The Books that Made Daisy and Hazel

As some of you may know, I finished the latest draft of Murder Most Unladylike yesterday. This means that we're one stage closer to turning my brain's random firings into an actual, physical book.

In a few months, Daisy and Hazel aren't just going to be mine any more. They're going to belong to you, to every single person who reads about them, and some of you are not going to like them. It's a surprisingly scary thought.

Anyway, to stop myself worrying about that, I've come up with a list of books that I was thinking about when I wrote Murder Most Unladylike, a handy guide to what's in Daisy and Hazel's literary DNA. This is where the Wells and Wong Detective Society started . . . 


1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Of course this one was going to be in here! My father gave me a copy of A Study in Scarlet when I was eight (an interesting choice of childhood reading material, and one which may have been intended to make a passive-agressive point about the nuttiness of my mother's Mormon family members), and I've loved Holmes and Watson ever since.

There's a lot of the Great Detective in Daisy. He's a detective who's 's successful largely because of all the localised know-how he has. Take him out of London, or ask him to solve a crime that doesn't involve any of his specialised areas of knowledge and he's just not quite as brilliant. Daisy, likewise, is able to solve the murder because she's made an obsessive study of all the goings-on at Deepdean school. But she's also a bit anti-Holmes: when I was making up my detectives I wondered what would happen if someone as smart as Sherlock was actually interested in human emotions as well as footprints, and Daisy was the result.

Hazel, meanwhile, is a bit of a mixture. She's a tribute to Watson - not the dopey TV version, but Conan Doyle's smarter, cooler original who actually helped Holmes solve his cases - but she's also got Sherlock's three-pipe armchair brilliance. And that's very helpful, because all Daisy wants to do is shout, "THE GAME'S AFOOT!" and wrestle the murderer to the ground in triumph, but she couldn't get there without Hazel.


2. The Famous Five by Enid Blyton

When I was researching Murder Most Unladylike I realised with total horror that I couldn't have any of my characters actually reading an Enid Blyton book. The first Famous Five was published in 1942, eight years after the events in my book (process this, if you can: in the 1930s they had linoleum but no Enid Blyton). But of course, Daisy and Hazel wouldn't exist without Blyton's stories about Mallory Towers, St Clare's and the Famous Five.

The Famous Five are really the Famous Two and Three Complete Idiots. Timmy the Dog contributes more to any one mystery than Anne does to the entire series. In fact, all Anne does is cook and cry, and all Julian does is look after Anne, and all Dick does is chase after Julian looking adoring. They're rubbish. It's up to George, ably assisted by Timmy, to single-handedly protect the Cornish coast from smugglers, and I've always very much respected her as a detective heroine. Like George, Daisy and Hazel are extremely determined to solve their case, and they're also just as willing to take on grown-ups who they think are Up To No Good. Also, they like to eat cake and drink ginger beer while they do it. I hope Enid would approve.


3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

This might seem a bit weird at first, but the Harry Potter series made me want to write detective novels. I remember reading Philosopher's Stone for the first time when I was eleven and realising with total excitement that J.K. Rowling had written a whodunit.

Think about it. In each of the Harry Potter books you have to work out who the bad guy is. Most of them actually feature a murder in some way or another. In fact, the whole series begins with the murders of Harry's parents, and it's largely about Harry's quest to bring their killer to justice. And then there's Hermione, superstar girl detective, who always solves the case. See what I mean? Harry Potter is just a mystery series with wizards. There's definitely a bit of Hogwarts in Deepdean, and a lot of Harry, Ron and Hermione's friendship in Daisy and Hazel's.


 4. Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

I doubt you'll be surprised that I've got some Agatha Christie in this list. It's probably equally unsurprising that I've chosen her school spy story to feature here. Normally, Christie doesn't really write about children, and that's possibly because she's so awful at it. Her under-16s are basically just lumpy, pupal pre-adults, and when I first read her books (aged twelve) this really bothered me. I wanted to read a murder mystery with characters like me, and there just weren't any in Christie. Even the older teenage characters just ended up getting married, which was not a life path I could relate to. I think I wrote Murder Most Unladylike so that my twelve-year-old self could finally read about kids solving a Christie murder.

Anyway, Cat Among the Pigeons is an exception to Christie's general no-children rule, and I think it's quite great. It's got an exciting jewel heist, midnight shenanigans in the sports pavilion, lots of hockey and tennis and even more teacherly intrigue.

