Wimsey in the News: The dynamics of cozy mystery books

DNAIndia.com: The dynamics of cozy mystery books
There is a set of mystery readers who endlessly look for books like Agatha Christie’s. Christie-like books, called the Cozy Mysteries or “Cozies,” are lightweight and fun mysteries mostly devoured by women.

Here, the murders are civilised, the setting is small town and the sleuth is usually amateur. There is neither gory violence nor graphic sex.

The crime is neatly solved and good triumphs over evil. They also usually have a woman in the lead and detail in minutiae the towns in which they are set.

Along with Agatha Christie, three other women writers — Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham —wrote a plethora of Cozies in the 1920s.

The most popular among them is undoubtedly Agatha Christie and the one who has almost vanished from the scene is Allingham. Christie’s two popular sleuths — Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple have stolen readers’ hearts for many decades.

Christie started using psychological analysis and logical deduction to solve crime rather than using the obvious blood-and-cigar trails that were the norm till then. Almost as prolific as Christie was Ngaio Marsh with 32 novels featuring policeman detective Roderick Alleyn. Dorothy Sayers has penned 16 novels with a suave detective, Peter Wimsey.

At one time, all mysteries from Perry Mason to Sherlock Homes were Cozy mysteries. But later, as mysteries started getting more hard-boiled, Cozies have become mostly by women for women. The most popular contemporary writer of the genre has to be Mary Higgins Clark. She has written nearly 40 books, some in collaboration with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark. Then there is Janet Evanowich, Charlaine Harris, Rita Mae Brown, and Lilian Richards enjoying a fair share of success writing their Cozies.

Alexander McCall Smith is the most well-known male writer. He has created a most enjoyable series The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, set in Botswana. Not very popular in India, but a bestselling American mystery series with an even more popular TV tie-in is Murder, She Wrote by Donald Bain. People know Jessica Fletcher, his protagonist of the series, a lot better than the author himself!

Among Indian writers, yesteryears have seen the Feluda series by Satyajit Ray and the Byomkesh Bakshi ones by Saradindu Bandopadhyay. More recently, Kalpana Swaminathan’s Lalli Mysteries make an interesting read. But the one book recently released that snugly fits the bill of a Cozy is Suparna Chatterjee’s All Bengali Crime Detectives. Four retired men, endearing in their own ways, solve a neighbourhood crime. Suparna brings Calcutta to life through her protagonists.

Young-Adult girl fiction comprises of love stories or fantasies and not many mysteries. However, not all girls like girly tomes. Cozy mysteries do not have much boy appeal with their gentle themes, but they certainly make a good read for mystery-loving girls as young as even 12 years old.

A scene from the stageplay Busman's Honeymoon

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=10842

If you go to the website above - via your computer - you'll be able to view 3 minutes of a scene from the stage play Busman's Honeymoon, which was on in the West End in December, 1936.

This was the last Peter Wimsey novel (althogh Sayers left behind an unfinished one, Thrones, Dominations). Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane have just married, and Peter has bought a house, Tallboys, for their honeymoon. But when they arrive they find the body of the previous owner at the foot of a flight of stairs, dead.

In the 1930s, movie theaters showed newsreels before the main feature, and in this instance they are showing a scene from the play. It's interesting that they chose this clip - Peter Wimsey has nothing to do, they're showing off the comedic talents of the actress, instead.

It's even more interesting that the person who, in the modern day, described this clip for Pathe apparently never heard of Peter Wimsey - "appears to be a murder mystery" indeed!

BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON

From the Pathe site:

Full title reads: "Now we are taking you over to the Comedy Theatre, London, for a peep at - 'Busman's Honeymoon' where that famous Character Actress Nellie Bowman is being cross-examined by David Hawthorne. (In the background Lord Peter Wimsey - Dennis Arundell, watches)."

Scene from a stage play, appears to be a murder mystery. Various shots of stage with set that looks like dining room from country house. Nellie plays Mrs. Ruddle , a comic housekeeper, who is being interviewed about the mysterious death of her master. Hawthorne plays a detective trying to establish the time of death but gets frustrated as Mrs. R. keeps changing her story. In the end they discover that she was not (as first suspected) the last person to see her master, in fact it was the young police constable (character of Joe Sennen) taking notes. Arundell paces about in background, making odd comment.

