Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler turns 124 127 years old today, so I thought I'd bring back some old posts about his influence on crime writers beyond his own American (and English) borders.

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Four years ago the Los Angeles Times asked writers what they would give Chandler as a birthday gift, but I'd like to discuss taking rather than giving, namely what other writers have taken from Philip Marlowe's great creator.
Two years ago, in a post called "Chandler in South Africa," I noted Roger Smith's graceful extended tribute to Chandler in his novel Mixed Blood.

Last year I discovered Claudio Nizzi, Massimo Bonfatti, and their loving, amused, and amusing tribute to Chandler (and just about every other crime, movie, and pop-culture trend) in their Leo Pulp comics.

Matt Rees, Welsh-born and Jerusalem-based author of mysteries set in the Palestinian territories, told Detectives Beyond Borders that: "My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett." Moreover, he said the social chaos of the territories reminded him of the worlds those two authors portrayed so well: "In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler."

In Ireland, Declan Hughes invoked Chandler in discussing his own country's Celtic Tiger economic explosion and concurrent boom in crime and crime fiction: "The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.”

Also in Ireland, your humble blogkeeper noted the debt to Chandleresque plotting and wisecracking in Declan Burke's first novel, Eightball Boogie. Colin Watson's delightfully opinionated social history of English crime writing, Snobbery With Violence, cites Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," for his observations about crime writing and English writers.

An afterword to Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian crime novel American Visa noted the author's references to Chandler, Hammett, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. I've also detected more than superficial signs of Chandler's influence in novels by Australia's Peter Corris and noted the traces of Chandler some have found in the work of Algeria's Yasmina Khadra. Finally, Chandler is one of many crime writers upon whom Australia's Garry Disher muses in his wildly self-referential and wildly funny story "My Brother Jack."

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And now it's your turn. What other crime writers from outside the United States have felt Chandler's influence? How has the influence shown itself?

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Late-breaking Chandler tribute: I've just read the following in William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around Rosa):

"Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

Christie vs. Christie vs. Christie

Dame Agatha Christie will probably still be making news at the end of days or the closing of The Mousetrap, whichever comes first.

Lately, she’s been the object of sniping from Peter Temple, who doesn’t take her writing seriously (“often ridiculous plots and the fact that reading her can be like being trapped in the company of an aged thespian who turns what should be three-minute anecdotes into three-act plays.”)

A piece in the Spectator, on the other hand, accords Christie a kind of moral superiority over Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler because, the writer says, she took murder more seriously and found it more shocking than they did. (Hat tip to Petrona, where I found the article.) The writer exaggerates, possibly to the point of misconstruction, Chandler’s famous statement about motivation for murder in crime fiction, but the argument is nonetheless worth reading.

Somewhere between Temple’s Christie-is-bad argument and the Spectator’s Christie-is-good is Colin Watson’s that Christie could be sensitive, savvy, disingenuous, and, just possibly, not above a spot of pandering.

Once I have you here, readers, who else in crime fiction has sparked such widely divergent opinions?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Noble efforts that don't quite work

Sometimes an experiment is interesting even if it doesn't work. Colin Watson's Kissing Covens (also published as Broomsticks Over Flaxborough) includes a tasty send-up of advertising-speak. Some excerpts:

"So he's absolutely integral — but integral — so far as local product acceptance is concerned."
"In an above-the-line situation, Gordon."

and

"Hang on. We'll just kick that one around a bit, shall we? One — have we really lost him, disappearance-wise? Or is he just temporarily snarled up in a bottle situation?"

That's good stuff, but five pages of it is too much. Pompous abbreviations for the men's company and titles are funny on the scene's first page; on its fourth, "TEAK'S DCBV nodded" is tedious piling-on.

On second thought, perhaps length is not entirely to blame. Perhaps the scene, published in 1972, doesn't work in 2007 because so many people really do talk and write that way these days. Conversation-wise, that is.
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OK, readers, now you weigh in. What crime-fiction scenes, tricks, devices or tactics have you read that are clever but don't quite work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Colin Watson for the holidays

What better way to honor America than by reading a classic British crime-fiction comedy? In Charity Ends at Home, Colin Watson again casts a satirical eye on the English village mystery. Here, in the fifth of his twelve Flaxborough Chronicles, he adds fierce rivalry within the world of pro-animal charities to a roster of targets that has included lechery, snobbery, sexual hypocrisy, blackmail and embezzlement.

