tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post8648552719263230009..comments2024-03-28T10:31:55.774-07:00Comments on The Passing Tramp: The World Is too Much with Us: Isms and Phobias in Golden Age Crime FictionThe Passing Tramphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-10144733110827707732019-07-22T17:29:49.445-07:002019-07-22T17:29:49.445-07:00I should mention that lots of people were calling ...I should mention that lots of people were calling Japanese "Japs" in the midst of the Thirties, with all that was going on, and of course more were doing so in the Forties. Of course crime fiction, like other fiction, will reflect that sort of things. Still, I find Mrs. Pym hard indeed to love, or even like.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-35968105848874838392019-07-21T20:14:55.238-07:002019-07-21T20:14:55.238-07:00Well, I guess the extent to whether these terms we...Well, I guess the extent to whether these terms were natural at the time is some indication of the extent to which racist, or racial, attitudes were ingrained in people. My southern grandfather habitually referred to blacks as "coloreds," which was a common "polite" word for them in the South at the time, and he was known to use the n-word at times. Yet at the same time he concealed a girl's partial black heritage at the school where he was principal, so she could stay in the school. MMany people were complicated in their attitudes.<br /><br />I think my main point was that it's easy to go after the thrillers on the language issue, but how about the attitudes in the more sophisticated books? Often people don't discuss that. I think it's worse, because of the way it's portrayed as the high-minded, objective, intellectual discussion, when really it's nothing of the sort. It's just stupid.<br /><br />Agatha Christie made it clear she thought of thriller writing as fun but rather sort of slumming and she adhered to some of the conventions of the time. I don't think it meant she was deeply racist. As I discuss myself in my new post, Nigel Morland himself was half Jewish. But both he and Jefferson Farjeon, another Jew, both used the sinister black man trope on occasion. Did it reflect his actual views? I have no idea.<br /><br />I think Upfield gets criticized by people today for racism, but he certainly was trying to do something different for his day and prominent liberal critics like Anthony Boucher loved his work.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-83581735735598823742019-07-21T03:47:08.949-07:002019-07-21T03:47:08.949-07:00It's worth remembering that in the 1920s and 3...It's worth remembering that in the 1920s and 30s things were attributed to "race" which had nothing to do with it. How far was it actual racism, how far a matter of perception and language? An old man I knew - a Cockney - regularly referred to "sheenies" and "niggers", but was very careful not to do so when he was with people who might be hurt. It wasn't a matter of cowardice - he fought British fascists before WWII and later led actions to stop his employers restricting black and Indian people to the worse jobs - but that those were "natural" terms for him to use.<br /> An interesting aspect to "golden age" racism can be found in Napoleon Bonaparte, Arthur Upfield's half-Aboriginal Australian detective. Upfield obsessively - tediously, even - emphasises the effects of Bony's two ancestries on him and directly attributes particular qualities and skills to one or the other of his ancestries, yet nowadays the same things could be expressed in cultural terms and regarded as perceptive and observant. One of the interesting things about Upfield's books is that he portrays Bony as holding positions which Australian Aboriginals couldn't then hold and being regarded with a respect which was non-existent at the time. Was he trying to directly influence people's behaviour?Roger Allenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11012987757094423896noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-46538255857096459912019-07-21T01:32:06.006-07:002019-07-21T01:32:06.006-07:00Oh, that's okay, I kind of cracked open Pandor...Oh, that's okay, I kind of cracked open Pandora's Box a bit, lol. I am struck how we seem to be repeating a lot of the same attitudes of the Thirties, that you see in GA detective fiction. It worries me, because it didn't end well the first time!<br /><br />I think the antisemitic references did tone down over the Thirties. Writers would have have had to have been pretty oblivious not to notice what was going in Germany. Even Sapper, whose Bulldrog Dummond books I can't abide, I'm sorry, does a mea culpa of sorts in one of the later ones not long before his death. (It's still a wretched book though.)<br /><br />I do think some of the GA writers handled these matters better than others though. What really tees me off about the ABC piece is how ABC always had to act like he was such a sophisticated writer and then he offers up tosh like that. I like some of his books, but he's an exasperating author. But then you could say the same about Chandler. That's one thing I like about the Humdrums, they never put on airs.