Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

nooo my lovely wimsey

but he IS annoying of course (tho this is also part of his technique-for-detection = he annoys the ppl in the story also) and yes her pacing sometimes sucks (i know ppl who are big fans of gaudy night but i am not really one of them bcz i also find harriet annoying lol)

i think sayers slightly predates christie and carr and is not in fact quite attempting the same thing (she is in dialogue more with chesterton oddly enough, tho not very like him stylistically; viz sketching the changing social landscape around her and its concomitant moral conundra -- wimsey like brown being a fiction who falls "outside" the world at hand)

minor but amusing tidbit which i have never quite decoded: wimsey is thru his mother a de la gardie = related to COUNT MAGNUS

(googling more on this intolerable factoid i find that i am nearly the only person on the internet who actually cares abt it)

it’s gaudy night that really tipped me over the edge with the pacing, and harriet v is annoying ofc but wimsey’s courtship of her is the single most annoying thing in literature.

lol at count magnus titbit.

I like detective fiction a lot, am reading a lot of it, would still like to try Sayers, but ... her books appear to be long, and GAUDY NIGHT, the one that sounds most interesting, appears to be absurdly long. So I go on not reading her.

i would start with:
MURDER MUST ADVERTISE (which has drugs)
THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB (which has war-induced PTSD)
and maybe
CLOUDS OF WITNESS (which has a MIRE, but also the rest of wimsey's family, some of whom are a chore)

murder must advertise is tolerable.

Who are the best British mystery writers from the Carr-Christie-Sayers era? Which I think of as first half of 20th Century, but can be earlier-later.

Graham Greene is one who I think of

also Patricia Highsmith

yeah, but was thinking more of whodunits.

I loooove Gaudy Night despite all its flaws, but then I first read it at the age of twelve which I think is a good age for it. I think at that age I read it as a romance - and I agree, Lord Peter's courtship of Harriet is intensely annoying - but now I read it as a pretty portrait of someone gradually recovering from PTSD.

My recommendations for the series are Whose Body --> Clouds of Witness --> Strong Poison --> Murder Must Advertise --> Have His Carcase --> The Nine Tailors --> Gaudy Night. With the caveat that Clouds of Witness is a bit icky, Strong Poison is embarrassing, Murder Must Advertise is smug, and everyone in Have His Carcase is an asshole including both leads. But they're all fun reads anyway, imo.

I also like Lord Peter going all I WANNA CHANGE MY CLOTHES MY HAIR MY FACE at his fancy mirror and then realizing he's an aristocrat and will never even get rid of his stupid monocle. It's a good moment.

Pretty good portrait I meant to say

I finished Paretsky's INDEMNITY ONLY. Basically a good job, maybe flawed by trying too hard to be perky and sassy - I suppose implying or effecting a lightness of tone not so typical in the US crime genre. Maybe that's the intention. I suspect that the later novels in this series (at least 17 or so) get darker, and the character must get considerably older and harder.

I then started on Walter Mosley, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1990). Notable how within 3 pages the narrator's WWII background is established. Efficient narrative.

I just realised that it's sweet that poster Lily Dale, the biggest Bruce Springsteen expert on ILX, comments on the work of Dorothy L. Sayers by quoting ... Bruce Springsteen.

Who are the best British mystery writers from the Carr-Christie-Sayers era? Which I think of as first half of 20th Century, but can be earlier-later.

Let me say I am relieved to find someone as resistant to Sayers as I am. Instead I'd like to propose Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse, an offbrand Campion story that's part Hitchcock man-on-the-run thriller, with some of the uncanny flavour of Chersterton's Man Who Was Thursday, minus the whimsy. Also a great sentence writer, I think.

I would be surprised if Patrick McGoohan hadn't read it before coming up with Danger Man/The Prisoner.

xpost to dow - I wonder how much in the grand scheme of things it matters what gets assigned for reading in junior high and high school classes in US public and private schools, presuming that is where how and we read Solzhenitsyn.

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. (I was indirectly asking if you read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich as assigned reading in junior high or high school but appreciate your insights on PKD as well. If anyone was assigned PKD, I would be impressed.)

