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Originally Posted by Mike Ripley
Reviewing The Reviewer
Dorothy L Sayers as crime critic 1933 - 1935
Mike Ripley
Mike Ripley has been crime fiction critic of the Daily Telegraph for ten years. In July 1999 he was the opening lecturer at the Dorothy L. Sayers Convention at Newnham College, Cambridge.
It was a bloody and awful business being a character in a crime novel in the 1930s. Nowhere, but nowhere, seemed safe.
Based on the books Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed for The Sunday Times, there was: Crime At Guildford, Poison In Kensington, Death On the Oxford Road, A Dagger In Fleet Street (in the back, one presumes), Death At The Opera, and even A Death At Broadcasting House.
Perhaps more worryingly, there was even A Killer At Scotland Yard, which probably explained the appalling crime rate.
There was Murder At Lancaster Gate, although now better known as the headquarters of the Football Association, this is forgivable, and ominously, there was Murder Up The Glen written by a man named Campbell, and therefore the Glen in question was probably Glencoe and the book autobiographical.
There was Murder.... At The Manor, In The Square, At The Flower Show, On The Moors, On The Cliff and, of course, On The Orient Express.
The period also saw the passing, no doubt sorely missed, of a certain Lord Edgeware.
To combat this crime wave, there were a host of detectives, both professional policemen and gifted amateurs, and among them some very famous names: Hercule Poirot, Albert Campion, Ellery Queen, Inspector French, Max Carrados, Father Brown, Perry Mason, Philo Vance, Dr Thorndyke and Reggie Fortune.
It must be said, however, that there were many lesser-known ones, who failed to make an impact on either the crime figures or future readers.
Professionally, Inspectors Richardson, Boscobell, Heather, Higgins, Treadgold and Bull, not to forget Sergeant Whalebone, represented the British police, whilst Captain Michael Lord and Captain Devaney covered beats in New York and New Haven respectively.
Batting for the amateur side were, among others: the Hon. A.S. Pennington, the Rev. Ebeneezer Buckle, Dr Quentin Pace, Dr Hailey, Dr Blair (obviously not junior doctors) and one Paul Savoy, of whom DLS wrote was:
"one of those detectives with a superiority complex..(he treats his followers) with a condescension which would be intolerable from Almighty God to a black beetle."
*
Beginning in June 1933 and finishing abruptly in August 1935, Dorothy Sayers reviewed 364 crime fiction books for The Sunday Times - an average of three a week, and approximately 25% of the total output of crime fiction in those years of 'The Golden Age' of crime writing.
In order to review three or four titles for a weekly deadline, it is said she actually read two novels a day , an impressive, almost incomprehensible feat. Given that this period also saw her lecturing, promoting Murder Must Advertise, acclaimed by the Daily Express as "having eclipsed Edgar Wallace and Conan Doyle as the master writer of detective fiction", editing short story collections, publishing The Nine Tailors and writing Gaudy Night, one wonders just how many hours there were in a DLS day.
By the standards of the day, though, Dorothy Sayers' own output of fiction was restrained to say the least. One of her favourite writers, J. Jefferson Farjeon, regularly produced three novels a year as, in one year, did Anthony Gilbert , which prompted Dorothy to note in her review: "There are many reasons which may prompt an author to produce books at this rate, ranging from hyper-activity of the thyroid to the grim menace of rates and taxes."
Sixty-five years on there are still some authors - either hyper-active or in hiding from the Inland Revenue - who strive to such prolific heights. Indeed there is one British author who has published, under three names, four new novels within the last year.
Immediately we can identify three things which have not changed in the six decades since Dorothy Sayers reviewed crime fiction. We still have quality, we certainly have quantity and, for every famous character (whether detective or villain) whose name and idiosyncrasies enter the language, there are two, or three, if not five or ten, who are here today and gone today.
Dorothy's weekly review columns between 1933 and 1935 have been painstakingly logged by the DLS Society and were the subject of an impressive analysis by Ralph Hone in 1985.
There are some physical parameters to be established.
