Connie Willis talks BLACKOUT! (Part 7)

Connie Willis responds to some of your comments about BLACKOUT, and muses some more on the great mystery writers.
(Read earlier dispatches from Connie Willis here)

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading these blog entries, and especially for all your comments and questions. I’ll see if I can respond to a few of them now.
Holly: Yes, I love Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. One of my favorite books is GOOD OMENS.
Shawm Kreitzman: I’m sorry about the reference to the tube station attacks being in 2005. (It and other mistakes are being corrected when a new edition comes out.) The date was a typo that somehow got overlooked. I was actually in London two days after the attacks, and our hotel was very close to Russell Square Station, which was still closed. We had to use St. Pancras, which was full of guards, and to get there we had to go past Tavistock Square, where the bus had been blown up. Everyone we met was “keeping calm and carrying on,” just like they had in the Blitz.
Claire Baxter: As to the reference to E.C. Benson, sorry. I was referring to E.F. Benson, who wrote the MAPP AND LUCIA novels, not E.F. Bentley, though I loved TRENT’S LAST CASE. I, too, read it because of Dorothy Sayers. She’s one of my favorite authors, along with Agatha Christie.
They do very different things–Dorothy’s writing comedies of manners, and you read the books less for their mystery plots than for the pleasure of listening to Lord Peter and Harriet talk “piffle,” and Agatha’s trying to kill you, or at least infuriate you because you should have seen the ending coming. When THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD came out, S.S. Van Dine was so furious that he made a list of rules for mystery writers–rules like, “The narrator shall not have a love interest,” and “Only one person can commit the murder,” and “The murder has to BE a murder and not a suicide or natural causes.” Now, I can’t prove this, but I’d swear Agatha took this list, stuck it up above her desk, and proceeded to work her way down it, figuring out a way to break every single one of the rules, while still playing fair, as she always does.
Other mystery writers of that era I also like are Margery Allingham (THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE) and Michael Innes (DEATH AT THE PRESIDENT’S LODGING.) He set a bunch of his novels at Oxford, as did Edmund Crispin, whose Gervase Fen novels feature an absent-minded professor, though my first contact with Crispin was through science fiction, where he was the editor of a lot of great anthologies, including the BEST SF series.
I also like C.P. Snow’s novels about Oxford, especially THE SEARCH. They’re not mysteries, though you often think the characters are going to kill each other as they go about choosing a new head for the college, and, as I recall, the arguments in one of them were what led Dorothy Sayers to write GAUDY NIGHT. My favorite thing about Snow is that, unlike most Londoners who calmly went about their business during the Blitz, he admits to being absolutely terrified, not by the prospect of being killed, but because he was convinced England was going to lose the war. And he was in a position to know England’s chances better than anyone–he was a scientific advisor to the government. His writing always seems so calm and rational–it’s comforting to know he was scared to death.
Now, as to Benson and the MAPP AND LUCIA books. They’re the ongoing story of two women competing for social supremacy in a small English town in the 1930s, written as if they were an account of the Napoleonic Wars, only with dresses, bridge parties, and amateur theatrics as weapons. They’re absolutely hilarious, and I’ve never met anyone who’s read them who didn’t think they were delightful.
I first discovered them through the BBC series, MAPP AND LUCIA, starring Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan–is there anyone else out there who finds new books by reading the credits of movies and TV series? The series is very good, but the books are even better. There are six of them, beginning with QUEEN LUCIA, and after I read it, I vowed to space them out so I’d always have the pleasure of a new one to look forward to rather than reading all of them at one go, as I had the JEEVES AND WOOSTER books. Then I immediately sat down and read the other five straight through. Luckily, he also wrote a slew of other books, and I’m trying to be good on those.
I’d love to hear what other mystery writers and other writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties you like and why. And thanks for reading BLACKOUT!
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Connie Willis