I’ve recently been indexing my upcoming book (Allusion in Detective Fiction: Shakespeare, the Bible and Dorothy L. Sayers, since you ask), an experience which I found, to quote Niles Crane being taught the box-step by Daphne Moon, “boring, yet difficult”. I say this shamefacedly, since I know there are numerous indexers around who would do it incomparably better and enjoy the process, but there’s no help for it now. Indexing does have its moments of interest, even for someone as bad as it as I am, not least in the way it highlights the appearance of texts or ideas across a book. I hadn’t noticed, for example, that John Betjeman appears twice in my book, once because of a satirical article he wrote in a student magazine about the Oxford Examination in Holy Scripture, and once because a 1990s detective novel shows a potential influence of his poem “Slough”.
Two other Johns came to my notice whilst compiling the index: John Milton and John Donne. Not perhaps entirely unexpected, given that a lot of the book deals with the work of Dorothy L. Sayers inveterate Donne-quoter and Milton-wrangler (recall Miss Climpson reporting that Milton’s account of gender in Paradise Lost was not congruent with sound Catholic doctrine?) Nonetheless, it was interesting to see them popping up in different parts of the book. The same is definitely true of E.F. Benson, whose Mapp and Lucia novels seem to have been a fellow-traveller of detective fiction from the 1920s to the 1990s and beyond. There is certainly something to be written at some point about how the Mapp and Lucia books, though not crime fiction themselves, accompany and influence the genre through the decades. Even, perhaps, on how the latest TV adaptation of the novels is in dialogue with adaptations of Golden Age crime fiction and its pastiches. (In writing that, one should not neglect Miss Phryne Fisher. It is never safe to neglect Miss Phryne Fisher.)
But more to the purpose, I also noticed how many books I had quoted, mentioned, discussed or brought in to develop an argument, from one particular publisher. Dean Street Press calls itself a publisher devoted to “uncovering and revitalizing good books”, a quest declaration which is rather charmingly humble and dramatic at the same time. They publish a range of books, clustering around the mid twentieth century. They have been a major part of my reading life for about seven years now, ever since I bought their edition of Ursula Orange’s Begin Again (and reread it at least once a year since.)
Their books are splendidly produced and designed, especially those in the “Furrowed Middlebrow” imprint. The fact that several of them have paintings by Eric Ravilious on the cover gives a more accurate sense of their aesthetic than any description I can give. They’ve also managed to hit a sweet spot in the market: at ten or twelve quid for a gorgeous paperback they’re a lovely gift or treat, or you can have the ebook for no more than a few quid. Discussing pricing might sound a little cynical as a point about books, but it really makes a difference. At the paperback price you can give a copy of an especially loved book to a friend, but at the ebook price you can afford to take a risk on one which you’re not sure if you’ll like.
Being able to browse through their catalogue, and take those risks, has opened up a whole new realm of writing for me. In my latest book I quote from Anne Morice’s Death in the Grand Manor whilst discussing the changes in Shakespearean and Biblical allusion from the mid-twentieth century to the later decades. Whilst analyzing Agatha Christie’s depiction of the sermons of rural vicars, I cite a passage from Elizabeth Fair’s Landscape in Sunlight, to show how Christie’s attitudes were shared by other writers. In tracing the intricate ways in which later detective novelists borrowed from Dorothy L. Sayers, I highlight the curious appearance of the word “orgy” in Susan Scarlett’s Murder While You Work. This, naturally involves explaining that Susan Scarlett was the pseudonym under which Noel Streatfeild wrote romance novels, and commenting on the tricky genre line which Scarlett/ Streatfeild has to walk in Murder While You Work, and how that novel is different from the same author’s Babbacombe’s and Clothes Pegs. (Regretfully, I had to cut the discussion of Ursula Orange’s Begin Again and the way it shows the influence of Sayers’ work. But I will get that into print somewhere…)
These aren’t the main focus of the study, but I was struck by how often I was writing “Dean Street” and “Furrowed Middlebrow” in the footnotes. It made me notice how I had “reached for” these books mentally whilst working on Christie and Sayers, and how much they provided of my feel for the era and its writing. From a scholarly point of view, Alison Light’s Forever England and Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel provided a lot of the critical scaffolding within which I discuss them, but Dean Street and Furrowed Middlebrow provide my experience of the books.
