
Well, maybe being a woman would make him a better read. Anything would be an improvement.
Maybe we can do something for Freemana Crofts, Austina Freeman, Gilbertina Chesterton, Mother Superior Knox, and Cecilia Street too …
Afterall a sex change isn’t all that much more drastic than rewriting history to suit ones prejudices.
March 4th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
My chuckle for the day!
Well, actually, there were nine or ten, truth be told.