But anyone who doubts that Watson loved his mythical eastern English setting should reads this little lyrical gem:

The streets were full of bicycles, clattering droves of them, bowling homeward from the docks and timber yards and factories. ... Timber men, packers, engineers, men from the wharves converged in speeding groups which then split at junctions and crossroads with banter and shouts of farewell. The older men, riding alone or in pairs, let the others pass while they sat in straight-backed dignity in their saddles and showed off skill at lighting pipes with one hand. They affected not to notice the antics of the boys who stood on their plunging pedals like rodeo performers or crouched, chin to handlebars, and furiously raced one another, with the squeals of the cannery girls as prizes.

When I left off my reading to watch the fireworks, an enthusiastic fund-raiser had just been found face-down in a well. I'll report back later on how she got there.

Click here for more about Colin Watson and the Flaxborough Chronicles.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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How do authors change their series over time?

Five months ago, I asked how series characters change over time. This time I'll focus on their creators. Recently I've noted that Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have become more sympathetic and tender as they've grown older. Earlier, I discovered Colin Watson's delightful tendency to apply slightly spicier touches of naughty words as his Flaxborough Chronicles series progressed.

Those are two of the more creative ways I've seen of changing a series just enough to keep it interesting while retaining the features that made it distinctive in the first place. How do your favorite crime-fiction authors do it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Colin Watson knew his shit ...

... which is why he never wrote a sentence like this one. As in his fourth Flaxborough novel, Lonelyheart 4122, so in his twelfth and last, Whatever's Been Going on at Mumblesby? In both, Watson uses curse and coarse words sparingly but to great effect.

His curse words were not meaningless interjections, all-purpose intensifiers or serve-all synonyms, the way such words often are today. Rather, set as they are against something very much like the traditional English mystery-story village, they regain their old ability to shock (and I'll update this post with examples later).

To be sure, the curses are more intense in the later book, published in 1982, fifteen years after the earlier one. Curse words were for Watson indicators of changing times, another indicator of the skill with which he wielded them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A kicker and a tease

Coffin Scarcely Used, published in 1958, was the first of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles novels, and in spots the plot is extravagant (codes; secret passages of a kind; a man found electrocuted, his mouth stuffed with marshmallows; and a final one that would constitute a spoiler if I revealed it).

One or two descriptions are flat, as well, but never mind; the book has one of the great kickers ever, which, for obvious reasons, I also cannot reveal. Suffice it to say that the kicker is funny, but it's no mere throwaway to end the book on a light note. It has resonance and just might make you think back on the characters about whom you will have just read.

Click here for more about Colin Watson and the Flaxborough Chronicles.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The little world of Mayhem Parva

That's the celebrated title of Colin Watson's celebrated chapter on the classic era of detection ushered in by Agatha Christie. It is here and in succeeding chapters in the final third of Snobbery With Violence that the arguments become more convincing, in large part because the authors Watson discusses are more familiar.

Earlier chapters deal with Sax Rohmer, Sydney Horler, `Sapper' and Edgar Wallace. In the book's later chapters, Watson wrestles with Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Leslie Charteris ("The Saint"), wrapping up with a discussion of that sadistic, retrograde, socially insecure faux snob (Watson's verdict, my words), Ian Fleming. The older writers are easy to lampoon because of their outlandish plots, their cartoonish characters, their racism, and their pandering. But a current reader of Watson's entertaining survey may find the earlier chapters harder to engage with because, I suspect, the authors are little read today (although Edgar Wallace did make it into the blogophere in this discussion of When the Gangs Came to London last year).

The later chapters also make better reading because the authors under discussion were, for the most part, better, subtler and more sophisticated writers. It's easy to mock E. Phillips Oppenheim's contempt for the working classes, Sydney Horler's weird prudery and anti-Semitism, Sapper's embodiment of ideals akin to those that flowered later in British fascism, and Wallace's inconsistent and wild plots. Authors such as Christie and Sayers, however, leavened their embrace of current attitudes with just enough self-mockery to leave the matter in doubt, according to Watson, and that doubt, he says, could benefit them commercially. Here's a selection from Christie's Cards on the Table followed by Watson's assessment:

"He was tall and thin, his face was long and melancholy, his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black, he wore a moustache with stiff waxed ends and a tiny black imperial. His clothes were works of art — of exquisite cut — but with a suggestion of bizarre. Every healthy Englishman who saw him longed earnestly and fervently to kick him. They said, with a singular lack of originality: `There's that damned Dago, Shaitana!'

"The passage shows Mrs. Christie's awareness of how widespread in the England of 1936 was xenophobia, her own disapproval of which she implied in the phrase `with a singular lack of originality.' But it would have taken someone with a little more substance than that of the average reader to notice that here was not just another sneer at the foreigner."

