"Are Women Human?"

Ben Domenech, in "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought...," notes that today is the birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, the author of very good, "Golden Age," mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. But she was much more:

If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. ....

If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field. ....

The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed Guinness toucan, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.

What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. .... (more)

Domenech proceeds to quote from Sayers' "Are Women Human?" It can be found online here. A few excerpts:

...[W]e have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that “a woman is as good as a man,” without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: not that every woman is, in virtue of her sex, as strong, clever, artistic, level-headed, industrious and so forth as any man that can be mentioned; but, that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes: there is no harm in saying that women, as a class, have smaller bones than men, wear lighter clothing, have more hair on their heads and less on their faces, go more pertinaciously to church or the cinema, or have more patience with small and noisy babies. In the same way, we may say that stout people of both sexes are commonly better-tempered than thin ones, or that university dons of both sexes are more pedantic in their speech than agricultural labourers, or that Communists of both sexes are more ferocious than Fascists — or the other way round. What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error into which men have frequently fallen about women — and it is the error into which feminist women are, perhaps, a little inclined to fall into about themselves. ....

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. There is a fundamental difference between men and women, but it is not the only fundamental difference in the world. There is a sense in which my charwoman and I have more in common than either of us has with, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw; on the other hand, in a discussion about art and literature, Mr. Shaw and I should probably find we had more fundamental interests in common than either of us had with my charwoman. I grant that, even so, he and I should disagree ferociously about the eating of meat — but that is not a difference between the sexes — on that point, the late Mr. G.K. Chesterton would have sided with me against the representative of his own sex. Then there are points on which I, and many of my own generation of both sexes, should find ourselves heartily in agreement; but on which the rising generation of young men and women would find us too incomprehensibly stupid for words. A difference of age is as fundamental as a difference of sex; and so is a difference of nationality. All categories, if they are insisted upon beyond the immediate purpose which they serve, breed class antagonism and disruption in the state, and that is why they are dangerous. ....

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person. It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship. If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me. (more, the entire essay)

Ben Domenech, "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought," DailyWire, June13, 2026.

Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

Rear Window

Hitchcock is the director whose films I rewatch most often. I enjoy some of the early British movies, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but even more those made at the height of his American career: Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest. And that list isn't exhaustive. The most important not listed is Rear Window. From "Looking Back at Rear Window" reviewing a recent, apparently flawed, book about the film:

Released in the summer of 1954 to general acclaim and impressive box-office receipts, Rear Window endures as a genuine pop-art achievement, its big-budget Hollywood approach—glamorous stars, enviable costume design, blazing Technicolor, and studio-system craftsmanship—enlivened by a restless intelligence behind the camera. By mixing suspense, comedy, romance, and mystery, Hitchcock delivered a rousing if incongruous tour de force, its lighthearted tone occasionally contrasting wildly with its sordid subject. After all, if any film featuring (off-screen) murder and dismemberment can be considered lighthearted, Rear Window would be it. With a witty screenplay, an appealing star with longstanding box-office prowess (Jimmy Stewart), a promising young actress of striking, almost numinous beauty (Grace Kelly), and a talented supporting cast (including Raymond Burr as the villain and the irrepressible Thelma Ritter), Rear Window offers new delights with every viewing. ....

Though Rear Window was his third film with a restricted setting (after Lifeboat and Rope), Hitchcock seemed to relish the scale of the challenge this time around. Rear Window takes place entirely in a single room: where Jefferies watches the action across the courtyard (first with binoculars, then with a camera/telephoto lens combination), forcing the audience to share his subjective point of view. To realize his bravura vision, Hitchcock had one of the most elaborate sets since the days of Cecil B. DeMille constructed. At a cost of “$9,000 to design and $72,000 to build,” Paramount erected a life-size model of a Greenwich Village apartment complex. .... (more)

Carlos Acevedo, "Looking Back at Rear Window," City Journal, Jan. 9, 2026.