I've read Allingham's first book from c.1927, and it's quite plain and short but enjoyable. It doesn't give the impression that she'll go on to be a notable stylist. (I haven't yet read more.)

I note that the condition of being black in 1948, and the feelings associated with white people (resentment, fear, et al), give Mosley a load of content for his fiction that white writers didn't really have.

good meaty ilx discussion of british golden-age tec fiction easily missed in this thread (starting with this post):
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

scrolling down contains this classic ledge post:

not that lesbians don't walk dogs.

― ledge, Monday, 19 March 2012 2:12 PM bookmarkflaglink

I've read Allingham's first book from c.1927, and it's quite plain and short but enjoyable. It doesn't give the impression that she'll go on to be a notable stylist. (I haven't yet read more.)

I note that the condition of being black in 1948, and the feelings associated with white people (resentment, fear, et al), give Mosley a load of content for his fiction that white writers didn't really have.

just seen chuck tatum’s post - and it sounds like i want to give that book a go tbh.

Yeah, was thinking that too. Thanks for all the tips yall.
Still mean to check Mosley, but did see the screen version of DWTBD: just every single shot mattered, and the racial aspect came right across, though I'm told there's much more in his books: like you make up your mind, finish your drink, in whatever little place you can afford to drink in, go out to your car, and there's a cop. You deal with him, then you go do what you meant to do: that same night, or whenever you get out of the slammer. And that's...Tuesday, or whenever. The reader learns, or may have already learned, like the character, to factor such possibilities into the timeline.

Hope I'm not (although I probably am) overpraising it, but I found it to be genuinely odd and intriguing book, not at all what I was expecting. Perhaps it helped not having read any other Campions before it.

She's not a notable stylist at all - just an excellent action/suspense writer: the action scenes are very easy to imagine, while at the same time discretely suggesting that something isn't quite right.

youn, I didn't have to read that in junior high, got out of there right before Animal Farm became required reading (was told it was gross, still haven't read it). Did have to read 1984 in first year of high school. We enjoyed the scariness, esp. Winston and the rats, also Winston and Julia in bed. We noticed that the intro (by Lionel Trilling, I think) pointed out that this wasn't just about Communism (point of having us read it was Communism is Bad). In there or maybe somewhere else a little later, was a mention that Orwell got the idea for the Ministry of Truth while writing propaganda for the BBC during WWII (still later I looked at a collection of it: pretty good prop, just your man George sitting down at the table with plates of seemingly plain fare, solid and just warm enough for wartime).

My local book club has made me accidentally dovetail with this thread's current enthusiasm for crime fiction by making me read Tom Hindle's A Fatal Crossing. Recent but clearly in the mode of that golden era fiction - set in the early 20's, there's a murder and the theft of a painting on a transatlantic cruiser. Our protagonist, part of the ship's crew, is assigned to accompany Scottland Yard inspector Temple on his investigations.

It's pretty rubbish. The main character is haunted by the fact that he's lost his daughter (noir trauma-by-fridging 101) and Temple distinguishes himself solely through being unbearably rude and arrogant. Which of course many of the great detectives are, but Hindle misses out on the eccentric part - Temple doesn't do opium or mutter about his little grey cells in a Belgian accent, there's no whimsy to grab hold on to, he's just a loudmouth dullard. The cruise ship setting works ok, obviously part of the appeal is to be transported to this old world of immense wealth and luxury. All the characters are vague sketches. I don't much care about the mystery, though I admit I usually don't. Also tying in to Fizzles' complaint about Gaudy Night - this thing is 400 PAGES?? 400 pages for a fluffy pastiche excercise? The fuck out of here.

Tonight I will learn whether the person who suggested it likes it, and the conversation will have to be civil and full of disclaimers, or whether they also hated it and we can just go in.

