At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

It was interesting, just odd to read him write so much about style.

I don't find him at all convincing when he tries to critique style or close read, surprise surprise, but there is a kernel of thoughts worth reading in that piece.

This wasn't very good. Essentially the LRB are terrible at conveying what might be good, about something that isn't as well written as *whatever literary thing* they think the LRB readership likes (love toooo beeeee patronised to) so Lanchester gets into an argument that the conventions of genre are approaching some kind of modernist framework that simply doesn't land (can we flip this around? I mean Cervantes was playing on specific types of romantic novels at the time? What pulp did Joyce read? Molly's Requiem didn't come out of nowhere. What was Melville mining when writing about whales - which was a jumping of point for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with whales) leading to that awful moment where he is dutifully listing the half dozen or so of her best books like some accountant - like does that matter if its easy to read/re-read anyway. He dismisses any of her more political works, but if we are going to praise her like this why not start with those anyway?

In this piece you could map where literature has just gone wrong with a certain section of the public. There is a...basic misunderstanding on how fiction works, what it can do or more importantly what it gives, despite these people's attempts to kill it - and they might succeed.

I want to re-read Auden's essay on detective fiction because I don't know if that was any better. Might report back.

I think Beckett used to read Agatha Christie? Certainly he read detective fiction, "Molloy" shows an influence.

Yep, there's this famous reading list where Beckett mentions (unfavourably) a Christie:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-books-samuel-beckett-really-liked.html

Talking of Ward Fowler, I wonder if he ever watched Columbo.

i mean, i think the refinement of the formalist puzzle-making element, to the exclusion of most the other factors in the pleasure and/or value of writing&reading fiction, *does* fit somewhere alongside the modernist project, but in a way that recasts how we shd think about modernism... which is at least partly to do with a response to the industrial encroachment of genre fiction forms

(years ago jenny turner wrote a long piece on lord of the rings noting the various ways its innovations could be tidied up into the categories within modernism that joyce in particular also had assigned him, except joyce is doing THIS -- good? -- but tolkien is doing THAT -- not so good?)

i still haven't reread this un-tired but just noting before anyone else does: lol at him making the joke abt the only author he's read a book by under no less than three different titles, but only giving us the politically non-problematic one (= and then there were none) (= also the one that gives the plot away… ) and dodging the original unsayable title even by hint. you have to know this book's history to know what he's evadiing…

molloy, malone dies and just one more thing

xp he does say he has read that particular book under three different titles IIRC, but that's still a reference for the true headz really

Obviously he's never seen the 80s TV movie version where the two heroes escape in a helicopter at the end.

It's interesting that Lanchester mentions Dorothy L Sayers - they have a lot in common, in that they're both successful bad writers who write overlong novels full of pedestrian detail passed off as canny observation. Obviously I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with Gaudy Night than Capital, but it's not much of a choice...

disagree, Sayers is the best of the golden era detective fiction writers (with the possible exception of Ngaio Marsh) IMO, but Gaudy Night isn't a great example of her work

it's years since i read much allingham to be fair but i think *all* the tec fic ppl he discusses are more able as writers and more observant detail-wise than lanchester is himself

(i am also v pro sayers)

The thing that confused me most was his choice to pull three extracts - one each from Allingham, Sayers and Christie - to show that Christie's lack of style makes her less "dated", while the other two's ambitions (stylistic and I suppose political) imprison them in their own time. But the stuff he quotes from Allingham and Sayers is evocative, summons up some character, gives you at least a faint interest in what's going on, while the Christie excerpt, divorced from its original context, is literally some "the butler came in and said SOMEONE'S BEEN MURDERED" self-parody, it couldn't possibly sound any creakier. Of course Lanchester's argument is that Christie's insistence on the mystery to the exclusion of everything else is what makes her great but in that case surely using an excerpt is doing the writer a disservice from the get-go.

I also didn't think much of his assertions on what genre fiction is "supposed" to do, the marking off of boundaries against anything too aesthetically or politically ambitious. Really don't think we need to mount a defense of genre fiction in 2018, those battles have been won ages ago, but it still feels like Lanchester's being somewhat patronizing about what he believes to be genre fiction's place.

