Sat 25 Sep 2021
A Book Review by David Vineyard: COLIN WATSON – Snobbery with Violence.
Posted by Steve under Reference works / Biographies , Reviews[18] Comments
COLIN WATSON – Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. Eyre & Spottiswoode, UK, hardcover, 1971. St. Martin’s Press, US, hardcover, 1972. Eyre Methuen, UK, hardcover, revised edition, 1979. Mysterious Press, US, softcover, 1988 Faber and Faber, UK, paperback, 2009.
I could never quite understand why one of my favorite books about the crime genre incited such violence in some readers, who bore a grudge against Watson for his informed and informing book on mystery and thriller fiction between the Wars that seemed completely out of proportion to anything he actually wrote.
Watson, after all, was the popular author of the Flaxborough/Inspector Purbright novels that revealed the darkly comical reality beneath the English village setting of Agatha Christie and others.
Yes, he was opinionated. Even I disagree with him on some points and authors, but he is never less than succinct in his arguments, and there is no malice in them. He merely sets out to deal with the social history behind the genre in that important era and to explain its origins and nature, and does so brilliantly, with delightful cartoons from Punch, that reflect the subject of many chapters.
If nothing else he coined a phrase to describe the village mystery so common to Agatha Christie that has stuck because it is so apt: Mayhem Parva.
Julian Symons’ Mortal Consequences seemed much more controversial to me, Kingley Amis’s James Bond Dossier more eccentric. Just what nerve had Watson struck?
The book opens with an epigram from Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On: “…that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good class tweed through twentieth-century literature.â€
Snobbery with violence hardly seems an unfair description of the genre from Agatha Christie to Bulldog Drummond, and indeed to James Bond who Watson defends from the charge of “sex, snobbery, and sadism†by simply pointing out Ian Fleming was no more blatant nor vicious on that count than anyone else.
So what is it exactly about this well organized and argued book that upset so many. I confess on rereading I was trying pretty desperately to discover that when I ran across the following passage on Bulldog Drummond, Sapper, and the rise of Fascism in England.
And there it was, the passage that set forth Watson’s “controversial†theme that inflamed what Amis once called “little old maids of both sexesâ€, the thing that enraged many of his critics. Watson had dared to suggest that popular fiction, far from the monster poisoning the minds of readers, was not actually the source of all societies ills, but merely reflected the prejudice and opinions of the average man, that people indeed got the entertainment they wanted and would accept in popular fiction, and were not swayed to prejudice by the blathering of a Bulldog Drummond or to snobbery by a Lord Peter Wimsey, nor to sexual obsession by James Bond, but that H. C. McNeile, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ian Fleming were merely highly successful at hitting on what the audience wanted and would accept at the time.
An audience that, as he quotes Margaret Lane Edgar Wallace’s biographer, audiences wanted “excitement without anxiety, suspense without fear, violence without pain, and horror without disgust,†to which Watson added crime without sin and sentiment without sex.
If there is a better description of the mystery novel and thriller in the between the Wars years, I don’t know what it is. He goes on to point out that the reader was an active participant in the game being played, not ignorant of reality enough to buy the sophistication of an Oppeheim drawing room or casino or a Christie great house where a murder will soon occur, but “able to disregard the voice of experience and reason in interest of his own entertainment.â€
In short the reader was not being plied with clever drugs, but willingly seeking the stuff out, rewarding a Sax Rohmer who confirmed his own fear of foreigners and foreign sorts, a Sapper or Sidney Horler catering to the average man’s self doubts with their “splendid†sportsman manly man heroes and slim topping women pitted against wealthy unsporting master criminals, slinky foreign women, inscrutable Easterners, and low East End types. The writers weren’t even prostituting themselves, they had merely stuck upon a gold vein of public prejudice and opinion.
