Salt and Snark

So keep in mind, as you read this, that Marie Benedict has been immeasurably more successful, as a writer, than I ever have been or will be. She's published seven novels on her own and co-written a further two. She is a popular and widely read American author who has been on bestseller lists. No doubt she has a large and faithful readership. What I'm saying here is that Marie Benedict has mastered the art of writing fiction that the market likes. This is not easy to do. If it were, I would have done it long ago. I have not, and never will.

Dorothy Sayers, who famously worked in advertising before selling her first crime novel, was also adept at writing what the market wanted. But she was also adept at creating a market for the kind of crime fiction she wanted to write. That was what the Detective Club was for: to cultivate, amongst readers of crime fiction, a taste for quality--and to force cultural gatekeepers to recognize crime fiction as a form of literature rather than disreputable and disposable entertainment.

In pursuit of this legitimacy, Detective Club authors were encouraged to pride themselves on the ingenuity and creativity of their plots as well as the rigor of their construction. Both the Detective Club Oath and the Rules of Fair Play stress the importance of constructing mystery plots that were logically coherent, would stand up to rational scrutiny, and would disdain the use of "cop-outs" and cliches. Or, as the Oath put it: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?"

Now, I will be the first to tell you that this Oath was more aspirational than enforceable. Agatha Christie in particular did not always honor this part of the Oath, or the Rules of Fair Play, and I would argue her fiction is often the better for it. But what strikes me as important about all this, especially in light of having just read The Queens of Crime, is the shared understanding that crime fiction should celebrate detection--the use of intelligence/logic/reason to clear away darkness and confusion and arrive at the truth. Detective Club members pledged themselves to challenge the reader intellectually, instead of merely stimulating the reader's sensations (as the sensation fiction of the 1860s did) or inflaming the reader's passions (the main goal of the "thrillers" and "adventure stories" that the Detective Club's bye-laws excluded).

In other words, a big part of the Detective Club's raison d'etre was to elevate crime fiction that challenged the reader intellectually. And for their readers, matching wits with not only the murderer and the detective but the author herself was a big part of the pleasure of reading one of these novels. Agatha Christie emerged as the reigning Queen of Crime in part because she was so good at winning these matches, while also giving the reader the illusion, with every new novel, that this time the she might actually outsmart the author.

Sayers was certainly as hard-core about the intellectual challenge of detective fiction as any of her colleagues. Though her detectives are not above relying on coincidence and intuition, her plotting is rigorous and her puzzles are challenging. But for Sayers, that wasn't where the mission of crime fiction ended. Sayers used crime fiction to explore all of her interests--intellectual, theological, spiritual, ethical. For that reason, a Doroth Sayers novel feeds the reader's whole person while also offering you an immersive experience in Sayers's own mindset and milieu. You come away from a Sayers novel with a lot more than you took into it.

Constant readers are probably wondering why I'm spending so much time establishing all of this. If your hypothesis is, "Does The Queens of Crime perhaps not capture any of that?" then give yourself a prize. And make it something good, because this novel's failure to capture any aspect of Dorothy Sayers as either a historical figure or a writer is SPECTACULAR.

The Queens of Crime, in fact, approaches detective fiction in a way that is diametrically opposed to everything Sayers cared about. As I said, the mystery plot is decently constructed, though as we will see it relies not only on the details of the historically unsolved May Daniels case but on the various solutions that various true crime aficionados have proposed. It's the writing itself that betrays everything Sayers stood for. In its approach to the reader, The Queens of Crime is the opposite of challenging. Instead of stimulating the reader's intelligence, this novel insults the reader's intelligence by making everything insistently and baldly obvious. It is written as if Benedict and/or her editors assumed not only that her readers have never read a Dorothy Sayers novel, but that her readers would be incapable of doing so.

