Defending Dorothy

[kerravonsen]

Last night while eating my dinner I watched a documentary about Agatha Christie, which was quite interesting. Alas the fly in the ointment was a little, needless, bit where they made a big point that a particular detective story by Dorothy L. Sayers was "all romance and no detection", apparently because they objected to the fact that the victim was a haemophiliac. And then they go on to say that Christie, by contrast, was masterful in distracting the reader with a red herring about coffee and sugar, while the real administration of the poison in question was due to a chemical reaction between tonic water and bromide.

Huh? I really don't see how they have a leg to stand on, apart from being allergic to romance. I've read the Sayers novel to which they refer, and the "romance" part of it is only a small portion of it (since the romance between the two characters takes about three books to get fulfilled, you can hardly say that the romance has taken over the books to the detriment of the detection!)

So let us consider the other objection, the haemophilia. Perhaps they think it isn't "fair", to have such an unusual victim who messes up all the normal chains of deduction. But aren't all red herrings "unfair"? The beauty of this one is that it is both a red herring and a clue. Are they objecting to it because it's obscure? But so is the reaction of bromide and tonic water, for people who aren't chemists (or pharmicists, as Christie was). I'm actually quite proud of myself with this particular Sayers novel because I figured it out about half a page before it was actually revealed, because haemophilia was a bit less obscure with me, as one of the guys at school was a haemophiliac. Perhaps they object because the victim wasn't "normal", as if there's some unwritten rule that all murder victims must be average, but you don't see them objecting to elderly, or bedridden, or blind victims... because their dead bodies don't produce red herrings as clues.

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I always prefered Sayers to Christie, no least because her detective had a real life and felt like a real person. Whimsey's mother, Harriet, these people are real.

Christie is just like doing a crossword, and half the clues only appear near the end.

[temeres.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing a programme on detective fiction on BBC Radio 4 a year or so ago, where one of the authors interviewed said he could easily write a hundred pages or so before resigning himself to putting in a murder to make the story fit the genre.

I read loads of Agatha Christie when I was a teenager, but looking back I think they were just too contrived and artificial, however ingenious. Detective fiction is more about lifting the lid on life, not death. It's about exposing the tensions between people, and to do that the characters have to be ultra-real, and in the typical Christie effort they aren't because they're subordinate to the mechanics of the murder and the subsequent process of deduction.

Yeah, I know that's not too coherent, but I've been up for 31 hours now and the brain's going...

[kerravonsen]

Well.... some people like doing crosswords...

[kerravonsen]

So, Christie put great emphasis on the mechanics, but she was very good at doing so. Wheras others may be better at getting to the psychological angle of what might drive someone to murder? Except that not many really do -- I mean, it's usually something banally evil like money, isn't it?

I think I must like much of my fiction to be mixed with bits of this and that: for example, pure romances are totally boring, but add a dash of romance to something else (like historical, or SF, or mystery) and it often enhances the flavour...

[temeres.livejournal.com]

If the fictional motives for murder seem banal, that's probably because real world motives are too - greed, revenge and jealousy probably topping the list.

There's more than one way in which people can end up becoming murderers. Some are driven reluctantly to the act, others go more voluntarily. Quick impromptu classification:
A: People driven to murder by circumstances that would stretch anyone's patience and often invite our sympathy - abusive partners, for example
B: People in the grip of an obsession beyond their control, as are many serial killers.
C: People prepared to countenance murder as a means of removing obstacles to their own, effectively selfish ends (money or power, for instance)
D: People prepared to kill as an instrument of furthering an ideology (those people we call terrorists).

Most detective fiction, going by the limited sample I've read (Christie, Cornwell, some Ruth Rendell and various others) seem to concentrate on types B and C, barely dabble in A and effectively ignore D (who mainly end up as the blackhats in thrillers). I can think of several reasons why this might be so, largely playing on the vicarious fear of readers wondering who might want to kill them and why.

That, however, doesn't really address the legitimacy of Sayers' alleged 'cheating' in the instance you cited (not a book I've read), but genre writing demands constant variations on the central theme, and the murder that turns out not to be a murder sounds like a perfectly legitimate variation to me. No worse than the sleuth turning out to be the killer, as I believe Christie did with her last Poirot, though I haven't read that one either.

[meril.livejournal.com]

Reading back over the book in question, it's another one where once you know it's coming, you can tell the clues. It wasn't just dropped in.

..and what romance? There was a lot of arguing, and people getting to know each other, but the romance in the Wimsey series is a multiple-book journey, not a single shot.

[kerravonsen]

Reading back over the book in question, it's another one where once you know it's coming, you can tell the clues. It wasn't just dropped in.

Yes, and it also was a factor in the psychological aspect of the thing, now that I think about it a bit more. Which is also evidence that it wasn't just dropped in. (Won't say more to prevent spoilers for those who haven't read it.)

as a Christie fan, and Sayers fanatic...

[izhilzha.livejournal.com]

The Christie novel you referred to is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (though the last Poirot had a very unexpeceted villain as well--Curtain is one of my favorite Christie stories, maybe because there's a focus on the psychological).

But I agree that Christie tended to focus more on the mechanics of the detective novel, and Sayers on the people. Rather like the difference between the kind of murder mysteries Harriet wrote before Gaudy Night, and the one she tries to attempt there, writing about "real people....[which would] hurt like hell."

Was Sayers more courageous than Christie, in that sense? Perhaps.