Hildegarde

I do think it’s interesting, the extent to which things I think are plain and obvious are really not–or at least are interpreted entirely differently by different people.

By “voluntary poverty” I didn’t mean people who never hold a job or don’t get an education.

I meant people like monks and nuns in monasteries, people who consciously give up material things on the assumption that such material things are in and of themselves bad or wrong to have.

This could be simply a matter of forgoing material wealth in pursuit of a higher ideal, but what interests me is the fact that we as a culture tend to accord respect to the very fact of the voluntary poverty itself.  We don’t ask if the ideal is a good thing.   We are impressed with the sheer self denial.

And I do know the Christian rationale for that sort of voluntary poverty, and for the idea that we should all be stripping ourselves down to the bare necessities in order to give everything we have to the poor.

Peter Singer makes much the same demand in his articles and essays on Western affluence and third world poverty.  We should all forgo everything but the absolutely bare necessities and then send everything we make over that to the poor.

My problem with that–in either the Christian or the secular version–is that it wouldn’t actually alleviate poverty, or at least it wouldn’t for long. 

The wealth the West has has by and large not been produced by taking from the third world in a zero-sum game.  Everybody in all Western countries–and in all countries that trade with Western countries–is richer today than they were a hundred years ago.  We’re significantly richer now than we were in my childhood.

This has happened because we have erected a huge and complicated and interconnected economy in which every part is at least somewhat dependenton every other part. 

If everybody forwent going out to dinner–evento McDonald’s–or buying electronic toys or fancy cars, the result would not be lots of money left free to donate to charity, but mass unemployment across the industrialized world.

And mass unemployment would lead to the collapse of the economy and the restriction of any money at all to feed anybody else’s poor.

It is, I think, the classic example of the usefulness of Kant’s directive that if you want to know if any action you wish to perform is truly moral, you should investigate what would happen if that action became a moral law that everybody was expected to follow.

I put that badly.  With any luck, I was clear.

The idea is so thoroughly dysfunctional, though, that it makes me wonder why anybody ever thought of it at all. 

I suppose we could excuse the early Christian Church because it would have been less obvious what would happen if the ideal had been reached–and possibly less would actually have happened.  Agricultural societies depend less on getting and spending for their economic health than industrial societies do.

Peter Singer has less excuse.  He’s supposed to be a philosopher.  Theoretically, that should mean he’s good at thinking.   It shouldn’t take that much thinking to realize what a mess you’d make if you could get people to actually follow your  moral rules.

Of course, Singer would probably say that his rule makes sense because the vast majority of people will never follow it, and therefore we do not have to worry about the world’s economy falling apart.

But I don’t think that answers the question.   A moral law is a precept all human beings must follow in order to be good human beings.  A moral law that is viable only if people don’t follow it is a contradiction in terms.

Which brings me to the question of why the rule exists at all.  The very earliest Christians seem to have thought that the Second Coming was close, at most a generation or two away.   Given that short a time frame, the idea that you should walk away from all your possessions made more common sense than it seems to now.

But Singer doesn’t believe in the Second Coming on any level. 

The underlying assumption in Singer’s case seems to be that there is no such thing as wealth honestly earned, that every one of us has what we have by accident, and that such accidents, being mere matters of luck, are not “fair,” and not being fair, are not justifiable.

Ayn Rand would have said that the point of such a system of thought is to make us all feel guilty, all the time, every day. 

And that the point of that would be that, well, guilt has its uses.

But if I look around me at the people I know now who take this particular attitude, they don’t seem to feel particularly guilty. 

In fact, if anything, they seem quite the opposite.  The modern equivalent, after all, is the self-conscious display of using only the “right” products, the ones that don’t harm the earth or exploit the indigenous peoples of South America. 

And if you’ve ever run into one of those–well, one of the “out” ones of those;  I do know some people who do this kind of thing without making it the foundation for endless self display–

But you know what I mean, and you know who you mean. 

I still find this all very odd, both in its Christian versions and in its modern ones. 

But right now, I want tea.

I’m having a kind of odd day.  After a long time when I’ve had much too much to do, I suddenly have nothing at all to do, at least not on anybody else’s schedule but my own. 

In general it’s nice to have days like this, but this particular day feels like a too-short breather at the beginning of what’s going to be a really long, drawn-out pain in the butt.  If you know what I mean.

And I’m trying to write a publications list that will be accurate and complete, which is harder than you’d think.  I’ve written a lot of different things over a very long period of time.  I don’t even remember all of them. 

