At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1398216/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_31

In the growing drug and pop culture of the sixties, he proves himself once again

not bad considering he retires aged 55 in 1905.

finally got round to this. didn't think it was terrible; in fact it wasn’t anything really. he hits upon a lot of the right points, but i don’t think he says much about them.

A telling phrase he uses is 'it's not as if anyone makes any claims for christie as a writer per se'. *writing* as the end point and purpose of writing has always struck me as a peculiar conceit of 'literary fiction' (begging the question a bit).

I think Christie *is* doing formal stuff and that formal stuff is characterises her and other Golden Age writing. I'd like to see the connexions that mark s suggests upthread where these formal experiments exist in some relation to the 'modernist project'. I'm not convinced they do in a way that illuminates much - my view is that the formal games are closer to crossword puzzles or parlour games than bearing much relation to the large narrative of Literature capital L; I’m suspicious of efforts like Lanchester’s to use this as an ‘in’ to literary credibility. I may be mischaracterising, but I think it can be the case. I'm also not a massive fan of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which often seems like a touchstone for genre-as-literature arguments, although it is technically impressive.

As I say, my primary take on all Golden Age writers, including my favourite John Dickson Carr, is that effectively they are an extension of a sort of Edwardian parlour game. Readers expected to try and *solve* them. Although the codification of the ‘rules’ wasn’t really that important – certainly no story i’ve read adheres to all of them – all of the writers had similar expectations about what constituted ‘fairness’ for the reader. This is a very different scene from a post-Chandler strand where impressionistic stuff just sort of happens at the detective. The furthest extension of this seems to me something like Broadchurch where no actual detection seems to get done at all (apart from going to places where things have happened), and where events keep on happening, with the detectives literally clueless, until the events reach an inescapable conclusion.

In GA fiction not only is detection seen to be done but the clues that are being used by the detective are available to be used by the reader. Incidentally although Lanchester says at the beginning he's trying to work out *why* Christie is so successful, there's bugger all consideration of reader or wider audience, it's just him going 'Christie, eh?' which is vmic. This explains a lot of the stylistic and character issues raised by people approaching this sort of fiction from a literary pov.

I think fundamentally Christie was very good at *snobbery*. It's for this reason Lanchester *is* right imo to highlight A Murder is Announced as a very useful book to look at Christie. Everyone is a social construct, with a backstory and clothes (my housemate recently pointed out that Christie is very specific about clothes - a key element in character definition for snobbery purposes). I think both the Edmund Wilson essays on detective fiction are bad not good, but their badness comes from what I perceive as his mandarin dislike of the genre – typically he’s right about a lot of technical things. In the paragraph quoted by Lanchester, for instance, he’s absolutely right to highlight misdirection as being one of the key techniques of this fiction. The unobtrusive distribution of the clues is essential – the unobtrusiveness comes by interlarding them in a way that’s integrated both in terms of style and narrative. They mustn’t stick out. Ideally they look whether in terms of sentence cadence or paragraph structure, unimportant.

I think the two-dimensionality of characters, a very common criticism, belongs to a similar category. Edmund Crispin/Bruce Montgomery, who I find pretty second rate, put his opinion fairly clearly in one of this novels, where the main character Gideon Fen comes across a crime writer testing out the practicalities of a crime device in a field. Fen suggests that doing this must enable him to some extent to get ‘inside the mind of the murderer’.

An expression of mild repugnance appeared on the man’s face. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, it doesn’t do that.’ That subject seemed painful to him, and Fen felt that he had committed an indiscretion. ‘The fact is,’ the man went on, ‘that I have no interest in the minds of murderers, or for that matter,’ he added rather wildly, ‘in the minds of anyone else.’ Characterization seems to me a very overrated element in fiction. I can never see why one should be obliged to have any of it at all, if one doesn’t want to. It limits the form so.’