Poirot and twelve suspects

In the mail yesterday arrived a 4K Blu-ray of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) from Kino Lorber. Watched it last night, and it was a completely enjoyable experience. My favorite Poirot is David Suchet, but an almost unidentifiable Albert Finney (fat suit, waxed mustache, etc.) was fine. The rest of the cast included Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. A remarkable gathering of film stars — none got top billing. Another star in the film was the train itself, looking very much like the actual train as presented in documentaries. I saw another such documentary the other day about the food served on that train during the 1930s, and enjoyed seeing what appeared to be some of the same in the movie. The plot is well presented. And the photography is beautiful. Whether the 4K version looks better than a Blu-ray, I can't say. I haven't read the book in years, but it is one of her most famous plots and the movie seemed faithful. If you like Christie, I recommend this film version. I also have the PBS Mystery version with David Suchet as Poirot and like it, too.

Action and adventure

Dirda has reappeared at The Washington Post with "What are the best adventure novels?" including a list of books that he would choose:

What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By “adventure” I don’t mean “exciting” — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker’s dozen:

• 
  Homer, The Odyssey
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• H. Rider Haggard, She
• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
• John Buchan, Greenmantle
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood
• P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

I haven't read The Odyssey since it was assigned in school. I never got into Haggard or Burroughs, except for a couple of the Tarzan books when I was in grade school. I know nothing about Bengtsson. But I do know the rest, and many are among my favorite reads.

Dirda goes on to consider some of the post-WWII titles he might choose as great adventure novels, and again, it's a list that includes many I've read with pleasure. Most of the rest of the essay is about another author unfamiliar to me, Lionel Davidson, and particularly his The Rose of Tibet.

I am very much looking forward to the book Michael Dirda is working on, an "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain."

Michael Dirda, "What are the best adventure novels? Let’s add a hidden gem to the list," The Washington Post, July 30, 2025.

Frederick Forsyth, RIP

I did enjoy his novels, especially Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War (both made into excellent films). He also narrated the BBC series Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. I used the first episode of that as an introduction to a unit on the military in an international relations class. From the Washington Post obituary:

Frederick Forsyth, a mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue who used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, died June 9 at his home in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. He was 86. ....

For a half-century, Mr. Forsyth was one of the most successful authors of the cloak-and-dagger circuit. He wrote more than 20 novels, short stories and other works, reportedly selling more than 75 million copies in more than a dozen languages. ....

.... Mr. Forsyth, who had mulled for years the attempted assassination of De Gaulle as scaffolding for a novel, spent a little over a month at the typewriter and finished the manuscript for The Day of the Jackal with the aid of many packs of Rothmans cigarettes.

The book was about a French paramilitary outfit that hires a remorseless British hit man known only as “the Jackal.” The tensions build on a collision course between the hired killer and an unassuming French police detective racing to stop him. The first four publishers who were pitched “Jackal” didn’t understand the book, Mr. Forsyth later told The Washington Post: “The point was not whodunit, but how, and how close would he get?” ....

In 1972, Mr. Forsyth won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. An acclaimed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, starred Edward Fox as the Jackal and Michael Lonsdale as the French police official. .... (more)

Brian Murphy, "Frederick Forsyth, thriller writer of ‘Day of the Jackal,’ dies at 86," The Washingtyon Post, June 9, 2025.

"Cooler than Cool"

I'm not sure when I first discovered Elmore Leonard, but it was after the time he was writing Westerns (but I do have DVDs of some films based on his Westerns). I believe I own copies of all of his crime novels, all eminently re-readable. I once gave old paperback copies of several of Elmore's books to a graduate student who aspired to be a screenwriter. A new biography of Elmore was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal today. From that review:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So reads the 10^th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. ....

Leonard’s style was Hemingway-like in its economy and reveled in the unexpected delights of the American language. His stories often began in the middle of a scene, and where they went after that was anyone’s guess. His opening lines, such as this one from 1980’s Gold Coast, were collectible: “One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

His crime stories, filled with oddball crooks and moody cops, were hard to pigeonhole, but Leonard’s audience grew to bestseller proportions, boosted by screen adaptations and near-idolatrous reviews. Many of his later works—among them LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), Out of Sight (1996) and Tishomingo Blues (2002)—have been reverently republished via the Library of America. Martin Amis would write that Leonard’s prose rang with the “American rhythms” of Robert Frost and Mark Twain. Ann Beattie compared his fiction, in its moral complexity, to Flannery O’Connor’s. .... (more)

Tom Nolan, "‘Cooler Than Cool’ Review: Elmore Leonard’s Life of Crime," The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025.