In 1934 there were 4,827 works of fiction published in Britain and 5,310 in 1935 , which represented between 31% and 32% of all books published in those years (between 15,400 and 16,700). Over 600 of those novels were crime novels - about one-eighth of all published fiction each year - mostly by British authors but with an increasing number of American titles.
1999 saw over 620 new crime novels published here - about one every 14 hours and a not too dissimilar rate from the 1930s; quite a remarkable achievement given the competition from films, television, video, comics, graphic novels and computer games. These are all new titles, not paperback versions or reissues or new editions and at least a third are by American authors.
The total number of new novels being published is now around 5,150 (1998 figures), which again is on a par with 1935. But the total number of new books in a year has increased to over 76,000 titles. Crime writing has maintained its share of fiction output, but fiction now only represents about 7% of all books published and all books vie for coverage in the review sections of our newspapers.
The immediate consequence of this increased competition is that today's crime reviewers have far less space in which to operate.
DLS, on average, contributed a weekly column of between 600 and 1,000 words covering two or three titles, four at the most. My column in the Telegraph, if I am lucky, appears six or seven times a year. I am usually allowed no more than 500 words and am expected to cover, on average, eight titles in each column. I do not believe that my newspaper is significantly different from any other in this respect these days.
Thus, the first real difference between reviewers now and then is space. Dorothy Sayers was given enough column inches to be able to say, on many occasions, that 'an ounce of quotation is worth a pound of opinion'. Not any more. A modern reviewer does not have the luxury to be able to quote passages from the texts as she did. And it also brings one of the great restraints - some would say it removes one of the great pleasures. The modern critic rarely has the space to do anything other than recommend crime books - and perhaps this is what they should be doing anyway. But the other side of the coin is that today's reviewer cannot afford the column inches dedicated to seriously criticising a bad book.
DLS had the time (amazingly) and the patience (incredibly) to plough through the worst of the Golden Age's output - for there is no hint that she skipped or skimmed crime stories, however grim - and then, none too gently, slip the blade home.
The following extracts will suffice here:
"Mr John Bentley is also over-elaborate in a rather dull way."
"An adventure story for children of a larger growth...."
"He writes an ugly kind of English style, elliptical and pretentious..."
"With every ingredient that should make a story thrilling - gangsters, jewels, disguises, pistol-shots, and hairbreadth escapes in profusion - it obstinately remains as stodgy as tapioca pudding."
"And when it comes to depicting sexual passion, he plans a seduction like Napoleon - and executes it like the famous Duke of York."
"He has brought dullness to the pitch of a fine art. Light dies before his uncreating word."
Of Richard Keverne's Artifax Intervenes - and surely Keverne was the dullest of crime writers - she wrote:
"The second story is the best, but none is very convincing, nor is the writing particularly good. I will mark 'For railway journeys' and leave it at that."
At least in Dorothy's day, the trains ran on time so hopefully she did not suffer too much.
Nor were the more famous heroes of crime fiction free from her scrutiny. Of Philo Vance, she wrote:
"It is, however, sheer natural cussedness that makes Mr Vance say 'in yon lavatorium' when he means 'in the bathroom'; something lingering with boiling oil in it should be reserved for tormentors of the King's English."
But she could be too dismissive. Of one American thriller she wrote:
"Crooks and cops wander confusedly and indistinguishably through featureless chapters, and in the end not one character, not one episode, not one phrase is memorable."
She may well have been right about the characters and there being not one memorable episode, but she was not quite right about "not one phrase". The title of the book was Calling All Cars, which became the call sign of virtually every American radio crime series, and then television series, over the following twenty years and arguably one of the first popular catch phrases generated by crime fiction.
She was, notably, extremely kind to contemporary crime writers who could be said to be of equal stature, although she was deferential to none except perhaps G.K. Chesterton, whom she listed in her personal 'first rank' of detective novelists (along with Conan Doyle, E.C. Bentley, A.E.W. Mason, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Austin Freeman and H.C. Bailey).