This is why there are graduate students.  Except, of course, that I’m pretty sure there are no graduate students devoting their time to me.

At any rate, it’s a kind of weird floaty day, and I’m still reading Augustine.

Which brings me to my puzzle for the day:  why is it that it has ever been the case that people considered themselves more virtuous, and other people more virtuous, because they went without ordinary human comforts?

We’re so used to the idea that there is something virtuous about poverty–or at least voluntary poverty–that it feels a little strange to ask why that should be so.

And yet the answer is nowhere near obvious. 

For one thing, I can’t think of a society anywhere–and certainly no particular society in the West, ever–where poverty has been hailed as a virtue in and of itself. 

In general, we don’t like poor people, and we tend to feel contempt for ourselves and other people if we/they are poor.  Certainly in the United States today, the assumption is that the poor have something wrong with them.  Either they are the unfortunate victims of circumstance–the homeless mentally ill, for instance, or the severely physically disabled–or they are useless reprobates, people who don’t do any work, or who get themselves addicted to drugs and alcohol, or who just won’t finish school and act like grown ups.

Once of the consequences of modernity–of a world in which life is infinitely more stable than it was in, say the Rome of antiquity or the Europe of the Middle Ages–is that we feel that, for most people, poverty or prosperity is a matter of choice.

We feel this way whether we are conservative or liberals.  Conservatives think poor people are responsible for being poor and therefore need tough love.  Giving them welfare payments and food stamps only makes it possible for them to enjoy their poverty and not bother to seek ways out of it.  Liberals think poor people are addled.  They’re too stupid to know how to run their own lives, which is probably “society’s” fault, but whatever it is, they’re to be treated like children rather than adults.  Whatever caused it, they’re now either intellectually or psychologically defective.

And yet the notion persists that there is something wrong with being not-poor, something wrong with enjoying the things of this world and the comforts and the pleasures they can bring.

In a way, this idea made some sense in a world that was far more random and unstable than the one we live in now.   In Augustine’s time, Rome was subject to wave after wave of invaders.  You could live a very nice life for decades, only to see it wiped out in an instant, without warning, because the barbarians decided to invade.

But even your very nice life couldn’t be counted on very far or for very long.  Even if the barbarians didn’t invade, you could have other things to worry about.  In a world without antibiotics, women died in childbirth routinely, even small infections could kill you in a day or two, and the very food you ate was a lurking danger.

Some part of the ancient injunctions to abjure the things of this world must have come from the simple fact that you couldn’t count on them.  Death was not just inevitable but likely to be unexpected and possibly soon.  Destruction of other kinds was equally unpredictable, and happened often.

In a way, the counsel of modern philosophers like Paul Kurtz, that men and women should find the “meaning” in their lives by concentrating on the wonder and joy to be had in this life in this world is a modern luxury, born of modern wealth and modern stability. 

The project only looks plausible because we feel secure in the lives we lead.  We do not expect to die young, and we do not expect to lose everything on the whim of an invader or the collapse of a civilization.  Life, we are convinced, does not work like that any more.   We find meaning in the future because we believe we can count on having one.

You can see where the fault lines are in this idea of the meaning of life by comparing the writings of somebody like Kurtz and the writings of the ancient philosophical school he and philosophers like him claim to admire:  the Epicureans.

Certainly the Epicureans believed that the meaning of life was to be found in the enjoyment of it, but they defined “enjoyment” much differently than modern men and women do.  It had a lot less to do with feeling good than with an iron self control, meant to put each man firmly in control of his passions, his desires and his habits. 

The Epicureans never lost the sense that the world was a dangerous place, violent, vicious, dangerous and unpredictable.   Kurtz seems to think of it as a Club Med vacation, if only we’d stop worrying all the time about what it all means.

And there is also, of course, the fact that there is something about too much  money, and too much stuff, that makes people–off, somehow. 

Not all people, of course, and not everywhere–but still, there is something. 

These days we would probabaly say that acquisitiveness is “addictive,” but I think what it really is is easy.  It’s a little like what happens to so many really beautiful girls.  Almost any real achievement requires hard work and at least some sacrifice.  It requires self control and dedication.  Why bother with any of that if you don’t have to? 

None of us really has much use for people who spend all their time talking about how much money they spent or what their clothes cost.  There is something superficial and annoying about this.  We think these people are not worth much on any other criterion besides money,  and no matter how much some of us may suck up to them, we don’t respect them.