It also features a non-white pupil, Princess Shaista. I admit, said princess is an utterly rubbish stock character, but the fact that she's there is really interesting. It made me want to write a non-white, non-English character who was actually a human being, and thinking that was one step on the way to creating Hazel. 


5. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie

Another Agatha Christie! Everyone knows about Poirot and Miss Marple, but she also wrote other detectives, and my favourite of those are Tommy and Tuppence. They are adorably immature adults (weirdly enough, I think Christie wrote her best child characters when she wrote about grown-ups), and they solve crime by pretending to be their favourite fictional detectives.

What's delightful is how silly Tommy and Tuppence are about really serious things, and how much fun they have with the detection process. That's the kind of detective novel I like to read. I love books that turn the crime into a puzzle to be solved, something that's awful but essentially fixible. And I love making jokes about serious things. Agatha Christie is the queen of all of that.



6. Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley

The cool thing about Sherlock Holmes is that he's always right. When you read a Holmes story you almost don't have to bother working things out for yourself (not that you even can, most of the time, unless you know 800 types of tobacco or the precise footprint tread depth left by a man carrying a body) because he's on the case. But it's also pretty cool to realise that sometimes, even detectives can be wrong.

Trent's Last Case introduced me to the concept of the fallible detective. Trent gets called in to solve a murder and completely screws his investigation up. He accuses the wrong person and awful things happen as a result. To me this was a total revelation. I suddenly realised that the reader could be allowed to be a better detective than the one the author's written. You could beat the professionals!

Daisy and Hazel may think they're pro detectives, but in true Trent style they go horribly wrong in the course of the investigation. They get there in the end (otherwise it wouldn't be much of a detective novel, would it?), but . . . well, all I'm going to say is that they get there in the end.


7. Raffles the Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung

I like my detectives to be a bit bad. Even Miss Marple, for all her kittenish old lady-ness, has a naughty side. A good detective needs to be able to break the rules (and to quite enjoy doing it), and so I think that this series, about a gentleman thief called Raffles and his adoring and spectacularly stupid sidekick Bunny, is pretty wonderful. The author, Hornung, was actually related to Conan Doyle (he was his brother in law), and these books were essentially fanfiction - Hornung wanted to write a version of Holmes where he was against the law rather than on its side.

So Raffles and Bunny go on daring night-time jewel heists, and steal priceless paintings from the Queen's collection, and it's all completely amazing and totally ridiculous. But the important thing about Raffles is that, even though he spends his evenings robbing people, by day he is the quintessential English cricket-playing gentleman. That's very similar to what's going on with Daisy. She seems like the perfect English young lady, but secretly she's a super-cool super-smart detective who will stop at nothing to solve a case. And she, like Raffles, is not above breaking the law - although when she does steal things she always makes sure to give them back afterwards.


8. Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

This is it. This is the one. I have read a lot of detective novels in my life, but if I had to pick just one to take to a desert island it would be Miss Pym Disposes. It's a murder mystery set in a girls' boarding school, in which someone is found dead in the Gym - basically, Murder Most Unladylike is an adoring tribute to this book. Miss Pym is a fantastically fallible detective (she gets it horribly wrong on numerous occasions), there's a non-white pupil (although she's another stereotype, sadly), and there's a twist at the end so twistingly twisty that your brain will melt with the horrible amazement of it.

Can you tell that I love this book? Tey is a really fabulous writer, and a very clever plotter, and she really deserves to be known much more widely than she is. Don't worry, the person whodunit in Miss Pym Disposes isn't at all the person whodunit in Murder Most Unladylike, so one will not spoil you for the other, but there is a lot of Ley's Physical Training College in Deepdean, and a lot of Miss Pym in Daisy and Hazel.


And that's your lot! Of course, there's an awful lot more where that came from. I'm a bit of a detective novel fan. Let's just hope that Nat likes what I've done to Murder Most Unladylike . . . and that, in eight months or so, you like it too.

Review - The Call of the Wild

Staring. Staring. STARING.

Today one of my seminar tutors was talking about war literature and said that Birdsong was a very bad book. I got so excited to discover a kindred spirit that I shouted "I KNOW, RIGHT?! I KNOW!" into his face. I think I alarmed him. It was worth it.

For the record, I watched the first 30 minutes of the BBC adaptation and then sunk under the sheer amount of fish-like gazing I was being subjected to. I will say it was better than its source material, but that's not difficult. (Yes, I am now firmly in the anti-Birdsong camp. It is a scourge upon this earth. Come at me.)