When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.

Drowned in noise and nonsense

I loved this, on Oliver Stone's film:

Stone’s film — one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1990s — has a grasp of history that’s about as loose as David Ferrie’s wig in a hurricane. It doesn’t merely twist New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s botched investigation; it hog-ties the truth and dumps it on Bourbon Street to get pancaked by a sousaphone section and a guy in a gator suit.

.... Who killed Kennedy? Stone’s answer: Who didn’t? The CIA, LBJ, the Mafia, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, right-wing wackjobs, crazy Cubans (my peeps), angry Texans, oil tycoons, “Tricky Dick” Nixon, and — why not? — even the Caddyshack gopher was spotted behind the picket fence, cheeky little rascal.

Mechanically, Stone’s three-hour Gish gallop mirrors how social media influencers lobotomize their audiences: it drowns you with a barrage of noise and nonsense that you can’t possibly untangle, so you surrender — and paranoia sets in. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made about conspiracy theories because it is a conspiracy theory....

By the time you realize that there’s no way Julia Ann Mercer could have seen Jack Ruby near Dealey Plaza, you’re already sitting across from Donald Sutherland’s “X” spinning a monologue for the ages. Next, you’re knee-deep in the debunked “magic bullet” theory — which rests entirely on the fallacy that Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally were seated at the same height (they weren’t) — right before Kevin Costner, channeling Jimmy Stewart, pleads, “It’s up to you.” ....

JFK was a warning, but, instead of heeding it, we turned it into a business model. Minutes after Tuesday’s JFK files dropped, Twitter lit up like one of Ruby’s neon signs outside his strip joint: we saw Ramparts clippings sold as fresh intel, antisemitic bile disguised as “just asking questions,” and even a forged JFK memo about UFOs. .... (more)

Giancarlo Sopo, "From Camelot to Clickbait: America’s Dealey Plaza Syndrome," National Review, March 20, 2025.

Some good reading

Standard EBooks continues to add to its library of beautifully formatted, downloadable, out-of-copyright, and thus free eBooks. This month, I noticed R. Austin Freeman's The D’Arblay Mystery, the ninth in their Doctor Thorndyke series. I've posted about the Dr. Thorndyke books several times before. Another is a book I haven't read since childhood, The Swiss Family Robinson.

Johann David Wyss was inspired by Robinson Crusoe but wanted a story his own children could learn from. Thus the novel’s various adventures are really lessons on topics as varied as farming, cooperation, animal husbandry, and frugality. The novel became a favorite of the castaway genre....

But my favorite discovery this month is the first book in which Albert Campion appears, Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).

George Abbershaw has been invited to a party at the gloomy old English mansion of a friend, along with a few people he knows, a few he doesn’t, and one he is sweet on. A suspicious death means George has to determine who can be trusted and who can’t, including a bespectacled young man named Albert Campion who seems to have shown up at the party uninvited. When things take a decided turn for the worse, George and the rest of the guests have to band together in an effort to extricate themselves from an increasingly perilous situation.

Although only a supporting player here, Albert Campion would be the protagonist of another sixteen novels and over twenty short stories, contributing to Margery Allingham being considered one of the four “Queens of Crime,” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Standard EBooks seems to intend to publish more of the Campion books as they become available.

Standard EBooks

A sense of sin

W.H. Auden observed that many mystery fans "have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy." That largely describes me. Apart from mysteries, my only interest in fantasy has been Lewis and Tolkien. I do like some authors of historical fiction.

