I have internet again. Quite frightening how without it one’s life implodes.
(And very slightly perturbing, how one gains far more subscribers by remaining silent than by writing anything…. I shall call it the Substack Paradox and probe no further).
Anyway: this is a delayed appendix to my last post, the one about P.D. James; I want to add something that I lacked space (the thing was already lurching into 3000-word territory) to examine in the essay itself.
I want, in fact, to pose a question. A very familiar question, but I am not sure that anybody has ever answered it satisfactorily. Why are so many of our best crime writers women?
Agatha is of course the template, the queen, imitated and rebelled against and parodied and meta-fied… Her understanding of her genre is so complete that she can fly off with it, executing coups with a casual speed, blinding as a triple fouetté, which none of the rest can quite master. My all-time favourite being the tennis pro who kills his victim back-handed. The simplicity!
Then there is her near-contemporary Dorothy L. Sayers, pictured at the top with the Detection Club’s resident skull; also more than capable of a coup - the arsenic-eater who builds his tolerance until he can ‘share a jolly old arsenical omelette’ with his victim and suffer no ill-effects - but handled oh-so differently, with the workings-out visible and with none of Agatha’s grand disdain for loose ends… essentially earnest, ever the Somervillian, longing to move her ‘fair and Mayfair’ detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, out of Piccadilly and into the shadowy quads of Oxford.
There is Margery Allingham, whose plots always seem to evaporate like mist (on which account the archaeologist - and sometime detective writer - Glyn Daniel described her, quite seriously, as a ‘very very naughty woman’) but whose books are anchored by her phrase-making: ‘He looked proudly puzzled, like a spaniel which has unexpectedly retrieved a dodo’. There is Josephine Tey, singular and carefree in her inventiveness (Miss Pym Disposes is one of my very favourite detective novels), although her The Daughter of Time will never convince me about Richard III. There is Ngaio Marsh, less of an original, fascinating for anybody who shares her bedazzled love of the theatre (I hope some people still do…) There is Gladys Mitchell, whom I find unreadable (‘quite impossible’, according to the gentlemanly Glyn) but whose detective Mrs Bradley )’makes me squirm’) can be interpreted as a boldly feminist creation.
The Golden Age Girls! Who also included Patricia Wentworth, E.C.R. Lorac (to whom I had the pleasure of being introduced by
), Mavis Doriel Hay, Christianna Brand… and, of course, quite a lot of men. I am not saying that men cannot write crime fiction. What is notable, strikingly so, is that this is a genre in which women have excelled to the point of dominance. Or, as the writer Iain Sinclair put it in 1994, some fifty years on from Glyn Daniel, but with no notable increase in gallantry:Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh: the only writers ever likely to be block-booked for honours. A coven equivalent in status to today’s theatrical knights. They conjured compensatory fantasies, parallel worlds where bluestockings, erudite medics and village busybodies stood alone against a conspiracy of social climbers, artsy-fartsy pinkos, dagos with garlic breath, Hebrew financiers and all-round wrong ’uns.
This paragraph fell within an exuberantly brilliant, atrociously vicious review of Original Sin by P. D. James, who is of course prominent (arguably foremost) within a later generation of female crime writers.
The gist of the review, however, is that she had the authorial capacity to be something more, not necessarily outside the crime genre, but pushing harder at her remarkable descriptive gifts, and at the daring new shoots that bud within Innocent Blood and The Children of Men (both of which - as non-detective novels - are free of Dalgleish, whom Sinclair likens hilariously to the Duke in Measure for Measure). Yet by the time she reached peak success - Original Sin was an extremely robust bestseller - she was trapped in a room full of Christiean tropes, reconfigured unconvincingly for the impending millennium. Or:
An increasingly silly catalogue of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery.
Albeit from the standpoint of deep admiration, I semi-agree with this; I too think of P. D. James as the end of the Golden Age, pulled between its interwar certainties and the post-war lack of them. To a lesser extent I think the same of her friend, the other great female exponent of late twentieth century crime fiction, Ruth Rendell. (Although Ruth may not have seen it that way. A sincere non-admirer of Agatha Christie, she spoke drily of ‘that awful Marple woman’; and ‘that village [St Mary Mead] where one finds a lot of normal, law-abiding people living ordinary, blameless lives, who suddenly decide to murder their aunt. Well, I don't believe that.’)
Ruth, with her austere, ironized voice, is a fundamentally modern figure - far more so than Phyllis, although both wrote detective fiction that was extremely socially aware. In my previous essay I wrote of how the genre is, by definition, a form of incidental socio-historical commentary, but that Phyllis deliberately used it as a means to address questions such as nuclear power, vivisection, the Macpherson report, the mental health system. In his review Iain Sinclair wrote of Original Sin that ‘Themes of the moment – Aids, urban regeneration, yobs on the loose – are scattered like serpents’ teeth, in the hope that some of them will thrive’, which is cruel but, skewing one’s vision, one sees his point: this is an innately conservative book, set in the age of grunge but with a plot that harkens back to the Second World War, and a moral framework that is pure Golden Age.
