Barbara Pym? or Agatha Christie?
Jul. 25th, 2024 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinSpotted via the site formerly known as Twitter (I have friends who are involved in certain C of E debates): the promo for 'A Clergy Marriage Weekend to Support Clergy Marriages' -
This is not for clergy marriages in trouble, this is for couples with a 'healthy relationship... to provide space for reflection and growth'. (From comments, we are led to suspect that this is trad married m/f couples only, and I am not entirely sure whether what is also in the subtext is 'clergymen and their good ladies'.)
I am not sure whether I want to summon the shade of (spinster) Barbara Pym to hover over these proceedings and apply her anthropologically-trained novelist's eye (I cannot help recalling that novel, An Unfortunate Attachment, in which one of the several UAs depicted is surely a clergyman's wife being far more devoted to her cat than her husband....).
Or: as this is literally taking place at a luxurious country house hotel: have we got the makings of a country-house murder mystery?????
I was recently moved to remark on Bluesky about the category error of describing Dame Agatha's works as 'cosy mysteries' - I assume this is because people lazily assume she was a Lady Crime Writer, and one of her best-known sleuths was a Sweet Old Lady.
That would be Miss Marple, who knew all about What Evil Lurked in the Heart of Man (& Woman), simply from observing human nature in St Mary Mead.
In Christie, it is never, or at least very very seldom, that the comforting solution is that the outsider dunnit. Far more likely to be the impeccably inside person.
Actually - though he is no longer with us either - I might like Robert Barnard for this one.
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Date: 2024-07-25 05:11 pm (UTC)Sure: isn't the total cliche of the country-house murder mystery that "the butler did it"?
And the authors choose the butler because he's the least likely person: in reality, this master of service and discretion would be the last person to murder in his master's house.
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Date: 2024-07-25 05:19 pm (UTC)My point was that Dame Agatha, as a specific author who is often rather loosely invoked, contraverts the cliches: it is very, very, unlikely to be the butler wot dunnit.
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Date: 2024-07-25 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-25 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-25 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-25 09:35 pm (UTC)To start with, I am English, which possibly gives me a certain edge in understanding the bat-whistle class nuances.
To go on with, I have actually read most of Christie's works and a great deal of other crime - and general literary fiction - of the period.
I am a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Butlers might not be riffraff but they were still hired servants.
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Date: 2024-07-25 10:05 pm (UTC)Sure, and I agree with you, and I also explicitly agreed with you when you wrote, "They are still outside the charmed circle." So I don't know why you think you have to pull the Card from Authority on me. I'm not denying your knowledge, and once you explained what you meant by the original statement we weren't in any real disagreement. I just said that there's a huge difference between ... well, I've said it twice already.
For that matter, you don't know who I am either.
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Date: 2024-07-26 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-26 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-26 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-26 10:12 am (UTC)I googled to find out which mysteries actually had the butler doing it, and the internet appears to consider it a trope of American origin, from a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
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Date: 2024-07-26 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-26 04:56 pm (UTC)Also shd be noted: in these mysteries the servants are invariably Not Under Suspicion for various reasons, like all together in the servants' hall at the critical juncture. Except the one mystery, can never remember is it Sayers or Christie, where the servant is clearly not of the servant class: a phrase which now horrifies my egalitarian soul.
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Date: 2024-07-26 06:06 pm (UTC)