The idea that voluntary poverty is a virtue, however–that not  having things makes you a better person than having them–is much more complicated than that, and much less easy to understand.

Granted there is something intrinsically idiotic about caring passionately about whether you’ll change five-figure ball gowns midway through your debut, it’s less clear why you are a better person for forgoing a good mattress and box spring to sleep on a board, or for living in a fifth floor walk up instead of a four bedroom/two bath in the suburbs.

Some of this, of course, is just moral exhibitionism–especially these days.  Augustine and his fellow bishops often gave up significant fortunes to enter the church, depriving themselves of all worldly goods in order to emulate Christ in his poverty.

These days, people preening themselves on their poverty relative to those evil, greedy, jerks in Scarsdale sometimes spend more on their self-conscious non-acquisitiveness than it would have cost them to acquire serious real estate. 

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you check out the world of eco-vacations, where it will set you back ten to fifteen thousand dollars to spend two weeks being miserable in the rain forest.   Spend five thousand more and the tour company will supply air conditioned tents.

But even with all that, I am left with the original question: why should be a mark of virtue to voluntarily have less money than other people?

Of course it’s a mark of virtue not to think about material things all the time or waste your life chasing after ephemeral “stuff” that you’ll throw out before you use it.  Of course it’s a mark of virtue not to lie or cheat or steal or violate your integrity for money. 

But it makes no sense to me whatsoever that just doing without what you could have, honestly earned, is better than having it.

So, things are actually fairly calm here this morning.  There’s been all kinds of weather lately, and then my mother has been ill.  It’s hard to know, at her age, what you’re looking at when people tell you that she has this infection or that.  Something that would mean not much of anything for me or one of the boys is a very big deal for her. 

But things seem to be improving, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

We’re also at the stage where the “medical professionals”–the scare quotes exist because we’re not talking only about doctors and nurses these days.  We’ve also got social workers, hospice workers, “end of life counselors” and a whole array of other people who seem to think they have the right and the duty to sit in for the kind of thing you would have, in other days, talked over for yourself or discussed with a priest.

My general feeling that social work and clinical psychology have become a rival or substitute religion to the older stuff has been mightily supported by the evidence.  What these people hand out has nothing to do with “science” and everything to do with attempting to mold emotions into what they’ve been taught is “appropriate.”

And like true believers everywhere, they have no idea how enormously offensive they’re being, or how intrusive.  It seems to be an axiom of the profession that expressing your grief–even (or maybe especially) to total strangers–and avoiding pain are the two great goals of the “end of life process.”

Politicians yap about “privacy” when all they’re talking about is the government checking into the book buying habits of suspected terrorists–and I get that.  I’m opposed to the government checking into the book buying habits of anyone.

But the real assault on privacy comes with the fact that it is impossible to get rid of these people, and impossible to get these people to treat you like an actual human being.

Their idea of “respect” for your “culture” is, well–just that.  It’s treating a lifetime of commitment to an idea as if it were just another irrational emotion like any other irrational emotion, to be humored rather than understood, respected, or even opposed.  Opposition would work better than this, because opposition would mean we both understood that the question mattered. 

It doesn’t help that most of these people seem to know as much about human beings as I do about carburetors, to use a comparison I’ve used before.

I’ll revert to my original contention that these sorts of “mental health professionals” would know more about how the human mind worked if they ditched the clinical psych courses and spent four to six years reading Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, Hemingway and, you know, what the hell, Barbara Cartland.

There’s a lot wrong with Barbara Cartland, but she had a pretty shrewd idea about how a great many women think.  Hell, Christie had a pretty shrewd idea of how lots of people think.

At any rate, the one thing I have to admit is that there has been no pressure, this time,  to put my mother out of her misery as if she were an ailing cat. 

I stress the “this time,” though, because as sure as God or evolution made little green apples, that line of argument will be back again any day now.   Along with not knowing much about how actual people actually work and not being able to even imagine any kind of intellectual commitment other than their own, these people tend to be totally flabbergasted by the idea that suffering is not always the worst thing that can happen to you. 

The idea that some people choose it just makes them think that the persons in question need therapy and counseling to rid them of their self-destructive addictions and raise their self esteem.

And I have responded to all of this by giving another whack at a translation of Augustine’s City of God, which I tend to think of as a great big mountain I have to climb someday, but that I almost never feel the need to get started on.