The closest she came to criticising Agatha Christie - then writing at the height of her powers - was in her review of Why Didn't They Ask Evans? in 1934. Whilst bemoaning the absence of Hercule Poirot, replaced in this adventure by Lady Frankie Derwent and vicar's son Bobby Jones, she wrote that Christie had:
"been much more successful than with her earlier pair of youthful investigators, Tommy and Tuppence, who were a trifle sentimental and tiresome."
Even the most ardent Christie fan will agree with this assessment of her gay-young-thing adventurers from the 1920s, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Sadly, Dorothy's coded advice to leave them on the sidelines went unheeded and Tommy and Tuppence were to remain sentimental and tiresome for another forty years until Dame Agatha's last book.
There were no doubt many crime writers who quaked at the prospect of DLS reviewing their work, although Agatha Christie was unlikely to be one. But, overall, DLS was a gentle enough reviewer until, that is, it came to an example of abuse of good English and there she could be tenacious.
"What has the English language done to be served up in this dismal mess of rehashed phrases, like resurrection pie?" was one of her milder rebukes; "That is the kind of English that I can only call slop" one of her more forthright ones.
For four months in 1935 she even ran, as a postscript to her column, The Week's Worst English and even, on one occasion, The Week's Worst Latin! These poscripts caused more outrage and letters to the editor than anything she ever said about a crime story. There were several weeks when more space was given over to attacking or defending her views on grammar than was given to reviewing books. And there are no obvious examples of her backing down from her original claims.
Ralph Hone has summarised her concern for good writing - to be more accurate, good English - as 'uncompromising - not to say truculent' and in an essay on The King's English she decreed that the abuse and misuse of diction, syntax, idiom, style, good manners .... "These things are treason..."
But apart from defending the English language, what did DLS see as the role of the reviewer of crime fiction?
The first thing to say is that she would not have used the expression 'crime fiction'. She talked in terms of 'mystery stories', 'thrillers' and 'detective fiction' and at times got into something of a tangle with her terminology. But essentially, she was concerned with the detective story which contained a significant element of puzzle - the whodunit?
Given this, her prime rule was, not surprisingly, never give away the plot. In one succinct summary (10 June 1934) she admonished not only reviewers and readers but also publishers who gave the game away on dustjacket covers.
"Chattering friends who reveal the plot of a mystery story before one has read it are merely thoughtless; reviewers who commit this offence are just as naughty and lazy (because summarising the plot is the easiest way to write a review); but the publisher who sanctions a blabbing jacket has no excuse at all."
Only a week later (17 June 1934), she was once again 'dogged by misfortune', when a reviewer blew the gaff on There's Death In The Churchyard by William Gore:
"Again a serpent in human form has spoilt my enjoyment by giving away the plot, before I had read it, of one of the jolliest detective novels of the year."
Years after she had finished reviewing, she still took this to heart and complained to the editor of the Evening Standard (in January 1939) that Howard Spring had brazenly divulged the plot in his review of Agatha Christie's Murder For Christmas.
Is divulging the plot a problem to trouble the conscience of the modern day reviewer? Not really. Very few modern crime novels depend purely upon the whodunit? principle. Even with writers who still incorporate a significant puzzle element in their plots - Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, P.D. James - the solution of that puzzle is subservient to the consequences of the central crime on the main characters.
When Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express appeared in 1934, Compton Mackenize, writing in the Daily Mail called it 'a capital example of its class' and Dorothy Sayers herself reviewed it as: 'a murder mystery conceived and carried out on the finest classical lines'.
But in 1949, Raymond Chandler (who was to give away the plot of Busman's Honeymoon in his essay The Simple Art Of Murder) described the same book as follows:
"the whole set-up for the crime reveals such a fluky set of events that nobody could ever really believe them."
When the book was turned into a highly successful, star-studded film in 1974, a well-organised campaign by students ensured that many of the advertising posters had the words "They All Did It!" added, from the day the film opened.
Such behaviour, either from a giant of crime writing or the cinema-going public, would have been frowned on with a terrible cold eye by Dorothy Sayers.