What was good, though - I think I may have mentioned this before - was the BBC's Sherlock. I've reviewed it - and talked about what makes a good adaptation - over at Litro, and I've also done a piece on why Culture should be for everyone (but Ulysses is very bad).

Now. I keep saying I won't review the books I read for my MA course. And then I read a set text and end up weeping covertly into an airplane window so the guy sitting next to me won't think I am mad or regretting my decision to commit an act of international terrorism (though considering this flight was going to Cork I'd have really been thinking outside the box, target-wise. Note: I am a law-abiding tender-hearted humanist. If any policemen are reading this, I'm joking, don't arrest me).

Anyway, my point is that some books are too good not to tell you about, and so it is with The Call of the Wild. 

The Call of the Wild is great in two very different ways. The first sixty pages (it's a tender morsel of a thing at just under 100 pages) make up one of the greatest wilderness novels I've ever read, simply because Jack London has realised something really crucial about wilderness novels: if your protagonist is a human man, it's never going to work out. Your guy can get busy hefting hacksaws and bringing down bison but ultimately he will feel the call of cooked food and toes that are not frostbitten, and he will go back to New York, or London, or wherever it is, and get hitched.

In fact, most wild men aren't really that wild at all. Robinson Crusoe looked at nature and saw a table, and from then on people in wilderness novels have approached the landscape in terms of the best setting for their new log cabin. But if at the centre of every man's heart is a large feather bed, in the heart of every dog lurks a wolf, ready to jump out and rip everything to shreds. Therefore, if you make your protagonist a large dog, and stick him in the middle of the snowy wastes, then shit, my friends, is going to go down and it's never going to stop.

The Call of the Wild is the story of Buck, a large dog (you see where I am going with this) who gets kidnapped from his cushy home in Southern California and shipped off to the Klondike goldrush to become a sled dog. Horribly mistreated and forced to fend for himself, his layers of good-doggishness get stripped away to reveal the neolithic badass wolf beneath. Buck goes wild, and then wilder, and it's all so incredibly hardcore that even reading it makes you feel awesome by association. By page 40 I  wanted to run straight up the nearest mountain and punch the sky in the face.

And then, just as I was powerfully psyched and ready to see Buck become king of the world, the novel changed pace and became one of the most beautiful human-dog relationships I've ever read. Buck is rescued from particularly wicked owners by the gentle woodsman John Thornton, and they fall instantly and madly in... love, I guess, that special sort of human-dog adoration that's almost better than anything you can get from another person.

This is something that has a huge capacity to affect me. I lost the canine love of my life two years ago and to a large degree I think I'm still in mourning for her. When she died it felt as though I'd lost a family member, and even now I have moments when I think of her and feel absolutely bereft, that I'm missing something I'll never get back again. So the bond between dog and human, if written well, has a great potential to make me cry. But I defy even you, dogless ones, not to feel a pang at the moment when John Thornton puts his entire life savings on the line over a bet that Buck can drag half a ton (because he thinks that Buck is the best dog there is and won't hear anyone say otherwise), and then Buck does it, on his own, out of sheer mad fidelity to his master.

Where it goes after that I won't say - but really, I just want to know where this book has been all my life. It's wonderful. Brutal and incredibly sweet by turns, it's got dogs, nature, Victorian adventure and most importantly DOGS, and I am absolutely writing my essay about it when the time comes.

And best of all, it's on the 1001 Books list.

4 stars.

Review - Love and Mr Lewisham

Happy 2012, readers! Felicitations, fireworks, champagne and all that. Indeed, I may have had too much of that - but now it is the 4th I can look life in the face again and tell you about the first book of my year, and the first book from my towering Christmas present pile, Love and Mr Lewisham.

I guess the good thing about getting through Love and Mr Lewisham first is that it leaves definite room for improvement as far as my reading material goes. I've already had the situation, with the new episode of Sherlock, where I sat down afterwards and wondered if anything could ever be that good again, and for that to happen with a book as well as with a TV show in the first four days of 2012 would be asking too much of the universe. 

Love and Mr Lewisham was - fine. It was perfectly good, and even quite sweet (which I found a bit weird, conceptually - you think H. G. Wells and you think of angry metal objects exploding violently while invisible people do experiments on animals in the background, rather than a story about two people falling in love and arguing about it, which is Love and Mr Lewisham's basic plot).

