Sunday, February 23, 2014

Everyone Hates a Critic: The Christie Caper (1991), by Carolyn Hart

When I was reading The Christie Caper, it occurred to me that the book's author, Cozy Queen Carolyn Hart (soon to be MWA Grand Master Carolyn Hart), not only shares the same first name as Carolyn Keene, the pseudonym for the Nancy Drew mystery authors, but also Carolyn Wells, who published mysteries from 1907 to 1942.

I wonder whether in any of her "Death on Demand" series novels Hart has ever mentioned Carolyn Wells (if not, Wells must be about the only writer she has never mentioned), because the two women seem to share certain affinities as crime fiction authors, most obviously a liking for murders set in "nice" surroundings, a classic cozy trope.

Hart's Death on Demand series, which she launched in 1987, has reached 23 novels as of last year.  She has two other series, together accounting for 11 novels.  I believe her fiction writing career started with 5 juvenile mysteries, the first one published before I was born (now that's old).  Between 1985 and 1987 she also published 9 non-series crime novels.  In 2003 she published another non-series book, Letter from Home, and in 2012 one of those darn cat mysteries, What the Cat Saw (is this the start of another series?).

Carolyn Hart

By my calculation, that makes an even fifty mysteries, but I see interviews with her as of last year say 51, so I must be missing something.  In any event, that many popular novels over a half-century makes Hart a significant presence in the mystery world, a fact being recognized this year by the Mystery Writers of America.  She is also someone who clearly knows and loves the classical, or as she would say, traditional, mystery, for which I salute her.

Hart's The Christie Caper is the seventh Death on Demand book, about Annie Laurance Darling and her lowcountry South Carolina mystery bookstore "Death on Demand."  By this book she's married to Max Darling, who, we're told several times, looks just like one of the Hardy Boys grown up--the blonde one, whichever one that one was (Shaun Cassidy played him in the TV series).  Max comes with a mother-in-law, Laurel Darling Roethke, a much-married comic sexpot (there's a vulgar acronym for this "type" today, but this is a family blog, of course, so I won't spell it out).  Then there's Frank Saulter, chief of police, and Brice Willard Posey, the spectacularly stupid circuit solicitor.

a critic at work
What drew me to this one is that it details murder at a mystery convention, organized by Annie, in honor of Agatha Christie's 100th birthday.  It all looks to come off brilliantly, but then it turns out there's a turd in the punchbowl, in the form of tough guy mystery critic--he has a fanzine devoted to hard-boiled mystery--Neil C. Bledsoe.

Neil seems determined to make an absolute ass out of himself, in every way possible.  Apparently, Neil thinks hard-boiled mysteries are the only acceptable form of crime writing.  He despises cozies and wants everyone at the "Christie Caper" convention to know it.

It gets really ugly when Neil declares he is publishing a book that is going to expose Christie as a scheming tart.

Now everyone at the convention is in a positive tizzy.  Next thing you know, shots are fired at Bledsoe, then a vase is is pushed off a ledge, above where he is sitting.  Is a deranged Christie fan at work???

Eventually there is a death, then another and yet another.  This all happens only in the second half of the book, which made the first half of the book rather slow going for me (I do like me murders, guvnor).

A lot of the book felt padded to me, with Christie trivia (I enjoyed this at first, but then got tired of it as it went on and on); the dotty antics of mother-in-law Laurel (I couldn't figure out why she kept insisting on talking about Poe at an Agatha Christie convention--maybe this was an inside joke about the Edgars versus the Agathas?); intervals of "love" (i.e., sex, demurely described) between Annie and Max; and, lordy!, lots of food (Hart constantly refers to one male character as "chunky," but by the end of the book I was expecting her to start describing Annie as such, with all the food she was putting away). Of course one person's padding is another person's pleasure--so to speak!

a killer cozy convention
The plot is certainly a classic style plot, although most Christie fans may be be able to deduce what's up for precisely that reason (i.e., we've all seen this one before).

The official investigators being idiots, it's left to the amateurs, Annie and Max, to pursue the culprit when murder strikes (Max, who seems to be something of a handsome layabout, has a "consulting" firm, we're told, but it's definitely not a private detective agency). They are aided by Lady Gwendolyn Tompkins, "England's reigning Crime Queen."

Lady Gwendolyn without a doubt was my favorite character in the book, enough so that I regret Hart never launched a Lady Gwendolyn "Crime Queen" series of mysteries.  Has she ever appeared in other Death on Demand novels?

