tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post7434846545944109139..comments2024-03-27T11:26:20.466-07:00Comments on The Passing Tramp: Carolyn Considers: "Why Women Read Detective Stories" (1930)The Passing Tramphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-73638398421316729632015-03-27T12:56:06.917-07:002015-03-27T12:56:06.917-07:00You lucky, lucky person!You lucky, lucky person!Lucy R. Fisherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08632983296994349550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-48626258715534746872015-03-27T11:41:10.020-07:002015-03-27T11:41:10.020-07:00Well, I don't know whether there is any hard d...Well, I don't know whether there is any hard data, but it's taken for granted by a lot of commentators back then that women liked Wallace. Men too, but, if anything, women even more so. And he was a huge seller, selling more in the 1920s than most of the true detective novelists, so I'm not surprised his audience cracked demographic barriers.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-72849559720375466182015-03-27T11:38:43.917-07:002015-03-27T11:38:43.917-07:00I think this is true, Christie has always appealed...I think this is true, Christie has always appealed to a wider audience, hence the sales! She always had the puzzles going for her.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-44260459131396132862015-03-27T11:37:24.601-07:002015-03-27T11:37:24.601-07:00I imagine Wells was including herself in that list...I imagine Wells was including herself in that list! She certainly was selling better than most American mystery writers in the US, though her mysteries by this time often were poor. Rinehart would have been huge, but I think between 1920 and 1930, the whole decade of the 1920s, she only published one mystery novel! She doesn't mention AK Green, but Green published her last in 1923. This may suggest Wells didn't think much of the men! Of course there was Van Dine and Biggers, but a lot of the big American men were yet to come too. <br /><br />This goes back to my own view, which is that when people recall the Golden Age it's much more for the 1930s than the 1920s. People often act as if the GA can be defined by Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh (see Lucy Worsley), when in fact Allingham and Marsh were late-comers and even Sayers was much better known in 1940 than she was in 1930 (and Christie in 1930 was often referenced with Ackroyd).The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-34630285682389465202015-03-27T08:16:16.926-07:002015-03-27T08:16:16.926-07:00Which women mystery writers were being celebrated ...Which women mystery writers were being celebrated in the US in 1930? Mary Roberts Rinehart is the only one I can think of from that era. Anna Katharine Green hadn't written a book in seven years and would die in 1935. There were several minor writers who had been cranking them out throughout the 1920s (Isabel Ostrander, Natalie Sumner Lincoln, Lee Thayer) and some just starting out in 1930(Harriette Ashbrook, Mignon Eberhart) but were any of them being celebrated? Does she mean noticed favorably in reviews? Selling books in large numbers? I wonder what Wells meant exactly. Anyway, I think she is exaggerating. I don't think US women writers outnumbered men in mysterydom this early in the history of the genre. I may just come up with a chart to see if she was right or wrong.J F Norrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06473487417479127354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-48091694554787816592015-03-27T01:46:00.515-07:002015-03-27T01:46:00.515-07:00I hadn't realised Edgar Wallace had been so po...I hadn't realised Edgar Wallace had been so popular with female readers. I'd have assumed that the readership of the thriller writers - Buchan, Charteris, Wallace, etc - would have been primarily male. It appears that I'm wrong.dfordoomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02306293859869179118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-37898673310001091272015-03-27T01:42:55.827-07:002015-03-27T01:42:55.827-07:00I started with Christie, back in the 70s when I wa...I started with Christie, back in the 70s when I was still at school. She was hugely popular with adolescent males back then. But then I don't think of Christie as being a "women's" writer in the sense that Sayers is. By impression then, and it's still my impression, is that Christie appeals to male readers as much as to female readers. The other Crime Queens seems to me to be much more female-oriented.<br /><br />In general I overwhelmingly read male writers but I still thoroughly enjoy Christie's work. I find Sayers to be close to unreadable, and Allingham to be entirely unreadable.dfordoomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02306293859869179118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-61339228602464123712015-03-26T20:20:02.860-07:002015-03-26T20:20:02.860-07:00Yes, it does make me wonder about the gender assum...Yes, it does make me wonder about the gender assumptions people make now and have made in the past. I've gotten, rather belatedly, to quite like some hard-boiled, but my more youthful genre reading was all *wrong*, according to the stereotypes.<br /><br />Some of the assumptions about readers in the 1920s and 1930s seem frankly sexist to me. You have even Carolyn Wells, making the case for women as detective fiction readers, referring to the "keen logical interest" having "partially dormant in the feminine mind." She seems to be linking detective fiction to the modern liberated woman of the Twenties, along with pajamas (yes, women wearing was pajamas was a controversy back then) smoking and getting bobbed hair.<br /><br />But then I read today about what men are supposed to want to read and usually it's books I don't want to read!The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-46245538136128012032015-03-26T20:04:23.255-07:002015-03-26T20:04:23.255-07:00Foxessa,
