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Snobbery with Violence

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years ago

Watson -- Snobbery with Violence -- Cover

Watson, Colin - Snobbery with Violence (1971)

 

As an author and journalist Watson brought a well-informed mind and a good deal of personal experience to this survey of twentieth-century crime fiction. The earlier chapters cover the logistic and economic aspects of distributing pulp fiction to the ever-growing number of literate Britons during the early decades of the century: later chapters focus on particular authors and the ways in which they catered to the public tastes.

 

Without formal references it is hard to know how accurate the book is, but some of the more startling statistics have stuck in my mind from an earlier reading many years ago: the days when one in four books sold in Britain was by Edgar Wallace; the unimaginable fortunes to be made by productive authors like Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim. The chapters covering GAD writers are less dramatic, and much of the material they contain has been reworked before or since, but Watson covers the ground with wit and style. His analysis of Agatha Christie in particular foreshadows the recognition of her genius later made by Robert Barnard.

 

A couple of minor quibbles: Watson claims that Wallace's male detectives are eternal bachelors, when in fact many of them do marry the heroine at the end of the book. And there is an occasional comment which suggests that Watson sees the puzzle plot as a lower form of literature than his own. He writes, for instance, of the red herring being 'discredited': but entertainment can never be discredited, it can only go out of fashion, and the right person may be just as entertained by a red herring in 2007 as in 1927.

 

In fact Watson's view of the decline in puzzle plot popularity seems to be based on ridicule: so many people laughed at and sent up the conventions of GAD writing that its fans became too embarrassed to read it. There may be an element of truth here, but surely this can't be the whole story?

 

The book finishes with a chapter on James Bond, whom Watson regards as the pinnacle of cynical depravity in popular writing. It's hard to imagine what he would have had to say today about American Psycho and Hannibal Lec

ter, but I'm sure it wouldn't have been very polite.

 

Well worth reading for entertainment and background.

 

Jon.

 

From the back of the paperback edition of 1987:

 

From the author of the celebrated 'Flaxborough' novels comes this entertaining and witty account of English crime fiction and its reading public. With characteristically understated irony, Colin Watson examines the social attitudes reflected in the detective story and the thriller from Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace to Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. Originally published in 1971, Snobbery with Violence has become a classic of literary and social history. As H.R.F. Keating says in his preface, 'There have been academic studies of popular fiction in much of this field since . . . but none supersedes this book, and certainly none can be read with anything like as much ease and pleasure. My way through it . .. was littered with snorts of laughter and giggles of delight.'

 

'Here, as elsewhere, Watson's writing has a polished ease rarely met in the field of crime writing.' The Times

 

Contents:

Introduction

1 • 'So many yards of stuff", sensation pattern'

2 • Mr Smith, Mr Boot and others

3 • A very decent sort of burglar

4 • De rigueur at Monte

5 • The Bulldog breed

6 • King Edgar, and how he got his crown

7 • Excitable Sydney Horler

8 • The Golden Age of detective fiction

9 • The Orientation of villainy

10 • Amid the alien corn

11 • Below stairs

12 • Girls who kept cool

13 • The little world of Mayhem Parva

14 • Gifted amateurs

15 • Smart but not arty

16 • Driving like hell

17 • 'With thy quire of Saints for evermore . . .'

18 • Licence to kill

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