"From what I've seen, I shouldn't think there's a house or cottage in Thornden where they aren't chewing over the crime at this very moment."
[Mrs. Haswell] and Miss Patterdale were agreed that although it was disagreeable to persons of their generation to have a murder committed in their midst, it was very nice for the children to have something to occupy them, Thornden being such a quiet place, with really nothing to do in it at this season, except to play tennis.
--Detection Unlimited, Georgette Heyer
The late Professor Jacques Barzun, who died a dozen years ago at the age of 104, was a vocal defender of classic detective fiction for over half a century. While he could be unappreciative, even patronizing, of women suspense writers, castigating them not merely as HIBK (Had I But Known)--a dismissive acronym which had been applied by critics before him to popular authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart--but as, to use his own term, EIRF, which stands for Everything Is Rather Frightening.
What interested Barzun in his preferred examples of crime fiction was not domestic disquiet but devoted detection. He was especially uninterested in the tribulations of mid-century housewives which filled the pages of books by such women crime writers as Celia Fremlin, Ursula Curtiss and Charlotte Armstrong. Sounding like a judgmental bystander in Eden, he pronounced EIRF novels a "feminine error."
However, there was a group of women writers whom Barzun adored: the cadre of detective novelists from the Golden Age of detective fiction who had been collectively dubbed England's Crime Queens: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Novels by each of these authors he included in his and Wendell Hertig Taylor's reprint series One Hundred Classics of Crime. (These were The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Strong Poison, Dancers in Mourning and Swing, Brother, Swing).
There was one other English lady from the Golden Age of detective fiction whom Barzun believed merited inclusion in these august ranks, one who ironically was not known primarily for detective fiction: prolific regency romance writer Georgette Heyer. Her mystery A Blunt Instrument was another of Barzun and Taylor's entries in their Classics of Crime.
Georgette Heyer published a dozen detective novels between 1932 and 1953, ten of these between 1932 and 1942 at the height of the Golden Age, with two stragglers appearing in the early 1950s, after which the author retired from the mystery field, though she continued steadily publishing her regency romances nearly up to her death in 1974 at age 71. I think Barzun is well-justified in his admiration for Heyer's detective novels. There are a few weak numbers in the lot (see below), but generally it's a most impressive body of work for fans of classic genteel detective fiction.
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| Thriller Book Club ed. from the 1950s |
When I started reading detective fiction again in 1989--I had stopped reading it for six years when I was enrolled in college and law school--one of the authors I started reading was Georgette Heyer, who had recently been reprinted in paperback by Berkley. I read nine of the Heyers over the course of a year or less, I believe.
Yet I didn't read the last one or the first two, where Heyer was still acquainting herself with the style and mechanics of detective fiction. Her last one, Detection Unlimited, I actually started several times for no fewer than three decades but I never got anywhere close to finishing it. My attention always wandered.
Why was this? Having finally stuck with it this time and read it over the course of about a week, I see why. It's rather long by my count (95,000 words maybe?), very talky and discursive, with underdeveloped characters. Of course all of Heyer's mysteries are chitty chatty, as it were, and usually the chitchat, at which the author typically excels, is a high point of her writing, Heyer (pronounced "hare," like a rabbit) being a very witty writer. But here the talk just went on and on and on. One character talked in a two-page paragraph of about 900 closely printed words. The attention inevitably wanders.
I think Heyer's return to detective fiction in 1951 was a bit half-hearted. Her commitment had always been somewhat shaky: Her lawyer husband, George Ronald Rougier, actually plotted the books as far as the murders went, though she did all the writing; and her romances far outsold her mysteries so she had less financial incentive to write them. Also her disdain for modern, post WW2 (i.e. Labour governed) England really comes through in the last book, which is classically set in a provincial English village. The denunciations of how much the owners of big houses in England are suffering gets a bit heavy-handed. The passage below is one of the most sweeping condemnations of Labour-era England that I have come across in a detective novel from the period.
Coming upon, in the village of Thornden, the the dilapidated country mansion Old Place, home of the Squire and his wife (their childless son was killed in the Second World War and the estate and will be inherited, upon the Squire's death, by a cousin in South Africa), Chief Inspector Hemingway, in charge of the investigation of the local murder of obnoxious solicitor Sampson Warrenby, disgustedly says: "Progress." Then this passage follows:
But he said it to himself, well-knowing that his companion, inevitably reared in the hazy and impracticable beliefs of democracy-run-riot, would derive a deep, if uninformed, gratification from the reflection that yet another landowner had been obliged, through excessive taxation, to throw out of work the greater part of his staff.