That's interesting to read! Of cour...Foxessa,<br /><br />That's interesting to read! Of course in the piece I'm speaking about people's historical perceptions, which can be wrong. I certainly didn't conform to the stereotype of the male reader in my own mystery fiction reading. I started with Christie--my Mom's Pocket paperbacks from the 1970s--then went on to, yes, the Crime Queens: Sayers first, then Marsh and Allingham, and Heyer, Brand, Ferrars, Tey. In the 1990s I did finally take up John Dickson Carr and some of the other men, like Crispin, Blake and Innes. If course today, I read about everything, even hard-boiled!<br /><br />I find it interesting how people's perceptions have changed so much, whether these perceptions are right or wrong. Today people often tend to think that women are more the market for "traditional" detective fiction, that men need "action" to drive their fiction reading; while eighty, ninety years ago men were the ones seen as being more interested in detective fiction. Were people's perceptions right, then and now, or was a lot of gender stereotyping being done? Carolyn Wells is challenging this gender-driven view back in 1930, while also affirming the view that detective fiction readership had traditionally been seen as more masculine.<br /><br />I suppose my own feeling is that a lot of women were drawn toward the detective fiction of the Crime Queens, because of the importation into it of human values to go along with the problem interest. This was when the traditional problem-oriented detective novel began to be dismissed as "Humdrum" and the writers most associated with it, like Crofts and Rhode, as ""Humdrums." I think the readership for those sorts of novels has always been seen as more male. It will be interesting to see what the response to the British Library reprint series is as they start reprinting more books by Humdrums (they've already started with Crofts).The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-82430084168663003212015-03-26T19:52:51.709-07:002015-03-26T19:52:51.709-07:00The curious aspect of this is that today, certainl...The curious aspect of this is that today, certainly in the Scandi countries and the UK, a lot of the hardest-hitting crime fiction is being written by women and, if we're to judge by bloggers, read by women too. (I imagine the same's true for modern cozies, although I follow those less.) At the same time -- according to my exceptionally unscientific sampling of crime-fiction blogs wot I follow -- a lot, perhaps most, of the people interested in Golden Age/elderly cozies are men.<br /><br />Er, lent/leant.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-85298740899986505772015-03-26T17:49:11.008-07:002015-03-26T17:49:11.008-07:00I have no ideas about this. The attics and baseme...I have no ideas about this. The attics and basements of all my relatives' homes were filled with boxes of these kinds of books and magazines. But it was particularly after the mass market paperback began in WWII here in the U.S. that these collections began.<br /><br />I spent hours and hours of all my childhood and adolescence digging through all the magazines and books stored in these attics and basements, including my own parents' home. They weren't only mysteries and detective fiction either, but westerns galore. And all kinds of old popular fiction books, and ladies magazines reaching back into the late 1800's and early 1900's when my great great grandmothers and great grandmothers were young ladies searching for the styles and manners that would distinguish them from the less cultured and lettered women.<br /><br />I read all of it, except the military fiction, and sometimes, when desperate would look into that too.<br /><br />This is probably one of the big influences that made me into an historian . . . .<br />Foxessahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06754083123669916994noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-56821573848484558322015-03-26T16:06:44.059-07:002015-03-26T16:06:44.059-07:00I should add: note how in 1930 she said there were...I should add: note how in 1930 she said there were more celebrated female writers of mysteries in the US, but more celebrated male writers of mysteries in England. Would she have claimed that a decade later?The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-66236208605264445592015-03-26T15:45:46.915-07:002015-03-26T15:45:46.915-07:00Well, in 1930, I think the idea of Crime Queens an...Well, in 1930, I think the idea of Crime Queens and the mystery "novel of manners" hadn't really crystallized. By the mid-thirties, you had Christie as an increasingly popular crime writer and Sayers achieving bestsellerdom with Gaudy Night. Then by 1940 Marsh and Allingham were becoming well-known in the US too among mystery readers. 1940 looked a lot different from 1930. But I'd say for much of what traditionally has been considered the "Golden Age" (1920-1940), men were considered to be more the market of ture detective fiction. Carolyn Wells was an early voice challenging that idea. Of course she herself was a detective fiction fan of long standing, as well as a practitioner of it, if an imperfect one.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-71206150773463362772015-03-26T14:15:32.322-07:002015-03-26T14:15:32.322-07:00No mention of the appeal of the Queens - their ski...No mention of the appeal of the Queens - their skill as social observers. And their wit. They wrote novels of manners - what happened to those?Lucy R. Fisherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08632983296994349550noreply@blogger.com