This novel is supposed to be narrated by Dorothy Sayers. It does not sound anything like her. In fact, Benedict seems to have no ear for voice at all. All of these characters, major and minor, speak with the same voice, which is indistinguishable from the narrative voice. That would be a problem (for me, anyway) in any novel, but it's a special problem in a novel where the five main characters are mystery writers with very distinctive voices. This is the kind of thing that drove me nuts about P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley, a murder mystery set in the world of Pride and Prejudice. James's absolute failure to capture Lizzie Bennett's voice--or really any of her charm and wit--was baffling to me in the same way. Are both of these novels the result of authors/editors/publishers trying to cash in on the fanfic phenomenon without actually understanding how fanfic works? Possibly. I can certainly tell you that I know there are fanfic writers out there doing a better job with Dorothy Sayers's voice than this woman (shoutout to @oldshrewsburyian but I'm sure there are others). Maybe it is only because I have spent this much time in the world of adaptation that I am cranky when someone who gets paid to write--which I, let me stress again, do not--seems not to have engaged with or been captivated by the source material.

But that's not the whole problem. The problem is that what we get instead of Dorothy Sayers's voice is this:

"I force myself to stay silent as we make our way through the savory and sweet delights. I want to say nothing that will overwhelm. Aside from the odd remark about the wonder of this mouthwatering sponge or that delectable sandwich, we do not speak. The unnatural quite makes me physically uncomfortale, and I squim until finally Agatha says, 'Your Detection Club is a noble and worthy endeavor, make no mistake. We writers of mystery and detective novels have great need of the unity it would provide if we are to elevate our craft.'

As she reaches for a slice of the pastel-colored Battenberg cake from the tray, I echo her sentiments. 'No matter how beautifully written a mystery book is or how important and profound its themes, mainstream reviewers lump us in the 'genre' category and refuse to consider our work as literature. They think of our books as pulp fiction, and as one who reviews detective novles for the Sunday Times, I am keenly aware of the difference in treatment. But if we support one another and insist on a certain level of quality, then we stand a chance.'

'I am committed to your new club,' she says. 'But what is this "greater need" you have of me? On that, the jury remains out.'

'Well,' I venture, delighted that she's chosen this moment to take a bite of her favorite orange poppy-seed cake--a delectable confection always softens my mood--'you know I've installed Gilbert as the first president.'

Nibbling away, she nods at my mention of G. K. Chesteron, known as Gilbert to his friends and colleagues. He's well loved by the publicfor his Father Brown mysteries and a little less loved by his fellow writers for his verbosity. Still, I chose him to give the club a certain level of gravitas that I wouldn't be able to confer if I'd named myself president."

OK, that was a long excerpt but it showcases many of the problems I have with Benedict's writing. The way she handles the introduction of Chesterton's name is typical: her narrator refers to Chesterton in dialogue, and then in the following narration immediately gives you the top three facts that would turn up in the AI overview if you searched his name on Google. When Christie and Sayers discuss the Detective Club, they trade facts about it in language that no human being would use in conversation. To make it seem like this is a conversation as opposed to a slightly goosed Wikipedia stub, Benedict includes some details about what her characters are eating which create a rudimentary sense of place and also establish for these Queens of Crime some safely generic character traits, such as a fondness for expensive little treats. It's all very safe and very bland. There's no personality. There's no flavor (OK, the cake is orange-poppyseed). There's no zest. There are no risks taken.

And the whole novel is like that. Benedict assumes throughout that her readers will just never get anything from context and cannot wait a single sentence to have references explained to them. She is unwilling to leave anything mysterious, even for a moment. Sayers's job as narrator is to make things obvious: to tell the reader what matters about what is happening and how she should feel about it. Interactions amongst the Queens are flattened by what I have started calling "round robin dialogue," where you can see Benedict going down the list of participants to ensure that each of the five Queens has weighs in, in order, on whatever topic is being discussed. We never learn anything about any of these women that we couldn't learn from a biographical blurb. Characterization, dialogue, descriptions--all of it is maddeningly superficial. Again, comparing this to what you find in fan-written fiction--even fanfiction that might have a lower level of technical competence--there seems to be no love here for Sayers's work itself. At moments I wondered whether Benedict had actually read any of Sayers's writing--such as this one, where "Sayers" reflects on how different it is investigating a 'real' crime (I'm going to explain the scare quotes in ta minute) than writing about it:

"Suddenly I wonder: Have I ever had my detectives experience these emotions as they study the belongings of the victim? I fear I've created cold and calculating investigators who don't recognize the humanity of the deceased and feel a sense of loss at their death."