Hemingway's companion, poor, young Constable Melkinthorpe, recalls that there once were many more people employed at the Old Place, adding: "Of course, things are different now." This draws the ire of Hemingway, who snaps: "They are....And the people as notice it most are those gardeners and grooms and gamekeepers. So you put that into your pipe, my lad, and smoke it!"
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| a very 70s take on a 50s novel presumably this is Charles and Abby (see below) |
Of course the Labour Party did want to redistribute wealth and make society more equitable. Did they go too far, or not far enough? Or did they get it--like the porridge upon which Goldilocks, doubtlessly a covetous leftist, impudently supped--just right? This is a subject for debate, but Heyer in her books was not really interested in debate but rather declamation.
In defending the privileges of the landed gentry, the author impugns the motivation of those desirous of promoting greater social equity as nothing more than envious desire to do down the landlords. She's not thinking of the wealthy, mind you, it's their servants. We have to keep up the Great Houses in private ownership in order to provide employment for butlers, gardeners and lady's maids. Don't do it for the lords of the manors; do it for their lady's maids!
Of course other beneficiaries of this regime were classic English mystery writers--we fans love us our country house parties, whatever our political persuasions. There's no question that the austerity era in England took a lot out of the vintage English mystery. Many writers adapted pretty well to the changes, but some did not.
I tend to think that someone as out of tempo with modern times as Heyer was probably would not ever have adapted. In her regencies society could be kept in stasis for as long as she wrote them. It reminds me of how mystery writer John Dickson Carr--who, though an American, was temperamentally like Heyer (though she apparently didn't like Americans and she didn't like Carr's mysteries)--turned decisively to period mystery fiction in the Fifties because there was so much about modern England that he couldn't abide. So Heyer was probably right to abandon detective fiction when she did. In any event, I believe that around this time her husband became too busy with legal work to contribute his share to the effort.
Detection Unlimited doesn't make a bad swan song; it's just a bit of a curate's egg: only good in spots. In his summary of the novel in A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun, a conservative himself, complained that the detection was "a trifle too unlimited," with altogether too much idle chatter. I think he's right. There is a lot to like in this book if you like classic English detective fiction of the more genteel sort, but the action is much too diffuse. The novel needed tightening and some weeding out of characters. Those discarded country house gardeners might have been of some use here, metaphorically speaking!
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| Thornden in Detection Unlimited |
Heyer plunges us right into village life on page one and the hopefully hardy reader really has to weather a welter of character introductions in the first few chapters just to get on with it. There is a frontis map of the village (which does matter), but inexcusably no cast of characters, at least in my edition. Besides the squire and his wife, there's another rich guy, an estate agent, and his wife, who are the parents of the male love interest in the story, Charles Haswell. He's interested in Abby Dearham, the pretty secretary of a novelist and niece of a local spinster. These characters, probably around the age of my parents at the time, as mentioned provide the love interest in the book, but it's a minor thread in a rather busy tapestry.
Not surprisingly love interest is normally a big part of Heyer's detective stories. Heyer's lovers exchange great repartee and never get soppy or gushy about things. That sort of thing--emotional exhibitionism--just isn't done by sensible people in a Georgette Heyer novel.
Anyway, back to the characters, there's Thaddeus Drybeck, a fuddy-duddy older attorney who hated the younger, more energetic and successful upstart Sampson Warrenby, the novel's murderee. Then there's Mavis Warrenby, the dead man's niece, who clearly has a yen for a handsome displaced Pole in the village, of whom her uncle disproved. He's not the first Pole encountered in a mystery by Heyer, who despite her extreme Britishism was of Russian descent. On hearing there's a Pole in the case, Chief Inspector Hemingway is nonplussed, to say the least of it:
"If I'd been told there was a Pole mixed up in this case I'd have reported sick....I've had one case with a Georgian mixed up in it, and two more with Poles, and they pretty nearly gave me a nervous breakdown."
Mavis Warrenby is a pious doormat, and if there's another thing Hayer hates, it's pious doormats. She's even dismissed as "pi." Against all evidence she's always insisting that her uncle was a nice man and that she liked him as any niece should, though he clearly wasn't and she clearly didn't. We never see Warrenby alive, but it's made clear that everyone in the village couldn't stand him because he was a pushing upstart newcomer who wanted to be the top dog--a "pocket Hitler" as someone calls him. "He is recognizable as a character created only to be murdered," says waspish local detective novelist Gavin Plenmeller in a meta moment, accurately enough.