Watson offers a number of acute judgments on how post-war crime and thriller writing changed in style while remaining as unrealistic as ever in substance. Fleming and the thriller writers who followed, writes Watson, pulled off the high sleight of hand of making espionage seem realistically exciting: "Into what was still the old-style hokum — the gunplay, kidnapping, chases, escapes and so forth — was elaborately insinuated the proposition that not only were these things happening in very truth, but they were unavoidable ... "

Watson has a lively eye for absurd statements, and his book contains more witticisms than do most works of social and literary history. Here, he takes Kingsley Amis to task for Amis' defense of Fleming against allegations of gratuitous, vicious violence: "More ingenuous was Amis's attempt to counter the sadism charge by quoting two extracts from `the real thing' — the works of Mr Mickey Spillane. This is rather like retorting to a diner who complains of having found slugs on his cabbage that he is lucky not to have gone to the establishment next door, where slugs are served as the main course."

And what, by the way, is Mayhem Parva? Let Watson explain:

The setting for the crime stories by what we might call the Mayhem Parva school would be a cross between a village and commuters' dormitory in the South of England, self-contained and largely self-sufficient. It would have a well-attended church, an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detective-inspectors, a village institute, library and shop — including a chemist's where weed killer and hair dye might conveniently be bought. The district would be rural, but not uncompromisingly so — there would be a good bus service for the keeping of suspicious appointments in the nearby town, for instance — but its general character would be sufficiently picturesque to chime with the English suburb dweller's sadly uninformed hankering after retirement to `the country.'

N.B. I complained that Watson's early chapters cited but failed to name any of the rare authors of quality whose books he says suffered because of reviewers' facetious attitudes toward crime stories. Later in the book, he offers highly interesting comments about Anthony Berkely Cox, who "had written in 1930 that the detective story was in the process of developing into the novel with a crime theme, `holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.'" That seems an astonishingly prescient statement, and Watson says the change did not make itself felt for several years. In the interim, a popular magazine rejected a version of one of Cox's books. "'Life,' commented Cox patiently, `is very, very difficult,' and he went on to write more crime novels that bore a disconcerting resemblance to literature."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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More Snobbery With Violence

Colin Watson's 1971 book Snobbery With Violence is not, a cover blurb and my previous post to the contrary, a work of literary and social history, at least not in its first half. Rather, it is an entertaining, informative and occasionally illuminating essay and chronicle of the shortcomings, prejudices and popular reception of English crime fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. If it comes close to a traditional academic field, that field is sociology rather than history.

It's not history because Watson avoids examples that might create difficulties for his thesis. As English crime fiction grew unavoidably popular in its Golden Age between 1920 and 1939, Watson writes, "Book reviewers settled into an attitude of good-natured, if slightly supercilious tolerance." Such reviewers' "slightly facetious style," he says, "revealed singularly little about the books and although in most cases this was a blessing for their authors, the rare novel of quality was likely to suffer the injustice of exactly similar treatment simply because it happened to treat of crime. Librarians unwittingly performed a like disservice to the few writers in the field who believed that if a book of any kind was worth writing it was worth writing well."

You can guess what's coming, can't you? Watson fails to name any such "rare novel of quality" or any of the few writers who wrote them. He does cite Raymond Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," but for his observations about crime writing and English writers (Chandler, though American, was educated at Dulwich College) rather than as an author in his own right.

Without counterexamples of such rare crime novels by rare good writers, Watson can come off as a bit of a scold, albeit an entertaining one. But the funniest and most telling line, at least in the book's first half, is probably Chandler's, from "The Simple Art of Murder": "The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Snobbery With Violence

That's the title of Colin Watson's highly opinionated social history of English crime fiction, published in 1971 and reissued by Mysterious Press in 1988.

His thesis, at least a mildly provocative one, is that detective stories were expressions of conventional attitudes and prejudices on sex, foreigners and other dicey matters. "It would be difficult to point to any other single branch of popular entertainment that conformed more strictly to current notions of decency," he writes.

Watson presents the detective story against a background of the rise in literacy among the English and the flourishing of commercial libraries. Among other things, his opening chapters are a reminder that commerical expansion can mean restriction rather than expansion of avenues for unconventional expression.

And you may be surprised by what he has to say about George Orwell.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A last word (for now) about Colin Watson

Though I could not name a novel or a movie off hand in which such a figure appears, I seem to recall the abortionist as a powerful symbol in crime fiction of the mid-twentieth century. This was the figure whose medical practice dare not speak its name, whose specialty was only hinted at.