The amateur investigation seems to be conducted by Max and Lady Gwendolyn mainly over the telephone (oh! the long distance bills!), with computers making barely a blip.  For her part, Annie interviews all the suspects at the convention, so that the investigation gets a bit repetitious.  Still, I think Annie reaches the solution through legitimate clues--though being  such a Christie fan she should have spotted the plot sooner!

Hart does provide a nice twist ending, about which I cannot say more without risking spoiling for those who have not read the book.  I have one other Death on Demand book on Kindle, A Little Class on Murder (#5, where, I believe, Annie teaches a class on mysteries) and probably will read it sometime this year.  However, I can't really say that The Christie Caper fired me with enthusiasm to immediately read another book in this series.

Overall, I didn't find the writing in The Christie Caper memorable, nor did I get, for the most part, a strong sense of characters and place from the book.  If you compare the Death on Demand books, set in South Carolina, with Margaret Maron's North Carolina mysteries, for example, I think you will have to admit that the Marons are stronger in these respects.

Margaret Maron

Hart keeps telling us how sexually magnetic Neil is, despite being an obnoxious, sexist, cozy-hating pig and all, but I kept thinking of the adage, show don't tell. She never convinced me that he would draw any other reaction than disgust.

Similarly, the whole thing with the convention panicking about the Christie scandal book just seemed silly. Heck, if people thought Agatha Christie actually was having it off a century ago with Eden Phillpotts that probably would only increase interest in her work!  How interesting that would be were it really true (it's not, of course; there does appear to have been a sexual scandal in Phillpotts' life I only recently found out about, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Christie).

Tuppence (Francesca Annis)
 and Tommy (James Warwick)
still the classic cozy crime couple

Nevertheless, I think I can see the appeal of The Christie Caper if you are looking for a light escapist series mystery read.

For my part, I certainly would love to be the owner of Annie's bookstore, where it seems she mostly just has to answer the phone to take all the orders that keep pouring in.  And no doubt whichever Hardy Boy he looks like, Max makes a wonderful fashion accessory (I just knew at the Agatha Christie costume party Annie and Max were going to be Tuppence and Tommy).

For me, however, the most striking thing about The Christie Caper is the animus directed against hard-boiled mysteries and the true crime genre.  Hart's characters repeatedly make comments to the effect that it is the cozies that are the realistic books, because they are about the sort of people most readers know.

This depends on the reader, of course, but I would argue that probably most people most readers know aren't involved in murder, so in this sense the genteel murder mysteries are less realistic. Still, there's no question that hard-boiled mysteries can be heavily stylized and romanticized, in their own tough way.

However, I've never been sympathetic to demands for hyper-realism, anyway.  I like the stylized approaches of the classic stuff, be it tough or "traditional."  I was pelased to find that Hart likes the novels of Raymond Chandler; apparently she's not as anti-hard-boiled as one might think from a reading of The Christie Caper.

Since I've mentioned Margaret Maron, I've decided I should review something by her next, to give a more positive appraisal of a so-called modern "cozy" writer.  I also think I'll try to take a look at Hart's non-series and Agatha-winning Letter from Home, which unlike any of her other books, I think, is set in her native Oklahoma.  It's interesting to me, given my work with the Oklahoma Choctaw mystery writer Todd Downing, who taught at the University of Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s, that Hart is a 1958 OU graduate. I myself have Oklahoma family connections on my father's side.

Between them Hart and Maron account for, I believe, twenty Agatha best novel nominations and seven wins, an impressive tally that no one else really challenged until the Louise Penny steamroller came along!

19 comments:

  1. Since you've mentioned Carolyn Hart's forthcoming Grand Master award from the MWA, I should point out that Margaret Maron will be honored a couple of days later with Malice Domestic's Lifetime Achievement Award. For the record, so will Dorothy Cannell. Hart, of course, is also deeply involved in Malice Domestic. So let the traditional writing continue...

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    1. Les, didn't Maron get the MWA Grand Master award last year? I should have mentioned that, but I will be writing about Maron next week.

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  2. no. I think it was announced last year (at the tail end of Malice 25), but it's being given this year. Details at http://www.malicedomestic.org/ . By the way, Tom Schantz of the Rue Morgue Press is also being honored with a Poirot Award this year. Looks like a good conference.

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  3. Les, I meant didn't Maron win the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of American last year? I thought I read that....

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    1. Yes she was so honored last year, Curt. You're right.

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    2. So that's two of the most prominent Malice Domestic Writers in succession getting MWA Grand Master awards, good show.

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  4. Spot on! That was my impression I had when I read the book.

