Skip to main content

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements



  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include: 
  The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford. The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.  The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric. 





  Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded, simpering flounce reminded them of the girls back home. Florence King never became a Southern Lady, let alone a Belle, but her grandmother's failed efforts to make her one (she never convinced her to become so delicate in her nether regions that her womb might potentially fall out, like the sky on Chicken-Licken's head) are tremendously funny. 




  Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. I'm always beguiled by the exactitude of this novel. I see it as a fairy story - Cinderella and The Fisherman and his Wife - find the Crawfords deeply erotic, Mrs Norris horrifying.  In my more recent re-readings I've stopped heckling Fanny Price. She's not well in her head.  





  A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie. The clues in this one always have me grinning. Watch for the gender of names, use of diminutives and alternate spellings of a word. The most obvious clue to the murderer's identity is presented again and again but I've yet to hear from anyone that has grasped its significance at first reading.
  Incidentally, the lesbian couple, Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd, are described with neither prejudice nor special pleading. In a complaint email to ITV I cited them, along with Mr Pye (The Moving Finger), Clotilde Bradbury-Scott (Nemesis) and 'my queer house-sitter' (A Caribbean Mystery) as evidence that Christie does not need ITV's LGBT character transplants... 
  'Reworking the plot of The Body in the Library as you did recently, you managed to jettison one of the great joys of a Miss Marple: that moment when she gasps, says she's been so terribly, terribly stupid and sends Gladys/Cherry/Edith, or whichever maid is working for her at the time, to fetch Inch, the local taxi driver. We know she's going to London, to Somerset House, and are now on the lookout for someone in the novel being secretly married to someone else, or being their parent, child or sibling. As I say, it's one of the joys of a Miss Marple. And you ruined it.'
  Lesbifying Dame Agatha's denouements indeed!  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I've been going for tr

Where Babies Come From...

Haberdashery Girls... An excerpt from my forthcoming book of interviews:   Where Babies Come From. I asked people, ‘How were you told the facts of life?’ And, ‘What information were you given?’ Here is Belinda, who used to be an escort.  She is now in her eighties. My sister read about Dutch caps.  We looked at Old Masters paintings and wondered how having those funny big white hats on their heads would stop women getting pregnant. In British Guiana, we had native servants who would do the deed al fresco au natural.  From the age of five, I was playing 'sex' with my dolls.  They’d have their dolls’ tea party, a recitation lesson, then I’d have them mount each other. When we came back to England, I had a nanny.   Katrin was fresh from the convent. She was all mummy could get for me.  I expect it was a time of general strikes.  Mummy would send Katrin for breaks back to the convent meanwhile sending me for remedial elocution.  This would happen when I’d said one too many ‘tinks’,