Wed 16 Mar 2011
Archived Review: ELIZABETH LEMARCHAND – Suddenly While Gardening.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
ELIZABETH LEMARCHAND – Suddenly While Gardening. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1978; paperback, 1983. UK edition: Hart-Davis, hc, 1978.
Lemarchand writes the classic (some would say old-fashioned) style of detective story, and this one, about the skeleton of a recently murdered youth found in an ancient gravesite on an English moor, fully demonstrates the blunt, efficient approach she takes to her craft.
Detective-Chief Superintendent Pollard is her detective, and part of what he discovers the title gives away for free. In any case, after all these years, there ought to be a law against accepting broken watches as evidence, of anything, at any time.
That’s what I think.
[UPDATE] 03-16-11. I didn’t happen to mention it in this review, but there were two detectives from Scotland Yard who worked as a team in each of Elizabeth Lemarchand’s mysteries, Tom Pollard and Gregory Toye. When they began Pollard was an inspector and Toye his sergeant, but when the former was eventually promoted, perhaps Toye was also.
There were 17 entries in the series, beginning with Death of an Old Girl in 1967 (when the author was 61) and concluding with The Glade Manor Murder in 1988. All of them were reprinted in the US, but only a few had paperback editions.
A quick search on the Internet has come up with very little critical commentary on her work. One site devoted to cozy mysteries says of hers: “Very traditional British mysteries, often set in girls’ schools; makes use of English history and archaeology.”
I don’t know for sure — this is the only book of hers that I’ve read — but I think my review may have encapsulated Lemarchand’s approach to detective fiction rather well. While she was obviously not another Agatha Christie, and in spite of the somewhat negative tone to my comments, I wouldn’t mind reading another.
March 17th, 2011 at 1:30 am
Cozy in another of its meanings fit Lemarchand — in the sense that she wrote the kind of mystery that was comfortable and unchallenging, but by no means lacking in the essential ingredients.
That’s not to say she was bad, no small number of writers worked successfully in this rut, and her books were exactly what she intended them to be and exactly what her audience wanted, without any major flaws that would put off those of us who only dropped in once in a while.
You actually have to admire writers who book after book maintain a steady pace and consistent tone while producing good mysteries worth the time it takes to read them.
It may not be everybody’s favorite brand, but its a good cup of tea nonetheless.
March 17th, 2011 at 2:13 am
An absolutely fair assessment, I should think!
March 17th, 2011 at 2:30 am
David, You’re right about the word “cozy” to decribe mysteries as having a lot of meanings.
I looked back at that cozy-oriented website where I got that description of Elizabeth Lemarchand’s work.
http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/bibliographies/cosies.html
This I hope is not beyond fair-usage, but here’s the definition you’ll find there:
“COZIES: A SELECTIVE LIST – Compiled by Helene Androski (University of Wisconsin):
“Each of the following authors wrote (or write) mysteries that contain most of the elements of a cozy: a minimum of violence, sex, and social relevance; the solution is arrived at by ratiocination or intuition rather than forensics and police procedure (or beating a confession out of someone); the murderer is indeed exposed and order restored at the end; the hero/ine is honorable and the other characters (often including the murderer) are well mannered and well-bred (except, of course, the servants); the setting is a closed community of some sort, such as a village, university, stately home. Desirable, but not essential: a writing style graced by wit and literary allusion.”
Not bad, as far as trying to define something that means something slightly different to everyone else.
Here’s a selection of some of the authors in the A to C range (alphabetically):
Catherine Aird
Allingham, Margery
Robert Barnard
M.C. Beaton
Nicholas Blake
Lilian Jackson Braun
Jon Breen
Simon Brett
W.J. Burley
John Dickson Carr or Carter Dickson
G.K. Chesterton
Agatha Christie
Edmund Crispin
I like the way she’s thinking, but I wonder if this list was compiled before the current crop of hobby-oriented mysteries came along.
March 17th, 2011 at 3:47 am
I suspect cozy in England comes a good deal closer to what we would think of as the classic form of the mystery. I certainly like that definition though.
I don’t know that cozy is really the right term for what we think of now as cozies — perhaps a better word for them would be ‘domestic’ mysteries, since their pleasures tend to be domestic in nature.
And to be fair there is a faint touch of the screwball in many of the American cozies — albeit a gentle version more Capra than Hawks or Sturges — in that, at least, they hark back a bit to Phoebe Atwood Taylor/Alice Tilton or even Stuart Palmer and the Lockridges.
Sadly, unlike those writers most of today’s books in the genre don’t seem much interested in the mystery plot of actual detective work — at at least they don’t to me.
The British cozy and the American seem to be two distinctly different kinds of books so that at best we may have to start distinguishing them as British and American cozies.
Churchill was right, two nations separated by a common language.
For the life of me though I can’t quite think of Allingham’s TIGER IN THE SMOKE or Blake’s A PRIVATE WOUND as exactly cozy in any sense of the word, and surely Crispin is too anarchically funny to truly be cozy.
