Murder-mysteries, edits and a budgerigar
Hey everyone, it's me again, this time with some thoughts about murder mysteries and as usual a bird incident to discuss.
BOOK REPORT
But first: work! I've checked my subscriber list and my editors are NOT on it, so I'm clear to tell you that last week was a Big Procrastination Week for me, with a lot of "well it's time to sit down and do a couple of hours work on the book" followed by, two hours later, "look how much bird shit I cleared off the patio, magnificent, definitely what I intended to do with my Thursday afternoon".
But this week is going better! I've been haring through the book and cutting out whole paragraphs that were precious and delicate babies last time I read it, but which are now clearly just overlaboured jokes and weird diversions. I'm trying to cut another five thousand or so words out by the end of next week, wish me luck / send me anything you really hate seeing in a book that I should consider deleting. (Last month someone told me they hated it when a book has a fox in it, and I had a minor and needless fox in mine! And it's gone now! Thanks, woman I met in a pub, for your help with my word count.)
BIRD REPORT
Huge bird news: last week we got visited by someone's pet budgie. Definitely a pet: it perched on the fence, hopped back and forth, looked curiously at the house.
Terry remembered seeing a sign about a missing budgie so he hurried off to get a phone number while I stood in the garden just generally trying to convince the budgie not to fly away: making little tch-tch-tch noises, and putting out a bowl of chopped-up apples and linseed, and standing very still with a wooden spoon outstretched towards it, trying to look like an alluring perch. The budgie was having none of it, but it stuck around till Terry got back with — unfortunately — the phone number for the owner of an entirely different missing budgie. Then the budgie flew off. What a week.
READING REPORT
I've gone through something like five Rex Stout murder mysteries this week (see "big procrastination week" above). God, they sure are very readable. They're narrated by Archie Goodwin, whose job is to be charming, able to dance, okay at fighting, and willing to leave the house occasionally; he gathers clues and brings them back home where the mysteries are solved by Nero Wolfe, whose job is to sit around and be a genius and have thoughts and also look after his orchids and eat a lot of minutely described meals.
The usual pattern is:
A client comes to the big house that Archie and Wolfe and Fritz the cook and Theodore the orchid guy all share, and asks Wolfe to solve a mystery
Wolfe doesn't want to solve the mystery because he would rather just sit around and read a fancy book and eat a fancy lunch, and who can blame him
Archie convinces him to take the job because the upkeep costs for the house and all its orchids and fancy lunches are immense (actually, the books generally have an extremely strong baseline sense of "people need money to do stuff and they are aware of how much things cost and that's important", which isn't the case for a lot of the 1930s murder mysteries that still get widely read. I don't know much about Stout's personal life but his wikipedia page does include the great sentence "In 1916, Stout was tired of writing a story whenever he needed money".)
Wolfe and Archie have taken the job but they have no idea what to do so they ask some vaguely connected people a bunch of random questions. This isn't me projecting: this is explicitly described as their technique, just stirring up trouble and fishing for weird things to look into. Archie will probably meet and flirt with a beautiful woman as part of this process but he will probably not kiss her.
At some point there's an interaction with the local homicide detectives. Usually this is the police telling them to leave the case alone, in which case it may or may not involve threats of arrest. But occasionally it's the local police going "god we are STUMPED on this one I tell you what, got any ideas?"
Wolfe will then hire several other minor detectives to do research or tail someone or watch a particular building. Crucially, he will refuse to tell Archie what he's instructing these minor detectives to do, because if he told Archie then he'd have to explain his theory about who did it, and then because Archie is the narrator we the readers would know and the book would be over.
All the suspects gather in Wolfe's office, and Archie tells us in really extraordinary detail exactly how he arranges the chairs, whether he has to get any extras from the front room, who sits where, and whether anyone sits in a space other than the space that had been allocated for them and has to be asked to move.
Wolfe tells us who did it, using information gathered by the minor detectives
The person who did it angrily admits it
That's the end of the book!
Like all 1930s murder mysteries they are deeply weird about at least one specific group of people, and in this case that group is "women", but I do mean weird rather than necessarily misogynist. Wolfe doesn't like to have women in the house — but that's treated as a regrettable oddity. And Archie is very keen that the reader knows at all times whether a particular woman is hot or not — but there are a lot of women Archie considers plain who are also brave or funny or interesting or clever criminals who almost get away with it, which feels like something you can't always rely on from mysteries by men in this era. (In other "how has this aged" notes, Archie is also weird about Wolfe's weight, but again, I do mostly mean weird rather than necessarily eg fatphobic. It also sounds like the first few books aren't great, and apparently a couple of the later ones try to do a "racism is bad" plot and make a big mess of it, though I haven't read those so can't report first-hand).
ANYWAY. After this week of murder mysteries I went to the local charity shop and there was a copy of a book from 1984 called Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story by Ernest Mandel, so I bought it and brought it home and opened it to a random page and saw this:
In a brilliant flash of intuition, Walter Benjamin once observed that a traveller reading a detective story on a train is temporarily suppressing one anxiety with another. Travellers fear the uncertainties of travel, of reaching their destinations, of what will happen when they get there. They temporarily suppress (and thus forget) that fear by getting involved in innocent fears about crime and criminals that, they well know, are unrelated to their personal fate.
God okay FINE, Ernest Mandel, Marxist economist and long-time leader of the Fourth International, you got me, I guess I've been reading all this Rex Stout because I'm stressed about my edits and what happens once I've finished them, ugh.
Mandel's book as a whole is so exactly what you'd imagine it to be from the title and the writer. Here is my favourite passage so far:
The clues must be all up front. No secret substitution of one identical twin for another is allowed, no secret passages out of rooms supposedly locked from the inside. The reader must be surprised when the murderer's identity is revealed, and with no violation of 'fair play'. Agatha Christie is thus aptly called the 'queen of deception'. And indeed, to practise the art of deception while 'playing fair' is the very quintessence of the ideology of the British upper classes.
That last sentence! Is it... true? Is it perceptive? I am so gobsmacked by the rhetoric of it that I can't even think about whether it makes any sense, if I try my brain just swerves and I end up reading it again and going "god what a huge position to take in such a throwaway line, amazing".
Right! I think that's it, speak soon, hopefully next time I'll have spent a slightly smaller proportion of my week reading murder mysteries but no promises,
Holly