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

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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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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