The Queens of Crime - early feminists?

The Queens of Crime

By Marie Benedict

The woman coming into the tea shop has drastically changed since the last time our narrator (Dorothy L. Sayers) saw her, only five months before. Very quickly we realize that the new arrival is the famous, even notorious, fellow crime writer Agatha Christie, who is still being hounded by the press after her mysterious disappearance years before. That's two Queens of Crime already! They're meeting to discuss the formation of The Detection Club, and how women writer-members are already being 'put in their place' by male writers, even though Dorothy had the idea for the club and got it off the ground.

Sounds familiar to any woman who has ever had a project taken over by a man once she's done the legwork for it.

Dorothy and Agatha have a plan: lure their female crime-writing competitors to set aside past rivalries, stop the snark about each other's plots and characters, and form a cohesive resistance against the male takeover of the Detection Club. Baroness Orczy of Scarlet Pimpernel fame (with many other stories to her name), Ngaio Marsh with her Roderick Alleyn (and later Troy Alleyn) mysteries, Margery Allingham whose gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion, brought a touch of chaotic whimsy to his atmospheric adventures, are all invited to solve a ‘body in the library’ scene... in a real library, thanks to Dorothy's connections. 

 

Nowadays, crime writers' organizations, associations, and sisterhoods take women's membership for granted, but early in the novel there's a lifelike depiction of the first meeting and swearing in of Detection Club members, complete with a skull named Eric to swear on. And some overtly paternalistic and even misogynistic shunning of female members that goes a long way to convincing the other Queens they need to band together. An early sisterhood of crime writers, in fact, foreshadowing (a lovely mystery fiction concept!) the work of Sisters In Crime so many decades later.

 

Does it work? Well, that's part the story of how these amazing crime writers end up collaborating to solve a real-life murder.

The author shows her knowledge of Dorothy L Sayers' personality and passions in both overt and subtle ways. One, early on, occurs when Dorothy is extolling the general benefits of women crime writers gathering together to support each other, and another when she notices a reporter referring to body of the murdered woman as 'it' rather than as 'she'. The author of Gaudy Night, that feminist exploration of women's higher education disguised as a mystery novel, could do no less. In fact, the dehumanization of the victim by the male-dominated police and press forms a large part of what drives the collaborating Queens to investigate the disappearance and death of a young woman on a day trip to France. There are similar nods to the known personalities, public quotes, and styles of the other Queens, but Dorothy's personal life forms the backdrop, showing an early modern variant of a double-career household.

The prose itself is solid and practical with occasional flights of fancy, but does not attempt to ape the styles of any of the Golden Age Queens in its dialogue or overall style. Descriptions are focused on the detecting, as they should be. Our narrator even reflects at times on the differences between detecting as portrayed in her novels and the processes - including the psychological and emotional - of detecting in real life, with a real person as the victim.

Overall a very enjoyable read with quality crime-solving, although historical purists may remark on the odd false note, such as when the elegant and refined Baroness Orczy (born 1865 to Hungarian nobility, and raised in an pre-WW1 era of unrelenting propriety of dress and deportment for women) would be seen leaning on a French train station wall at the venerable age of 66 years.  

BONUS CONTENT: A February 2024 essay about how those real-life Queens of Crime brought about the worldwide fascination with the detective novel.

While men seeded detective fiction, it was women who brought the genre to lustrous fruition. In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, four stellar queens of crime writing — Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh — became doyennes of a popular culture phenomenon in publishing that would establish their dominion over a worldwide audience.

#Netgalley #StMartins #review #crimefiction #QueensOfCrime #historicalfiction #AgathaChristie #DorothySayers #MargeryAllingham #NgaioMarsh #BaronessOrczy #LordPeterWimsey #RoderickAlleyn #TroyAlleyn #AlbertCampion #ScarletPimpernel #HerculePoirot #MissMarple

The Cure for Women

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women’s Lives Forever 

By Lydia Reeder

This book is both wonderfully and terribly timely in an era when under-informed male lawmakers and their supporters are once again trying to roll back women’s health care, especially around wombs and vaginas. Just as male dominated medical schools in the mid-1800s worked hard to remove woman as midwives from the birthing rooms, destroying centuries of traditional supportive care for pregnant and post-partum women, so a still-patriarchal medical system now is attempting to overturn much of the past 150 years of advances in medicine for women.

So many women fought to get us where we are now. Watching their labour, and all the work of other women since them, be overturned by ignorance and deliberate misinformation is both heartbreaking and enraging.

So who are those Victorian women who changed women's health care?

We learn about not only the Mary Jo Putney of the subtitle but also Harriet Hunt, who petitioned for the right to sit in on lectures at Harvard Medical School and organized the Ladies’ Physiological Society of Boston. Harriet later connected with early American suffragists Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott, and helped make women’s medicine part of the national women's rights conversation. Harriet also joined with wealthy women in Ohio to start the Ohio Female Medical Loan Fund Association, that funded women medical students across the country via interest-free loans.

Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first American woman accepted into regular medical school.

Sarah Hale, the influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the USA’s most popular women’s magazine in 1851, who ran a series of editorials praising female physicians as being ‘by nature’ more suited to take charge of the sick and suffering.

Ann Preston, the Quaker woman who was training in and organizing ‘irregular’ medical schools that taught about home and public hygiene , nutrition, and instruction on human physiology. She was also successful in enlisting Elizabeth Blackwell to help overcome Victorian women’s reluctance to give up their ‘purity’ over allowing doctors to physically examine them.

(Male doctors at that time generally examined women in the dark, by touch, with the patient fully clothed. Having access to female physicians permitted women to be examined and treated without fear of losing the respect and regard of their husbands, and was ultimately one of the chief social advances leading to a drop in women’s mortality rates in the latter half of the Victorian era.)

Marie Zakrzewska as a child spent a few months in a teaching hospital in Berlin, where her mother was training as a midwife. Marie took to following the doctor on his rounds and eventually he offered her books from his medical library to study. In adulthood she went back to the hospital to train in obstetrics and later emigrated with her younger sister to America, where she found that male doctors had succeeded in virtually barring women from practicing medicine. So she set up a knitting business instead. Eventually she connected with Elizabeth Blackwell through volunteer work at a homeless shelter and was invited to work with her. Marie was one of the early beneficiaries of the Ohio Fund to pay for her advanced medical training.

This is also a tale of men like J. Marion Sims, a surgeon and avid self-promoter who became very wealthy working on rich white women after he honed his techniques for gynecological surgeries on un-anesthetisd slaves and destitute women, often naked, in an auditorium full of men who found the weeping and screaming of the agonized women an added feature of the ‘show’. He started his first Womens Hospital by recruiting rich NY women to sit on a managing board, and then later incorporated it, removing all power from the women’s board and placing it in the hands of an all-male board of governors drawn from the richest magnates in the region, whose expertise lay not in medicine or womanhood but in making money. It’s not hard to see the entrenchment of the USA’s highly monetized health care system in moves like this.

Victorian women fought for decades to get the right to not only attend medical school but to treat patients and, maybe most important, to teach other women about caring for their own bodies. Now that is once again under threat, and it behooves all women to inform first themselves and then their sisterhood about the fight that got them the medical comprehension of women’s issues they have thus far benefited from in their lives. 

 

Let us not throw out all those hard-won gains by all those generations of women (and their few male allies) who fought this fight before us.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

by H.G. Parry

 

COMING OCT 22, 2024 

from Hachette

 

2024 is a great fall for well-crafted fantasy fiction with a literary bent. 'The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door' is a must for any adult who still yearns to open a door and find themselves in Narnia (or some other fantastical world. Or had ever dreamed of other lands among the dreaming spires of Oxford like CS Lewis and JRRR Tolkein.

This book's getting the rare 5th star from me.
.
I'm right there with The Scholar (a teen named Clover) every step of her journey from the struggling family farm - struggling because her older brother was gravely wounded in WW1 and their father died in the Spanish Flu - to the dreamy spires of a fictional Camford: the secret magical university accessible through a door in the Bodleian library in Oxford or its Cambridge equivalent. The world of post-WW1 England, the elegant yet practical language, the relationships between students and their parents, even the mysterious world of the university Board and its sociopolitical secrecy, all feel real and complex and totally immersive even before Clover and her coterie get serious about opening the titular Door.

This is the familiar school of magic trope with an older cast and the richness of British university tradition behind it. In time and in literary space, think 'The Magicians' meets 'Jonathan Strange'  with a grim undercurrent from CL Polk's 'The Midnight Bargain' (which also deals with magical post-war trauma of a similar-feeling era). 

#NetGalley #TheScholarAndTheLastFaerieDoor #Oxford #Cambridge #WW1 #historical #Amiens #PCTSD #PTSD #scholarship #university #magic #Fae #magical #fantasy#Camford #CSLewis #Tolkien #CLPolk

Johnny Delivers By Wayne Ng

Johnny Delivers

By Wayne Ng

Guernica Editions, November 1, 2024.

 

This story smoothly sets the 1970s stage for a second generation Chinese immigrant’s son, a CBC or Canadian born Chinese. Johnny’s whole life has been steered by the previous, more traumatized immigrant community, seen as a precious hope of the future to not only his own parents but to lonely old-timers who got cut off from their families back in Asia during the Chinese Exclusion Act and never managed to reconnect after it. High school is as casually racist as you expect (or recall) from the 1970s. Jocks pick on all immigrants and every other person of minority background must decide every time whether to keep silent and avoid notice or intervene and risk being beaten up too. Mostly Johnny keeps his head down, works in his family restaurant and pals around with Leo, who works the door at Auntie’s gambling den, where Johnny’s own mother spends far too much time.