This was the era of the lending library and the newly literate middle and lower middle classes equally prejudiced against the very rich, the foreign, and the poor. The era in England when an entire generation of young vital men had died in the trenches in Europe and the world no longer made sense and people were desperate to make sense of it. The writers who succeeded, who prospered were not preaching, but merely reflecting, and the more accurately they reflected their audience the more successful they were, and when they could do so with minimal disturbance of the social order they were rewarded.
Watson touches on the strangely clipped and emotionless language of the era, the blathering of a Drummond, Wimsey, or Campion, the topping girls, the sometimes silly language, even the bloodless violence.
Again, the audience and not the writers determined the voice. The sheep were not led, but leading because to go against the prejudice of the flock was to risk a blow to the pocketbook. “Foreign was synonymous with criminal in nine novels out of ten, and the conclusion is inescapable that most people found that perfectly natural.â€
What Watson is saying that really hits home is that when we are condemning a popular writer like Rohmer, Horler, Sapper, or Edgar Wallace we are actually condemning grandpa and grandma or mom and dad, who read this because they believed this, not because they were being force fed prejudices they had not been schooled in well before they read thriller fiction.
The same was true of Ian Fleming, of Mickey Spillane, of Stephen King, or Lee Child today. We get the popular literature, the movies, the music we support that reflects what we believe and what we value. Pretending we are led down the garden path by what we consume is like blaming the apple tree because some of the apples aren’t ripe yet.
Watson also makes a good argument for the value of this kind of fiction which, as he points out, reflects the material life of its time in a way more serious literature does not down to the smallest detail of daily life in its need to be grounded in recognizable worlds familiar to the less than sophisticated reader. He also points out that during the heyday of the lending library readers had something like 180 to 210 books a week to choose from across all genres, but certainly in the mystery genre. Even figuring a reader reading one book a week the competition was fierce for the reading dollar. Readers, not writers dictated what was acceptable in their chosen reading with their money.
I’ll leave with Watson at his most cogent. If you disagree with this conclusion, and I don’t discount any disagreement, please quote a single legally and psychologically proven case and not apocryphal accusations or criminals and their representatives seeking an out by unfounded claims of victimhood is all I ask.
—
(*) Intellectual in England does not only connote the Left alone. There are equally those on the Right condemning the taste of the “common man†and the Middle Class.
September 25th, 2021 at 10:42 pm
Outstanding review, David. Spot on in all respects.
September 25th, 2021 at 11:41 pm
Swell analysis. I’m in agreement; especially about Fleming. I object strongly whenever I hear Fleming painted as a bigot, or chauvinist.
But I enjoy a good trivia challenge too. Possible responses to the question posed in the last paragraph. Timothy Hinkley? Leopold & Loeb? Charles Manson? There were also two embezzlers (can’t locate the story at the moment) who admitted to reading Jessica Dorfman Jones as they planned their crime. Miami, I think. Admittedly, the ‘inspiration’ in all of these cases was not strictly pop-fiction but general popculture, including movies and music.
But the challenge as posed, is slippery in itself. Any case might be exempted from inclusion, based on the way it’s structured.
On the other hand, I can’t see how to “expand” the question’s parameters without taking into account the vast debate tied to violent American TV programs, or first-person shooter-video-games. The result would be a muddle.
Nevertheless: there has been over three thousand school-shootings since Columbine (a statistic which recently startled me). Privately, I do suspect today’s casual daily diet of media is a factor. There’s some statistic out there which says that (something like) 90% of American TV series revolve around murder?
September 26th, 2021 at 1:45 am
Lazy,
Everyone you mention was a proven sociopath, not a normal person changed by reading violent literature. They were all born sociopaths. Sociopaths are outside of the sticture set by Watson and by me.
September 26th, 2021 at 5:57 am
I had as much fun reading this as the book itself.
As far as any deleterious effects from literary or media violence, one has only to look at Steve Lewis and draw the obvious conclusion.