(I also don't really think much of "dated" as a criticism in the first place, a book belonging to a time and a place is part of the appeal, and yeah that includes when I'm "reading for pleasure").

"There’s also a new novel from John Lanchester: The Wall (Faber, March) is set in a dystopian Britain under siege from the Others. Written in chilling, affectless prose, it’s like The Road meets Never Let Me Go – smart, speculative fiction from one of our most brilliantly wide-ranging minds."

affectless prose as a sort of commendation! lack of affect is typically seen as a psychological problem of course. and while affectless prose can have an aesthetic and emotional purpose certainly, lanchester’s “badly translated instruction manual” style doesn’t really seem equipped for that sort of nuance.

i don't care what anybody's personal opinion of McCarthy or Ishiguro is, that comparison is brutally insulting to both

To be fair. i suspect The Wall will feature exactly the same sort of shoddy, un-thought-through worldbuilding that Never Let Me Go did.

Shameless!

Author of the Month: John Lanchester

Our Author of the Month for January is novelist and journalist John Lanchester. A regular contributor to the LRB, Lanchester writes about the world of finance, new technology, food and everything else besides with sparkling insight, wry humour and remarkable clarity. His first novel The Debt to Pleasure, published in 1996, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, and his latest, The Wall, published by Faber, is a hypnotic portrayal of a fatally fractured world in which it is both sensible and necessary that the young should hate the old. You can explore his books in several genres here, and come and meet them in person at the shop throughout January.

btw strongly agree with Daniel Rf's criticism above -- Lanchester in the AC essay quotes those two passages from the other 'dated' writers and both seemed to me really GOOD and interesting -- having exactly the opposite effect of what he thought.

Anyone catch the John Malkovich Poirot over Christmas? Was interesting in its attempt to flesh out all the "modernist" minimalist stuff JL talks about Christie leaving out - adding (or attempting to add) plausibility, character history and motivation, references to contemporary politics, etc.

Kind of a sadface, gritty, DCEU take. Well-made but unlikeable. The one thing JL leaves out of his essay (easy to forget because it's so obvious) is that Agatha Christie is FUN. This wasn't.

I taped it but not sure I'll bother

i like it much more once i stopped thinking of it as a poirot story and just took it on its own merits

malkovich has been terrible in so much stuff that i'd kinda forgotten he can act - i thought he was great as a broken, walled-off, very still character who just happened to share a name with hercule poirot

Yeah, it was certainly very watchable. On the "gritty reboot" scale I'd put it above Zack Snyder but way below, say, Doom Patrol.

I watched it and quite liked it except a) it was quite gory and bloody for me, b) the denoument / villain's motivation stuff was preposterous - 'I wanted to revitalize you, Hercule Poirot! that's why I violently killed various people' etc - wasting all the previous effort to make a decent programme. Also c) the anti-/immigration theme was heavy-handed.

Agree with b and c, mostly. Really enjoy watching Malkovich and thought he was good in this. It was maybe shackled a bit by being BBC1 Christmas entertainment and could have gone further with its noir instincts.

I dunno, I find myself tiring of BBC drama that dials up the oppressively dour atmosphere at the expense of character development and this felt straight out of that playbook. It relied too much on the relevation of Poirot's past and I just didn't find any of it believable.

Still it was diverting enough and hardly in Taboo territory, but there was still something that felt lazy about it.

I don't watch tons of BBC drama tbf, Malkovich and the 30s were the hooks for me in this case.

(is that a diss on taboo, taboo was good not bad, this is canon and no backsies)

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TBH I was so incandescent with rage at Malkovich playing him without the moustache that it was difficult to concentrate on much else for the first episode or so.

I think it's fair to say the whole production was likely to irritate a lot of Christie purists.

Oh I see the adaptation changed the motive for the murderer which is insane as the new one made no sense at all, as the Pinefox has pointed out.

I think the "sense" of the motive is that the murderer was a psychopath with a fixation on Poirot which doesn't seem notable more implausible than the book

It's definitely where the TV version's gestures towards politics and social relevance failed to cohere tho

More importantly how come Ron Weasley still looks 14?