The niece is repeatedly disparaged--and not solely by Gavin--as a gormless nitwit. After enough of this I started to feel a little sorry for her and even for her uncle. (We never actually get to see him alive, we just hear him repeatedly disparaged after his death.) Heyer's attitude to dutiful do-gooders is a lot like John Dickson Carr's: utterly scathing. See these comments from the author's lovers, Abby and Charles:
ABBY: "There was a girl at school awfully like [Mavis], always saying, 'Oh, I don't think we ought to!' and being kind and forgiving to everyone, and saying improving things. She was the most ghastly type! And the worst thing about people like that is that they actually believe in their own acts. I wouldn't mind half so much if they were doing it deliberately, and stayed honest inside, but they don't."
CHARLES: "All I know about her is that she chose to come down here and act as a sort of unpaid drudge for an out-and-out swine, who wasn't even decently polite to her, rather than get a job and be able to call her soul her own."
This is ironic given that Charles ostensibly has a job but seems able to spend all his time with Abby doing amateur detecting. (What fun!) Abby even asks him at one point if he ever goes to work. In truth I think Heyer liked best her Regency bucks who never had to dirty their hands in trade. Her favorite characters are blunt types who speak their minds--at least if it's conservative entiments coming out of their mouths. She puts these characters in all of her mysteries, and frequently they are quite funny, if sometimes unwarrantably cruel. In Detection Unlimited the top "blunt" character is aforementioned mystery writer Gavin Plenmeller, who inherited an estate in the village from his late brother. He perennially offends everyone in the village--well, not goody-two-shoes Mavis--with his outspoken comments.
There is also a major and his Pekinese-breeding wife. Her pack of prize-winning Pekes, all of whom derive their names from the letter "U," may be the most amusing thing in the book. Then there's a London stockbroker turned gentleman farmer and his young wife and baby. It's a lot of characters to remember--at one point Chief Inspector Hemingway announced he has nine or ten suspects. This novel could have been called Too Many Suspects, but that title was already taken.
Sampson Warrenby is found shot dead on his garden bench after a tennis party attended by most of the village notables and then we are off to the races. Scotland Yard, in the form of Hemingway and his underling, Inspector Horace Harbottle, make an entertaining investigative team. Birdlike, inquisitive and perceptive Hemingway goes back to the Thirties, when he was a deputy to Superintendent Hannasyde. He's always been one of my favorite fictional police detectives.
I like Harbottle a lot too and I think it's a shame this is his only appearance. A "walking tombstone" with a "quelling sort of face," sober Harbottle is an abstemious evangelical type whom it's easy for Hemingway to get a rise out of, but in this case it's affectionately done. I enjoyed this exchange:
"It's all very well to be sent into the country," [Harbottle] said suddenly, "but I don't like this case, Chief!"
"That's because you've got an inferiority complex," responded Hemingway, unperturbed. "I thought there'd be trouble when they started talking about the Squire. It set you off remembering the days when you were one of the village lads, carting dung, and touching your forelock to the Squire."
"I did no such thing!" said his indignant subordinate. 'What's more I never carted dung in my life, or touched my forelock! I hadn't got one, and I wouldn't have touched it if I had!"
"One of the Reds, were you? Well, it's no use brooding over the equality of man here, because that won't get us anywhere."
Sorry you only got one novel, Horace, my lad. We hardly knew ye! With Horace you might be reminded of PC Glass from A Blunt Instrument, whose Bible quotations invariably got under Hemingway's skin.
The murder plot mechanics provided by Heyer's husband are good, but the whole thing feels rather labored and the denouement is rushed with a rustic ex machina, not to mention anti-climactic, as if Heyer realized, damme, I had better be getting this thing over with. I'm glad I finally read Detection Unlimited, but I'm guessing I won't ever read it again, something I never thought about her other books, which reward rereading.
I'll draw to a close with this bit of conversion between Gavin, the detective novelist, and Abby, the secretary to a mainstream author. It's rather in the nature of shop talk for a mystery writer. What do you prefer, persons or problems?
"There is nothing to solve except the comparatively uninteresting matter of identity of the murderer. No hermetically sealed room, no unusual weapon, too few seemingly unshakeable alibis."
"Well, I think the identity of the murderer is far more interesting than those other things," objected Abbey, "Fascinating, when one actually knows all the people," she added naively.
"Ah, yes, but you, my sweet, are a female. Persons are more interesting to you than problems."