I’ve got one of those convoluted relationships with City of God.  I had to read a great deal of it, in Latin, in college and graduate school, but until a couple of years ago I was never able to find an unabridged edition of it.  I read a very abridged edition of it when I was in high school, published in paperback by Doubleday’s Anchor Books.  I didn’t realize at the time that it was abridged, or I wouldn’t have gone for it.

The edition I have now I got a few years ago when Amazon threw it up as a suggestion.  I went looking to see if it was the complete work or not, and I got a little nervous about the fact that it nowhere said that it was unabridged.

Then I looked at the product info and found that the edition was 1197 pages long, and I figured that if it was abridged, I might not want to know about it.

Anyway, the thing has been knocking around in my house and my luggage and my big totebag on and off for forever, and there was just something about all this talk about counseling for the “end of life process” that made me thing it would be a good idea.

For those of you who don’t know, Augustine wrote the book in the wake of a sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, to counter arguments that the conversion to Christianity was responsible for Rome’s defeat. 

What it really is is a long text, written in a hodgepodge of styles, about the nature of evil in the world and the way we should respond to it.  It is, of course, a Christian work and depends on Christian understandings of the reality of the world. 

If you’re used to thinking of Christianity as what you get when you tune into a broadcast by Joel Osteen or John Hagee, this will not be familiar to you.

The book is also written in short little sections, making it easy to pick up and put down, and wasn’t even conceived as a “book” at all, at least in the sense we think of books today.  

Back in the days before publishers and reviewers and the whole apparatus of modern publishing, writers wrote and passed their manuscripts around to be copied and loaned out and dispersed any way that could be had.   The imperative was to write something that everybody would want to read, because that was the only way your work was going to last at all.

Of course, by “everybody” here, what’s meant is the class of educated and literate people, which in the Rome of 410 amounted to probable only a percentage or two of the total population.

And Augustine is not necessarily the perfect thing for me to read when I’m in a mood like this.  When it comes to the great theologians of Catholic Christianity, I lean far closer to Aquinas.

But something I don’t agree with at all struck me, today, with the fact that the counselors and therapists I can’t seem to get rid of, who hover over my mother’s dying like buzzards, might be well served by being forced to read and confront Augustine, even when he’s being completely awful.

Augustine believed that the happiness of the saints in heaven would be increased by their contemplation of the torturous eternal pain of the souls in hell.

It’s the kind of thing that tells us a lot more about Augustine the man than it does about the religion he was committed to–and what it says about Augustine is not pretty.

But it is real. 

It’s not a very nice trait in men and women, but it does exist, and it exists on a wide scale throughout the ages.  We call it schadenfreude these days, and it’s everywhere we look, an inescapable part of the human personality. 

These idiots would probably call it a disorder.

So,  here’s the thing.

I’ve been trying to write this post for days, and for days I’ve been sort of drifting off away from it, as if my mind isn’t really on it.

It was actually supposed to be somthing fairly fun–I was going to call it Hercule Poirot Saves The World from Fascism, Communism, and the Chinese.

It concerned a book called The Big Four, which is one of the very few Agatha Christie Poirot novels I had never read before this year.  It was written in 1927, and it’s hard to explain and sound as if you’re serious. 

At any rate, it’s impossible to describe the thing without making a post full of spoilers, but I don’t really care, because there’s little to no chance that any of you are going to want to read it. 

It does, though, make me wonder about two things.

The first is–just how much leeway a writer has once he or she had become enormously popular.

This book was written in 1927, remember, so if people were going to be put off by it–and I really don’t know why nobody was–they would have done it at the beginning of Christie’s career, and not the end.

And yet nobody seems to have been, or, if they were, not for long.  Let me just point out that this is not a traditional Poirot number.  It doesn’t concern a murder per se, nor is it an exercise in detection in the way Poirot novels usually are.  It’s not the kind of thing where a regular reader might have gone, “okay, it’s week, but she’s been strong before, and maybe she just had an off year.”

It’s–well.  I’d have to go into all that, and I just don’ t have the energy.

But I do know that it has always been a truism in publishing that if a writer gets popular enough, he can get his laundry lists on the best seller lists. 

I have no idea if that’s true or not, or even if it used to be true and is less so now that we have instantaneous media. 

But if this thing made anybody’s best seller list, my guess is that the truism was at least, at one time, true.

The next thing concerns something that most writers will never have to deal with.  In fact, I’m not sure that anybody but Christie has ever had this kind of deal.

