British Library Crime Classics

While my go-to genres of books are SFF and history, I'm never averse to the odd crime, thriller or mystery novel. This is one of those interests I've inherited from my dad, and like him, my preferences range from John le Carré at the more literary end to trashy airport thrillers, though he traditionally opted for Tom Clancy doorstoppers, while my interests run to the pithier international thrillers, like Tokyo by Mo Hayder (which I read when I went to Tokyo).

More recently, he's developed a taste for British mysteries, after years of picking up Agatha Christie mysteries (presumably an interest he got from my grandmother), so whenever we've gone to Borderlands, an SFF bookstore we like up in San Francisco, he's brought back various books from the so-called Golden Age of Crime Fiction. I've skipped over the Dorothy L Sayers books he's gotten, grown concerned at the decay of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh books, and explored with interest the really obscure books he's bought from the British Library Crime Classics series.

This series is heavily focused on writers that have been largely forgotten and are long out of print. There are basically no names I've heard of before (John Bude, Freeman Wills Croft, Mavis Doriel Hay, et al), and the titles are what you might call stereotypical: The Cornish Coast Murder, The Santa Klaus Murder, Death in the Tunnel, Murder in the Channel. If a TV show like the Simpsons made fun of the British interwar mystery genre, these are the kinds of titles they might come up with.

The quality is also, to put it charitably, variable. I've read four of the books so far, and I'm at 2-for-2 of good vs bad. The first I read, Death in the Tunnel, while stolid and far from unpredictable, was at least well-constructed and terse, while Murder in the Channel was boring and afflicted by terrible prose. The Cornish Coast Murder benefited from its real-life locations (apparently a novelty in British writing back in the 1930s) but is dragged down by really rotten prose and dialogue. On the other hand, The Santa Klaus Murder is one that I resisted for the longest time, because it seemed to contain the worst excesses of the "cosy" mystery subgenre, but it's proven much better-written and, if not gripping per se, moderately well constructed (no spoilers, though, as I'm planning to finish it tonight).

What's interesting is how the series has resurrected all these books that have been forgotten since World War II, largely because the authors have been dead for decades. John Bude, for example, wrote about 30 mystery novels, apparently, but since he died in 1957 is unknown now (that, and the Cornish Coast Murder is pretty bad, as I said). Mavis Doriel Hay, by contrast, died in 1979, but she only wrote the Santa Klaus Murder and two other mysteries, all of which were also forgotten since she wrote on other non-fiction topics during her long career.

It just shows how it's generally hard to predict what will remain in print forty, fifty or sixty years in the future. Agatha Christie certainly created some entertaining and atmospheric mysteries, but is she really better than these other authors? Or to put it another way, if an author can churn out potboilers at the rate that John Bude did, it seems strange that they'd have gone so completely out of print. Though given how easily some SFF books fall out of print even these days, it's probably not that surprising.

The other interesting thing is seeing the mores of interwar Britain portrayed this way. You can obviously get that by reading Agatha Christie (just google the original title of her book, And Then There Were None), but it's still fascinating seeing that culture even in these little-known books. Bude's Cornish Coast Murder contains some whoppers, like suggesting that the murderer's erratic firing indicated a woman, while Hay's Santa Klaus Murder is full of class commentary about the murder victim's driver and secretary, though in the case of the latter, Hay does a better job of portraying those attitudes as wrong-headed.

Of course, there's also the fact that so many of these unearthed writers are women, which means characterizations are presented differently. Hay isn't quite as sexist as Bude, as you can imagine, and her female characters (and central romance) are better drawn. The genre is one that's always been heavily represented by female authors, so it's good to see that a number of these women are also being brought back into print; contrast that with Gollancz's SF and Fantasy Masterworks series, which republish some notable (if not quite forgotten) works in those genres, but almost exclusively by male authors.

As I've suggested, some of these books and authors deserve their obscurity, but if any of them catch your attention, they're worth a read. And for all that I've criticized John Bude's first mystery novel, I was sorely tempted to borrow the other three by him that my dad had on his shelf in Italy; in the end I left them there, for future lazy vacation reads.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on the Sandman

Just finished Netflix's adaptation of DC/Vertigo's The Sandman the other day, and thought I'd share some thoughts on it, both the good and the bad. As it says in the title, I'll be talking spoilers, so be warned (though do spoilers apply for a TV show that faithfully follows a comic that ended about 30 years ago...?).

