Tea at Trianon: Why the Mystery Novel Is a Perfect Literary Form

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Why the Mystery Novel Is a Perfect Literary Form

From Crime Reads:

The Golden Age of mysteries was also the primeval age of amateurs, with a whole range of strange birds emerging. Queen of the era, of course, is Agatha Christie, who not only gave us one of the classic private eyes in Poirot, but also inspired a cozy crime wave with Miss Marple. The kindly old spinster with a mind sharp as a razor and nerves of steel helped spawn a thousand eccentrics in quaint villages whose residents have an alarming propensity to knock each other off. It was also a fertile time for aristocratic gentlemen sleuths who tracked murderers for amusement, like Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Whimsey, or Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Allyn, who set the prototype for the posh Inspector Lynley books by Elizabeth George or PD James’s poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. And then there’s Morse, the grumpiest, snobbiest intellectual detective of all, in the most highbrow of settings, Oxford. But maybe the oddest duck in the pond is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Catholic country priest who not only catches criminals, he saves their souls and convinces them to confess. This became its own mini-sub-genre, with Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi series, and now Sister Boniface on the BBC. (Read more.)