Why The Moon Travels Oein DeBhairduin
Gay Irish traveller retells folk tales from the Traveller tradition . Introduced with reminiscences about his own childhood etc.
I had thought this was more of a picture book with the tales told in a way more angled to children until he did a talk in a tie in to an exhibition i have been volunteering with recently. Then i found out that there were copies in the library system including the local library though looking on the library catalogue website highlighted them as NEW. Book was launched back in 2020 and i've been semi consciously intending to read this since then.
Anyway nice gentle book for the most part. I enjoy folklore ad folk tales and am aware of them as a means of imbuing the values of a society into its members. So also interested in the process on a meta level to see how it is actually done.
Read about half of this yesterday in the installation that I heard the talk in a couple of Saturdays ago.

Paraphernalia : the curious lives of magical things / Steven Connor.
Book about everyday objects and the values and interpretations imbued i them.
Somebody on here was talking about this a few months ago I think. & I've been waiting for a copy to appear through the interlibrary loan system. Seemed to be both shipped to me and noted as missing in a stock take from the specific library that was supposed to have done so. Shades of Schrodinger
I was reading a load of other stuff at the time so left it to sort itself out and it never appeared so presumably was discovered to be missing. Anyway seems to be an interesting book. I've only read the introduction so far though but looking forward to getting into this cos I am interested in this process. I think an object one is familiar with is likely to be experienced differently than one temporarily encountered like. & I think that is part of the process talked about here among some other stuff.

How to Plan a Crusade: Religious War in the High Middle Ages Christopher Tyerman
Picked this up in a charity shop yesterday. Have mai9nly looked at the introduction so far. Seemed worthy of note but may need some more reading on Crusades as background. I have a penguin pairing of 2 Crusader chronicles floating around teh bed space and a longer history of teh Crusades I picked up a couple of months ago.
But this looks at the financial and management side of how one would deal with the more pragmatic side of a longer campaign in a distant area . How one marshalls one's troops, plans for horses to be fed/sheltered etc. & sounds like it could be interesting on that level. Not sure how fast I will get to this. If i will read the other books on the subject first or whatever. But looks interesting.

Blutopia Graham Lock
INteresting look into 3 jazz artists who I am at least semi familiar with but can always do with learning more about. Pretty erudite and looking at thgings from different perspectives tahn i have seen done elsewhere.
Dealing with racist assumptions and projections each one of these artists had to deal with was very interesting.
I think I would recommend this to anyone who has teh time to deal with it. & can read a book so peppered with numbers leading to endnotes which are pretty in depth themselves. Very worthwhile anyway.

A brief history of neoliberalism / David Harvey.

Why The Moon Travels is categorised more as Adult (non) Fiction . I think the author told me there was a children's picture book he had talked about in previous talks that I might have got confused with this. Good to have things representing ethnic minorities especially the travellers who seem to have been vilified for decades, hoping that they way they are portrayed is changing. The back story to the traveller population that is now coming out is that there had always been a degree to which the population was mobile up until a certain point and it is only in the wake of British rule and a few other factors that the balance became more to settlement, So there are direct parallels with indigenous populations elsewhere that are being contextualised through the gaze of an external settler colonial gaze.

i used to work with graham lock and yes, he is extremely diligent and an excellent writer as well as a lovely person

so i am glad you are enjoying his books

yeah you get cited in that book a bit. Interviews etc with the artists concerned.

scrolling down contains this classic ledge post

a classic, inscribe it on my tomb!

Noticing from an advert in a train station that John Banville now writes detective fiction under his own name rather than Benjamin Black, and as it was on offer at 89p, I gave April in Spain a go. If anything it cemented my belief that I don't really enjoy detective fiction. I don't think it was a bad example, though the final reveal was perhaps even more out of the blue than is typical and didn't seem to fully explain preceding events. And though it certainly wasn't badly written you wouldn't have thought the author had been described as '"one of the great stylists writing in English today'.

Now trying the more fantastical (and oulipian, apparently) thriller The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier.

xpost to dow - Thanks for reminding me about the quotidian in Orwell. I think he was good at casting and naming strange future inventions that become a part of ordinary life. I'm not so sure I like tracking and lidding in KSR's The Gold Coast and 'papes and minning in PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which I am reading now, but I think all of the predictions behind and behaviors associated with the names are fairly accurate. Descriptions of mobile phones from the recent past seem particularly awkward.