In a good essay about the appeal of murder mysteries, Alan Jacobs reflects on his enjoyment of such television series as Inspector Morse and its sequel Lewis. He writes "These shows are, it’s often said, old people’s television: Inspector Morse was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, and I’d be surprised if Her Majesty didn’t keep up with the later developments," and he "wonder[s] whether the detective story as a genre is made for people with more than a few years behind them." Jacobs:

...W.H. Auden, in a famous essay about detective fiction, speculated that the fundamental logic of such fiction involves the portrayal of an apparent Eden that is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored—but not the original order since the dead cannot be brought back to life. “Murder is unique” among crimes, Auden says, “in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness.” This is a kind of legal fiction, this substitution of the society itself for one who can no longer seek, or benefit from, justice: in a broken world, things can never be what they were. But partial restoration is better than none, and hope for it is a reasonable aspiration, one claimed by those who have known what the poet James Wright calls “The change of tone, the human hope gone gray.” The satisfactions of the murder mystery are real but somewhat grim, in ways that perhaps best suit the no-longer-young. They are anything but utopian.

In the murder mystery, society does not simply stand in for the victim, it undergoes its own development, for if the story begins in a seemingly orderly and peaceful world, the operative word in that description is “seemingly.” Its initial state is, Auden says, one of “false innocence,” and a murder does not bring evil into society but rather reveals the evil that is already there. The human tendency to take complacent pleasure in a fictional innocence is something that can best be seen in a small and mostly closed society, which is why so many classic detective novels are set in places like English country houses or long-distance railways or isolated villages....

In Auden’s essay on detective fiction he muses on the curious fact that many of its fans have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy—and he speculates that the mystery offers something unique: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin.” ....

And so we’re left with a world in which justice is hoped for but never fully achieved, in which sin and crime can be exposed and punished but never, never quite, paid for—at least not by us. Hard lessons, but ones we all learn if we live long enough. .... (more)

Murder in Paradise | The American Conservative

Alec Guinness’s George Smiley

Alec Guinness is one of my favorite actors. Not the Alec Guinness of Star Wars, particularly, but the Guinness of the Ealing comedies, or the films he made with David Lean, and especially his role as George Smiley in the television series based on the le Carré books. I revisit those at least once a year. I like the BBC version far better than the 2011 film with Gary Oldman. From someone who, apparently, hadn't seen the 1979 version before:

The thing about spy shows is you can’t do anything else while you’re watching; to miss a micro-expression is to miss the plot. Such is the case with 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries based on the le Carré book of the same name, which I recently watched in full. As in the case in real-life espionage, the series features very little in the way of action. Only one episode features gunfire; occasionally, a man jogs. It was, sincerely, riveting. ....

...Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, a dour, droll cuckold and high-ranking intelligence officer whose devotion to England is only superseded by his commitment to social propriety. Smiley, recently and unjustly fired from his position as second in command of the Circus—the nickname for the cadre of top officers within the UK’s intelligence services—is tasked with ferreting out a mole leaking British secrets to the Soviets. It’s believed that the mole is one of the remaining members of the Circus, so Smiley and his few allies can’t let anyone know what they’re up to. (Rather, being professional spies, they can’t let anyone know even more than usual.) For his part, Smiley has to pretend to still be in forced retirement. Not the easiest way to go about an extremely high-stakes mission set at the height of the Cold War.

Even bearing these constraints in mind, Smiley sets about his mission with extreme delicacy. You could be forgiven for mistaking the setting of Tinker Tailor as an alternate-reality London where any act of rudeness sets off the offender’s exploding ankle monitor and blasts their component atoms into the mesosphere. Most of Smiley’s conversations with his various sources and suspects are comprised of intimation, allusion, and tactical civility. ....

Throughout this process Guinness’s Smiley never raises his voice; not once does he rise from his seat. By weaponizing formality, he’s obviated the need for blunter instruments. Why steal secrets when you can ask politely? (more)

 Calvin Kasulke, "Tinker Tailor Soldier... Shifgrethor," CrimeReads, Feb 24, 2025.

Rooting for justice

Alan Jacobs is writing a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. Today he considers a distinction she makes between stories of crime and stories of detection:

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. ....

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E.M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. ....

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. (more)

I enjoy recent authors like Elmore Leonard, but my favorite authors, Dorothy L. Sayers among them,  wrote in the Golden Age.

The book cover above is my copy of the book in which the essay was published.

Alan Jacobs, "The Integrity of the System," The Homebound Symphony, Feb. 10, 2025.

"Witness" is forty years old!