From what I’ve heard, the Christie estate has a quid pro quo for anybody who wants to publish Christie novels–publish one of them, or all of them, but if you don’t keep all of them in print, then none of them stay in print.

If  this is true–and I’ve got no reason to think it’s not, as the person who told it to me is in a position to know–I wonder if this is really a good idea.

I can see the point to it, in a way.  especially if your serious has a continuing story about its main characters–but the Poirots and the Marples really don’t, in any significant way.

And although I’d say that all the Marples were solid, the Poirots–well, the Poirots are saddled with The Big Four.

Okay.  I’ve got to spill it. 

I’m going back up to the top and changing the title of this post, and then I’ll get to it.

Here is the plot of The Big Four.

And remember, this was written in 1927.

The world is being plagued by wars and revolutions–such as the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

Innocent people think this is just a bad time, with everything in chaso, but no.

The world disturbances are being orchestrated by the four most vicious and powerful people in the world, The Big Four, whose goal is nothing short of world domination.

I am not making this up.  The book actually says that what they want is “world domination.”  In fact, Poirot himself says it.

The Big Four consist of a Chinese man (number one, and the brains of the outfit), a Frenchwoman (turns out to be a famous French scientist), an American (businessman, of course) and an unknown fourth, who is such a master of disguise that he can change into anything from a small rabbit to Andre the Giant without being detected by anybody, anywhere.

You think I’m kidding.

Part of the cover copy for the paperback I have reads like this:

“Hercule Poirot has had his share of intruders–yet none more peculiar than the emaciated stranger covered in mud who stumbles into the detective’s apartment, shouts half-crazed warnings about “the Big Four,” and dies.  But not before plunging Poirot into a crazy netherworld of international intrigue, secret weapons, kidnapped, physicists, underground laboratories, hairbreadth escapes, and an employee from a local insane asylum who’s all tooe ager to let the baffled Belgian in on the sinister secret of “the Big Four.”

I told you you thought I was kidding.

At any rate, what to say about this book.

At one point, Poirot and Hastings are captured by the evil Frenchwoman and her henchmen and about to be executed in an underground laboratory.  Poirot protests that in France, it is customary to allow a condemned man to have a last cigarette before he dies. The evil Frenchwoman gets Poirot’s cigarette case from his pocket, gives him a cigarette and starts to light it–

But  no!  Poirot doesn’t want a light.  The cigarette is not a cigarette at all, but a tiny blow pipe, already loaded with a curare-tipped dart, all so cleverly disguised that the evil Frenchwoman didn’t notice when she was putting it in Poirot’s mouth.

And now, the evil Frenchwoman is convined to have her henchmen untie Poirot, because of course, with several of them there and Poirot’s hands tied behind his back, there’s no possibility that they could have overpowered him before he had a chance to actually hit anything with the dart.

I mean…

I  mean…

Oh, never mind.  The whole thing is so silly it’s impossible to know what to do with it, and it’s not the first or even close to the last of silliness.

At one point, the mysterious Mister Four is disguising himself as a great chess master recently escaped from the new Bolshevik government. 

This man is forced to agree to a match with an American chess master–it would look suspicious if he continued to refuse–and, wham, in the middle of the match, the American chess master dies.

Why?

Because, in spite of being smart enough to have orchestrated the Bolshevik revolution (Lenin and Trotsky were mere puppets) and most of the labor unrest around the world, Number Four does not know how to play chess.

But that may be made up for by the murder method–so subtle that Scotland Yard could not detect it without the help of Poirot.

Scotland Yard thinks the American died of poison, but he was actually electrucuted as soon as he moved his chess piece onto the proper board square, whereupon a powerful jolt of electricity shot up out of the floor through his fingers and killed him instantaneously.

Apparently without making him do things like writhe and convulse or, you know, anything else common in electrocution.

And we’re still not halfway through the book.

The thing reads like one of those silent movie serials, or a really bad comic book.  There are so many plot holes, it’s impossible to know how to navigate the thing.

For instance, when the book opens, Hastings arrives in London (from South America) to find that Poirot has arranged to take a job in that same South America, one from which he never intends to return.

A scant few pages later, Poirot decides that the South American job offer was in fact just a plot by the Big Four to get him out of the country while they carried out a particularly nefarious plan, and he changes his mind and doesn’t go.

And that’s it.  No problem with the apartment–it’s still his.  Apparently, when he decided to move permanently to South America, he didn’t bother to do anything like get out of his lease or rent the place to new tenants. 