As a reviewer in the 1990s, I have never had to face the problem of whether or not to divulge the plot, it is no longer an issue. Two notable bestsellers in the early months of 1999 featured particularly gruesome serial killers and in both cases, the killer had to be - fairly obviously - a policeman. Was there any point in revealing this or alternatively complaining because it was so easy to spot, when the killers' actual identities were not themselves the central theme of those books?
What could one say about Frederick Forsyth's The Day Of The Jackal? The plot revolves around the assassination of General De Gaulle which we all know did not happen, so where is the puzzle? Why even pick the book up?
And how would DLS have reviewed Ruth Rendell's brilliant novel A Judgement In Stone (1977)? A novel which begins with the words:
"Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
"There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman's disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was made, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman."
Thus, the beginning of a truly great crime story, detailing the murderer, the victims, the reason, the consequences and the fact that the murderer had a partner. Hardly a whodunit? conceived and executed on classical lines. Not many clues left for even the dimmest reader to fall upon.
In an odd way, the technique used here by Ruth Rendell - by no means the first example of it - is the antithesis of the "playing fair" school of detective puzzle story writing. Where it was once a cardinal rule to allow the reader to spot the clues if they were clever enough, it now seems the norm to get most of them out of the way on the first page!
The point is the puzzle element no longer dominates the crime novel as it did the detective novel of Dorothy Sayers' day - and even then, the writing was on the wall, and I think she knew it.
After six months of reviewing, she wrote (17 December 1933):
"The limits of the genre are so closely defined and the technique so straightened by tradition that any really startling 'difference' can only be produced by sheer genius, or by a tour de force often more disconcerting than satisfactory."
An interesting comment which appears to say that the only methods of breaking the so-called 'rules' of the whodunit? are through sheer 'genius' or a surprise or leap of plotting which would rankle the faithful and leave the devoted unsatisfied because the author was not prepared to 'play fair'.
Is, therefore, Ruth Rendell's A Judgement In Stone a work of genius, or a disconcerting and unsatisfactory tour de force? What about Agatha Christie's The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd which outraged readers and critics for "cheating"? Or, indeed, her Murder On The Orient Express, which DLS acclaimed a classic but on which Raymond Chandler had decidedly opposite views; supposedly, and famously, saying once that "only a half-wit could have guessed it".
And yet, some eighteen months later (28 July 1935) DLS seemed to be softening her insistence on 'fair play' although she still clearly believed there were rules to be adhered to, when she mused:
"The detective story is passing, in these days, through an extraordinarily interesting stage of development......(But) now comes the moment when, having made our rules and got them by heart, we can begin to experiment and play about with them. And this will bring us face to face with a whole set of new problems...."
She was in danger of missing the boat of change; or perhaps she had seen it departing and decided not to try and catch it.
In America, Dashiell Hammett had not so much broken the rules Sayers defended as totally ignored them, with the publication of Red Harvest in 1929 and The Maltese Falcon in 1930. And in Britain in 1931, Anthony Berkeley, writing as Francis Iles, published a true classic of crime fiction, Malice Aforethought, which began - very unfairly - with the words:
"It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business."
An opening which was reprised seven years later in 1938 in another famous novel: "Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours."
And in 1934, although strangely not reviewed by Dorothy Sayers, James M. Cain produced The Postman Always Rings Twice, his highly influential contribution to American noir writing and, later, cinema, and often cited as one of the best crime novels of the century.
Authors such as Hammett, Cain and Iles had already started the trend away from the pure detective puzzle and in to the crime novel, which was to diversify, multiply and continue to surprise to this day.
Dorothy Sayers, as a critic, carried the standard for the classical detective tale as a puzzle, a perfect mechanism, a game with fairly-laid clues, written, of course, in flawless English. But it was to be a rearguard action. The 'Golden Age' of British crime fiction was already beginning to lose its shine. As Julian Symons was to observe with the luxury of hindsight, it:
"...was not the main highway of crime that it looked at the time, but a minor road full of interesting twists and views which petered out in a dead end."
There is enough evidence in her Sunday Times reviews to suggest that DLS realised this. She may not have liked it, but she saw it coming.