This made me really angry. Because if there is one writer amongst these Queens of Crime who has absolutely NOT created cold and calculating investigators, it's Dorothy Sayers. It is in fact one of Lord Peter Wimsey's core traits that the glee he initially takes in the discovery of an intriguing new murder puzzle is always at some point overtaken by a crushing sense of the responsiblity he's taken upon himself by meddling with it. The flippancy Wimsey demonstrates when he first gets the facts is defensive--something which is dramatically revealed at the midpoint of Wimsey's first mystery, Whose Body? In fact, in Whose Body?, Wimsey attends an exhumation of the murder victim which is so upsetting for him that he dissociates. It's true that often Wimsey's concern is more strongly evoked by the effects his investigation might have on the living; but Whose Body? isn't the only novel in which confrontation with a corpse nearly undoes him (it happens again, for instance, in Unnatural Death).

So why have her fictional Sayers "wonder" whether she has done something that the historical Sayers certainly did not do? I can only understand this as part of this novel's attempt to overwrite the actual life stories and literary work of her Queens of Crime with a superficially 'feminist' narrative that's more comfortable for her and for her contemporary audience. She wants her "Dorothy Sayers" to have an arc in which involving herself in the investigation of the murder of a real woman leads to a feminist awakening which is eventually shared by the Queens of Crime, who become a little society that will take up the cause of defending single women from the criminals who target them and the media and law enforcement organizations who at best ignore female pain and trauma and at worst smear and blame women victims for the violence they have suffered. In order to do this, Benedict has to invent a Dorothy Sayers who has never thought seriously about the relationship between crime and crime fiction, or cared about the predicaments of single women in postwar Britain (despite having lived through many of them).

Now. If you have read Missing Pages, I know what you're gonna say. "But Plaidder...isn't this arc establishing the Queens of Crime as a feminist detective agency exactly what you did with the ACD canon verse when you invented the Society for the Protection of Single Ladies?"

Why indeed, I have asked myself, do I hate this arc so much in Benedict's novel when I have myself perpetrated something similar? And I have come up a word to explain why I have had such a negative reaction to the 'feminism' this arc generates: "self-satisfied." There is something about the contrast between how basic the 'feminism' of this novel is and how much Benedict congratulates her characters for achieving it that sets my teeth on edge. It's Benedict's refusal to actually encounter the times and places in which these women lived deeply enough to understand why the "feminism" of figures like Dorothy Sayers of Baroness Orczy is complicated that bothers me. The point of historical fiction--from my point of view anyway--is to introduce the readers to ways of thinking and living that our current time and place has tried to erase. This novel does the opposite. It takes the safest, least controversial aspects of 21st century feminism and shoves them into a story about the past, displacing anything that we might have learned from our encounter with it. We see this from the beginning, when Benedict has Sayers recruit the other Queens of Crime to solve the 'real-life' May Daniels murder in order to prove their worth to the male members of the Detective Club. Benedict's author's note admits that she just invented this no-girls-allowed animus on the part of Chesterton et al.; and this is exactly the kind of presentism I'm talking about. I have no doubt that Sayers, Christie, Marsh, Allingham, and Orczy did encounter sexism everywhere they turned; but not in this particular form. Sayers and Christie built this damn treehouse; nobody was going to hang a "No Girls Allowed" sign on it. Nor would Sayers and Christie have accepted "proving ourselves worthy to the boys" as a reason to do anything, let alone involve themselves in a real murder investigation. They knew they were worthy. More to the point, they would have known that "shutting the boys up by showing them how boss you are" is a losing game. They never accept your proof; and they never shut up.