Mike Duncan vs Mary Beard: Different Approaches to History

A couple of months ago I wrote a post talking about how much I was enjoying Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, and how it was sticking with me more than previous attempts to learn about Roman history, including Mary Beard's SPQR. Now that I've finished Duncan's series (as of yesterday) and had a chance in Italy to review some of Beard's book, I thought it would be a good time to look at the two different approaches to history and why I responded better to one than the other.

Part of it is clearly the way my brain retains information. Over the course of several months, I listened to Duncan narrate various points in Roman history, and I think the repetition helped facts to stick in my mind. He also helpfully pointed out when an important figured entered the historical record, so that my mind was primed to learn more about this person I'd been told to expect.

By contrast, when I read SPQR it was in my lunch breaks at work, and in the evenings, and at times I've found that I focus too much on getting through pages to really take in what I'm reading. I have this romantic idea of how many books I should be reading each month or year (4 and 50, respectively), and sometimes find myself chasing page counts rather than luxuriating in the prose or the facts for which I'm ostensibly reading a book. It seems likely that SPQR fell victim to that, as other books have before it.

Ironically, I'm finding that in certain circumstances the antidote to that forgetting is to read multiple books at the same time, a few pages at a time. Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of several books I'm reading (or rather rereading) at the moment, and I feel I'm retaining more than I did the first time I read it, back in 2003 or so.

The other difference between SPQR and the History of Rome is how they're organized. SPQR is clearly a work of erudition, drawing on Beard's expertise in Roman and Classical history, but looking at it again last month it didn't seem organized in the way I'd have preferred (I'm tying myself into knots to avoid saying that it's poorly organized, because I don't think it necessarily is - it's just poorly organized for me).

I suppose this is how my brain organizes information, but I need that spine of who was in charge, and in what sequence, to take in the sweep of history. This is why I've retained more of John Keay's China: A History, than of his India: A History. The book on China is given shape by explaining how each of the major dynasties arose, while India's history is a little more messy and so I have more trouble understanding the significance of the Maurya Empire, among others. All I know is that it came long before the Mughals, but I have precious little understanding of what happened between them - hence why I'm also rereading that book.

Another example is British history, or English history, if you prefer. A couple of years ago I picked up Simon Schama's History of Britain, thinking that it would be good to finally have a grounding in the history of the nation in which I've spent most of my life, apart from the US. His books are well-written, don't get me wrong, and I did get some understanding of that sweep of history, but for whatever reason his middle volume, on the English Civil War and the various religious wars, escaped me.

Subsequent to that, I picked up a copy of Rebecca Fraser's Story of Britain, which in the UK is (possibly cheekily) titled A People's History of Britain, and which I christened in my head A Tory History of Britain. It's defiantly old-fashioned, hanging its structure off the doings of kings and queens and nobles, and Oliver Cromwell; a review I read praised its focus, saying that it was superior to the current vogue for relating the daily life in "Boringshire".

Having read Fraser's book, though, I can say that the approach helps, conservative revisionism aside (and besides, Robert Tombs's The English and Their History made Fraser's Tory History look positively Blairite). Don't ask me to distinguish between the Angevins and the Plantagenets, or to put the Poitevins into that historical context [never mind, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Ed.], but between one thing and another I have a better sense of how the Stuart dynasty failed and gave way to the Hanoverians, who led to Queen Victoria and the current British royals.

By the way, this isn't to say that history should never deviate from talking about what nobles and royals were doing. The History of Rome took a couple of episodes to talk about what daily life was actually like in different points of the empire, and did so in a way that made it come alive better than any source I'd seen before. That said, his series misses out on what women were doing during those centuries of Rome. This is in part because the sources we have available don't say anything about women, although he has a lot more to say about various empresses at the end of the Western Empire.

Looking at SPQR again, Beard organized her book to touch on various topics, and only devoted one chapter to the emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Her overall scope ends in the early 200s, when Caracalla gave citizenship to all residents of the empire, as opposed to just Romans or Italians. There are certainly good reasons to foreground the historical currents rather than the emperors, who weren't always in control of events, but I can't help feeling I'd have gotten more out of her book if she'd used the sequence of emperors (roughly speaking; you don't have to go into too much detail on Otho, Galba or Vitellius, as she doesn't) as a starting point to talk about what life was like in the empire.

To put it another way, not much may have happened during the reign of Antoninus Pius, fourth of the so-called Five Good Emperors, but that's because Rome was enjoying an unprecedented period of stability since the accession of Nerva through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Antoninus Pius isn't too interesting on his own, but he's worth mentioning when considering that stability, since it would end with the death of his successor Marcus Aurlius, and would never be attained again. SPQR didn't leave me with that understanding, and the History of Rome podcast did.