Posted on 01/08/2024 11:44:59 AM PST by Borges
Many years ago, I was in crisis. As a result of university, I had come to hate reading, an experience all too familiar to those who study literature. What saved me was picking up an unfashionable Victorian novel in a bookshop: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). A short way into its opening – in which the hero Walter recounts how, returning from his mother’s cottage in Hampstead he is accosted by a terrified young woman dressed in white, assists her, then learns that she has escaped from an asylum – I was gripped. The story, filled with vivid characters, satirical observation and a captivating mystery returned to me the powerful pleasures of fiction, and eventually enabled me to become a novelist myself.
Collins – who turns 200 years old this month – was the creator of what TS Eliot called “the first and best detective novel” in 1868’s The Moonstone. Every subsequent writer in this genre, from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers to Abir Mukherjee and Mick Herron is indebted to his instinct for meticulous plotting and psychological complexity. Equally enthralling, The Woman in White has been transmuted (with a lesbian riff) into Sarah Waters’s best-selling Fingersmith, which in turn inspired the erotic Korean film The Handmaiden. The Moonstone, which outsold his close friend and collaborator Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, is the foundation for Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart novels. However, his legacy is even more widespread.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Defective Fiction...?
Hmmm, isn’t that what we have now?
Isaac Asimov said Agatha Christie was an outspoken hater of Jews and only was silent about it late in her career when it became so unfashionable she decided to shut up.
“I Have Always Imagined Paradise As A Kind Of Library. “
Jorge Luis Borges📚📚
For a lit major, this woman in uneducated in the extreme!
Both books are a good read and the earliest movies, made from both, are also also very good. So was the Brit T.V. series of THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
The remakes of both movies aren't worth seeing.
It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes...........
Historical revisionsim.
From Wikipedia:
Poe’s early detective fiction tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin laid the groundwork for future detectives in literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
I read “The Moonstone”. My wife read “The Woman in White” and “No Name” as well. “The Moonstone” well-written, if a bit unwieldy. From a literaty standpoint I would put it a notch below Dickens at his best, but still worth the time. I elget the vibe that Collins woukd probably lean left if he were alive today.
His later novels were overtly activist about this or that - and his sales dropped. Even back then, people didn’t enjoy being preached to. Swinburne said of Collins’ commercial decline:
What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered—’Wilkie! have a mission.’
The first was Edgar Allen Poe. He invented the genre.
Moreover, as Chandler pointed out, the American detective story shows "a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . it is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in." In that world, the detective provides a contrast as "down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean . . . a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."
In the real world, who would you have on your side as an ally in a tough spot. Miss Marple? Lord Peter Wimsey? Hercule Poirot? Or would you rather have Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Jake Gittes, or Jim Rockford? And, in a deeper sense, American hard boiled detectives show how we too should act when in life we are forced to go down mean streets.
LOVE Collins!!!
The British detectives were the product of a polite and civilized society, possibly the best the world has ever seen. American “hardboiled” fiction is plain nihilistic, a product of a violent frontier society beset by all kinds of subcultures lusting for unearned wealth to be taken by violence.
America a la the Founding Fathers is great. But that is because it was essentialy BRITISH in origin and highly civilized. The later melting pot of all kinds of mongrelized peoples fighting one another for wealth and power is more like Machiavellian Florence than what George Washington envisioned.
Diversity is NOT your strength.
You're a bigot and uneducated! The FFs were mostly from upper middle/upper classes; they were also mostly exceptionally and UNUSUALLY, for the times, highly educated. They hardly represented the vast majority of the populace of that time.
Those involved in THE WHISKEY REBELLION" were hardly all THAT "civilized"!
Arron Burr was hardly a "civilized" man.
There's diversity and then there DIVERSITY...the latter being what most of today's ILLEGAL invaders are; useless, criminal, and low IQ.
High literature in the person of T. S. Eliot reflected this in his famous line that "April is the cruelest month," which contradicted the traditional pastoral view of spring as a time of hope and renewal. Similarly, William Butler Yeats "Journey of the Magi" begins with a realistic "A cold coming we had of it," and his "The Second Coming" concludes with "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem this hour to be born" as a warning of the danger in the waning of Christina faith.
One can, of course, dissent from modernist realism in literature, from poetry to Hemingway to hard-boiled detectives, but it reflects profound disillusionment with long-established literary idioms after the rise of scientific materialism, the extraordinary and so often senseless death and destruction of the First World War, and the sufferings of the Depression. These discredited traditional ideals of nobility, Christian chivalry, and courtly love.
Nevertheless, modern literature -- including hard-boiled detective fiction -- finds a sense of moral purpose in the struggles of individuals caught up in the complex and sometimes brutal demands of modern life. Hemingway, for example, found moral purpose in male heroism against extraordinary physical threats and demands. And the American hard-boiled detective is also a hero, a "man of honor" in the modern city as Chandler put it, in battle against gangsters, crooks, and indifferent and corrupt cops. Usually, the result obtained is only a half-measure of justice, which is the most that modern life commonly permits.
Is the cozy world of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot a better one? Perhaps -- but that is not the world we now live in, if we ever did. The heroes that we must look for are going to be flawed and often down at the heel -- but, as the hard-boiled detective stories indicate, we should be glad to find such heroes when we can.
Excellent post, and very fun conversation.
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