September 26th, 2021 at 7:10 am
Excellennt review. I agree with everything David said, and thought the Watson book was well worth reading.
September 26th, 2021 at 11:36 am
re: sociopaths, is partly what I meant about the framing of the question. In hindsight, one can always suggest that any convicted criminal was a sociopath, in the lead-up to their deed. How can one ever substantiate a felon’s earlier normalness, ‘after-the-fact’ of their crime?
September 26th, 2021 at 1:42 pm
In the case of Leopold & Loeb wasn’t it Nietzschean philosophy that inspired them?
September 26th, 2021 at 2:02 pm
Not really, just arrogance and insanity. They should have been strung up. Oh, there is another element to the murder of Bobby Franks. It seems that Armand Deutsch, who grew up and old to become a film producer was the intended victim, but a wealthy child, as they all were, he was picked up the day scheduled for his death and driven to a dental appointment. But these two morons just had to murder someone, and they did. The only good thing, Clarence Darrow’s defense did not get them off, so he was stiffed by the wealthy families of these two degenerates. The hell with Clarence.
September 26th, 2021 at 8:41 pm
Much to mull over. In the case of L&L, yes there was a FWN influence but also simply a cerebral “we’ve read everything, we can commit the perfect murder” strain in their mindset. They weren’t ‘recluses’ from what I have heard, they were luminaries of collegiate life at U of Chicago. So, how to claim that they were sociopaths before-the-fact? Rather, they were highly social; which is what was so startling.
Anyway, this is all just for the sake of argument. The OP’s review was sterling; I’m just ruminating. I’ve no stake in my position, I just wanted to hear what everyone else might opine.
I’m in agreement that popular literature is the handmaiden of our own psyche. Orderly citizens invested in maintaining social order, are the first to indulge in sensational, squeamish-seeming novels.
For an example of how misguided “moral panic” can dismember publishing all we need do is recall the demise of EC Comics, subsequent to the institution of the astringent ‘Official Comics Code’ in 1956.
Great stuff by the OP
September 26th, 2021 at 8:43 pm
The point is, regardless of psychology, all of the people mentioned above were in some way “bent” to use a phrase from the era Watson is writing about. All of them were damaged long before popular media had a chance to effect them.
Ted Bundy was a sociopathic murderer and compulsive liar, why would anyone believe his attempt to make himself look good by blaming pornography (incidentally he sold that bilge to Jerry Falwell who wanted to hear it, the usual trick of sociopaths)? Millions read Nietzsche without murdering anyone like Loeb and Leopold. FDR and Winston Churchill both credited Wagner as their favorite composer yet didn’t become Hitler.
Those we are talking about had a mental kink of some sort and the evidence is that anything can be a trigger with people who are ready to be triggered by something. Of course popular literature and mythology is the easiest thing to tap into if you are unconsciously seeking that trigger already lurking in your subconscious.
The whole idea of Juvenile Delinquency in the ’50’s ignored the fact that JD was actually at a thirty year low in that period, there were just more teens with more money to spend and media was catering to them and the audience wanted to hear about JD’s even though the problem was smaller than it had been during the Depression and early War years.
Actual studies have shown only minor incidents of increased aggression in children exposed to violent cartoons and games despite some attempts to load those studies and get the results they wanted. Adults aren’t really affected at all, unless there is something wrong with them to begin with. Normal people are able to deal with fiction.
Mickey Spillane found success because he appeared with the right kind of story and voice at the right time. Jonathan Latimer had written an ultra violent sexy hard boiled novel before the war that went nowhere. The same happened with Ian Fleming in post War England, with Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason in the late ’30’s, with Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes before them.
Those writers inspired other writers and imitators because they successfully mined what the audience was looking for, not because they created the audience. The attitudes in their books reflected what the audience already felt, their only influence was tangental business like making a brand of some object or product iconic. They could sell cigarettes but not politics.
