The most unexpected way in which the past few months have affected my reading is that it is completely dominated by whim and obsession. There’s no discipline any more and no urge to read anything even remotely demanding. If I want to read something, I REALLY want to read it and I want to read it right now and then I want to read EVERYTHING like it. I have completely eschewed the literary equivalent of a wholesome balanced diet in favour of stuffing my face with chocolates. I owe two reviews and Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week looms and I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing.
(June will be the Month of Responsibility.)
(Felix Vallotton, A Woman Reading, 1922; oil on canvas, private collection; found here)
So, first there was the Frances Hardinge obsession. Then the Diana Wynne Jones. Then the Dorothy L. Sayers. (Actually, that is continuing, I just ran out of her work and so am awaiting three more at the point of whose arrival the obsession will resume.) And then I saw my copy of Joan Smith’s A Masculine Ending, which I bought about twenty years ago in a charity shop and quite liked. Suddenly, it was the ONLY book in the house I wanted to read. And then I wanted to read ALL the rest of the books in the series, so I ordered them and read them in less than two days.
Joan Smith is a respected British journalist and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she published a series of five ‘detective’ novels featuring a lecturer in English literature at London University, Loretta Lawson. I’ll list them all, not least because the titles are so good:
- A Masculine Ending (1987)
- Why Aren’t They Screaming? (1988)
- Don’t Leave Me This Way (1990)
- What Men Say (1993)
- Full Stop (1995)
I freely admit that for me much of their appeal is nostalgia. They cover the years of my late teens and early twenties, and during that time I studied English literature at university and went on to live in London for a while (as Loretta does). Detective novels are often concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, what people were doing and when, and so are full of reminders of things we did and technology we used. Smith’s novels focus very intensely on a few days and there is plenty of minutiae to please. Loretta sends faxes and uses answerphones, word processors and floppy disks – upgrading to a laptop in the last novel. There are a few fashion moments – a shocking pink handbag, a tube skirt, harem pants. There’s fresh pasta from the deli and Habitat sofas. There’s a sobering reminder of the casual sexism that still abounded at the time. And there’s plenty of politics: Why Aren’t They Screaming? is set around a women’s protest at a US air base similar though smaller to Greenham Common, the academics in What Men Say scoff about the government’s cutbacks to education and insistence on courses’ ‘relevance’.
But politics is not just a surface issue to the novels. As a series, they examine the often brutal nature of the power imbalance between men and women. Most significantly, they demonstrate how men’s potential for violence impacts women’s behaviour (and, in some cases, ability to live) while women’s concerns are easily dismissed as hysterical or unimportant. Against the macho world of the police forces she has to deal with and the rarefied sexism of some academics, Loretta strives to live a feminist life. She remains on good terms with her ex-husband, John (conveniently for many of the plots, he is a journalist), although he is convinced that their marriage was destroyed by Loretta’s joining a women’s group. She is loyal to her friends, most notably Bridget, a lecturer at Oxford University whose own late marriage and high-risk pregnancy are the focus of What Men Say. In A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way it’s her over-developed sense of guilt – a very female trait, Smith implicitly suggests – which spur her on to investigate.
The final and probably the best novel, Full Stop, finds Loretta staying in a friend’s apartment in an oppressively humid New York. She starts receiving obscene telephone calls. Gradually, her judgement is undermined. Is she being followed? Can she trust the police? Was the man in the theatre just being friendly or did he have another motive? She even starts to distrust her ex-husband. How can you navigate the world in this state of constant suspicion and alertness – and yet, how can you not? The discombobulation of being in a slightly alien culture adds to the sense of menace.
Smith is pretty meta in her approach and plays around a bit with the conventions of detective novels. Her heroine is not a detective (although this is nothing new in the genre) and not always very good at detecting. Still, the identity of the murderer is usually pretty clear and Smith isn’t interested in sudden twists – outwitting the reader is not her aim here. Every novel denies the reader a comfortable ending. The guilty often profit from their crimes; sometimes, the innocent are imprisoned.
Crime fiction is not really perceived as ‘women’s fiction’ and yet some of its greatest practitioners have been women. Perhaps, Loretta suggests, that is why it is looked down upon. In Don’t Leave Me This Way one of her lovers, Robert, sneers when she tells him she’s going to set up a course on female crime writers: he doesn’t believe that Agatha Christie is a fit subject for academic study (now that dates the novel! Things have moved on a lot since then). Later, she discusses the writers she’ll include on the course with a colleague:
‘[...] If it’s Americans you’re after, how about Sara Paretsky?’
‘I’ve got her. She’s wonderful.’
‘Amanda Cross?’
‘Oh, maybe.’ The conversation was having a calming effect on Loretta, and she elaborated. ‘I’m not so sure about academic mysteries. I tried one by Joan Smith the other day and she got all the details wrong...’
Guffaw. These novels aren’t great forgotten masterpieces, though I miss the characters, but I can only say that they hit the spot for me and if you see them, try them.