To my mind, and particularly with Christie, the two-dimensionality, the image of characters as intersecting vectors of social roles, background, clothes, domestic interiors, engages the reader’s own snobberies. This snobbery itself will misdirect the attempt to unravel what happened. After all there is always a suspect – a cad, a foreigner, a deliberately secretive person, who is used as an initial suspect (sometimes in a late reversal they do turn out to have done it). It also adds to the parlour game elements. They can arrange the cardboard cutouts. This is not at all, as Edmund Crispin points out, about psychology.

To digress slightly, it was interesting watching the recent adaptation of The ABC Murders. I was interested to see the generally positive ilx response. It really was a dog's dinner imo (unfortunately the point I need to make means SPOILERS if you haven't seen it). The elements weren't necessarily bad or *rong*: there is a bit of a grim anti-foreign element in the book (Poirot is dismissed as an interfering 'Frenchman', in the way Marple is as an interfering old woman) tho the V for Vendetta look in this adaptation was both gruelling and silly.

And I should add that I think things like Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are so symbolic now they are ripe for any sort of game you want to play with them at all. Notions of authenticity are absurd.

This three-parter was 'Poirot: The backstory' under the guise of a traditional detective story. I thought it was incredibly slow to go about its business. SPOILER The reveal of him as a priest rather than a policeman was a ridiculous on several levels: one, the detective as father-confessor and battler of evil in mundane forms is already a well-worked space so this amounted to a DO YOU SEE moment, emphasised by the second point that The ABC Murders is itself a formal experiment based upon Chesterton's question in his (excellent) Father Brown story The Sign of the Broken Sword: 'Where does a wise man hide a leaf?'. I think there's something of a direct reference to this in the original Christie novel:

Is it not your great Shakespeare who has said “You cannot see the trees for the wood.”’ I did not correct Poirot’s literary reminiscences. I was trying to see his point. A glimmer came to me. He went on: ‘When do you notice a pin least? When it is in a pin-cushion! When do you notice an individual murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.

The adaptation completely broke the implications of this statement and effectively broke the point of it entirely. as the pinefox points out, the motive of it revivifying Poirot was daft, but so was the ‘I was enjoying killing so much I just thought I’d carry on’.

I thought Malkovich was good as a pained and in pain version of Poirot whose old world courtesy is out of place in a brutalised world – Lanchester is again right to point out the 'problem' of Poirot, tho he doesn't point out that Hastings is *even more* irritating – what this adaptation reminded me of was that actually it's often the fact that Poirot is well-liked by sympathetic other characters that enables him to solve crimes at a 'softer' level than pure clue finding, it's a central emotional mechanism to the books I think, and *is* probably a factor in the counterintuitive success of Poirot as a figure.

What John Dickson Carr did for the locked room, Christie did for all sorts of different 'set ups' – despite toiling in the right space, I don't think Lanchester quite gets this properly framed (his 'school for wizards' comment).

I think I got up to here and then abandoned the post cos i had to go and do something else, and now can’t remember what else i was going to say, which is just as well as it’s overlong already.

I still think the initial frisson of a magical impossibility to be unraveled by detection is hard to beat in this sort of fiction, though I don’t think Christie is particularly good at the atmospherics of it in a way that Dorothy L Sayers or John Dickson Carr are. I still get a frisson of excitement when I read the opening paragraph of The Hollow Man:

To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied – with reason. Those of Dr Fell’s friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.

some french bigwig -- maybe breton? -- said that the english didn't need surrealism, they already had alice… and i feel you could make a similar claim about oulipo and christie, and then double down on the analysis: if in la disparition the "absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence" (the mass death of WW2), then christie's expertise in misdirection without cheating is maybe similarly deeply connected to the thing i liked best (for being said out loud) in lanchester's account, christie's "complete belief in… human malignity"