Without them I would have had to read these books in an academic library, having called a copy up from the stacks (or on an interlibrary loan from elsewhere), with a notebook at hand to jot down any telling points. Or, and this is much more likely, I would imply never have read them. I wouldn’t have taken the trouble and expense to get hold of them, I wouldn’t have been able to “risk” the money or the time of my working life to read them, and I certainly would not have become accustomed to reading them in odd quarter-hours. I am extremely grateful to the university librarians in Dublin, who arranged for me to read a copy of a rare and un-republished Gladys Mitchell novel, which was crucial for a chapter of my minigraph Witchcraft and Pagnism in British Women’s Detective Fiction. But that novel never had to chance to become part of my mental furniture in the way the work of Elizabeth Fair (amongst others) has, thanks to Dean Street and Furrowed Middlebrow.
There are other ideas, and other scholarly arguments, which I’m pretty sure I shall call upon my Dean Street collection to develop. Probing the Gothic swirl of writing which draws on Jane Eyre in the British midcentury will involve rereading Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie and Jean Rhys, but it will also involve discussing D.E. Stevenson’s Rochester’s Wife and making a tenuous (but passionate) argument about the company fancy-dress ball in Susan Scarlett’s Babbacombe’s). It is no accident that the heroine of that novel goes as a Puritan and her cousin goes as a maenad, but that accident only makes real sense through the lens of a midcentury writing culture soaked in Jane Eyre. (However, I am now straying into that territory of the tenuous but passionate…) My noticing that connection is an accident, though, and one which only happened because I was able to explore Scarlett’s writing at my leisure.
I’m writing as if the major value of publishing these books was to provide mildly obscure points in literary history, which is certainly not the case. There is enormous value in allowing people to read these books in attractive and affordable editions. It opens up whole swathes of writing, and therefore of thought and feeling, which simply weren’t available to the casual (or the besotted) reader before. (The same is true, in their different niche, for publishers like Joffe, or Persephone, or Grey Ladies.) It allows us to enjoy some classics more, when we appreciate more about the world in which E.F. Benson, or Angela Thirkell, or the “Provincial Lady”, were writing.
There’s also the side-effect value, especially in this kind of fiction, of become more attuned to how people lived a few generations ago. So much of our contemporary discussions of culture, politics and ethics declares (implicitly or explicitly), that until about twenty years ago, everybody thought X. Or, alternatively, that no-one has ever thought X. Or, with one twist of refinement, that all people who have ever thought X have behaved in Y way. I may be indulging in special pleading, but I do wonder if a cultural marketplace in which more people have been able, cheaply and enjoyable, to immerse themselves in the popular reading of eighty years ago, might be a healthier one. If only because it would contain more people inoculated against being told what everyone thought back then, and thus (whether for or against) what everyone should think now. It won’t change the political tide. But it might make some of the chattering classes (of whom I clearly a member) slightly less liable to being hoodwinked in their chattering.
But this, of course, is a side-effect, and thankfully I cannot imagine anyone setting out to read Dean Street books in order to improve the ideological complexion of their society. I am much surer that they have done me good, by providing hours, days, weeks of absorption and enjoyment. They have stocked my mind with books I never would have read, and tuned my hazy literary intuitions to tones and rhythms which I would not have known about. I have read them by the boating lake with an empty sandwich packet tucked under my knee to stop it blowing away, I have read them in the bath whilst debating whether to get out or put more hot water in and stay here another quarter of an hour, I have read them in the garden whilst the lilac branches held the drizzle at bay. So here’s to Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow with a gratitude most fervent, but not so vigorous as to topple over the pile of to-be-reads.
quiteirregular 