    The problem with the book is too much padding.

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    1. I have to admit I got bored with some of it, like all the Christie trivia and lists of food. I didn't feel like with all that Hart was really creating compelling atmosphere and it took away from the murder problem.

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  5. It's interesting to me that the most striking thing you noticed is the animus directed towards hard-boiled fiction. What I find curious is that. as near as I can tell, this book is saying if you don't agree that murder should take place off-stage and written about so as not to offend delicate sensibilities, you deserve to have your head smashed to a bloody pulp by a heavy vase falling from a height. Hmm. I think there's a cognitive dissonance here.

    I think there's the bones of a Ph.D. thesis here, and it would probably trace the evolution of detective fiction from a time when women and men writers competed equally to serve a market made up largely of men (or a market that didn't acknowledge that women bought/read half the books sold) to Hart and her fellow female cozy writers creating mysteries by women, about women, for a market made up almost entirely of women. I could say more, but I feel a sequel to my recent post about "what is a cozy" coming on!!

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    1. Noah, you do get a sense of real resentment of male hard-boiled writers (and readers) in this book. There's also criticism of true crime and serial killer books. Of course on the latter front, Hart was fighting a losing battle, because a certain film with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster came out the same year as The Christie Caper and nothing was the same in the crime fiction world again. However, you now have Hart getting the Grand Master Edgar award from the MWA, so it seems the two sides have patched things up, even though Hart, unlike Maron, never got, I believe, an Edgar nomination (let alone a competitive win like Maron).

      In Caper, Hart also gets takes time to denounce gun violence and NRA members (some things haven't changed) and I kind of got the impression she thinks of hard-boiled fans as being right-wing. That's interesting to me, because I always thought it was the hard-boiled fans who thought the cozy fans tended to be conservative!

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  6. The Christie Caper was published in 1991 and I know I was still using a typewriter back then. Lack of computers makes a lot of sense. Only a handful of people had email in the early days of PC marketing and the internet didn't really take off until after 1995 as far as I recall.

    Carolyn Hart was one of the more interesting writers I heard speak at Bouchercon in Cleveland a few years ago. Her insights and her obvious love for the genre got me to buy a few of her books. I've yet to read any of them though. Interesting that business about cozies being more realistic because they are about characters most people know. I actually recognize those types in hard boiled novels more than then “nice” people in traditional mysteries who seem so dull and uncomplicated. And I feel like the characters I read about in Barbara Vine and Minette Walters books (not at all cozy writers) might just as well have been written about the people I work with!

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    1. John, I know when the book was published and imagine I recall the period as well as you, as I'm almost as old as you are. My comment about computers being barely a blip in the book was simply an observation, not a criticism. It's interesting to go back and look at how things have changed.

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    2. John, on your second point, I agree that books with all these "nice" people don't seem as realistic, unless we can be made to believe all these nice people might commit foul murder. Christie can do this. Hart, going by this book, not so much. And I agree about James and Rendell. They are more genteel writers, but you can certainly believe those characters might be up to somethign wicked!

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  7. I tried a few books in this cosy style (UK spelling) but they weren't for me - having said that, this was when I was a student in thw 1980s but it doesn't sound like much has changed ...

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    1. Sergio, somehow spelling "cozy" with a "z" just seems, well, cozier! Did you ever read any Margaret Maron in the eighties or nineties?

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  8. The plot set up of the Christie Caper is reminiscent of Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, in which the heavy drinking hardboiled novelist Stephen Worth is hired to do the screenplay for a movie based on the Adventure of the Speckled Band. The local chapter of the Irregulars is horrified, Worth sneers at Holmes and them, and is promptly knocked off, as I'm sure he would have put it.

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    1. Jim C. I have had this book for years and never read it! Sounds like it would make a great point of comparison.

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  9. I meant to comment yesterday, so I hope I don't get sidetracked today. I have Letter from Home but have not tried it either. Also the first one from Death on Demand and the Henrie O series (also not read). I have avoided the "cozy" series books by her so far because I fear they won't be "demanding" enough, too cute, but they certainly have made her name, so ... who can blame her for continuing to write them?

    I have read some Maron, not a lot. I did not read more than two of her Deborah Knott series because it is set in the South (I am guessing that was the problem, it has been a while); I have read the first two in the Sigrid Harald series recently and I am a big fan. I will read them all. I don't consider them cozies because they are police procedurals (with a female detective) but they are not gritty or violent.

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    1. TracyK, I like the Sigrid Haralds too! I always wonder why Maron never got more attention for those. More about Judge Knott later.

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