Tuesday Night Bloggers: History and Mystery

 
 

pick a year, any year…



Tuesday Night Bloggers History & Mystery
The Tuesday Night Club has chosen history as this month’s theme, in any way the blogger likes to interpret it.

Bev at My Reader’s Block has, as ever, produced a great logo for us, and she is also collecting the links this month.
 
 
I recently read two crime books set in 1956: one was written then, one was written in 2016. I was fascinated by the differences, and have decided to take that as my theme this week.

Jane Austen is reputed not to mention any current events, particularly the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. This is not quite true (remember where Anne Elliot’s beloved, Captain Wentworth, got his money from…. ?), but it marks the difference between contemporary and historical fiction. Pretty much all books set in the past are full of ‘Have you heard the news from London?’ and gossip about the top level of society and awkward amounts of exposition. Those writing about their own times don’t feel the need to put all that in, and they also don’t know which are going to be the key features of their own era.

So I’m continuing my researches into 1955 & 1956… through contemporary eyes and more modern ones.


My first modern version is Elizabeth Wilson’s She Died Young, published this year. She does a great job of creatingShe Died Young 1956, and I would say did a lot of research. The Hungarian Uprising is recent and important, as is the Suez crisis. There are criminal gangs, madams and brothels, and there’s a vivid picture of a London half-life involving police and villains. There is a character who is clearly gay.

Then there’s Miss Hogg and the Bronte Murders by Austin Lee: published in 1956, set maybe 1955. No political features here, as I said on the blog:

There is no consideration of the Hungarian Revolution, or prostitutes, or secretive gay activities.

But Miss Hogg is rather good, I liked her and her straightforward manner and fondness for a tipple – as in so many English books of the 1950s (and later), opening time for pubs looms from time to time. And in a most unconventional moment, she takes back the tip left under a saucer on a café table because she needs the pennies for a call from a phonebox. (This is the kind of authentic detail that may have escaped the estimable Elizabeth Wilson).

And there is another nice contemporary detail. The town of Bletchley is very famous for something: the proverbial fact that it is exactly half-way between Oxford and Cambridge. No-one would nowadays think that was what was most notable about Bletchley, but back then its key wartime role (see the Robert Harris book Enigma) was unknown still, a desperate secret. ….

Agatha Christie produced Hickory Dickory Dock and Dead Man’s Folly in 1955 and 1956. They are very much of their time: she may not have had much political detail, but she was exercised by the post-War changes in the English way of life, and she documented them very carefully. There is a village fete, and I loved this casual throwaway remark: the fortune-teller must not pretend to be a gipsy because ‘everyone in agricultural districts hates gipsies': the kind of crass but authentic detail you can rely on in Christie, and nothing could be more true to its time.

Dead Man's Folly


Folly is very clearly set in Christie’s own house, Greenway, in Devon. In the book she mentions the pleasure boats from Dartmouth making a commentary on ‘Nasse House’ as they go past: nowadays they comment on the fact that it was Agatha Christie’s house, which gives you a weird post-modern feeling if you are reading it on site, as I did recently.

dart 2boat house
The multi-cultural hostel in Hickory Dickory Dock is not something you could imagine in Christie’s earlier books – you could seeTuppence living in a hostel for nice young ladies (like Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means), but not the establishment run by Miss Lemon’s sister. The book is clearly an attempt to be more uptodate, and there is some very cautious investigation into ‘modern’ race relations, and 'modern' relations between the sexes.

Hickory Dickory Dock is a very reasonable Christie, but unfortunately in my mind is always associated with the comment on it in Robert Barnard’s A Talent to Deceive, which may be unfair but makes me laugh every time I think of it:
Evelyn Waugh's diary records that [Hickory Dickory Dock] 'began well' but deteriorated 'a third of the way through into twaddle' – a judgment which, unusually for him, erred on the side of charity.
Which brings me nicely onto Robert Barnard’s own Scandal in Belgravia, - published 1991 - with its intricate plot switching back from a 90s framework to a crime in 1956. Again, homosexuality is important, and so are all kinds of political issues of the time  – the Foreign Office, spies, lefties and debs all to the fore. I liked this look at changes in phraseology over the years:
Displaced persons - what we today would call refugees, I suppose— one of the few instances of our language becoming less euphemistic in recent years.
Scandal in Belgravia 1

My Halloween book this week – Six Were Present by ER Punshon – is also a 1956 book, and, like Christie, the author is interested in a post-war world, and even in post-colonialism. Bobby Owen is contemplating a world where people use Christian names too much, and there is an attempt to see people in other countries as equals, and their beliefs as more than mere un-Christian mumbo jumbo.

