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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Colin Watson

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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Colin Watson

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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Colin Watson