Actually, Love and Mr Lewisham is more technically relevant to my interests than anything else I've read by Wells. It's all about being young and poor in London, which I have vivid personal experience of, and also about being in love, which has happened to me too, whereas I have never personally travelled to the future or been shot at by an alien death ray. And yet, if you go into a novel expecting death rays and end up with 200 pages of people having misunderstandings about bunches of flowers you are going to feel slightly cheated, plot-wise, and so I did. Allegedly Love and Mr Lewisham is about spiritualism (another reason why I was interested in it, I love a good bit of chicanery and/or haunting), but it turns out that Wells just wants an excuse to have an ethical discussion about whether or not faking seances is cheating (yes), and if so whether or not that is wrong in the grand scheme of things (still yes), and that's fine, but to be brutally honest I prefer it when he writes about invisible people.

That's not to say I didn't get something from Love and Mr Lewisham. It proved to me rather neatly that 1) I should thank every power in the universe for the rise of women's education, because (all jokes about the earning power of English Literature graduates aside) it means that I can go out and earn cold hard cash rather than having to sit all day staring at the wall and being a drain on my (fictitious) husband, only for him to (fictitiously) come home and talk about things that I don't understand, like Science and Politics and Spelling. And 2) I am really glad that I did not get married aged 21 just because I wanted to cohabit with someone. It works for some people, of course, but it has the potential to go hideously wrong, especially if you are both poor and living in London, and so, in Love and Mr Lewisham, it does.

Things turns out OK in the end, in a sappy sort of way, but all the same Mr Lewisham and Ethel's trials and tribulations (will he choose his Woman or his Career? Will she escape her trickster father in law? etc) are just never going to be as interesting as a death ray. Maybe I'm shallow. Maybe I misunderstood the kind of book Love and Mr Lewisham is. But I have to say that if you're looking for a good (less famous) H. G. Wells novel, don't read this. Read The Island of Doctor Moreau, because that has insane conflicted half-human half-animal lab experiments in it, and it's also set on a desert island, and as I have said many times before ('m lying, I've never said this before but it's true anyway) a desert island setting means that things are going to be AWESOME. Also, you should watch Sherlock, because it was amazing.

Welcome to 2012.

Love and Mr Lewisham gets 2.5 stars.

Racist Yarns

On a glamorous, living-in-London whim I booked tickets to see The 39 Steps a few days ago. Only after the fact did it occur to me that I may have never actually read the novel the play is based on. (It is difficult to be entirely sure because every single jolly adventure yarn written between 1850 and 1920 is in fact the same book. The settings change, as do the hats and moustaches of the characters, but the fight for good old Crown and Empire is everlastingly recycled).

So there I was, reading The Thirty-Nine Steps (it is a sliver of a thing, it took me all of a day to get through), and on page 16 one character turns to another and starts casually slandering Jewish people, and I realised with heaviness in my heart that The Thirty-Nine Steps (first published in 1915) suffers from the same knotty issue as do most other ripping yarns I have read. It is deeply and horribly racist.

And this, of course, is a problem for a reader in 2011. It's not only that it's academically unpopular, at the moment, to read this sort of book. Postcolonialism is (in scholarly circles) where it is at, and ripping yarns tend to be full of sunburned men in topis taking wild potshots at elephants and black people (these being held in roughly the same estimation in the mind of the shooter). But, of course, it's much more than a matter of academic taste. The views in these books are seriously offensive to huge sections of society - and so if you do read things like King Solomon's Mines and The Thirty-Nine Steps and end up enjoying them despite their moral content, are you essentially colluding in racism? Does it make you a bad person?

I'm not sure I have the answer to this, but it is something I wonder about a lot, because the ripping yarn genre has always completely fascinated me. Do not get me wrong, I am so glad that I live in a world where saying things like "Those bally insolent darkies ruin everything! Where is my boy, so that I may beat him?" will get you glared at and then swiftly arrested, but I can't help but be amazed by, and curious about, by the attitudes that show through in books like The Lost World and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Chinua Achebe famously decided that Heart of Darkness is irredeemably racist because (among other things) it uses the word 'nigger', but while that may be true if you read it by the standards of today, it sort of misses the point. Heart of Darkness comes from a world that can't really be judged by the morals of the 21st Century. You can't even be racist in the way a 21st Century person would understand racism. Truly good people by the standards of the story, characters who you are meant to totally believe in, beat up their black bearers as much as anyone else, or turn around and cheerfully spew the most astonishing racial invectives, and there's no sense that this might be even the slightest bit morally dubious.