If they are guilty of anything it is that they didn’t use their influence to try and change things that needed changing, but the history of popular entertainment suggests that had they tried they would have lost their audience.
They didn’t instigate, they revealed, they didn’t sway the audience, they were evolved by the audience. Doyle discovered Holmes worked better in short form. Fleming discovered his audience wanted more escape and less serious spy business. Spillane discovered there was an adult audience, many of them returning veterans, who wanted something that reflected the harder edge the War had given them, not realism, but hyper realism.
Crime, poverty, prejudice, social injustice, those things aren’t created by popular fiction or by mainstream fiction. Stephen Crane didn’t create the slums he wrote about. Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t create the Victorian fear of atavism. Bram Stoker didn’t create vampires or their curious sexual appeal, they simply unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) tapped into something the audience was ready for whether they knew it or not.
It is comfortable to blame the MCU for ruining movies (it was Horror and Westerns before that), to blame Mickey Spillane for violence, to blame Sapper for racial prejudice and jingoism, but the fact is they merely reflect what the audience wants and if they try to educate that audience history shows they fail. They are prisoners of their own success.
My friend Rex Miller created the serial killer Chaingang and wrote several novels about him. Rex hated Chaingang and hated writing about him. In fact he killed the character off in the first book, SLOB, but was forced by his publisher (NAL) to resurrect the killer in the last five hundred words, and then contracted for more books. He was a prisoner of the character’s success the way Doyle hated Holmes but could not escape him.
I listened to him many a late night complaining about how hard it was to write about a huge serial killer that leaves a wake of brutal murder behind him and no one notices when he arrives in a new town.
But Chaingang was what the audience wanted. There was a comic book and talk of a movie … if he had lived Rex would still be struggling trying to make sense of why no one puts Chaingang in a cage and never let him see the light. Rex wanted to write about how that kind of violence and evil ultimately corrupted and destroyed his cop character Jack Eichord, not about Chaingang happily slaughering people.
He didn’t create that audience, the audience created him. That is all Watson is saying. The fault lies in us, not those catering to us.
I guess that is too hard a truth for many to process. Personal responsibility is a tough sell when it is so much easier to claim you were led down the garden path by some pie eyed piper with a typewriter or a PC.
September 26th, 2021 at 9:26 pm
Well summarized.
But: I myself can’t dismiss the entire ‘nurture’ argument. This was Darrow’s stance, flawed as it was. (‘Nurture’ was supposedly to blame for L&L, rather than ‘nature’). But if we entirely dismiss ‘nurture’, then we toss out the history of classical-conditioning.
Indeed, not *every* fan of Ricard Wagner or FWN became bloody-minded, nope. Not at all.
But this argues from numbers. How many people thought about it? A very different question.
How about the ‘Lost Cause (of the Confederacy)’ movement in the USA. We just saw it in action this past year. How much damage has such myth-making caused? And how was such mental folly perpetuated? Via popular culture. Similar to the ‘stab in the back’ movement of Germany’s 1930s.
Conclusion: although I agree where the blame ultimately lies, I can’t quite agree that culture plays no part in crime.
additional refs:
Jean Genet’s ‘The Balcony’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balcony
William Lazenby’s ‘The Pearl’ –audience by subscription, middle & upperclass English elites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pearl_(magazine)
The ‘Grand Guignol’, Pigalle, Paris. At its peak immediately prior to both WWI & WWII. Thronged by the upper classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Guignol
September 26th, 2021 at 9:38 pm
Violence –never an easy topic to skim over lightly –and I don’t wish to do so here –but, as far as I can supply over the internet, here’s a relevant source for all the latest studies on culturally-inspired psychological trends. Free to view online, at reduced resolution.
https://www.mediaed.org/
September 26th, 2021 at 10:35 pm
I find that “evidence” of culturally inspired psychological trends tend to find what the researchers want to find rather than what is really there. Think of Wertham and SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, total BS that destroyed an industry, ruined lives, and was based on nothing but apocryphal evidence gathered by Wertham looking for headlines and not acutal science (yes, I know he had a good record before that, but it is curious how he suddenly managed to become famous without doing a siingle actual statistical study to back his ideas).