March 17th, 2011 at 7:16 am
I’d add Dorothy Simpson to the “comfortably cozy” list. Like Lemarchand I enjoyed reading her books without thinking any of them stood out as great works of either literature or detection.
March 17th, 2011 at 9:13 am
Yes, the list does not include the modern cozy.
I believe all mystery sub-genres must be divided into classic and modern to be fairly judged.
Classic focuses on the who-done-it, clues, the puzzle of the mystery. Because of this, characterization can be as weak as a game of Clue.
Modern focuses on the characters. Because of this, the mystery is often just a plot device to give our characters something to do.
I much prefer modern over classic, but most here would disagree.
March 17th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Michael, the challenge for character-driven mystery is it better darn well have good characters to make up for having a pro forma mystery, or else there’s no reason to read it. Just as there were a lot of mediocre clue puzzles in the GA, so were are there a lot of mediocre character-driven novels. It may be flattering to modern crime writers to think they all will survive into the future, but if they are like other writers in past times, 90% of them will be mostly forgotten.
By the way, I think the presence of Blake’s name on the list indicates the problems people have defining cozies.
Blake’s The Beast Must Die is about a grief-stricken father plotting to avenge the vehicular homicide of his son.
His The Case of the Abominable Snowman involves the seeming suicide (in the nude) of a drug-addicted, sexually active single woman.
The Private Wound, which David mentioned, has explicit sexual references.
These are not cozy stories (nor are most of his books written after 1940, I would say), unless one finds PD James cozy (some people do, incidentally, in part because her books invariably involve long descriptions of architecture and interior design and are populated with numerous well-educated, excruciatingly eloquent, upper middle class, white characters, who say “go to bed” where most people today under a certain age would probably use a much more direct, short Anglo-Saxon word to describe the process or at least say “have sex”).
March 17th, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Jeff, I agree that Dorothy Simpson ought to have been included in that online list I pointed everyone to, but she isn’t. If I were writing a book along the lines of “If you like ___, then you ought to read ____,” Simpson and Lemarchand would go in either blank as a matching pair.
Curt, While I like Helene Androski’s definition of “cozy” (up in Comment #3) and while maybe Nicholas Blake belongs in the category, his mysteries do not, as you so succinctly point out.
March 17th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Well, if allusions to sexual activity are out of bounds in a cozy, that would knock out a number of Blake books. Also, in End of Chapter there is a description of a throat-cutting with a razor–that would probably violate the violence prohibition–so would the slit wrists and blood drained into a bathtub in The Worm of Death.
As for the social relevance point….Well, that would knock out Gaudy Night, for example, though most people probably think of Sayers as cozy. But academics argue that Sayers’ books are filled with social commentary.
A writing style graced by with and literary allusion would knock out most of the books by Crofts and arguably other Humdrums, who are more interested in straightforward narratives and the application of math and science. Yet often people find reading about those hansom cabs and milk-shops in R. Austin Freeman a cozy experience.
March 17th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
We probably should begin by admitting that the primary appeal of the American cozy is to women readers while the British definition (given here) seems about equal between writers who appeal equally to men and women.
As I said, and Curt and Steve reiterated, Blake is about as cozy as a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake (to let Chandler have his say).
By this definition Peter Dickinson would be cozy as well as Michael Gilbert and frankly I don’t find anything the least cozy about either of them (a few of the Calder and Behrens stories and Gilbert’s classic ‘The Amateur’ have endings as ruthless as anything in Hammett).
I suppose you could call Doyle and Chesterton cozy in that part of their appeal is their comfortable familiarity, but there’s a ruthless side to Father Brown and Doyle deals with some decidedly non cozy subjects including murderous children,the Mafia, and racial prejudice. Freeman cozy? Well, perhaps in some aspects, but despite the appeal of Dr. Thorndyke to many female readers (Sayers called him the most handsome detective of all) he seems a cold fish to call cozy.
Maybe we will have to face that definitions are not always precise or as concise as we would like. I knew quite a few women who read Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series in part for he relationship between Carella and his deaf wife Teddy and many of John Creasey’s female fans enjoyed the domestic lives of Roger West, Gideon, Patrick Dawlish, and the Baron. Dick Francis had a huge female fan base, and I’m not sure you could reasonably call him cozy by any definition.
There are writers and series that easily fall into definite categories, but we may have to face not every book falls into a simple category. They may appeal to different readers for different reasons, but that doesn’t mean they fall into simple categories.
March 17th, 2011 at 8:06 pm
I prefer the word nostalgic for some of these works. I personally enjoy going back to the 1900-1940 period for a nostalgia trip, whether I’m reading Freeman, Street, Marsh or Carr. But that doesn’t make them all cozy.
There was a funny discussion on the BBC once where they were basically calling P.D. James a cozy writer, because all her books seemed to them like they took place with uppper middle class, well-educated, white people in the 1960s and you didn’t have gangs or explicit swearing, sex and violence (I think James tends to throw in the f-word about once a book, just to show she can). But I bet they wouldn’t have dared call James a cozy writer to her face!
October 28th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
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