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Apr. 13th, 2022 10:34 pmMartin 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.
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.