Catcher in the Rye might not get assigned anymore. I'm not sure that would be good or bad in and of itself, but there would probably be a wide range of novels, particularly those not available in English translation, to consider as alternatives.

I'm somewhat disappointed that Lethem didn't write an introduction for The Library of America edition of PKD. (He selected the novels and wrote fairly extensive notes.)

What kind of notes? Explanatory endnotes?

Finding actually reading a book in full very difficult recently (have recently abandoned Fermata by Nicholson Baker, A Lie About my Father by John Burnside, and Dryland by Sara Jaffe) I have obviously decided that now is the time to try and read William Taubman's Gorbachev: His Life and Times.

xpost - Yes, for example, "mad dogs and Englishmen" as being quoted from a song by Noel Coward.

xpost to ledge, i'll be interested to know what you think about the anomaly. i picked it up at random in mercer st books nyc and.... well oulipian my ass. i sort of enjoyed it a bit and then ended up hating it?

just scanning down the crime and detection bit of that lanchester thread i'm going to do the entirely dignified thing of quoting myself:

---

I was reading a John Dickson Carr novel over the weekend - as I often do! it's become a bad habit and is pure comfort reading - and there were some sections in the opening chapter that reminded me of how much a period can be observed in works that don't have the requirement of social evaluation as their reason for existence:

On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne's Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank - with barbed wire so that the children shouldn't fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St. Anne's, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.
Unreal!

No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.

This is already much better than anything Lanchester has written! For a start Lanchester very rarely describes any physical spaces with any interest or accuracy. Secondly, Lanchester isn't at all interested in creating atmosphere, doesn't even consider it. Atmosphere is a big thing in non-realist novels, more important than author's 'voice' or tone usually, I think it's probably a good thing in realist, or lit novels as well, but it doesn't seem to me to be worked on very often.

Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war is over. You come out of hospital - a little shakily, your discharge papers in your pocket - into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the interminable weight of threats.
People didn't celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.

But something awoke, deep down inside human beings' hearts, when the cricket results crept back into the papers and the bunks began to disappear from the Underground. Even peace-time institutions like the Murder Club...

I realise the end of World War II was more epochal, the transitions more obvious, there's a feeling of well-picked detail - those cricket results! Also, tellingly, even in this brief opening to a brief crime and detection novel, the newspaper version of events, the public version, is contradicted. You immediately get a sense of character and of the outside world, something JL hasn't managed in however many bloody pages I'm in. Just in the brief excerpt there's a sense of an independent person (not a cipher) and objects and events that differ from the public record, not it fulfil it: it's not just colouring in the newspaper version of events.

---

in relation to what mark s was saying upthread - i think intentionally or not, all of the golden age period 'tec fiction writers are v good recorders of the social moment - I'd definitely include DLS in this.

More generally, i never really got down with the *rules* of those novels, which as many people have said at least one is always broken in even the most platonic ideal examples, sometimes to provide its main effect. i find it very hard to believe that readers treated them the same as crosswords - an early JDC novel had a seal on its last pages and if you returned it before you broke its seal having guessed the conclusion you'd get a refund - great gimmick! But i wonder if they provided some sort of poetic constraint or forced exclusion which resulted in meaningful creativity in all sorts of areas.

<hand wave>

THEN CAME the Chandler mode, which was less about solving and rules, and more a manichean experience of crime and resolution. chandler is great. love him. but some of his effect wasn't - Broadchurch is the bullshit long end of that game where the cops are crap, no one gives a shit about the formal constraints of carrying out and executing a crime, and the reverse engineering in terms of solving it. and much as i loved the killing and the bridge, these are the same.