I think part of what interests me so much is trying to get my head around the thought that, less than 100 years ago, a large majority of white Europeans genuinely believed that most of the rest of humanity were just about as important as tigers, maybe, or camels (and definitely less worth bothering about than horses or dogs). Not that white supremacy doesn't still exist today, of course it does, but today's white supremacists are generally angry at or frightened of people who do not happen to look like them. The characters in most ripping yarns just don't care enough about the other races they come across to be angry at them. In their view of the universe, black people truly don't matter.

Better to be black, though, than Jewish. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, one white character turns to another white character and says that he has decided to trust him because (and I am quoting here) "you're a white man". I had to read that sentence about three times before I properly realised that he's not just stating the bleeding obvious. What he means is, "you're a good man". White, you see, is right, but you have to be the right sort of white. The Enemy are the wrong sort of white, because they are foreign, but even The Enemy are preferable to The Jews, who have committed the crime not only of being foreign but also of being in disguise - they are essentially black people, but ones who are nefariously pretending to be white men in order to get all the money in the world into a big pile and sit on it.

The Jew in action

If the anti-black rhetoric in adventure yarns tends to be alarmingly casual and disgustingly condescending, but not particularly hate-filled, the stuff levelled against Jewish people more than makes up for it. The anti-Semitic sentiment in not only adventure stories but almost all genres of novel, pre-World War Two, is astonishingly violent, and moreover seems to come from a really heartfelt place. A very long list of writers seemed to genuinely believe that if white people relaxed their vigilance, even for a second, The Jews would come sneaking up behind them and STEAL ALL THEIR GOLD AND WOMEN. And out of that came passages like this little gem in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the description of

a little white-faced Jew in a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.

That's vicious, horrible stuff - and the sort of thing, of course, that got Hitler into power fifteen years later. I bet John Buchan would have hated the idea that he had anything in common with a Rascally German, and there's a mean part of me that hopes he had some sleepless nights over it. But of course, he didn't - anti-Semitism was A Thing in Britain in the 1920s and 30s (and eugenics, too, which they tend to gloss over in GCSE History lessons).

So when you read those sentences, vile though they are, you're looking at a product of a certain time - most definitely a worse time, if you happened to be anything other than a (white) white man - but one with a completely different moral landscape. Even though you may instinctively want to, you can't judge an outburst like that the way you would if someone you knew turned round to you tomorrow and started expressing the same sympathies.

And that brings me to something else I've also read recently, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. It's a novel that is, incidentally, quite sensitive about racial issues, but its protagonist, college professor David Lurie, begins the action by having what is not only a disturbing but also a borderline illegal relationship with his student, a girl thirty years younger than him. At one point he coerces her into his bed and engages in a sexual act that is described as

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.

Ah yes. Not quite rape. My favourite.

David loses his academic post over it, but decides, infuriatingly, that he has done nothing truly morally wrong - on the contrary, he has been 'enriched' by the experience. Of course, this could be the views of one character, and nothing to do with the author, but there's such a fuss made about love in old age (he did it for love! For love!) that I have a nasty feeling that this isn't the case. In fact, there's a very dodgy attitude to women in general running through the novel - about half way through it I was brought up short by this interesting aside:

Sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight.

Now, compared to dangerously insane Jewish conspiracy theories, all of this isn't so bad. But all the same I found it incredibly bothersome, almost more so than that passage from The Thirty-Nine Steps, and I think that's because of when it was written. Disgrace won the Booker in 1999, which means it's recent enough that it ought to have known better. I'm fairly sure that by 1999 the concept of not being an asshole towards women was fairly widely understood, so the fact that Coetzee goes ahead and does it anyway says quite a lot about him as a person.

Offense, of course, is purely personal, and each person has the absolute right to be upset by anything they come across. But I do think that there are some things that you have to let writers from certain time periods get away with, purely to prevent yourself going insane with helpless rage. I also think it's important to read books from different periods that are offensive to us today, if only to remind ourselves how comparitively recently their kind of poisonous beliefs were the norm.

And finally I think that J. M. Coetzee may not be a racist, but all the same I wouldn't want to be in the same room with him. He's sad, annoying proof that society's morals may have come a long way since 1915, but they've still got a long way to go.