(no subject)

[skygiants]

Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder, a nonfiction book about the 1930s detective writers' org where Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers & G.K. Chesterson &cetera hung out together, has a number of irritating qualities, but I also found it compulsively readable!

The book is a miscellany of reasonably solid social history interwoven with author biographies, plot summaries of Edwards' favorite 1930s crime books (carefully vagued out because Edwards feels very strongly that it is his solemn obligation not to spoil the endings even when it's relevant to a point that he wants to make), anecdotes about the historical crimes that inspired some of the books, and gossipy speculation about the ways in which the books may have reflected Personal Feelings or Secrets of their Authors.

So, like, on the one hand
- Edwards does not do a great job tracking when people show up in his narrative and when he's actually explained who they are, and since there were a LOT of people in the Detection Club at various points it makes it fairly confusing to keep track of them all
- he loves melodrama. he LOVES melodrama. he loves building up Mysterious Secrets and Ominous Foreshadowing in his nonfiction narrative, most of which do not actually justify the level of Portentous he is giving to them
- relatedly: he's absolutely convinced that he's discovered a Secret All-Consuming Golden Age Love Affair! no one else has written about this! his evidence is that they wrote some characters that sort of resembled each other into their books! he's very proud of himself about this!
- his examination of genre tropes and shifts over the course of the approximate-decade of his focus is necessarily not particularly nuanced because a.) he's trying to do too many things in his book b.) as aforementioned he thinks it's bad form to actually spoil the plots which unfortunately is a relevant part of genre analysis and c.) as far as I can tell he is totally uninterested in the concept of noir
- this is a tiny pet peeve of mine but he has a deeply annoying habit of referring to periods in the lives of various authors as either At the Height of Their Powers or When Their Powers Were Fading, as if they were mysterious wizards


But on the other hand:
- many of these problems are because he is so CLEARLY so enthused about his subject that he CANNOT stop himself from going off on tangents and also he REALLY wants everyone to read all his favorite 1930s crime books someday, which honestly is pretty endearing
- I love collective history ... I love reading about how members of a community bounce against each other and inspire and challenge and irritate each other and get into tangled collective group projects that they then are bad at completing ... the chapters about Dorothy Sayers cat-herding her colleagues into writing round-robin novels together were so much fun for me that they alone justified the price of admission (which was zero, because this was a library book)
- Edwards' polite No Spoilers policy was effective, I now have a Golden Age TBR list twice as long as my arm

I will leave you with my favorite factoid that I learned from this book, which is that Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline. I want to live in the universe where I get to read that book.

Comments

[sovay]

I will leave you with my favorite factoid that I learned from this book, which is that Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline.

THAT'S A GOOD FACTOID.

Martin Edwards is one of the editors of the British Library Crime Classics, which means I have read several of his introductions to individual novels. I would love to know the overlap between the collection and his favorite books.

[skygiants]

Apparently he's the archivist for the current incarnation of the Detective Club! As well as a collector of Golden Age memorabilia, which explains how he has such vast breadth of knowledge but also is (once again) simultaneously funny and frustrating when he smugly footnotes a reference as belonging to his own personal library (such as Dorothy Sayers' annotated copy of 'The Case of Constance Kent') -- like, thanks, buddy, bbut how is anyone supposed to follow up on your research?

[kore]

....aww, you make him sound adorable, altho honestly if I read his book it sounds like I might want to drown him in a bucket. But he is so enthusiastic and melodramatic!

[skygiants]

He really is! He's having a wonderful time! Feels like sitting at a party with a guy who is telling a really involved, occasionally truly wild series of stories about people you kind of know and he is a pretty good storyteller but occasionally you just have to raise your hand to be like 'hey wait a minute who's that again?'

[pengwern]

they WHAT
this sounds wonderful!if irritating at the points you point out. hm. it sounds really great if like...this was a fictional book in a fictional universe? one layer down XD

[skygiants]

what famous individual has NOT wanted to write a detective novel at some point!! I guess!!! this feels like when I found out about Winston Churchill's Ruritanian romance, but infinitely better tbh

[antisoppist]

There is a Simon Brett radio play called "Eric the Skull" about the setting up of the Detection Club which has Fenella Woolgar playing a very bouncy Dorothy L Sayers who keeps thinking "must not ask Agatha Christie about the state of her marriage".... ooops. And insists on getting hold of an actual proper human skull to swear oaths on.

If anyone can listen to BBC Sounds, it is still available here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j9kf

[skygiants]

Fenella Woolgar as Dorothy Sayers does sound AMAZING tbh

[lirazel]

I was thinking, "Well, this sounds interesting, but not for me," and then I read the chapters about Dorothy Sayers cat-herding her colleagues into writing round-robin novels together and now I'm tempted!

Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline. I want to live in the universe where I get to read that book.

LOVE THIS.

[skygiants]

That's the thing, I'm so glad to know the things I know now! I did have a lot of fun reading it! I just really wanted to also take it back and heavily edit it...

[osprey_archer]

I read this book! I found it irritating for exactly the same reasons you did (SOMEONE needed to go through this book and mark "this is the first appearance of this person, please introduce them!" every time that it did not happen!) BUT ALSO endearing for exactly the same reason you did, because he's just SO enthusiastic.

I have now forgotten every single book that he recommended but I will be looking forward to the glut of Golden Age detective fiction you will surely be reading over the next few months and may add to my TBR that way.

[skygiants]

I thought it was just me and my bad memory for a while, and then I started actually checking in the index and every time the first three references would have zero context and the actual explainer would be a random page somewhere in the middle and I felt really vindicated.

So far NONE of the things I've put on my mental list appear to be in my local library, which is truly appalling, but some of them are in the other library that I can ask Beth to put in requests for so all hope is not lost!

[whimsyful]

I swear that every new edition of a resurfaced Golden Age mystery I read now has a foreword by Martin Edwards, so it is entirely unsurprising that he is super enthusiastic and cannot stop himsef going on tangents about them!

the chapters about Dorothy Sayers cat-herding her colleagues into writing round-robin novels together were so much fun for me that they alone justified the price of admission ( I may check out this book just for this section.

Edwards' polite No Spoilers policy was effective, I now have a Golden Age TBR list twice as long as my arm I am currently reading a collection of Dorothy L Sayer's published reviews of other ppl's crime fiction, and same!

[skygiants]

Now I'm deeply intrigued by this as well! What's the title of the collection?

[whimsyful]

It's called Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers! It's a collection of the crime reviews she wrote for The Sunday Times from 1933 to 1935. With, of course, a rather long commentary by Martin Edwards. Not really the kind of book you read from cover to cover, but great to dip in now and again. I'll probably write it up once I'm done. She doesn't spoil anything, and her voice is terrifically witty with some great turns of phrase (I especially enjoyed one week where she compared the set of books she was reviewing to racehorses at the track).

[brainwane]

I laughed aloud at The Height Of Their Powers.

Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline.

!!!!!!!

[skygiants]

Someday the curse of the moon shall fall upon every writer and their powers dwindle accordingly! Simply nothing can be done about this!

RIGHT

[etirabys]

> this is a tiny pet peeve of mine but he has a deeply annoying habit of referring to periods in the lives of various authors as either At the Height of Their Powers or When Their Powers Were Fading, as if they were mysterious wizards

sdkfjlskdjflkj this WOULD be deeply annoying to read but made me burst out laughing in the car

[skygiants]

It hit the point where I seriously considered making it a drinking game (or would have if I was not reading a big chunk of this book at work)

[hilarita]

I am trying to work out what a Marxist detective novel looks like. The capitalist did it? But that's often true in Golden Age fiction, because it's usually about rich people who have the time and resource to plan a ridiculous murder. I really wish that their book existed!

[skygiants]

I ended up seeing what else I could Google about this and there's a ton of detail in here if you search 'crime novel' including a list of Motifs and Plot Elements!

[hilarita]

Coooool! Thanks!

[chestnut_pod]

Well, I don't really want to read this book, but I really, really, really want to read that other universe's Brecht + Benjamin Marxist detective novel!!

[ethelmay]

Babylon Berlin might hit some of those buttons, kinda. Weimar Republic, Trotskyites running around, etc. I have only seen the first episode and not read the books, though.

[chestnut_pod]

I am so glad to know that is out there in the world.

[skygiants]

WE WERE, TRULY, ROBBED (by history)

[superborb]

See, the mysterious wizard framing of authors SEEMS like it ought to be endearing!!

[skygiants]

I will admit partly it is that as someone who also writes I deeply resent the (probably correct) implication that entropy comes for all our talents sooner or later ....

[rydra_wong]

I will leave you with my favorite factoid that I learned from this book, which is that Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin were at one point planning to co-write Marxist detective novels together and got as far as a first chapter and an outline. I want to live in the universe where I get to read that book.

Well, now I really really want someone to write a historical detective novel wherein Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin are trying to co-write their Marxist detective novel when a corpse is discovered and together they have to try to solve the murder mystery, etc. etc..

[skygiants]

WELL NOW I DESPERATELY WANT THIS ALSO