With Ruth Rendell, ostensibly similar, there is a tonal difference. She too took on ‘issues’: she wrote a compassionate take on transgenderism in A Sleeping Life as long ago as 1978; addressed racism and domestic violence in Simisola (1994); eco-warriors in Road Rage (1997)… and the truly interesting thing is the way in which these themes - while directly interrogated - are also integrated into the plot, indeed their correct interpretation will lead to the solution. So there is a distilled quality, which is very Christiean. She disliked Agatha for her lack of ‘realism’ - I always feel that ‘truth’, which Agatha undoubtedly dealt in, is more important - but for me Ruth is Agatha turned inside out, with all the dodgy malfunctioning human synapses on view. In an earlier post I wrote that Agatha’s Towards Zero, surely her darkest book, is pure Ruth Rendell. But Ruth was a deep diver into evil, who would have laid bare the sickness of that particular criminal. For Agatha (and perhaps this typifies the tough, religion-raised, Golden Age generation) evil was simply a fact of life, the devil that walked among us.
Meanwhile P. D. James, who had a religious sensibility (Original Sin) through which she explored evil, saw its containment - and purgation - within the genre as consoling to the female psyche, which brings us back to women and detective fiction.
This is what I wrote in my Agatha biography.
It is, very often, women who write (and read) these books; but Agatha, for all her genteel settings, domestic detail and unwillingness to describe physical violence, was probably the least feminine of any of the writers of classic detective fiction. Usually there is a sense that female crime writers are using the genre because it is both fantastical and safe. It enables them to go so far, in their contemplation of death and sex and darkness, then to be thankfully reined in again; it enables them to examine relationships within a grid, a pattern, rather than in the vast expanses opened up by ordinary fiction; it allows the creation of an idealized figure, the detective, whom they can colour in with whatever characteristics they choose; it allows them to transcend the genre as much and as cleverly as they wish in the comforting knowledge that it will, in the end, provide a literary safety-net. However much depth is put into a piece of detective fiction, it will never have the power that it would within a straight novel: it will always be bound within the rules of its world. That is the delight and limitation of the genre; for both writer and reader.
It seems to me now that there is a faintly censorious air about this explanation, although I still stand by it - genre is a delight and a limitation.
Nevertheless there is this idea (also within the Original Sin review) that a genre writer could, should, be doing more… which leads to the unwelcome implication that women have thrived within the crime sphere because of its inherent boundaries - its smallness, even… But then many literary forms have boundaries, and one doesn’t think less of a Shakespearean sonnet because he was ‘limited’ to fourteen lines. And, to my mind, the creation of a successful piece of crime fiction constitutes a simple but vitally important test: can this writer tell a story? Can they keep a reader engaged with the question of what happens next… without which, whatever other qualities a novel may possess, it is essentially stillborn? P. D. James famously likened the construction of Emma to a crime novel, with its central conundrum - which of these men is Emma’s true mate? - kept steadily smouldering by the deft placement of clues and red herrings, culminating in that blissful rush of solution (‘it darted through her with the speed of an arrow…’) It is an entrancing and convincing thesis, and above all it shows Phyllis’s respect for the genre in which she triumphed.
Because she was a woman?
I am never entirely sure about the notion - which she herself offered - that women, by writing about crime, are containing their fear of it; that by writing about evil, within a template that is highly elastic but nevertheless consolingly present, they somehow feel themselves to be allaying it. I once wrote a detective novel (not good enough; although I regularly think about how to improve the wretched thing), and I don’t remember experiencing any such feeling, or indeed anything other than desperate frustration at how hard it was and deluded satisfaction at having completed it. Perhaps proper crime writers feel something more profound, as though THE END really does signify a sublime glimmer of order within a dishevelled universe.
Compensatory fantasies, as Iain Sinclair put it. Again, one takes his point. And, again, is this not true of other fictional genres, other works of fiction?
Back to crime: what I am, indubitably, is a woman reader, and what I love, fundamentally - beneath all the fun stuff such as corpses in dinner jackets, or the serious stuff about moral absolutism v relativism; beneath what can be done within genre - is that a good piece of detective fiction holds the pure essence of narrative, which I why I often describe Agatha Christie’s work as fairytales for adults.
I imagine, however, that men feel similarly.
In other words, I can only answer the question posed in this essay by reverting to the explanation above, in my biography. Any better solutions out there?
I am rather fond of Ngaio Marsh - the New Zealand set parts of the Alleyn novels are another interesting dimension, alongside the theatrical ones.
The women crime writers question is fascinating. I find it interesting that many men writing in the same period used pseudonyms (I'm reading Michael Innes' Death at the Presidents Lodging at the moment - real name J.I.M. Stewart) because they wanted to be taken seriously as academics - not something that bothered DLS as the theology etc was published under the same name.
So many brilliant questions (and SO glad you mentioned sonnets. Think I might even go further than you, re genre - because it's boundaries don't inevitably have to result in something possibly good, but less (back to the sonnet): it's entirely dependent on how the writer interprets those boundaries; just that it's easy to be facile within them.)
One could argue that women writing for money (as a "respectable" way of being self-supporting) wrote what would sell...but no, that doesn't really work either. Endlessly fascinating. (But rather hoping you might reconsider the whole detective novel lark yourself...)