Obv there are a few amazing writers in this mode - George V Higgins is a serious literary figure imv with dialogue and plots to die for. Jim Thompson as well ofc as the utmost expression of manichean wrestling. GVH especially good at the sort of social observation you get in the golden age.

as regular ilxors will know i love JDC, and I kind of like Agatha Christie - JDC in particular, in his best books (there are many very bad books and some good books with very bad bits) was just really really good at providing clues in a way that is not noticeable, identifiable later, and not hidden through drowning it in stuff happening (DLS). Agatha Christie is also good at this, though imv her best trait is her social observation, dialogue and manner. JDC also - no two characters are the same, he was a demon for observation of physiognomy and manner.

anyway, that's a rough slightly drunken thesis (i'm ion a train dronking wine)

I don't think I follow the apparent claim by Fizzles that hard-boiled detection meant a great decline in ... Detection?

I have heard a version of that claim before, and also seen it partially denied. But Fizzles confuses me by talking not about what Chandler actually does in this mode but ... BROADCHURCH? A programme I haven't seen (and I suspect is not much like Chandler?), and what Fizzles' comment about 'the cops' implies in comparison to Chandler or Golden Age detection, I can't tell. The cops in Poirot are not much ... cop, are they?

I have mentioned it before but the recent novel EIGHT DETECTIVES could be of interest to anyone thinking about eg: 'the rules of detection'.

I have mixed feelings about Chirbes' Cremation. It's the first of his I've read and I may try another. The late-stage capitalism in post-Franco Spain context is not something with which I am familiar, and some of those setting details are engrossing. It's a character study: dense internal monologue chapters alternating between different characters, mostly members of one family, intertwined perspectives, and I ended up liked the ambling, pace ("understated plot," maybe). Has some *underworld* plot elements and stock tropes that I found a little too prestige TV for my tastes.

― zak m, Wednesday, 10 August 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Excellent piece on the book. The translation is slammed.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/brick-mortar-and-rot-cremation-rafael-chirbes/

So one of the things i like about the pinefox is that he forces you to be *explicit* and clarify details that are important that you might not have considered. this is v useful for me bcos i tend to jump to conclusions without necessary spadework. thanks pf!

yes, i am going to claim, for the sake of argument, that hard-boiled detection meant a great decline in detection. hard-boiled detection was about going places that your instinct or a 'hunch' thought might be useful and getting beaten up. basically it's following your nose according to what gets your most injured. classic detection follows THE RULES. i'm not saying any one is more valid than the other in terms of reality, that would be ridiculous. but bot have different literary mechanisms and effects. REAL DETECTION is not in itself important other than as a literary or aesthetic constraint (see oulipo).

Broadchurch is the experience of a detective going through an emotional arc or trauma to get to an end, in which the crime may not be fully resolved. pure chandler. i would argue. i mean my main issue with broadchurch is that no actual detection takes place at all. a vibes based approach to criminality if you will.

re: the cops in poirot. it's a weird one forced by literary function. so poirot respects japp enough to both spend time with him socially and trust him professionally. in the books he is not the comic character he is in the itv and other tv portrayals. Clearly though the cops are not able solve the particular cases described by christie.In general i think the idea is that the cases poirot solves are too baroque or weird for a matter of conventional police work. the important factor to ascertain is that poirot is special. so the fact the cops can't solve it is fine. it's a case of showing poirot's extraordinary nature.

the function of les flics? i think its to provide some civic or structural solidity for poirot to do 'magic'. also they bring him crimes, verify his conclusions, bring justice (note their absence in Murder on the Orient Express where justice needs to be evaded - there are a few such grey roles (military, judicial or other) who are not the police to accept and allow resolutions that would not be acceptable to the police.

Also, the psychological imbecile in some of the books is Hastings not the cops. So what function are they performing? well, i would say

oh cool, another unfinished sentence.

"i would say" what you cvnt.

no idea.

oh i also want to say that only murders in the building is v good at reviving an old school detection approach.

I still don't understand Fizzles' original claim that "the cops are crap" in BROADCHURCH, as against earlier detective fiction.

Because, again, this is a founding premise of Sherlock Holmes - it's literally all over A STUDY IN SCARLET.

Not having seen BROADCHURCH I think I imagined the central characters *were* police detectives, so I can't tell if Fizzles is saying they are bad cops, or other cops are bad cops. But either way, the "inept police" seems to be a very long-standing genre element.