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cimoreneLast year I read a couple of books by Josephine Tey, best known (in the words of Wikipedia) for "The Daughter of Time (1951) (voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990)". That's the book where a fictional detective stuck in the hospital investigates Richard III and determines he was innocent of being a murderer (of the boys in the tower) etc, which was based on scholarly writings already known in the field (the field of Richard III, not the field of popular crime writing). It was a good read, and part of what makes it strike people as a good mystery is probably the ways in which it is very much unlike a typical detective mystery, although of course there are memorable examples of Holmes and Poirot solving cases while stuck away from the scene through intermediaries they send to do their bidding, and Miss Marple made it quite a habit in The Thirteen Problems.
Anyway, along with it I read Brat Farrar as well, which I agree with Wax is a good example of its type of mystery but it didn't blow me away, and The Man in the Queue, which is a memorably well-plotted and -premised example of the mid-century British (police) detective story. The events and clues as they unfold after the memorable premise of the seemingly untraceable and unremarkable victim who appears in a queue outside a theater to be killed in the middle of a crowd without anybody noticing anything makes for an extraordinary plot, and the narration has its charms.
So I remembered the amazing premise and twisty plot of this book when I rediscovered it on my ereader app but I couldn't remember the end or why I hadn't liked it and had decided afterwards not to read any more Josephine Tey, so out of curiosity I reread the beginning and skimmed the rest. As is so often the case with mystery and crime fiction the answer was
In the contemporaneous Agatha Christie, one often encounters so-called 'difference feminism', a then-popular variant of the concept that men are from mars and women are from venus and that they're just naturally good at different things which include, in women's cases, the caring professions and other womanly pursuits that can be paid less money, and in men's include violence. If you ask Agatha Christie, women are also naturally good at being practical and no-nonsense and somehow, in some mystical and sinister (hint: all that Eve and original sin bullshit) way, also at deception, where men are just so childlike about some things (most of them falling under what would be popularly described now as emotional labor). Miss Marple repeatedly says that men aren't "subtle" enough to detect specific womanly types of perfidy (including under this umbrella cosmetics and certain complex social situations/skills which both actually directly result from oppression).
Yet what The Man in the Queue most reminds me of is an early episode of Poirot called The King of Clubs in which a beautiful movie actress is being extorted for sex by a skeevy old movie exec who doesn't realize - as Poirot and the police don't realize either - that she works under an assumed name, and that her brother is an angry and protective young Sean Pertwee who just happens to live right next door to the gross old man and was happily therefore able to sneak into his study at night leaving no witnesses or trace evidence and punch him so hard he falls on a dangerous piece of furniture which kills him (and meanwhile leaves the young Sean Pertwee with no connection to the crime because nobody knows the actress's identity). Poirot figures it out and doesn't turn in the young Sean Pertwee for manslaughter because the creep deserved it, which is something Poirot does more than once in his career but, ironically, is portrayed as being much more conflicted about in The Orient Express (which was stabbing and not manslaughter, but you're still guilty of manslaughter if someone dies accidentally when you're doing something illegal like assaulting them because they're a creep????)
A beautiful actress is being stalked by a childhood flame in The Man in the Queue, and the man's plan to murder her if she won't give in to him is detected by the actress's birth mother, who commits the perfect murder when she finds him on his way into the theater with a stolen gun in his pocket. She is only caught because she comes forward to prevent an innocent man, the stalker's ex-flatmate, from being hanged on circumstantial evidence. The book's narrator and the detective agree that the mother was both sympathetic and in the right, but the detective disagrees with his boss that there was no guilty party in the whole mess.
Because a stalker intending to commit premeditated murder is hardly innocent even if he didn't get away with it...?
Nope! Because he feels that the actress is guilty because she's "cold" (meaning because she never wanted to date this childhood flame/neighbor-friend and went on to pursue her career without liking him... and because she is an actress and conceals her emotions well, by acting... and because while watching the play the detective hallucinates ["understands"] that she is in the habit of premeditatedly stealing the limelight from her costars out of a sadistic need for attention and hence unfairly making the audience think that said costars aren't as good as her, which, the detective explains in his internal monologue, is not true even though the entire reason she gets more audience attention and they think that is that she's incredibly good and incredibly charismatic...) and because "she's one of the most self-absorbed people he's ever met"... presumably because of the above hallucination combined with the fact that she didn't automatically suspect her childhood sort-of-flame-that-she-didn't-date of being a dangerous stalker whereas her intuition would have shown her that he was obsessed if she had more empathy????... whereas all he actually learns and observes of her is that she is a charismatic and talented actress who is perfectly nice when he interviews her.