Yes, I tried the first episode and found it too dour for my tastes, and not enough like the experience of reading a Poirot book - but then I got to thinking about bored how I am, too, with the Suchet 'heritage' treatment also. Perhaps something that acknowledged the surprising viciousness of a lot of Christie while at the same time sticking more closely to the 'traditional' whodunnit formula might hit the spot w/ me - or maybe if Mario Bava were still alive...

given that suchet redux set-design-wise is "it's the 20s! literally everything will be spiffy art deco!", i enjoyed the rebuttal here: ""it's the 30s! literally (almost)* everything will be edwardian, also decaying!"

*not the de la warr, an anachronism** they couldn't quite resist (the story was set in 1932 i think).
**another anachronism*** = a giles gilbert scott k2 telephone box (1st k2 = 1936: they needed a k1 but none survive in london)
***having a character sing 'night and day' isn't quite an anachronism: the show it's from, gay divorce (good title), is also 1932 -- but it probably didn't get widespread enough to be hummable for a couple of years (the film, the gay divorcee, is 1934)****
****(that i was busily googling all this while watching is possibly a sign my attention wasn't gripped)

I have to hand it to Mark S, those are good details.

In truth the 'night & day' semi-anachronism also results from being unimaginative about old time popular songs -- there are hundreds of less well known ones she could (more) realistically have sung but at this point 'night & day', 'I've got you under my skin', 'cheek to cheek' are virtually all that much of an audience will recognize.

(I thought this with very mild irritation at the time, while Mark was googling.)

they should have gone with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQXijs8cr3U

the motive was still inheritance wasn't it? the poirot bating was an extra treat. on xmas eve we watched the last ever suchet one from 2013, i usually enjoy them but it was truly dire.

things you were shockingly old when you learned: christie was writing them into the 70s, with contemporary settings. suchet filmed them all but made them all pre-war.

hoping there's a christie abt a 60s blues rockband getting back together for one last tour, but a freak accident with a live microphone and/or guitar/bass connection etc etc

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1398216/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_31

In the growing drug and pop culture of the sixties, he proves himself once again

not bad considering he retires aged 55 in 1905.

finally got round to this. didn't think it was terrible; in fact it wasn’t anything really. he hits upon a lot of the right points, but i don’t think he says much about them.

A telling phrase he uses is 'it's not as if anyone makes any claims for christie as a writer per se'. *writing* as the end point and purpose of writing has always struck me as a peculiar conceit of 'literary fiction' (begging the question a bit).

I think Christie *is* doing formal stuff and that formal stuff is characterises her and other Golden Age writing. I'd like to see the connexions that mark s suggests upthread where these formal experiments exist in some relation to the 'modernist project'. I'm not convinced they do in a way that illuminates much - my view is that the formal games are closer to crossword puzzles or parlour games than bearing much relation to the large narrative of Literature capital L; I’m suspicious of efforts like Lanchester’s to use this as an ‘in’ to literary credibility. I may be mischaracterising, but I think it can be the case. I'm also not a massive fan of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which often seems like a touchstone for genre-as-literature arguments, although it is technically impressive.

As I say, my primary take on all Golden Age writers, including my favourite John Dickson Carr, is that effectively they are an extension of a sort of Edwardian parlour game. Readers expected to try and *solve* them. Although the codification of the ‘rules’ wasn’t really that important – certainly no story i’ve read adheres to all of them – all of the writers had similar expectations about what constituted ‘fairness’ for the reader. This is a very different scene from a post-Chandler strand where impressionistic stuff just sort of happens at the detective. The furthest extension of this seems to me something like Broadchurch where no actual detection seems to get done at all (apart from going to places where things have happened), and where events keep on happening, with the detectives literally clueless, until the events reach an inescapable conclusion.

In GA fiction not only is detection seen to be done but the clues that are being used by the detective are available to be used by the reader. Incidentally although Lanchester says at the beginning he's trying to work out *why* Christie is so successful, there's bugger all consideration of reader or wider audience, it's just him going 'Christie, eh?' which is vmic. This explains a lot of the stylistic and character issues raised by people approaching this sort of fiction from a literary pov.

