Masters and Me at Ten Years I

Note: Hope you don't mind my shooting off a little steam on this subject.  My book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery was published close to ten years ago now and I will have more to say about the book as the year progresses.  It is just about a year younger than the blog itself.  Somehow I managed to miss my blog's tenth anniversary last year, even as the blog hit two million views.--TPT

the book with the forbidding subtitle
was published a decade ago

In a way I'm pleased that someone took the time—oddly nearly a full decade after the book was published--to pen a review on Amazon of my 2012 book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery of nearly 2300 words (though with, unfortunately, no use of the space bar).  Yet despite all the verbiage (rather tendentious, to use a term which he applies to my own book), he unfortunately does not really engage with a lot of my book, choosing instead to take the route of a would-be belittling and condescending hit piece.  I say “he,” even though the reviewer pusillanimously chooses to hide behind the initials “RTB,” because it reads like something a man would write.

                One of the larger ideas behind Masters was to look at the derision the pure puzzle or Humdrum mystery had been subjected to and show that this was not always the ascendant critical view.  So I go into the historiography of this subject, the then ascendant critical views of the pure puzzle mystery, the views of the past and of the three authors—John Street, Freeman Wills Crofts and J. J. Connington--in particular. 

                Back a dozen or more years ago, when this book was being written, the view that vintage American mystery meant hard-boiled and vintage British mystery meant the Crime Queens—mean streets vs. country houses--had really solidified.  Other authors who did not fit in these restrictive molds were largely ignored in major academic and popular critical works, right up to PD James’ Talking about Detective Fiction and that chatty, superficial tome by Lucy Worsley.  Things finally changed with Martin Edwards’ first genre study, which, I’m happy to say, used my works as secondary source material.

                Admittedly since then this view has collapsed like the Berlin Wall, but it was still there to take on, grimly imposing, when I wrote Masters.  A great many people then writing about the genre in these books evidently had no idea how well regarded the pure puzzle mystery, and these three authors, were once regarded.  (Of course there were informed exceptions, like the work of Jon Breen, Douglas Greene, Tony Medawar, for example.)

                As to the social attitudes of the Golden Age mystery, people again were largely basing their beliefs about that on the writing of the Crime Queens.  I was not attempting in Masters to argue that Streets, Crofts, Connington were not conservative, let alone that they were radical or left, but to argue that their conservatism was more flexible and nuanced that Julian Symons and Co. allowed.  Remember it was Symons who compared the social order of British mystery to that of the Incas.  Street does evince an interest in the working man, for example, which is largely absent from the work of the Crime Queens.

                There are numerous references to all this in my book, aside from the ostensibly "naïve" one to Death in the Tunnel, which I gather the reviewer has actually read, since it became available recently from the British Library.  In the Rhode series, by the way, Dr. Priestley is much more active and ambulatory in the earlier books and not "merely" a "Thinking Machine," though I doubt my reviewer, who faults me for not comparing Dr. P. to Jacques Futrelle's The Thinking Machine, is aware of that either.  I compare Dr. P. to R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke for several obvious reasons, but also because I know that John Street, like Crofts and Connington, actually read Freeman.  Indeed at least two of Street's detective novels were influenced by Freeman short stories.  It is all in the book.  Apparently the reviewer skipped rather a lot.

                There is also much in the book about the social and political attitudes of Crofts and Connington, which the reviewer does not address at all.  In fact he has nothing to say about my analyses of these authors, concerning Crofts' religious fervor and Connington's secular materialism and how it impacted their work.  Likely it is because he does not know enough about these authors to address these issues.

                I was amused to have the reviewer throw Punshon and the Coles in my face, since I have written about them extensively in, respectively, my introductions to the Punshon reissues and one section of my book The Spectrum of English Murder, which I imagine is vastly more work than he has done on those subjects.  He might find, if he read some of it, that in their fiction the Coles manage to get in more left social criticism than he thinks.

                I was struck by the reviewer's insistence that I cannot bring myself to admit that Street wrote too many books, when this is actually something I admit in my book.  (I think I actually use the words “wrote too much.”)  Of course Street wrote too many books (over 140!), just like Edgar Wallace.  Many of the later ones from the Fifties are poor, as I explain, and he certainly has misses earlier.  Either this criticism is made in bad faith or my reviewer spent more time writing his review than actually reading my book.

                My bibliography is extensive.  I gather the reviewer doesn't like the primary newspaper and periodical review listings, but those are included in full in the endnotes.  There are full citations of all the primary and secondary books and articles.  He should check out the sourcing in Bloody Murder.  What sourcing you ask?  Exactly!  The reviewer's misrepresentation of my bibliography is so omissive as to be reprehensible.  

                I gather he read an eBook version of my book?  The "list of names and terms" which he mentions I have no familiarity with; I had no idea it existed.  The print version which I wrote has an extensive index.  It is called "Index."  Here some of the entries under Crofts, Freeman Wills: alibis and time tables in; ancestry and family of; artistic temperament and Bohemianism; avarice; Biblical cadence in writing of; business and capitalism; charity and kindliness; church activities of; city and country; class, etc.  This is not in the eBook I gather?  This is too bad, but why on earth does Anonymous impute the "blame" for this to me?  He might as well attack me for publishing a book with no illustrations, when the print version is copiously illustrated.  Or is he just engaging in misrepresentation again?

                At least the reviewer says he enjoys my blog, although he does not seem to be aware of anything else I have done.  I am glad he finds the blog less aggravating and tendentious than the book.  The book aimed to contend with the then ascendant school of crime fiction criticism associated with Julian Symons and Colin Watson and various leftist academics, while the blog of course is more generally exploratory of the genre as a whole. 
              Frankly, I did not find my book anywhere as tendentious as his review, but it is, perhaps, a matter of whose ox is being gored.  I cop to quoting from a great many original sources.  I am an award-winning PhD historian by training.  I was one of the few people in those days really to go back and immerse in original sources, instead of just quoting Julian Symons, to whom I gather the reviewer is quite partial.  In fact, I have a good notion who "Anonymous" might be and, if I am right, this person is hardly an uninterested party in all this, shall we say?  (It makes the criticism that my book too much discusses plots--the raison d'etre of the authors--hugely ironic and outrageously projective.)  Maybe that is why this person chose to stay anonymous.  What a shabby performance.  

                Let me assure my readers that nasty anonymous hit pieces and spiteful academic score settling are not going to deter me from being outspoken about how I see the crime fiction genre.  To the contrary, they will have just the opposite effect.  It is my duty as a historian to give my honest views, without fear or favor.  In Masters I pointed out mystery writers and academics who wrote uninformed histories of the genre.  More recently over at Crimereads I spoke out about the dreadfully cruel, decades-long critical take on Cornell Woolrich.  I have a decade-old blog with over 2.2 million views and am an Edgar-nominated author.  I will continue to write about vintage crime fiction.  Ring out the old, ring in the new.  If you don't like it, by all means write and tell the world.  Just have the guts to sign your name to it.