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

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

I only just saw Fizzles' critique of JL's new novel's first page.

Excellent.

I ended up listening to that The State Of podcast. I almost felt sorry for JL, maundering on about wine drinking podcasts - “they even have meet-ups” - and being patronising to Lockwood - “it’s a very nerdy podcast where they talk about soil types (LAUGHTER)... which sounds like a joke but it’s true” [everyone goes no shit john] while she effortlessly covers being Extremely Online.

Also lol so middle aged. “They even have videos of people eating really hot chillis, have you seen those?” The bit where he says but i suppose you have to be worried about the mob-like pack mentality. i feel bad because he’s clearly the wrong person for the job here - extremely offline - and i don’t want to dunk him too much. tho hearing lockwood use language like edgelords to an audible blankness made me laugh.

lol at when she says to that pack mentality bit “well i think the people who worry most about that tend to be older people”.

to ignore that for the moment lockwood also manages to say a lot more about the internet than lanchester even from the ponderous letters approach. he’s terrible on facebook. he’s vague about the business model. he says if only facebook charged $20 per user of facebook they wouldn’t need to do all the algorithmic stuff. omfg. “it’s probably our fault - we prefer having everything for free than pay for it”.

Lockwood is 36 so only really young by LRB standards.

Last night I remembered that JL wrote a big retrospective on Marx for the LRB and how it contained this argument, which I now see is the very beginning:

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/john-lanchester/marx-at-193

I reflected (without looking up the above) that there was something dubious about this. Now that I read it again, it seems even worse than I remembered.

JL is virtually saying that Marx is uninterested in facts, data or accurate statements based on evidence. In faux-naif, passive-aggressive mode he says that he, JL, humbly does believe in these things. To which his audience is then supposed to think: Don't worry, John, so do we!

v busy today obv (second and i hope final day of big book send-out!) but i very much want to come back and dig into this at some point

I now feel surprised that I accepted this JL argument about Marx as possibly OK at the time. It now looks deeply tendentious, self-serving and misleading, and not even very intelligent or cogent on its own terms.

There is a gross amount of ego in that "I, on the other hand..."

I, on the other hand, refuse to believe that John Empirical Lanchester would fall prey to ego