 The theme of family loyalty runs throughout. Does Johnny have the right to walk away from the family restaurant and go away to college, to chase his own dreams and aspirations? The stakes rise fast when he learns his family’s restaurant may be lost to debt, and his increasingly elaborate stratagems to raise money create correspondingly greater complications for his schoolwork, his home life, and his budding relationship with the girl of his dreams.

 This deceptively simple teen story is really a complex tale of family and friendships, philosophy versus the hard choices of reality, and how Canadian immigration law and practice screwed over early generations of Chinese people who were doing their best to survive, paying their lives forward to give their children (indeed all Chinese Canadian children) opportunities that had remained beyond their own reach. 

 #RiverStreetWrites #GuernicaEditions #review #bookstagram #ARC #immigrants #Chinese #ChineseCanadian #novel #Family #SecondGeneration #1970s #familysecrets #teencrush

 

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Darbyshire

COMING SOON from Wolsak & Wynn

October 22, 2024.

Is it Dark Fantasy? Paranormal Noir? A tantalizing blend of genres named and yet unnamed?

Crisp writing, cynical voice, an ancient wanderer addicted to angelic grace. And no, that’s not a nickname for some new street drug. Cross - named for the one his current body died on, once upon a time - has been wandering the world for 2000 years, killing angels for their grace in order to either further or forget his eternal hunt for the traitor Judas, depending on the day. Judas, once realizing g that Cross is resurrecting, hunts him too, always seeking a means to ensure he stays dead this time.

The classical allusions, which are many, are intelligent but not off-puttingly erudite. They assume some basic familiarity with Judeo-Roman history. Knowing a bit of basic mythology helps too: Roman, Greek, Arthurian… to name a few. But, like Cross leaving bits of his memories in the library with Alice, you may never feel like you have the whole picture.

 Cross himself is a bit moody, an inner monologue on legs, and not terribly observant about the world outside his concerns. Jaded, you might say, and why not when he has been alive for most of the past 2000 years, give or take the odd dozen? All you know for a long time is that he learned in a Roman arena how to harvest grace from angels, has hung around with a lot of now famous (and now mostly dead) artists, and likes to support bookstores even when he’s not actively collecting books. Well, and the whole trying to kill Judas thing, which project he has more than one good reason to tackle.

I missed seeing the book when it was first released in 2013 by Chizine Publications under the name of Peter Roman. But it and its successors, The Dead Hamlets and The Apocalypse Ark’ are well in tune with these times that include shows like Lucifer and paranormal crime-solving like the novels by Jim Butcher or Ben Aronovitch. Maybe harkening back to the anti-heroes of classic Noir novels. Less action, more introspection, but definitely in the same deeply readable vein. 

 #RiverStreet #WolsakWynn #DarkFantasy #Mythic #JudeoChristian #antihero #Religion #Noir #Paranormal #angels #art #museums #novel #review #bookreview #Medusa #Gorgon #Mummy #Barcelona #Judas

 

Secrets in the Water by Alice Fitzpatrick

The tale is set convincingly on a Welsh island where isolation and insularity have endured despite increasing interconnections with the mainland. The changeable sea weather is almost a character in its own right. Longtime inhabitants regard newcomers with suspicion and faithfully nurture long held resentments against each other. It’s a classic cosy mystery setup with a touch of the neo-gothic: middle-aged Kate goes back to her village for her grandmother’s funeral and learns her only aunt’s suicide fifty years ago might have been murder. And it might have involved the snobbish older ladies everyone calls The Weird Sisters.

Kate soon uncovers a plethora of suspects, and of motives. There are so many characters, indeed - and some of them long dead - that a cast list would be handy. Many of them get their own short scene or two of largely inner monologue, leading readers to believe they’ll be important to the slowly unfolding plot. Their memories of their exact whereabouts (and those of other suspects) on the fatal weekend fifty years earlier are surprisingly specific. When everyone has their moment in the sun, it’s hard to much care when the supposed main character, Kate, is left wandering for long stretches, asking the occasional, largely ineffectual, question. She gets into a couple of dangerous situations but her reactions water down any tension that has arisen.

I expected to like this novel more than I did. It’s a genre I generally enjoy, and it was getting good mentions online. Yet it’s not a happy synthesis of the island-crime-cosy and the neo-gothic family saga. An essential element in both story types is reader investment in the protagonist’s quest for the truth, but there was nothing particular to like or dislike about Kate. No reason to root for her, no motivation to care about the suicide/murder victim particularly.

 A sketch map of the island would add to the classic locked-room feel.

Secrets in the Water
Alice Fitzpatrick
STONEHOUSE PRESS