I think fundamentally Christie was very good at *snobbery*. It's for this reason Lanchester *is* right imo to highlight A Murder is Announced as a very useful book to look at Christie. Everyone is a social construct, with a backstory and clothes (my housemate recently pointed out that Christie is very specific about clothes - a key element in character definition for snobbery purposes). I think both the Edmund Wilson essays on detective fiction are bad not good, but their badness comes from what I perceive as his mandarin dislike of the genre – typically he’s right about a lot of technical things. In the paragraph quoted by Lanchester, for instance, he’s absolutely right to highlight misdirection as being one of the key techniques of this fiction. The unobtrusive distribution of the clues is essential – the unobtrusiveness comes by interlarding them in a way that’s integrated both in terms of style and narrative. They mustn’t stick out. Ideally they look whether in terms of sentence cadence or paragraph structure, unimportant.

I think the two-dimensionality of characters, a very common criticism, belongs to a similar category. Edmund Crispin/Bruce Montgomery, who I find pretty second rate, put his opinion fairly clearly in one of this novels, where the main character Gideon Fen comes across a crime writer testing out the practicalities of a crime device in a field. Fen suggests that doing this must enable him to some extent to get ‘inside the mind of the murderer’.

An expression of mild repugnance appeared on the man’s face. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, it doesn’t do that.’ That subject seemed painful to him, and Fen felt that he had committed an indiscretion. ‘The fact is,’ the man went on, ‘that I have no interest in the minds of murderers, or for that matter,’ he added rather wildly, ‘in the minds of anyone else.’ Characterization seems to me a very overrated element in fiction. I can never see why one should be obliged to have any of it at all, if one doesn’t want to. It limits the form so.’

To my mind, and particularly with Christie, the two-dimensionality, the image of characters as intersecting vectors of social roles, background, clothes, domestic interiors, engages the reader’s own snobberies. This snobbery itself will misdirect the attempt to unravel what happened. After all there is always a suspect – a cad, a foreigner, a deliberately secretive person, who is used as an initial suspect (sometimes in a late reversal they do turn out to have done it). It also adds to the parlour game elements. They can arrange the cardboard cutouts. This is not at all, as Edmund Crispin points out, about psychology.

To digress slightly, it was interesting watching the recent adaptation of The ABC Murders. I was interested to see the generally positive ilx response. It really was a dog's dinner imo (unfortunately the point I need to make means SPOILERS if you haven't seen it). The elements weren't necessarily bad or *rong*: there is a bit of a grim anti-foreign element in the book (Poirot is dismissed as an interfering 'Frenchman', in the way Marple is as an interfering old woman) tho the V for Vendetta look in this adaptation was both gruelling and silly.

And I should add that I think things like Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are so symbolic now they are ripe for any sort of game you want to play with them at all. Notions of authenticity are absurd.

This three-parter was 'Poirot: The backstory' under the guise of a traditional detective story. I thought it was incredibly slow to go about its business. SPOILER The reveal of him as a priest rather than a policeman was a ridiculous on several levels: one, the detective as father-confessor and battler of evil in mundane forms is already a well-worked space so this amounted to a DO YOU SEE moment, emphasised by the second point that The ABC Murders is itself a formal experiment based upon Chesterton's question in his (excellent) Father Brown story The Sign of the Broken Sword: 'Where does a wise man hide a leaf?'. I think there's something of a direct reference to this in the original Christie novel:

Is it not your great Shakespeare who has said “You cannot see the trees for the wood.”’ I did not correct Poirot’s literary reminiscences. I was trying to see his point. A glimmer came to me. He went on: ‘When do you notice a pin least? When it is in a pin-cushion! When do you notice an individual murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.

The adaptation completely broke the implications of this statement and effectively broke the point of it entirely. as the pinefox points out, the motive of it revivifying Poirot was daft, but so was the ‘I was enjoying killing so much I just thought I’d carry on’.