Colin Watson has good fun with such a figure in Just What the Doctor Ordered, also known as The Flaxborough Crab, published in 1969 — good, coy fun, as perhaps was necessary for the time:

"Have you ever heard of a drug called `Juniform'?"

"I have."

"Is it well known?"

"Not in my field, no. But then it's hardly likely to become part of the armoury of the obstetrician."

"Oh, Bernard! You are sweet. Obstetrician ... So you are!"

"Now look, Lucy — do you want me to help or don't you?"

At once Miss Teatime quelled her trill of amusement.

and, lest there be any doubt:

"I'll see what I can do."

"Which I know will be a great deal, my dear. You are a man of resource. My confidence will not miscarry ... "

"Lucy! For God's sake! Not over the phone ... "

"Sorry," she said sweetly.

But the line was already dead.

Incidentally, abortion figures not at all in the plot. Watson apparently just saw a chance to have a good time, and perhaps to press up against some boundaries that were about to come down.

The novel does concern another area of medicine more directly, though, or, more precisely, an area of medicine and commerce. A pharmaceutical salesman figures in the story, and the pressure that such salesmen put on doctors to buy their products is a prominent theme. Such a theme is fresh today, never mind in a novel of the 1960s. And that makes the book another instance of Watson's beguiling combination of Golden Age style with contemporary subject.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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More Colin Watson

Sure, Colin Watson has fun at the expense of Flaxborough and some of its inhabitants, but he never takes cheap or easy shots. He can be wistful without being maudlin, satirical without being condescending. And always, a sense of compassionate humor leavens all, as here, from the last chapter of Plaster Sinners:

Purbright bought two half pints of bottled India pale ale and they sat in the corner of one end of the long, narrow room, which once had had tables of white marble and curly cast iron and mahogany counter and a gilded mirror and a wheezing tea urn big as Stephenson's Rocket, but now was fitted with plastic cantilever slabs and benches rivetted to the floor as if in fear of their being stolen.

"All right, ducks?" the custodian of the bar inquired of Purbright. She was a large woman, flushed and sweaty with an eruptive cheerfulness that neither her place of work nor her occasional
appearance at petty sessions could long repress.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Colin Watson

I normally don't keep track of naughty words in a novel, but it was hard to avoid doing so with Lonelyheart 4122, the fourth of Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels. Oh, the words are not all that naughty — arsehole, fornication, fetishists — and Watson uses them sparingly, but they were a surprise in a traditional English village mystery.

So was the novel's climax, in which Watson leads victims, police and perpetrators out of Flaxborough to a showdown in an isolated country house. If the occasional freedom with sexual and scatological language seems a product of the 1960s, the climax could well have happened in a hard-boiled American crime novel of the 1930s. That Watson makes this all work in a genial, well-constructed and at times very funny story published in 1967 is a source of wonder to this reader in 2007. There was plenty of life — and plenty of room for renewal — in a good, old mystery full of village eccentrics in Watson's day.

Flaxborough is an ideal setting for such a story, "a market town of some antiquity and a remarkable record of social and political intransigence ... the Vikings — welcomed as kindred spirits and encouraged to settle — had fathered a population whose sturdy bloody-mindedness had survived every attempt for eight centuries to subordinate and absorb it."

Two middle-aged women have gone missing, and the search for them leads police to an introduction, or dating, service. Flaxborough's police fear that a newcomer with a marvelous name, Lucilla Teatime, will become the third, and they place a shadow on her, several in fact. Miss Teatime eludes all with ease, leaving one stranded in the lingerie section of a department store:

He was soon looking so guilt-ridden that a supervisor went up to him and asked meaningfully if she could help him. Pook merely scowled at her.

As the supervisor passed closely by Miss Teatime, she raised her voice.

"They call them fetishists, you know," Miss Teatime said sweetly.

Could there be a better chronicle of the passing from an age when lingerie was unmentionable to one when it is unavoidable?

The novel is chock full of amused observations — "(Sgt.) Love departed after holding the door for the entry of a very plump woman in a short yellow coat and thinking that she looked like a pot of mustard."— about Flaxborovians and their ways. But not all is farce and delight. Sparing remarks about loneliness and about the changing face of once-prosperous streets indicate a gentle sympathy on Watson's part.
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A big thanks to Michael Walters for suggesting Watson and to Karen Chisholm for raving about him. You should follow their suggestions and mine and read the Flaxborough novels, of which you will find a list here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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