JL goes off the rails in his exploration of this, tho, i suspect bcz he associates it the conservative worldview (as in, we need the social structures we have -- even given some of the bad things that go with them -- because some ppl are evil and others need protection from them). he prefers christie to e.g. sayers or allingham, despite two things he assumes you'd expect him to be drawn to: (a) their greater ambition in lit-fic terms, and (b) that they considered themselves "progressive"

even ignoring the probable anachronism of the second as a term either writer wd use abt themselves, there's a really clumsy irregular verb going on here: I am politically engaged, you consider yourself progressive, they are virtue signalling, plus just a weird (and i think dumb and incurious) absence of interest on lanchetser's part in what the seeming flaws and lacunae in sayers' work -- as tecfic or as social observation -- can teach us about the historical development of (for example) feminism, and the various contradictory stages it passed through.

ok maybe this kind of topic DOESN'T interest him (bizarre flex given the focus of his own fiction, but everyone doesn't have to be curious about everything) (i guess) (big and grudging concession by me here lol). but i think it's tone-deaf not to grasp that it's going to be part of what others enjoy enjoying about the popular genre forms of yesteryear, and that some of the pleasure is the complexity of how it runs athwart the project the genre is allagedly ("classically") about. "christie is good bcz she stays in her lane" is real la-la-la-i-can't-hear-you stuff, given all the material he seems to have gathered about the genre and its pleasures and uses and flaws (and their uses…).

actually chesterton and father brown are a telling omission from this piece, i think -- i wasn't aware of the presence of his ghost in the abc murders, bcz i don't think i've ever read the abc murders, but he's surely the direct way into a discussion of crime and evil and formal playfulness and style and conservatives and progressives and etc: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution"

an essay on how christie isn't chesterton -- and why *that's* good not bad -- would i think tell us more about what's going on?

(i too have a whole list of notes on this piece that i kept starting to type out and abandon, lol: like "hercule poirot is almost a brechtian device", dude, no, that's not that a brechtian device is or does)

I'm also not a massive fan of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which often seems like a touchstone for genre-as-literature arguments, although it is technically impressive.

The thing almost everyone who makes claims for Roger Ackroyd seems to miss is that it is a complete steal of Anton Chekhov's only full-length novel, The Shooting Party, which was first translated into English only a few years before RA was published. So her great literary achievement was probably just plagiarism.

TMoRA is a great (if apparently plagiarised) twist attached to a dull book - so many of her others are smarter, funnier, more engagingly odd. I’m not sure why it gets mentioned so often.

I'd be interested to hear why you don't rate Edmund Crispin, Fizzles, I really enjoyed the few Gervase (not Gideon!) Fen books I have read, though Fen himself is something of a "Wimsey as Oxford Don" cipher.

i’m being too harsh. ive read and enjoyed them. i think there’s two things that put the brakes on that enjoyment a bit. i think they may be the same thing, but i’ll work through it.

1 a sort of determined flippancy or flipness towards the form. it’s clearly a form he loves, but perhaps because it’s a form he loves and knows he seems at a distance. mark s and lanchester both right to point out Christie’s belief in malignancy and the possibility of evil. it does make it feel like something serious is at stake, which is exciting! i’m not sure i get that feeling from Bruce Montgomery’s books.

2 you sense he’s point scoring against certain points of view (liking the countryside, or as above, a view of literature) - it’s like K Amis does tec fic (if kingsley amis hadn’t done a fairly bad example of the genre himself in the riverside villas murder*) which is unsurprising as he was a slightly older member of that coterie.

the reason i think they may be the same is that my shorthand for this would be “all a bit meta”. or perhaps it’s that 1 allows 2.

saying all this makes me want to revisit tho.

*trvm is an interesting example where K Amis is extremely assiduous in doing all the clue stuff, but similarly lacks the sense of evil, and in fact surrounds it with his sharp-eyed (and of course a great ear as well) view of social commentary and psychology. it’s perhaps the counterfactual to the “why are golden age characters so 2d?”

lol gideon, thanks - easy mistake to make!

does JL actually ever note anywhere in this piece chuck's point, that AC is funny?

to ramp up my own (actually not yet existing) argument, if you can reach back to christie via oulipo or forwards via chesterton, then the territory you're moving through very much involves deftly weaponised flippancy -- the most serious possible topics (hate and death) tackled via the seeming diversionary tactic of (literally) intellectual diversion = puzzles and/or puns

(sayers too maybe, tho she defensively opts more for a loving portrait of a man addicted to (wait for it) whimsy -- the fact she's sort of saying "oh no it's his deflection tactic not my deep strategy", viz this is descriptive realism on my part not deceptive formalism -- is possibly at the root of why some readers take against her?)

xp yeah a bit of pedantry seemed warranted when it comes to detective fiction!