I’m not arguing nurture plays no role, it was nurture and social pressures that created the society that gave birth to popular fiction. I am saying the role of popular fiction has been exaggerated by those with an agenda. It is the reflection and not the cause.
I am not arguing that popular fiction is innocent, only that it reflects rather than cauese societies ills.
I am saying there is no scientific evidence that popular fiction ever turned any “normal human being” with no history of a troubled past into a criminal while there is ample evidence of people born with personality problems who use the influence of popular literature as an excuse when they are caught.
I admit I am fairly cynical about the number of people who get religion while doing time, but were never bothered by a conscience before they were caught. The same goes for the type who gets caught and claims he did it because he read a Dortmunder novel by Donald Westlake.
There is such a thing as a criminal mind. A way of thinking that is unique among professional criminals and hard to get past. I am not saying no one reforms, only that there are far more serious issues than popular fiction that lead to crime and violence and going after popular fiction rather than poverty and abuse is a waste of effort. Blaming Bulldog Drummond for the intrinsic racism of his readers is putting the cart before the horse. Sax Rohmer only invented Fu Manchu, he didn’t invent the fear of Asians and racial animosity.
To paraphrase the fault lies not in our library, but in ourselves.
September 26th, 2021 at 11:12 pm
David,
You have made many salient points, and I have no problem with any, but as you must have gathered, I prefer to come at these things from the gut, and then speak, write or act accordingly.
As for Steve, I agree that comments should not conclude at thirteen.
September 26th, 2021 at 11:46 pm
David, excellent article about one of my favorite books of criticism by one of my favorite writers.
It strikes me that a lot of criticism of popular fiction is made by people who have not read a lot of it, and instead go by what they perceive in the most popular examples and extrapolate it to the entire spectrum.
A few examples:
“Pulp magazines were only filled with trashy, sensationalistic fiction.” Clearly the person making this has never read the best of the pulps. Blue Book, Adventure, Short Stories, The Popular Magazine, Dime Detective, Black Mask, Western Story, All-Story…you can keep adding to the list.
“Women were not represented in the pulps.” They were actually over-represented compared to what was happening around them. How many women were CEOs of corporations? Practically none. How many women were chief editors of pulp magazines? I can think of at least ten off the top of my head. Women writers, ditto.
“All pulps were misogynistic, imperialistic, and racist.” While its true that you can find plenty of that, there are quite a few honorable exceptions. One of the first inter-racial love stories in popular America literature was Honore Willsie’s Heart of the Desert, published in book form in 1913 after being serialized in Adventure in 1912. No slick or literary magazine would have published it.
I sometimes think that the only research some people do is look at covers and then form opinions based solely on the covers, forgetting that covers often have no relation to contents.
September 27th, 2021 at 4:45 am
“If [popular writers] are guilty of anything it is that they didn’t use their influence to try and change things that needed changing, but the history of popular entertainment suggests that had they tried they would have lost their audience.”
Conan Doyle went to a lot of effort to do just that. It’s interesting that the incompetence, prejudice and racism he found in the real-life cases he investigated didn’t appear in the Sherlock Holmes stories though.
September 27th, 2021 at 9:50 am
Adding merit to the side of Watson’s ‘no harm, no foul’ argument: Michael Denning makes no mention of any violence stemming from the increase in ‘sensational’ literature in the 1800s. I just flipped through to see if he had done. Very much enjoy and admire his study (‘Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America’)
There’s talk of the Astor Place Riots, and violent factory strikes, but that would be an absurd stretch for anyone to connect to what we’ve discussed above.
September 29th, 2021 at 12:31 pm
Funny enough, I’ve got this book on loan from the library at the moment!