Note: old records name play as 'Busman's Holiday'. Music is 'Light O' Love' by Thorn Hawkes.

Note: sound and vision seem slightly out of sync. I think this is because they we recorded separately and them edited together. AH 2001.

Ian Carmichael's Five Red Herrings

I'm getting my girdle in gear and the annotations should start flowing here tomorrow, meantime, head to your computers and from there go to BBC radio 4 Extra to listen to Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey in part 1 of Five Red Herrings, a 7 part, fully dramatized serial.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jw7f

Episode 1 is available for 7 more days, you can listen on your computer at any time, for free.

Carmichael also starred as Wimsey in several TV adaptions as well. Clips of those can be seen at Youtube, or your local library might have VHSs of them, and of corse they're available at Amazon.

Character sketch of Peter Wimsey

Many authors create biographies of the most important characters in their books, as an aide to writing about them, and Dorothy Sayers was no exception.

I'm currently annotating Clouds of Witness (the 2nd Peter Whimsey book - and it is in the public domain) and she includes this character sketch (with the conceit of being written by a relative of Wimsey's:

WIMSEY, Peter Death Bredon, D.S.O.; born 1890, 2nd son of Mortimer Gerald Bredon Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and of Honoria Lucasta, daughter of Francis Delagardie of Bellingham Manor, Hants.

Educated: Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford (1st class honors, Sch. of Mod. Hist. 1912); served with H.M. Forces 1914/18 (Major, Rifle Brigade). Author of: “Notes on the Collecting of Incunabula,” “The Murderer's Vade-Mecum,” etc. Recreations: Criminology; bibliophily; music; cricket.

Clubs: Marlborough; Egotists'. Residences: 110a Piccadilly, W.; Bredon Hall, Duke's Denver, Norfolk.

Arms: Sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat couched as to spring, proper; motto: As my Whimsy takes me.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Communicated by PAUL AUSTIN DELAGARDIE
I am asked by Miss Sayers to fill up certain lacunæ and correct a few trifling errors of fact in her account of my nephew Peter's career. I shall do so with pleasure. To appear publicly in print is every man's ambition, and by acting as a kind of running footman to my nephew's triumph I shall only be showing a modesty suitable to my advanced age.

The Wimsey family is an ancient one—too ancient, if you ask me. The only sensible thing Peter's father ever did was to ally his exhausted stock with the vigorous French-English strain of the Delagardies. Even so, my nephew Gerald (the present Duke of Denver) is nothing but a beef-witted English squire, and my niece Mary was flighty and foolish enough till she married a policeman and settled down. Peter, I am glad to say, takes after his mother and me. True, he is all nerve and nose—but that is better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brothers, or a mere bundle of emotions, like Gerald's boy, Saint-George. He has at least inherited the Delagardie brains, by way of safeguard to the unfortunate Wimsey temperament.

Peter was born in 1890. His mother was being very much worried at the time by her husband's behaviour (Denver was always tiresome though the big scandal did not break out till the Jubilee year), and her anxieties may have affected the boy. He was a colourless shrimp of a child, very restless and mischievous, and always much too sharp for his age. He had nothing of Gerald's robust physical beauty, but he developed what I can best call a kind of bodily cleverness, more skill than strength. He had a quick eye for a ball and beautiful hands for a horse. He had the devil's own pluck, too: the intelligent sort of pluck that sees the risk before it takes it. He suffered badly from nightmares as a child. To his father's consternation he grew up with a passion for books and music.

His early school-days were not happy. He was a fastidious child, and I suppose it was natural that his school-fellows should call him “Flimsy” and treat him as a kind of comic turn. And he might, in sheer self-protection, have accepted the position and degenerated into a mere licensed buffoon, if some games-master at Eton had not discovered that he was a brilliant natural cricketer. After that, of course, all his eccentricities were accepted as wit, and Gerald underwent the salutary shock of seeing his despised younger brother become a bigger personality than himself. By the time he reached the Sixth Form, Peter had contrived to become the fashion—athlete, scholar, arbiter elegantiarum—nec pluribus impar. Cricket had a great deal to do with it—plenty of Eton men will remember the “Great Flim” and his performance against Harrow—but I take credit to myself for introducing him to a good tailor, showing him the way about Town, and teaching him to distinguish good wine from bad. Denver bothered little about him—he had too many entanglements of his own and in addition was taken up with Gerald, who by this time was making a prize fool of himself at Oxford. As a matter of fact Peter never got on with his father, he was a ruthless young critic of the paternal misdemeanours, and his sympathy for his mother had a destructive effect upon his sense of humour.