Fen (and therefore Crispin) is a bit flip, yes, and I see what you mean about feeling that there is little at stake. Even the slightest Wimsey novels make you believe that he cares about bringing the criminal to justice, but as you say about the form itself Crispin seems more interested in the mechanics of the mystery. I think the ingenuity of the crimes make up for that to some extent.

"Golden Era detective fiction set in Oxbridge colleges" forms a genre within a genre, not something Christie herself was interested in. Theatrical murder would be another micro-genre, half Marsh's books are set in theatres are among theatre people.

the territory you're moving through very much involves deftly weaponised flippancy -- the most serious possible topics (hate and death) tackled via the seeming diversionary tactic of (literally) intellectual diversion = puzzles and/or puns

i think this is correct. parlour game evil would almost be my definition. they need to intersect at the right point tho and i don’t think they do with EC. it’s just occurred to me that crime fiction of this period meets the definitional requirements of comedy not tragedy (despite one or multiple deaths) - justice is served, order is returned, and it is endlessly repeatable.

my fairly conventional view of the village, country house, or yes college, is that they are closed communities - no one in, no one out, a version of the locked-room or snow-surrounded folly. but these are also comedic contexts, not least the consistent rural/pastoral settings.

this perhaps starts to help explain perhaps a modern fetish for this, which is no longer the “clue solving craze” of their contemporary time, but has a whiff of the downton abbey comfort blanket about them. (something of course the abc adaptation was trying to break).

that’s snide of me. especially since i enjoy these sorts of things very well, thanks, and saying that others enjoy them for hidden motives is naughty. save us from people who tell us how we should be enjoying stuff.

just went on a hunt for the early history of the parlour game "murder" to discover that
(a) wikipedia lists it under the heading "wink murder" (presumably so as not to confuse with the violent criminal act),
(b) there's a ref to it in harpo speaks (1961) that takes it back to the mid-20s, and a party at (new york critic) alexander woollcott's
(c) it was nicely reffed in the bbc abc poirot, the idea that between cases (or perhaps after they dried up) he made a living organising such games in big english country houses…
(d) wait, is this well known? woollcott totally had a pash on harpo for years (4evah in fact, since the day they first met in 1924 till the day he died in 1943) -- and they were close and affectionate corresponding friends all that time, tho the pash went unrequited

Was curious and found my old copy - good story!

https://i.postimg.cc/rm1Nt0kC/IMG-2581.jpg

Next page reads "...chapter in the novel she was currently writing while cooped up in the can."

YOU ARE DED

Fizzles' post, re ABC MURDERS, gives me the impression that in the original, the sequence of murders was a way of hiding the one important murder which was related to property, etc. I think that the TV version failed to bring this point out - hence my bewilderment at the final ludicrous 'motivation'. I don't recall 'can't see the wood for the trees' coming up at all.

that's correct, pinefox. that point, the entire point you might argue, was lost. tho the whole thing was more a psychological portrait of poirot - the murders didn't make any sense either before or after the fact. in fact you could argue the whole thing would better have been called 'Poirot's Nightmare' - a series of clueless murders motivated by only a peculiar whimsy, which he must negotiate without getting any further *in*, in a brutalised england free of the sort of things poirot is seen to like (the notion of the gentilhomme, courtesy, pleasant foods), the death of his closest friend in the force, and finally, Mon Dieu! he remembers he was once, of all things, a superstitious *priest*, rather than the policeman he had always supposed himself to be!