I thought Malkovich was good as a pained and in pain version of Poirot whose old world courtesy is out of place in a brutalised world – Lanchester is again right to point out the 'problem' of Poirot, tho he doesn't point out that Hastings is *even more* irritating – what this adaptation reminded me of was that actually it's often the fact that Poirot is well-liked by sympathetic other characters that enables him to solve crimes at a 'softer' level than pure clue finding, it's a central emotional mechanism to the books I think, and *is* probably a factor in the counterintuitive success of Poirot as a figure.

What John Dickson Carr did for the locked room, Christie did for all sorts of different 'set ups' – despite toiling in the right space, I don't think Lanchester quite gets this properly framed (his 'school for wizards' comment).

I think I got up to here and then abandoned the post cos i had to go and do something else, and now can’t remember what else i was going to say, which is just as well as it’s overlong already.

I still think the initial frisson of a magical impossibility to be unraveled by detection is hard to beat in this sort of fiction, though I don’t think Christie is particularly good at the atmospherics of it in a way that Dorothy L Sayers or John Dickson Carr are. I still get a frisson of excitement when I read the opening paragraph of The Hollow Man:

To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied – with reason. Those of Dr Fell’s friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.

some french bigwig -- maybe breton? -- said that the english didn't need surrealism, they already had alice… and i feel you could make a similar claim about oulipo and christie, and then double down on the analysis: if in la disparition the "absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence" (the mass death of WW2), then christie's expertise in misdirection without cheating is maybe similarly deeply connected to the thing i liked best (for being said out loud) in lanchester's account, christie's "complete belief in… human malignity"

JL goes off the rails in his exploration of this, tho, i suspect bcz he associates it the conservative worldview (as in, we need the social structures we have -- even given some of the bad things that go with them -- because some ppl are evil and others need protection from them). he prefers christie to e.g. sayers or allingham, despite two things he assumes you'd expect him to be drawn to: (a) their greater ambition in lit-fic terms, and (b) that they considered themselves "progressive"

even ignoring the probable anachronism of the second as a term either writer wd use abt themselves, there's a really clumsy irregular verb going on here: I am politically engaged, you consider yourself progressive, they are virtue signalling, plus just a weird (and i think dumb and incurious) absence of interest on lanchetser's part in what the seeming flaws and lacunae in sayers' work -- as tecfic or as social observation -- can teach us about the historical development of (for example) feminism, and the various contradictory stages it passed through.

ok maybe this kind of topic DOESN'T interest him (bizarre flex given the focus of his own fiction, but everyone doesn't have to be curious about everything) (i guess) (big and grudging concession by me here lol). but i think it's tone-deaf not to grasp that it's going to be part of what others enjoy enjoying about the popular genre forms of yesteryear, and that some of the pleasure is the complexity of how it runs athwart the project the genre is allagedly ("classically") about. "christie is good bcz she stays in her lane" is real la-la-la-i-can't-hear-you stuff, given all the material he seems to have gathered about the genre and its pleasures and uses and flaws (and their uses…).

actually chesterton and father brown are a telling omission from this piece, i think -- i wasn't aware of the presence of his ghost in the abc murders, bcz i don't think i've ever read the abc murders, but he's surely the direct way into a discussion of crime and evil and formal playfulness and style and conservatives and progressives and etc: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution"

an essay on how christie isn't chesterton -- and why *that's* good not bad -- would i think tell us more about what's going on?

(i too have a whole list of notes on this piece that i kept starting to type out and abandon, lol: like "hercule poirot is almost a brechtian device", dude, no, that's not that a brechtian device is or does)

I'm also not a massive fan of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which often seems like a touchstone for genre-as-literature arguments, although it is technically impressive.

The thing almost everyone who makes claims for Roger Ackroyd seems to miss is that it is a complete steal of Anton Chekhov's only full-length novel, The Shooting Party, which was first translated into English only a few years before RA was published. So her great literary achievement was probably just plagiarism.

TMoRA is a great (if apparently plagiarised) twist attached to a dull book - so many of her others are smarter, funnier, more engagingly odd. I’m not sure why it gets mentioned so often.

I'd be interested to hear why you don't rate Edmund Crispin, Fizzles, I really enjoyed the few Gervase (not Gideon!) Fen books I have read, though Fen himself is something of a "Wimsey as Oxford Don" cipher.