Her concentration on and preference for what she saw as the classic detective story certainly irritated other writers. One, who had suffered her critical wrath for his blood-and-thunder 'Tiger' Standish adventures, was journalist Sidney Horler, who suggested, acidly, that Miss Sayers:
"...spent several hours a day watching the detective story as though expecting something terrific to happen."
In 1935, with an air of resigned acceptance, Sayers wrote a sort of defence to this charge:
"Some readers prefer their detective stories to be of this conventional kind; they like to enjoy the surface excitement without the inward disturbance that comes of being forced to take things seriously. But I believe the future to be with those writers who can contrive to strike the note of sincerity and to persuade us that violence really hurts."
She was absolutely right and many readers to this day still prefer the conventional detective story with a closed circle of suspects, a strong puzzle element and little realistic consideration of the consequences of crime - usually violent crime. These 'cosy' crime stories, where the violence does not really hurt, exist today in great numbers both in Britain and America and are increasingly to be found with historical settings from Ancient Rome or even more-ancient Egypt, through every century to the nineteenth and, in a relatively recent ironic twist, even into the 1920s and 1930s.
But the future was indeed with those who could convey that violence really hurt, that crimes had consequences beyond the solution to the puzzle.
Today we would call it 'realism' although that expression covers a multitude of literary sins and brings to mind the clarion call of the San Francisco hippies of the late 1960s who firmly believed that reality was only for those who could not handle the drugs.
The modern reviewer has to look not just for realism in the story structure and the mechanics of the crime, which is still usually murder, because the modern audience is - sadly - more exposed to the reality of real crime. The reading public are far better informed about the law, about forensics, about police procedure than they were in the 1930s. They have, whether they wanted to be or not, been exposed to public details of crimes committed by sex offenders, by corporations, by governments, by policemen, by terrorists, by organised crime - and on a scale beyond the public perception of the early 1930s.
To give one example, drug taking in a 'Golden Age' novel would have been restricted to Chinamen or the younger members of an aristocratic family in with a 'fast crowd' and going to the bad. (I discount here any mention of Sherlock Holmes' personal seven-per-cent habit; a private matter and, in any case, prescribed by his doctors!). Drugs are now a fact of life, a huge black economy which is traded on street corners in every town and responsible for a huge amount of petty and not-so-petty crime to pay for it.
Today's Man On The Clapham Omnibus knows this - he may even buy his drugs there. Just as he knows that murder - still a thankfully rare crime in this country compared to, say, Little Rock, Arkansas - is usually committed by someone known to the victim by a method no more elaborate than the handiest kitchen knife. Let us be honest, if a murder method such as that described in Busman's Honeymoon was offered in evidence in court today, it would be greeted with hysterical laughter. As Raymond Chandler said, a murderer who needed that much help from Providence was in the wrong business.
But it is not just a question of what is possible - believable, realistic - in the mechanics of the plot.
Julian Symons, who eventually inherited Sayers' mantle and was crime critic for The Sunday Times for ten years, concluded that:
"Crime fiction, more than any other form of literature, is the product of a society and a way of life."
I take this to mean that crime fiction should reflect a contemporary society and a way of life and its wider contemporary setting. Symons has argued that writers and reviewers such as Dorothy Sayers, with their insistence on the classic detective fair-play puzzle as the standard to judge by, were merely reflecting their own work which emphasised the importance of preserving the existing state of society. The promoters of the 'Golden Age' of crime writing did not want that style to change because they did not want their well-ordered, isolated, almost timeless, society to change.
But the world was changing in the 1930s, so was crime writing. Was Dorothy Sayers guilty of trying to maintain a status quo in crime fiction because she preferred the status quo of society?
The evidence is slim either way. More and more, towards the end of her reviewing stint, she hinted strongly that the future was not with the classic puzzle novel written to the fair play rules. She also applauded "the touch of rough vigour" which American crime writers were supplying to the genre and even went so far (19 May 1935) as to say:
"Every so often I get the feeling that we English detective writers are growing old and staid and that even the newest and youngest of us have been born old."