Before Master and Commander Peter Weir directed Witness, forty years ago. It's an old film by now, I suppose, but it doesn't seem so to me. Like Master and Commander it isn't just a story, it immerses the viewer in an unfamiliar (to most of us) culture:

Before we see a gun, a bullet or a drop of blood, we see tall grass swaying in the breeze. Amid the grass there is a mass of men, women and children walking peaceably but confidently. We soon discern, from their unmistakably austere manner of dress, that they belong to the Amish community; we quickly realize that they have gathered for a funeral.

These images constitute the stirring, surprising opening of Peter Weir’s peerless thriller Witness. The film, which was released by Paramount Pictures 40 years ago this month, will eventually develop into a police procedural of rare drama and intensity, but not before Mr. Weir lays the firm foundation for the setting with which it begins and to which it returns: an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1984. ....

In the film’s early stretch, Mr. Weir exercises great patience in establishing the principal Amish characters: Rachel (Kelly McGillis), a widow whose late husband was being mourned in the opening scene, and her little boy, Samuel (Lukas Haas). By the time Rachel and Samuel have made their way to a Philadelphia train station, Mr. Weir has engendered such audience identification with them that, although they are outsiders in this environment, we no longer perceive them as such. Instead, Mr. Weir makes alien and unsympathetic the other travelers, some of whom cannot suppress their stares.

Mr. Weir’s approach of acclimating us to the Amish worldview pays dividends in a pivotal scene. After entering the train station men’s room, Samuel observes, through a slightly ajar stall door, a murder.... (more, with spoilers)

Peter Tonguette, "Peter Weir’s Witness: Crime and Community," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2025.

Marple

Last night I watched two of the Joan Hickson Miss Marple mysteries. I think Hickson is by far the best Marple on screen. I've owned the DVDs of that series for some time but last night, I watched streaming on Britbox and was glad I did — the episodes have been restored and are beautiful. I saw "The Moving Finger" and "A Pocket Full of Rye," neither of which I had watched recently and much longer since read. Speaking of the books, today I came across one reader's ranking of the twelve Agatha Christie's in which Miss Marple appears:

• 
  A Murder is Announced (1950)
• The Moving Finger (1942)
• The Body in the Library (1942)
• A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)
• The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
• A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
• 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
• They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
• Nemesis (1971)
• At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Not bad, although I would rank The 4:50 from Paddington a bit higher.

Jose Ignacio Escribano, "My Ranking of the Twelve Miss Marple Novels," A Crime is Afoot, Feb. 4, 2025.

In the public domain

Every January 1^st more works go out of copyright and enter the public domain. This year, in the United States, the songs, books, and films, are those published in 1929. Standard Books selects twenty of the "best," books available on their site including, for instance, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and others, including several by authors I always enjoy:

• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
• The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie
• The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan
• The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
• Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester

Each of the above is linked to a page where it can be downloaded or read online. All but one are mysteries. The non-mystery is the C.S. Forester, a WWI naval thriller. The Buchan is a Richard Hannay I haven't yet read but will soon.

"The quintessential spy thriller"

About John Buchan's first thriller and its subsequent influences:

A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. ....

A refreshingly uncomplicated tale of a manhunt that lasts a couple weeks, is set mostly in the Scottish Highlands and is told in around 40,000 words, The Thirty-Nine Steps has proved, so to speak, a runaway success. Indeed, the imperative of brevity and speed was something new and notable that Buchan brought to the thriller genre. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is remarkably cinematic for a novel published in the early days of the silent-film era. Certainly the thriller formula developed by Buchan had a profound influence on Hitchcock, who knew Buchan and whose “wrong man” style of thriller is derived from the model of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitchcock’s own film version of the book forms the basis for several of his subsequent Hollywood films, most notably the 1958 masterpiece North by Northwest.

In that film, as in Buchan’s original, the protagonist, played by Cary Grant, is caught up in a wider international conspiracy and through a series of unfortunate events is obliged to avoid both sinister foreign agents and the local police. He realises that he has become a decoy in a full-scale espionage operation designed to expose enemy spies operating on home soil.