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-37660420107633698032019-07-20T23:06:10.875-07:002019-07-20T23:06:10.875-07:00My own view, rightly or wrongly, is that racism wa...My own view, rightly or wrongly, is that racism was entirely acceptable by society at large, at least until the Nazi death camps showed where such attitudes tended to lead and it is ridiculous to expect authors to be significantly different from the societies in which they live and work. I'm old enough to remember when it took federal troops to desegregate US schools and that was long after WWII. As others have pointed out racism is far from an historical relic and even now seems very common. Is there really much difference between the Warsaw Ghetto where the people were not allowed to leave freely because they were Jews and the Gaza Ghetto where people are not allowed to leave freely because they are not Jews? Really? Perhaps we simply have a more highly developed set of code words that allow us to be as bigoted as ever while claiming we are not. Like Trump claiming not to have a racist bone in his body while denying a black President was really an American and telling the black Congress members of The Squad to go back where they came from. I hope and believe that we have progressed, but sometimes I wonder. I'm going to shut up now because I've wandered too far from crime fiction.Ron Smythhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00575735524072816238noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-68484369038822898512019-07-20T11:10:58.168-07:002019-07-20T11:10:58.168-07:00I'll be writing more about Morland soon on thi...I'll be writing more about Morland soon on this subject, because his social and ethnic background is unique among GA British mystery writers, where Berkeley was much more the usual thing. I wrote this not to attack Morland per se, but to point out that there were other, purportedly more sophisticated writers who did the same things as well. Also, with every passing day, seemingly, I find these things have not dated at all, as some have contended. We're witnessing the same issues all around us every day. GA mystery is more timely than ever, for good and ill.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-65186157519931257052019-07-20T01:10:52.354-07:002019-07-20T01:10:52.354-07:00My policy with regard to authorial bigotry is a si...My policy with regard to authorial bigotry is a simple one: I don't expect writers to be more intelligent or better human beings than the average person and so I'm okay, for lack of a better word, with them being assholes as long as they keep that private. Whatever Morland and Berkeley felt about Jews or Japanese or Black people was their own business; the problem is that they felt entitled to pollute their writing with it. I'll thus skip the books you mention that seem to be pretty poor work anyway. <br /><br />Of course this relative leniency of mine is probably helped by the fact that I'm from a country that produced and still produces lots of genius writers with skeletons in the closet. The Berkeley/Morland brand of bigotry is actually pretty mild in comparison with that found in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jacques Chardonne, Lucien Rebatet, Paul Morand or since we're dealing with crime writers, Léo Malet who really had a thing against Arabs. Being French permanently requires one to separate the artist from their art, for otherwise we wouldn't be reading anything at all - even that republican icon Victor Hugo said some unsavoury things about Africans.<br /><br />Still, I agree any writer, even one I admire like Berkeley, should be taken to task for their racist or other problematic feelings when they intrude in their work as long as it doesn't prevent a fair assessment of it. The crime fiction has had enough Watsons, Joshis or Symonses, people who only like writers on the same political side as theirs. Xavierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05702919450638993709noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-23444301929323442262019-07-19T16:56:18.520-07:002019-07-19T16:56:18.520-07:00Well, I'll give him another chance. I hadn...Well, I'll give him another chance. I hadn't read your Moon Murders piece, but it doesn't change my mond about Mrs. Pym, lol. Actually I found him more interesting as a person than his books, at least the Mrs. Pym ones. Pronzini included "John Donovan" in Gun in Cheek. But he wrote a lot of books!<br /><br />But my larger point is it's easy to beat up on the lowly thriller writers, but what about the mystery toffs?The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-55670565333333781012019-07-19T11:06:49.339-07:002019-07-19T11:06:49.339-07:00All that moronic spanking in Wychford... got me la...All that moronic spanking in Wychford... got me laughing and gasping almost simultaneously. The book is not all that good as a mystery either because it turns out there is no mystery at all. No crime even! A shaggy dog story of a detective novel.<br /><br />I don't care how much you enjoy maligning "our dear Mr. Morland" for his backward thinking. As a crime fiction plotter he had moments of sheer ingenuity.J F Norrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06473487417479127354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-6169672246065549952019-07-19T10:51:40.685-07:002019-07-19T10:51:40.685-07:00I liked Trial and Error a lot at the time, though ...I liked Trial and Error a lot at the time, though I'm not sure I 'd ever feel the need to read it again. I do like some of the Sheringhams, believe it or not! I've always thought the Iles books and The Poisoned Chocolates Case were overrated. His short story The Avenging Chance is brilliant, though.The Passing Tramphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09830680639601570152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137677673775151256.post-65446749518000737502019-07-19T08:08:39.866-07:002019-07-19T08:08:39.866-07:00Great post Curtis. Definitely a balanced post, nei...Great post Curtis. Definitely a balanced post, neither white washing nor damning everything in sight. Only read The Silk Stocking mystery once and remember very little about it, except that I didn't enjoy it. I stayed clear of The Wychford Poisoning Case, due to your warning, which you issued on my blog at the time of the reprint. Would you say the isms and phobias become less frequent or more muted in mid to late Berkeley novels? I think it would be really good if they could reprint Professor on Paws, as it has a wonderfully intriguing title (please don't tell me it's full of awful comments lol)Katehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05616800837907092489noreply@blogger.com