There are some crime stories published around that time that really have little to link them with 1955/6. JC Masterman’s The Case of the Four Friends is very much a Don’s Delight set partly at a New Year’s Eve party. It also has an Oxford college High Table element, but couldn’t be more different from Robert Robinson’s Landscape with Dead Dons, also 1956. You could read these books one after another and not get any remote feeling that they were set in exactly the same time and place.

Patricia Wentworth came up with Poison in the Pen and The Silent Pool in these years, but I would defy any reader to find any content illuminating current events. And Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice  reflects important events in the past without showing much about the present.


Scandal in Belgravia 2


Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight is a 1956 book with a very definite setting in 1953 – it makes much of the Coronation and the first ascent of Everest, nice contemporary ideas. I recently criticized Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison, published 2011, for getting details of exactly that time wrong…his book was another switching from modern times to a crime in the early 1950s.

But the whole question of inauthenticity, anachronisms and mistakes in crime fiction set in the past is too big to take on in this blogpost – in other words don’t start me on that particular topic.

So we’ll leave it at this: a book written in the 1950s will be rich in details of the clothes, the manners and the households of the time. Those written 20, 30 or 40 years will feel more researched and less natural, and have a lot more about politics. I didn’t find any references to Suez, Hungary or McCarthyism in any of the older books…

Those are genuine 1950s debs and nobs above, along with a fake fortune-teller from the Library of Congress (should've used her for this week's Halloween/seance piece for the Guardian), and TKR's pictures of the boat house and river at Agatha Christie's house.









Comments

  1. What a fascinating post, Moira! And it's spot on, too. That's exactly the sot of thing you see when you compare a book written ina time to one written about a time. They are different. You've chosen some great examples of how that works, too. I think it's one of those things that you can't really predict during a time - what's going to be a major issue. So, you focus on, well, life and the details of it.

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    1. Thank you Margot - I thought you would be interested in this idea, and now I wonder if you might do something on it too. I would love to hear others's ideas about the differences.

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  2. It's like the way that the '60s TV adventure series that I'm so fond of tend to make you feel that this is the 1960s, but leave you a little at sea as to when exactly in that decade. The clothes and sets were deliberately not up to date, so as to not date as quickly as 'cutting edge' stuff would do.

    Christie often works in contemporary stuff, but it is rarely obvious. Stuff like the Lindbergh Kidnapping in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS was something that would be recognisable to the original audience but not something that would date it too quick. In John Dickson Carr's THE NINE WRONG ANSWERS the Festival of Britain is a major setting in the latter part of the book, and absolutely ties it down to taking place at a certain period of history, but it's not something that a lot of writers of historical mystery would chose to highlight, They're much fonder of more dramatic events. It makes me think of the possibly apocryphal line from an historical film "Don't worry, it will be the Renaissance in a few years time!"

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    1. 'Men of the Middle Ages - let us head forth into the Hundred Years War!' - I'm quite sure that alleged line from a historical drama is apocryphal too, but I like the idea anyway.
      I'm so naïve that I hadn't really got that point you make about programme makers not wanting to be too specific, but of course it makes perfect sense.

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  3. Interesting piece, I don't think I've given this much thought TBH. Nor will I again....

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    1. I suppose if there's enough violence and gritty murders going on in dark settings, the era of the book doesn't matter...

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  4. Moira, you have reviewed some excellent novels set in 1956 or written around that period and I seriously need to read some of these authors, in particular Robert Barnard, who I have read once before, and Patricia Wentworth.

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    1. Both writers that I think you will enjoy Prashant...

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  5. This was fun and an experiment I should try, although I would probably stick to only one or two books from the period. Could never come up with as many as you have. I am still planning to read Poison in the Pen sometime; I don't know why I keep putting off Wentworth. I have plenty of her books, although some are e-books, which I am not getting along with lately.

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    1. I wish you would read Wentworth, Tracy, because I'd really like to know what you make of her...

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  6. Oh, please do write that post on inauthenticity, anachronisms and mistakes - it would be fascinating! As was this post. I have noticed the phenomenon in many children's books, too.

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    1. Thanks for the encouraging words - I should do that. I do know that many readers don't notice or mind, and I do not try to be pedantic. But when something is wrong, it trips me up when I'd rather be losing myself in the book.

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