The mystery as novel of manners

National Review, Jan 20, 1992 by Linda Bridges

Point because it reminded them of Juanles-Pins.

Dorothys Sayers - who put in her time as an advertising copywriter - has Lord Peter Wimsey wonder,

If all the advertising in the world were to

shut down tomorrow, would people still

go on buying more soap, eating more apples,

giving their children more vitamins,

roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters, and

laxatives, learning more languages by

gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by

radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing

themselves with more non-alcoholic

thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing

dishes, affording themselves

that little extra touch which means so

much? Or would the whole desperate

whirligig slow down, and the exhausted

public relapse upon plain grub and

elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all

rich men,... he had never realized the

enormous commercial importance of the

comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy,

who buy only what when they

want it, was the vast superstructure of

industry founded and build up, but on

those who, aching for a luxury beyond

their reach and for a leisure forever denied

them, could be bullied or wheedled

into spending their few hardly won shillings

on whatever might give them, if

only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious

illusion.

As in Dickens or Trollope, social comment often has political implications. Dickens's Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is more resonant than any newspaper editorial on courtroom delay, as we meet the people whose substance is wasted unto the third generation. Here is an Erle Stanley Gardner character on a later court's unreliability (written, by the way, in 1942 - before Earl Warren, but after FDR's Court-packing scheme):

"You can't tell what the Supreme Court

is going to do."

"Don't they allow regular rules?"

I said, "They used to be bound by precedents.

On those matters, we knew what

the law was. Now they're changing those

old decisions. That throws the whole list

out, because you can't tell which ones

they'll change and which ones they'll let

stand."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"It may be good, or it may be bad. It's

a condition. We've had a shakeup in the

law. Eventually these new judges will get

the law changed around to suit their

ideas. Then lawyers will know pretty

generally how to advise clients. In the

meantime there's a lot of guessing."

Nicholas Blake had some standing to write about poets and poetry: in his other life he was C. Day Lewis, and his detective, Nigel Strangeways, is recognizably modeled on W. H. Auden (even as John Dickson Carr's Gideon Fell is modeled on G. K. Chesterton). In Head of a Traveler he has a poet, whose house is covered with roses - "Drifts and swirls and swags of them. A cataleptic trance of white and yellow roses" - enlarge on the Sleeping Beauty theme:

"The Sleeping Beauty. Yes," he said

musingly. "And the thicket of thorns.

Yes. But have you thought ... have you

though what really kept her there? Not

the thorns, but the roses. She was the

prisoner of her own beauty, of her parents'

determination that she should be

invulnerable and never allowed to meet

her fate. The Queen took away all the