Denver, needless to say, was the last person to tolerate his own failings in his offspring. It cost him a good deal of money to extricate Gerald from the Oxford affair, and he was willing enough to turn his other son over to me. Indeed, at the age of seventeen, Peter came to me of his own accord. He was old for his age and exceedingly reasonable, and I treated him as a man of the world. I established him in trustworthy hands in Paris, instructing him to keep his affairs upon a sound business footing and to see that they terminated with goodwill on both sides and generosity on his. He fully justified my confidence. I believe that no woman has ever found cause to complain of Peter's treatment; and two at least of them have since married royalty (rather obscure royalties, I admit, but royalty of a sort). Here again, I insist upon my due share of the credit; however good the material one has to work upon it is ridiculous to leave any young man's social education to chance.

The Peter of this period was really charming, very frank, modest and well-mannered, with a pretty lively wit. In 1909 he went up with a scholarship to read History at Balliol, and here, I must confess, he became rather intolerable. The world was at his feet, and he began to give himself airs. He acquired affectations, an exaggerated Oxford manner and a monocle, and aired his opinions a good deal, both in and out of the Union, though I will do him the justice to say that he never attempted to patronise his mother or me. He was in his second year when Denver broke his neck out hunting and Gerald succeeded to the title. Gerald showed more sense of responsibility than I had expected in dealing with the estate; his worst mistake was to marry his cousin Helen, a scrawny, over-bred prude, all county from head to heel. She and Peter loathed each other cordially; but he could always take refuge with his mother at the Dower House.

And then, in his last year at Oxford, Peter fell in love with a child of seventeen and instantly forgot everything he had ever been taught. He treated that girl as if she was made of gossamer, and me as a hardened old monster of depravity who had made him unfit to touch her delicate purity. I won't deny that they made an exquisite pair—all white and gold—a prince and princess of moonlight, people said. Moonshine would have been nearer the mark. What Peter was to do in twenty years' time with a wife who had neither brains nor character nobody but his mother and myself ever troubled to ask, and he, of course, was completely besotted. Happily, Barbara's parents decided that she was too young to marry; so Peter went in for his final Schools in the temper of a Sir Eglamore achieving his first dragon; laid his First-Class Honors at his lady's feet like the dragon's head, and settled down to a period of virtuous probation.

Then came the war. Of course the young idiot was mad to get married before he went. But his own honorable scruples made him mere wax in other people's hands. It was pointed out to him that if he came back mutilated it would be very unfair to the girl. He hadn't thought of that, and rushed off in a frenzy of self-abnegation to release her from the engagement. I had no hand in that; I was glad enough of the result, but I couldn't stomach the means.

He did very well in France; he made a good officer and the men liked him. And then, if you please, he came back on leave with his captaincy in '16, to find the girl married—to a hard-bitten rake of a Major Somebody, whom she had nursed in the V.A.D. hospital, and whose motto with women was catch 'em quick and treat 'em rough. It was pretty brutal; for the girl hadn't had the nerve to tell Peter beforehand. They got married in a hurry when they heard he was coming home, and all he got on landing was a letter announcing the fait accompli and reminding him that he had set her free himself.

I will say for Peter that he came straight to me and admitted that he had been a fool. “All right,” said I, “you've had your lesson. Don't go and make a fool of yourself in the other direction.” So he went back to his job with (I am sure) the fixed intention of getting killed; but all he got was his majority and his D.S.O. for some recklessly good intelligence work behind the German front. In 1918 he was blown up and buried in a shell-hole near Caudry, and that left him with a bad nervous breakdown, lasting, on and off, for two years. After that, he set himself up in a flat in Piccadilly, with the man Bunter (who had been his sergeant and was, and is, devoted to him), and started out to put himself together again.