Once again, she saw what was coming though she did not necessarily approve of it. But she was writing here about style and technique rather than content and social concern. What is more worrying is when she reviewed two - and surprisingly only two out of 364 - crime novels which had Nazi Germany as a setting or a crucial part of the plot.
The first of these was Darwin Teilhet's The Talking Sparrows Murder, published in June 1934 which offered, in her words, "lurid flashes of light on the persecution of the jews" and other insights on which she seemed decidedly lukewarm and concluded that the overall atmosphere of suspicion generated by the book is that which "is bound to accompany national upheavals." And she left it at that.
To a modern reviewer, it seems incredible that a book - even if it was a very bad one - which had so rapidly tapped in to the biggest criminal gang in history did not merit more encouragement.
A year later, in June 1935, she reviewed the equally-forgotten Cornelius Cofyn thriller The Death Riders and here seemed positively remonstrative:
"The tone of its references to the German people and their present governors is ill calculated to promote international good feeling."
Given that the infamous Nuremberg Laws were enacted three months later, I think the more international bad feeling promoted by Mr Cofyn the better. But then hindsight is such a wonderful thing.
A modern day reviewer has to take account of changing social and political circumstances, Dorothy Sayers did not feel herself so encumbered. Crime novels no longer exist within vacuums as they once could. The library of the country house is no longer big enough to accommodate all the possible suspects.
There is one duty which every reviewer should regard as a pleasure and that is talent-spotting. Julian Symons put it well:
"A reviewer's particular pleasure is reading a good first book, finding a diamond among the zircons."
And Symons often told of his sheer delight in 'discovering' Len Deighton's first novel The Ipcress File in 1962. Similarly, Philip Oakes, the crime critic for The Literary Review since 1988 has written of his delight, after a decade of reviewing, in discovering the works of the American crime writer James Lee Burke. For myself, I take great pleasure in having been the first national newspaper reviewer to cover Minette Walters' debut novel The Ice House and predicting that here was a great crime writer in the making.
Sadly, Dorothy Sayers showed little interest in diamond mining.
There are some notable absences from the list of books she reviewed and, to be fair, these omissions may have been due to publishers' inefficiencies or the whims of literary editors . The Postman Always Rings Twice has already been mentioned for being absent from inspection parade. So too were the first novels of Simenon and Ngaio Marsh, whose detective, Roderick Alleyn, would go on to be ranked by some with Wimsey, Poirot and Campion as one of the 'greats' of the 'Golden Age' - although neither he, nor his creator, would get my vote.
But there were two examples in 1935 where, surely, important debuts were worth a louder fanfare than Sayers gave them.
One was Fer-De-Lance by Rex Stout, which introduced Nero Wolfe who was to become the American version of Sherlock Holmes (even if with tongue firmly in cheek) in over 40 books over the next 40 years. Sayers did not dismiss the book and admitted that Mr Stout's style was "good, in the colloquial American kind" but she could not resist comparing Nero Wolfe to Dr Gideon Fell, the creation of one of her favourites, John Dickson Carr. The tag "almost as good as John Dickson Carr" is hardly fair on Stout.
The other was A Question Of Proof by Nicholas Blake. This, she said, was an "admirable achievement" for a first novel even though the plot was "not the strongest point". And in her Week's Worst English codicil, she almost took Mr Blake to task for "his cavalier treatment of the gerund" - but then she relented, saying: "Dash it, the man can write; we'll have no carping." There is no hint here - no tentative prediction - that Nicholas Blake would go on to write the much admired and influential The Beast Must Die in 1938, nor that, under his real name of Cecil Day-Lewis, he would become Poet Laureate.
Two opportunities missed? All reviewers miss them - many publishers do too!
The fact of the matter is that Dorothy Sayers, in her reviewing, was looking to measure the detective story against her own established set of rules and standards, almost marking them as if she were marking an examination paper. Indeed there was one unfortunate who did actually receive a mark - beta double plus.
She supported - perhaps too much and perhaps too automatically - those of her colleagues who were of like mind, especially Austin Freeman, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr and Freeman Willis Croft, and had an admitted soft spot for Erle Stanley Gardner. She seemed to studiously avoid the highly popular 'Saint' books of Leslie Charteris.