Right, but even if she DOES not notice pining devotees due to narcissism (implausible) and even if she DOES premeditatedly hog the limelight at her costars' expense (unsubstantiated), that doesn't make her guilty, because you can't be guilty of driving someone to murder you on the basis that they don't want you to be alive if you aren't amenable to doing what they want! This isn't even a case of the oft-advanced misogynist concept that someone "drove" a man to violence by breaking up with them; this is someone she's never had a romantic relationship with, who has been a distant acquaintance since adulthood! What on earth does this detective think she should have done rather than 'drive' him to this - refrained, as a child, from being his childhood flame? Dated him even though she didn't want to???
I keep thinking that even by 1950s standards this 'twist' is absurd - like looking at these events and drawing that moral from this is cartoonishly far-fetched and it's hard to imagine it being written in earnest, but I can't make it make sense as the author disagreeing with the detective and attempting to somehow illustrate a flaw in his reasoning with it either, because there's not really any payoff? Actually the novel does deliberately illustrate his blindspot in trusting in circumstantial evidence, since circumstantial evidence actually proves nothing and in this case was proven false and nearly led to him getting this innocent guy executed. But that idea is thoroughly developed through the whole plot, from his conviction and from a number of side-issues and false starts due to his jumping to conclusions that will make circumstantial facts fit into the narrative he was expecting to see, and he's disabused of these notions pretty thoroughly, complete with thinking uneasily about the entire weight of habit, tradition, and institutional authority behind the practice of convicting on unreliable circumstantial evidence.
Whereas the only thing which I thought really supported the idea that this detective was being deliberately shown to be fucked in the head about women was an odd sequence where he enlists the help of a young nurse sympathetic to the falsely-accused innocent flatmate to attempt to goad an incriminating response from a female witness to the crime simply because she happens to share the initials on an object the victim-creep received in the mail. The nurse is suspicious at first, but opens up and becomes more trusting later, only to feel betrayed and used after the attempt fails and she finds out what he was trying to do. He seems surprised that she would have any opinions at all about incriminating anybody apart from the innocent flatmate, whereas she is uncomfortable with being used in a deception intended to incriminate anyone, and she appears to conclude that if he doesn't see why that isn't cool it's not worth her time trying to explain it to him.
Anyway, along with it I read Brat Farrar as well, which I agree with Wax is a good example of its type of mystery but it didn't blow me away, and The Man in the Queue, which is a memorably well-plotted and -premised example of the mid-century British (police) detective story. The events and clues as they unfold after the memorable premise of the seemingly untraceable and unremarkable victim who appears in a queue outside a theater to be killed in the middle of a crowd without anybody noticing anything makes for an extraordinary plot, and the narration has its charms.
So I remembered the amazing premise and twisty plot of this book when I rediscovered it on my ereader app but I couldn't remember the end or why I hadn't liked it and had decided afterwards not to read any more Josephine Tey, so out of curiosity I reread the beginning and skimmed the rest. As is so often the case with mystery and crime fiction the answer was
In the contemporaneous Agatha Christie, one often encounters so-called 'difference feminism', a then-popular variant of the concept that men are from mars and women are from venus and that they're just naturally good at different things which include, in women's cases, the caring professions and other womanly pursuits that can be paid less money, and in men's include violence. If you ask Agatha Christie, women are also naturally good at being practical and no-nonsense and somehow, in some mystical and sinister (hint: all that Eve and original sin bullshit) way, also at deception, where men are just so childlike about some things (most of them falling under what would be popularly described now as emotional labor). Miss Marple repeatedly says that men aren't "subtle" enough to detect specific womanly types of perfidy (including under this umbrella cosmetics and certain complex social situations/skills which both actually directly result from oppression).
Yet what The Man in the Queue most reminds me of is an early episode of Poirot called The King of Clubs in which a beautiful movie actress is being extorted for sex by a skeevy old movie exec who doesn't realize - as Poirot and the police don't realize either - that she works under an assumed name, and that her brother is an angry and protective young Sean Pertwee who just happens to live right next door to the gross old man and was happily therefore able to sneak into his study at night leaving no witnesses or trace evidence and punch him so hard he falls on a dangerous piece of furniture which kills him (and meanwhile leaves the young Sean Pertwee with no connection to the crime because nobody knows the actress's identity). Poirot figures it out and doesn't turn in the young Sean Pertwee for manslaughter because the creep deserved it, which is something Poirot does more than once in his career but, ironically, is portrayed as being much more conflicted about in The Orient Express (which was stabbing and not manslaughter, but you're still guilty of manslaughter if someone dies accidentally when you're doing something illegal like assaulting them because they're a creep????)