I don't mind saying that I was prepared for almost anything. He had lost all his beautiful frankness, he shut everybody out of his confidence, including his mother and me, adopted an impenetrable frivolity of manner and a dilettante pose, and became, in fact, the complete comedian. He was wealthy and could do as he chose, and it gave me a certain amount of sardonic entertainment to watch the efforts of post-war feminine London to capture him. “It can't,” said one solicitous matron, “be good for poor Peter to live like a hermit.” “Madam,” said I, “if he did, it wouldn't be.” No; from that point of view he gave me no anxiety. But I could not but think it dangerous that a man of his ability should have no job to occupy his mind, and I told him so.

In 1921 came the business of the Attenbury Emeralds. That affair has never been written up, but it made a good deal of noise, even at that noisiest of periods. The trial of the thief was a series of red-hot sensations, and the biggest sensation of the bunch was when Lord Peter Wimsey walked into the witness-box as chief witness for the prosecution.

That was notoriety with a vengeance. Actually, to an experienced intelligence officer, I don't suppose the investigation had offered any great difficulties; but a “noble sleuth” was something new in thrills. Denver was furious; personally, I didn't mind what Peter did, provided he did something. I thought he seemed happier for the work, and I liked the Scotland Yard man he had picked up during the run of the case. Charles Parker is a quiet, sensible, well-bred fellow, and has been a good friend and brother-in-law to Peter. He has the valuable quality of being fond of people without wanting to turn them inside out.

The only trouble about Peter's new hobby was that it had to be more than a hobby, if it was to be any hobby for a gentleman. You cannot get murderers hanged for your private entertainment. Peter's intellect pulled him one way and his nerves another, till I began to be afraid they would pull him to pieces. At the end of every case we had the old nightmares and shell-shock over again. And then Denver, of all people—Denver, the crashing great booby, in the middle of his fulminations against Peter's degrading and notorious police activities, must needs get himself indicted on a murder charge and stand his trial in the House of Lords, amid a blaze of publicity which made all Peter's efforts in that direction look like damp squibs.

Peter pulled his brother out of that mess, and, to my relief, was human enough to get drunk on the strength of it. He now admits that his “hobby” is his legitimate work for society, and has developed sufficient interest in public affairs to undertake small diplomatic jobs from time to time under the Foreign Office. Of late he has become a little more ready to show his feelings, and a little less terrified of having any to show.

His latest eccentricity has been to fall in love with that girl whom he cleared of the charge of poisoning her lover. She refused to marry him, as any woman of character would. Gratitude and a humiliating inferiority complex are no foundation for matrimony; the position was false from the start. Peter had the sense, this time, to take my advice. “My boy,” said I, “what was wrong for you twenty years back is right now. It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling—it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt. Begin again from the beginning—but I warn you that you will need all the self-discipline you have ever learnt.”

Well, he has tried. I don't think I have ever seen such patience. The girl has brains and character and honesty; but he has got to teach her how to take, which is far more difficult than learning to give. I think they will find one another, if they can keep their passions from running ahead of their wills. He does realize, I know, that in this case there can be no consent but free consent.

Peter is forty-five now, it is really time he was settled. As you will see, I have been one of the important formative influences in his career, and, on the whole, I feel he does me credit. He is a true Delagardie, with little of the Wimseys about him except (I must be fair) that under-lying sense of social responsibility which prevents the English landed gentry from being a total loss, spiritually speaking. Detective or no detective, he is a scholar and a gentleman; it will amuse me to see what sort of shot he makes at being a husband and father. I am getting an old man, and have no son of my own (that I know of); I should be glad to see Peter happy. But as his mother says, “Peter has always had everything except the things he really wanted,” and I suppose he is luckier than most.

Paul Austin Delagardie.

Time to get this party started!

I started this blog about a month ago, but have not done anything with it since. Well, there's many good reasons for that - various family issues have come up.

However, those problems have been resolved, equilibrium restored, and I'm ready to get to serious work on my annotations, and on this blog.

I know my Kindle readers can't listen to audio on their kindles, but get on your computer and go to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jvld

This is BBC Radio 4 Extra, a digital radio station from England, and this link will bring you to Unnatural Death, episode 1, starring Ian Carmichael.

It is a full dramatization in 6 parts.

There's 3 days left to listen to this first episode, and all the other eps are available to listen to now.

If you've never heard Ian Carmichael's version of Lord Peter Wimsey, you're in for a treat!