Yes now you mention it -- it was as though until the last half-hour or whatever, *he himself* had forgotten his previous job, and only remembered it when the flashback allowed!

it turns out Poirot's profession was the real mystery

"Perhaps Poirot's entire being, his inner life, was a kind of absence, a variety of fugue"

In fact the (sensible imo) absence of Hastings, an imbecile beyond comedy in the novels, does contribute to the notion of that absence or fugue. It's hard to take at face value in the books, but Poirot repeatedly insists that Hastings provides something essential to his reasoning process for each crime - a statement that's always been a bit mysterious, never quite clear exactly what he means - and lo here, in the BBC adaptation, without Hastings, he walks in a fugue-state netherworld. Hastings, the military-class moron *is in fact Poirot's central being*, the thing that negotiates between Poirot's locked-in mind and the material world of England and its crimes. In this TED talk I will &c

Hastings: named of course for that liminal space by which the future gentry passed through from Normandy to complaisant command of all landed England. Has that battle ever even ended? Is not every murder in a sense — *soft sound of curare dart leaving blowpipe, entering neck*

fucking loving the last week of this thread btw

downloading hollow man to ye kindle this very day

I haven't read it myself, but I have a copy of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd by Pierre Banyard, which I think might be of interest here - I believe Banyard suggests an alternative murderer to the one Poirot accuses.

Hastings disappears from the Poirot novels fairly early on tho? Of course, all detectives have to have a less brilliant foil who allows for plot explanation and the demonstration of the detective's genius. I really like the Christie surrogate Ariadne Oliver, who turns up in a few of the later ones. like the pretty good Dead Man's Folly, another one involving a game of murder that of course turns into the real thing.

(sayers too maybe, tho she defensively opts more for a loving portrait of a man addicted to (wait for it) whimsy -- the fact she's sort of saying "oh no it's his deflection tactic not my deep strategy", viz this is descriptive realism on my part not deceptive formalism -- is possibly at the root of why some readers take against her?)

mark s, it was a previous defense of Sayers by you here, some time ago on some other thread, that actually made me pick up a copy of The Nine Tailors and start on it last year. I gave up on it halfway through, and I almost always finish books I've started. I'd always avoided Sayers before because of a prejudice against toff tecs, but in fact, Whimsey wasn't nearly as insufferable as I'd feared, it was the sheer tedium of the writing that did for me. The central mystery wasn't at all compelling, and the endless details about bell-ringing etc killed any kind of narrative momentum. It wasn't 'cosy' exactly, but it wasn't 'dangerous' either - there was none of Christie's nastiness or humour, or her incredible gift for swiftly moving through the gears of story building, all those short, sharp paragraphs that now define, more than almost anything else, the modern bestseller. It felt like Sayers would never dare to be so vulgar or crowd-pleasing.

But perhaps I just picked a dud one.

it's the one that turned edmund wilson off also!

i'd recommend murder must advertise, the unpleasantness at the bellona club and maybe clouds of witness well before nine tailors, which is v slow, yes (as is have his carcase tho it has a better, grislier, sadder story)

(i'm actually a bit allergic to harriet vane i'm afraid, tho i have friends who luuuuurve her: gaudy night -- lanchester's quite incorrect pitch for best sayers -- is interesting maybe as a bluestocking 20s feminist's mary-sue fantasy of the perfect intellectual love match, in other words as a study of a bunch of symptoms offset by their partial cause, the tribulations of the early days of all-women colleges at oxford, inc. a nearly-all women cast)

was this the thread you meant?
who CARES who killed roger ackroyd?

Yes!!

i am quite enthusiastic abt 9 tailors in that thread, partly bcz apparently i had only just read it? i think it has quite a non-cosy conclusion and the actual cause of death is a bit grisly -- also as i excitedly note it seems to have a callback to m.r.james's the treasure of abbott thomas (tho not in any very eludicidatory way) -- but it is long and the bell-ringing stuff becomes a hard slog yes

I dunno I liked that one a lot, it was the novel (a gift) that got me into DLS, as no one has called her ever. It's very atmospheric, it has a satisfying story arc, though it's all very pious and by no means her best whodunnit. Five Red Herrings is good on that front and also a great evocation of an artists' colony in the 20s.