Most modern reviewers would say that their prime directive is to offer a consumers' guide rather than an OFSTED Report and that it is their duty to be on the look-out for "something new".
This is certainly my creed. After reviewing some 500 titles - culled from perhaps the 3,000 novels I have been asked to look at - the search for "something new" is, frankly, the only thing which keeps me sane.
There is still a thrill to be had from discovering a Minette Walters, a Walter Mosley, a Carl Hiassen, a James Lee Burke, a James Ellroy, a Colin Bateman or a Christopher Brookmyre although none of these, with the possible exception of Minette Walters, would have been acceptable - or even recognisable - as crime writers under Dorothy Sayers' rules of engagement.
And I would mention here another of my personal discoveries of recent years, the work of Jeremy Cameron, who draws on his experiences as an East London Probation Officer and who writes almost entirely in authentic (or so I believe) Walthamstow patois.
This is the opening to his debut novel, Vinnie Got Blown Away (1995):
"Vinnie was laying on the podium without his feet.
His feet were on the fourteenth.
'Vinnie my son,' I goes, 'you come off second best mate, you never ought to gone up there you fucker. Jesus Vinnie.'
He was dead. So would you be you fell off the fourteenth and no feet."
I can almost hear Dorothy Sayers reaching for her cigarette holder if not her revolver. The King's English, that is not. Nor even the Queen's. But it is a riveting introduction to the violent world of a dispossessed, mixed-race community which is very much part of Britain today. To read such a book, after a procession of humdrum novels each distinguished only by the quirks of a central character is, to say the least, refreshing. For every Inspector Morse, Frost, Rebus or Resnick today there are a hundred pale imitators; for every Brother Cadfael, the medieval monk and herbalist turned detective , there are probably a thousand clones ranged through history.
Such was the case in Dorothy Sayers' day, but she seemed reluctant to admit it - at least when it came to the detective story. It is not insignificant that of the hundreds of books she reviewed in what was supposed to be the 'Golden Age', only those of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham remain in print in this country - as well, of course, as her own.
She did give warning that things were likely to change and that many detective story writers seemed to have been born old, and that the American 'hard-boiled' school appeared to have all the fresh blood of the genre. But she never actually bit the bullet as Julian Symons was to, by saying (and making himself incredibly unpopular in the process) that up to ninety per cent of crime novels were "ill-written, poorly crafted rubbish".
Dorothy Sayers never said that about the detective novel - the summit of the art - but she did say something uncannily similar to Symons when it came to the thriller which she clearly regarded as somewhere below the summit, if not the base camp, of crime writing.
Responding to a claim, real or imagined, that she had been 'harsh and high hat' about thrillers, she claimed to hail them
"with cries of joy when they displayed the least touch of real originality....But ninety times out of a hundred I find only bad English, cliché, balderdash and boredom."
The need to define the difference between the detective novel and the thriller clearly taxed her during her reviewing period and she had at least three attempts at it.
In June 1933:
"Some readers prefer to be thrilled by the puzzle and others to be puzzled by the thrills."
In January, 1934:
"The difference between thriller and detective story is mainly one of emphasis. Agitating events occur in both, but in the thriller our cry is 'What comes next?' - in the detective story, 'What came first?' The one we cannot guess; the other we can, if the author gives us a chance."
And in March 1935, a thriller was where:
"the elements of horror, suspense and excitement are more prominent than that of logical deduction."
Despite this attempt to rationalise - or perhaps create? - an apparent divide, her true colours often showed through. More than once she decreed that a book had been "reduced to the thriller class" and she justified such dismissals in a column in December 1934 whilst praising the noble aims of the detective story.
"But if the aim is trivial, as in the 'pure thriller' it must be, what can one say about it? One can only say: 'This book is a thriller: it is well-written and exciting, or ill-written but exciting, or ill-written and dull' as the case may be."