A beautiful actress is being stalked by a childhood flame in The Man in the Queue, and the man's plan to murder her if she won't give in to him is detected by the actress's birth mother, who commits the perfect murder when she finds him on his way into the theater with a stolen gun in his pocket. She is only caught because she comes forward to prevent an innocent man, the stalker's ex-flatmate, from being hanged on circumstantial evidence. The book's narrator and the detective agree that the mother was both sympathetic and in the right, but the detective disagrees with his boss that there was no guilty party in the whole mess.
Because a stalker intending to commit premeditated murder is hardly innocent even if he didn't get away with it...?
Nope! Because he feels that the actress is guilty because she's "cold" (meaning because she never wanted to date this childhood flame/neighbor-friend and went on to pursue her career without liking him... and because she is an actress and conceals her emotions well, by acting... and because while watching the play the detective hallucinates ["understands"] that she is in the habit of premeditatedly stealing the limelight from her costars out of a sadistic need for attention and hence unfairly making the audience think that said costars aren't as good as her, which, the detective explains in his internal monologue, is not true even though the entire reason she gets more audience attention and they think that is that she's incredibly good and incredibly charismatic...) and because "she's one of the most self-absorbed people he's ever met"... presumably because of the above hallucination combined with the fact that she didn't automatically suspect her childhood sort-of-flame-that-she-didn't-date of being a dangerous stalker whereas her intuition would have shown her that he was obsessed if she had more empathy????... whereas all he actually learns and observes of her is that she is a charismatic and talented actress who is perfectly nice when he interviews her.
Right, but even if she DOES not notice pining devotees due to narcissism (implausible) and even if she DOES premeditatedly hog the limelight at her costars' expense (unsubstantiated), that doesn't make her guilty, because you can't be guilty of driving someone to murder you on the basis that they don't want you to be alive if you aren't amenable to doing what they want! This isn't even a case of the oft-advanced misogynist concept that someone "drove" a man to violence by breaking up with them; this is someone she's never had a romantic relationship with, who has been a distant acquaintance since adulthood! What on earth does this detective think she should have done rather than 'drive' him to this - refrained, as a child, from being his childhood flame? Dated him even though she didn't want to???
I keep thinking that even by 1950s standards this 'twist' is absurd - like looking at these events and drawing that moral from this is cartoonishly far-fetched and it's hard to imagine it being written in earnest, but I can't make it make sense as the author disagreeing with the detective and attempting to somehow illustrate a flaw in his reasoning with it either, because there's not really any payoff? Actually the novel does deliberately illustrate his blindspot in trusting in circumstantial evidence, since circumstantial evidence actually proves nothing and in this case was proven false and nearly led to him getting this innocent guy executed. But that idea is thoroughly developed through the whole plot, from his conviction and from a number of side-issues and false starts due to his jumping to conclusions that will make circumstantial facts fit into the narrative he was expecting to see, and he's disabused of these notions pretty thoroughly, complete with thinking uneasily about the entire weight of habit, tradition, and institutional authority behind the practice of convicting on unreliable circumstantial evidence.
Whereas the only thing which I thought really supported the idea that this detective was being deliberately shown to be fucked in the head about women was an odd sequence where he enlists the help of a young nurse sympathetic to the falsely-accused innocent flatmate to attempt to goad an incriminating response from a female witness to the crime simply because she happens to share the initials on an object the victim-creep received in the mail. The nurse is suspicious at first, but opens up and becomes more trusting later, only to feel betrayed and used after the attempt fails and she finds out what he was trying to do. He seems surprised that she would have any opinions at all about incriminating anybody apart from the innocent flatmate, whereas she is uncomfortable with being used in a deception intended to incriminate anyone, and she appears to conclude that if he doesn't see why that isn't cool it's not worth her time trying to explain it to him.
(no subject)
Date: 26 Feb 2019 05:48 am (UTC)But I also think that writers tend to reveal themselves and there is a lot of that kind of misogyny in the books.
I still love the Daughter of Time but listened to it recently as an audiobook snd rather wish I hadn't. The American graduate student part is particularly annoying. But the bit that I find most interesting is that she wrote the quotes from the historians and historical fiction in a way that still has an authentic voice for me.