Is it not your great Shakespeare who has said “You cannot see the trees for the wood”’

half-want to do the spadework tying the sign of the broken sword into macbeth's birnam wood here

"Precisely," I said. "Listen to this speech of the old man's. “On Tuesday last, a falcon towering in her pride of place was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.‟ Who does that sound like?" "It sounds like the way the three witches talk," said my companion, reluctantly. "Precisely!" I said again. “Well,” said the American woman, "maybe you're right, but -" "I'm sure I am,” I said. "And do you know what I'm going to do now?" “No," she said. "What?" "Buy a copy of 'Hamlet,'" I said, "and solve that!" My companion's eye brightened. “Then," she said, you don't think Hamlet did it?" "I am," I said' “absolutely positive he didn't" "But who," she demanded, "do you suspect?" I looked at her cryptically.
"Everybody," I said, and disappeared into a small grove of trees as silently as I had come.

https://i.postimg.cc/rySzmwgj/Screen-Shot-2019-02-02-at-21-35-30.png

"cold as charity - that's a good one"

https://media.giphy.com/media/xTcnTehwgRcbgymhTW/giphy.gif

is that from the book? did he watch the GoT opening scene S1 and think i kno let’s do this but with someone who thinks with leaden-footed affectedly affectless repetitiveness?

what is that style? the englisher mode of the US workingmans style? in itself fine (forebears like Carver, and the better Hemingway but in its U.K. form used through a fear for being though at all soft in any musicality, grace notes or intelligence.

“you look for metaphors” lol i think it was JL who was looking for metaphors. you don’t really look for metaphors when you’re cold esp not dead to semi-comatose ones.

he struggles with that metaphorical sphere of his mind quite badly really. and in fact i have a problem with “like a permanent physical attribute of the location”. doesn’t need “like”. it sounds like it is a permanent physical attribute, which he somehow contrives to make sound like it isn’t or that might be doubtful. i think he gets confused because it’s sensation rather than “water displacing object”. “it isn’t like other cold. this is a cold that is all about the place, a permanent physical attribute of the location” much more clearly does what it needs to - converting something understood by the reader into something that communicates the imaginative space JL is trying to convey.

perhaps a bit nitpicky that.

we can all enjoy the mangled boardroom of “it hits you as a package” tho.

the “it’s cold on the wall” bookending in the first paragraph is making me quite angry. it’s something you might do in school. it’s something legitimate - one of pierre michon’s short stories has a first para that subtly starts its first and last sentences with “je tiens” and in between delivers a glorious paragraph, which the bookending emphasises. here it just reminds you you are already fatigued (and i know that’s probably the point but why is it the point).

fuck.

“mainly it’s about how to hold, clean, look after and fire your weapon. in that order”

lololol imagine doing it in reverse order.

fuck.

as we all know there are a *lot* of good books dealing with repetitive privation in bleak environments. it’s quite a challenge JL’s taking on.

as always he reads like he’s still in the stages of figuring out how something works. like he’s trying to work out what words to put on the page, to set the scene in his head. that metaphor bit for instance, but also the process of weapons training. he’s literally put the worst possible words on the page to convey it.

You know nothing, John Lanchester.

A good book dealing with repetitive privation in bleak environments that I reread recently:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51MfsU%2BOipL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

'Instagram seems to have a real darkness' - John Lanchester

Listen to the new LRB podcast 'The State of ... 'https://t.co/hOizGY6Ekn

— London Review of Books (@LRB) March 12, 2019

just so we know what we're missing…

has he tried adjusting his screen settings?

oh god. fortunately i’ve got a lot of other things to do so i can’t listen to this.

what have you got to do tonight man go for it.

i mean can i just

On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing.

and

Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.

net-surfing <3

what have you got to do tonight man go for it.

rau! rau!

'Navigated to the web page'

rau!

Imagine the mileage to be got from describing all the noises and steps of using a dial-up modem