The influence of The Thirty-Nine Steps on Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest may be seen not just in the manhunt theme common to both. In North by Northwest, the Buchan influence is felt also in set-piece scenes such as the crop-duster attack upon the fugitive protagonist at the isolated bus stop. In the original novel, Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay is pursued across the Highland wilderness by a monoplane. ....

Interestingly, the novel ends with Hannay leaving England to serve as a junior officer on the Western Front. Although Hannay was the only man who could have saved the day in The Thirty-Nine Steps, after the German plot has been thwarted he is just another British soldier. It would not be long, however, before he is employed again as an independent secret agent in Buchan’s follow-up adventure, Greenmantle. (more)

Simon Caterson, "A Century of The 39 Steps," Quadrant, Sept. 21, 2024.

A puzzle story

At CrimeReads Martin Edwards writes an appreciation of the one Dorothy L. Sayers novel that, although a Lord Wimsey tale is—uncharacteristically—a "whodunit":

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote The Five Red Herrings in 1930, at the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Yet the book novel (published at the start of the following year and originally known in the United States as Suspicious Characters) stands apart from her other mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. This is because she deliberately set out to write ‘a pure puzzle story’. ....

For all her flair as a crime writer, Sayers was not particularly interested in the whodunit. As she said to Gollancz, ‘Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting) How did he do it?’ ....

The secret of her success in capturing the spirit of the place lies in her meticulous attention to detail. Her rural community is infinitely more lifelike than the ‘Mayhem Parva’ type of English village which featured so often in Golden Age novels. Right from the start, we’re left in no doubt that Sayers is writing about a recognizable artists’ colony. As she says in a prefatory note: ‘All the places are real places…and all the landscapes are correct, except that I have run up a few new houses here and there’. An attractive and lavishly detailed map of the area helps readers to follow the action. ....

A truly impressive legacy for a single novel. But one thing is for sure. I’d never fancy driving along those narrow, winding roads at anything like eighty miles per hour – not even if I were trying to establish an alibi for a murder! (more)

Martin Edwards, "On the Trail of The Five Red Herrings, A Sayers Novel That Stands Apart," CriomeReads, August 27, 2024.

Up to no good

The Wall Street Journal celebrates "Alfred Hitchcock at 125: Still a Cinematic Titan" by posting links to reviews about some of his films and related materials. Hitchcock ranks very high among my favorite directors. From an essay about Shadow of a Doubt (1943):

...Hitchcock always claimed to hold in special regard his 1943 drama of small-town life threatened by the presence of a killer, Shadow of a Doubt. Joseph Cotten starred as Uncle Charlie, a murderer whose preferred victims are affluent widows but who, like so many Hitchcock villains, manages to charmingly conceal his villainy—especially to his worshipful family.

“Shadow of a Doubt was a most satisfying picture for me—one of my favorite films—because for once there was time to get characters into it,” Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview.

Hitchcock efficiently establishes the character of Uncle Charlie, whose natural habitat is presented in the film’s opening: Under a false name, he occupies a run-down rented room in an ugly, uninviting urban environment. Charlie is first seen lying in bed, a cigar in his hand and cash by his side while brooding over his next move. After learning that two men are on his tail, he makes a hasty exit and seeks refuge in the bosom of his adoring relations in Santa Rosa, Calif. We do not yet know the specifics of Charlie’s criminality, but we know he is up to no good. ....

This psychological drama is set against the richest sociological portrait Hitchcock ever attempted. Hitchcock uses the splendid setting of Santa Rosa—its tranquil neighborhoods, gracious front porches, patient policeman monitoring a street crossing—not just as atmosphere but to render Uncle Charlie a stranger in a strange land. He not only hails from a place geographically distant from Santa Rosa, but proves to be far slicker and more sardonic than his homespun kith and kin. Intuitively, Young Charlie says at one point that her uncle conceals an enigmatic inner self....

The picture is preoccupied with ideas of normality and ordinariness, and Hitchcock, making the film amid World War II, makes clear that he sees such all-American qualities as worth defending. In a series of speeches, Uncle Charlie offers a cynical view of life—“The world’s a hell,” he says. “What does it matter what happens in it?”—with which he justifies his actions. ....

Peter Tonguette, "‘Shadow of a Doubt’: Hitchcock’s Tale of Small-Town Evil," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2023.