Her conclusion, that the thriller is and can only be trivial, is a cruel one and a shortsighted one. In 1936, Graham Greene published A Gun For Sale and Eric Ambler burst on to the scene with The Dark Frontier, sounding the death knell of thuggish heroes such as Bulldog Drummond and Tiger Standish. Just as, three decades later, Len Deighton and John Le Carre were to severely dent the reputation of that revisionist clubland hero James Bond, until the cinema took him into the realms of legend.
To say that writers such as these - and one should add Geoffrey Household, Francis Clifford, P.M. Hubbard and Lionel Davidson even before one gets to the present generation - had nothing to offer but trivial excitement is an injustice.
Again, I accuse with hindsight. The vast majority of 'thrillers' in the early Thirties probably were 'balderdash'. Heaven knows, a large proportion of them are today. But I would have liked to have seen Dorothy Sayers demanding the standards of thriller writers which she expected of detective story authors, actively promoting good thriller writing rather than - occasionally, and only occasionally - simply noting it.
Even when impressed by a thriller, her praise was muted. It was far easier to condemn from a lofty height often in highly moral tones. I suspect she enjoyed writing her review of The Communist's Corpse by an American, Richard Wormser, of whom little more was ever heard. And while she stuck to her rule of not giving away the plot, she gave away just about everything else and in the process unintentionally highlighted the very attributes which probably appealed to the book's buyers.
"Mr Wormser, with some originality, has chosen for his detective a woman journalist, six-foot-one in height, of Communist politics, and always down to her last nickel. He handles this unfortunate young woman with a touch of rather sordid pathos, making her courageous, humorous in a rough kind of way, generous and sadly hampered by her unusual height in what the popular Press calls her 'love life'. But I think he over-estimates the entertainment to be derived from seeing even so ungainly a female involved in rough-and-tumble fights and having her shabby clothes torn off her back, and tearing the trousers off people smaller than herself."
Can one ever over-estimate the entertainment value of a generous Amazon tearing the trousers off men of average height? These days, she would probably be a feminist icon.
*
In many ways, Dorothy L. Sayers boxed herself in to an untenable position as a reviewer.
She began from the premise that good English, a puzzle and fairly-deployed clues were the pre-requisites of the best detective novel and that the detective novel was the pinnacle of the crime writers' achievement. Everything else she marked against this 'Golden Age' scale.
Yet she obviously knew that such novels - the best of them anyway - were frozen in a world of unreality where the violence did not hurt. She knew that the future was to lie in a more realistic approach, far away from locked rooms and bodies in libraries. Even in 1933 the writing was on the wall and while she may have been stubborn about accepting it, she was not stupid enough to ignore it.
She was astute enough to recognise the vigour of American crime writing, although the Americans she preferred were clearly in the 'Golden Age' tradition. It would be fascinating to know what she thought of the novels of Raymond Chandler (we know what he thought of hers!) or the darker and more violent noir writers who followed in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Cornell Woolrich, Charles Williams, David Goodis and Jim Thompson, all of whom have an influence on popular culture, crime fiction and cinema fifty years on.
She did not attempt to talent-spot. Why should she? She knew the rules of the game and her reviewer's score sheet reflected how good an author was at that game. She was not looking for anyone who was prepared to subvert the rules or, even worse, play another game entirely.
The problem was, as her fellow 'Golden Ager' Ronald Knox mused: "the game is getting played out".
And she knew it. In 1935, she abruptly stopped reviewing for The Sunday Times and within a few more years had abandoned detective fiction virtually for good.
I can find no explanation as to why she stopped so suddenly except perhaps that the reason may have had something to do with the very last book she reviewed in her column on 18 August 1935.
It might - it just might - be that having to read A Killer And His Stars by H. M. Stephenson was the straw that broke the camel's previously stiff and broad back.
"The killer has a windy, badly brewed philosophy about stars, and this philosophy inspires and supports him in the commission of a singularly clumsy and uninteresting murder. His star, however, is a lucky one, for, by the perjury of a good woman, the remarkable amiability of the jury, and the author's ruthlessness in killing off all the witnesses who might have been useful to the police, the killer escapes hanging. But, oh my stars!"
It was time to go.
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