And on and on and on.

I haven’t finished it yet, although I’m close.  In spite of all the things that happen in it (I’m up to at least four murders), it’s very short, shorter than The Mysterious Affair at Styles or Murder on the Orient Express.

I have no idea what Christie thought she was doing when she wrote this thing. 

But I really wonder what the Christie estate thinks it’s doing by keeping it in print.

I know, I know.

I don’t post for days at a time, then it’s two or three in a single day.

But Cathy F posted this link

http://saundramitchell.com/blog/?p=4258

on FB, and it’s about books and money, and I wondered what people would think of it.

I don’t know anything at all about illegal downloads, and I don’t know where they come from or where people could get them to make them available.

And I make, well, okay, a lot more than this woman does, per book.

But if this holds for all novels out there, if there are a statistically proportional number of illegal downloads to actual sales…

Well…

It’s been an odd few days out here where I am.  We’ve been listening almost nonstop to weather reports threatening Armageddon, which means the grocery stores have been full of people fighting over the last bag of potato chips and loading up on things like sour cream and onion dip. 

If World War III ever happens, or the Second Coming ever arrives on earth, trust me, the people of New England will be hoarding potato chips and chocolate.

That being said, I’ve been trying really hard over the last few days not to comment on the shootings in Arizona, or on the issues arising out of it. 

Part of that has been simply that I feel as if I’ve declared my position on things like this a hundred times before.

Part of it is that I just don’t feel like getting yelled at.

But the time comes for everything, and the time has come for this.

Before I start, though, I’d like to point out that we have been having trouble with people wanting to COMMENT ON THE BLOG, who then get error messages and can’t actually post.

This is a systems problem having to do with new anti-spam software, and we’re trying to work out the kinks.

If you have this kind of problem, e-mail us and we’ll put you in manually.

And write your comments in an e-mail to yourself so that you can cut and post them later when we get you straightened out.  I’d like to see the blowback on this one.

So, let’s get to the two main questions.

First, did “toxic discourse” on talk radio and at Tea Party rallies cause this guy to shoot up Congresswoman Giffords and her associates?

No.

The man was obviously deeply mentally ill.  You could just as well say that he was motivated by his worship of Satan or his hatred of religion as he was by a hatred of government.

The man’s motivations were entirely biochemical, and if all the discourse in American politics had been unfailingly polite and moderate, he’d still have found a surface excuse to set him off.

The only possibility we have of protecting ourselves proactively from incidents like these is to strengthen the power of mental hospitals and mental health professionals to involuntarily commit people they think are dangerous.

And no, that is not something I would be willing to support.

Psychological is only a borderline science to begin with.  Clinical pyschology is not a science at all.  Giving “mental health professionals” more power to involuntarily commit people amounts to saying that we have the right to lock you up because some “expert” thinks you might commit a crime in the future–and, what’s more, to lock you up for an indeterminate time.

We went through all this in the Fifties, and found ourselves countenancing things like husbands getting their wives committed because the wives wanted divorces.  The courts quite rightly had enough by the mid-Sixties, and now the grounds on which we can involuntarily commit are very strictly construed.

I think we ought to keep them that was.  The DSM-whichever one it is now lists literally hundreds of “disorders,” many of which are only vaguely defined.   Handing over power to incarcerate on the basis of the “professional judgment” of people who think that people who get depressed when the weather is bad have some kind of “psychological disorder” is not something I want to risk.

So we get to second:  do we need to clamp down on “incendiary speech” and enforce “civil discourse” in our politics?

No.

Let me say this one more time, and get the usual howls of protest one more time:

Free speech is free speech.  It is not “responsible” speech  It is not “civil” speech.  It is not “accepting” speech.

Free speech is free.  It is saying what you want, whatever that is.  It is using whatever language you want.  It is taking any position you want, on whatever subject you want, using whatever language you want.

Before we go on with this, though, let me bring in one thing that always comes up in discussions about free speech.

Well, people say, speech isn’t completely free.  You aren’t allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater!

Actually, yes you are.  That comment–that you are not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater–was made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case called Schenk vs. United States in 1919. 

It’s always misquoted–Holmes actually said that you were not allowed to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater–and it was made to uphold a law which made it a criminal offense to distribute fliers opposing the military draft.

Think about that one for a moment.

What’s more, Schenk was overturned by the court in Brandenburg vs. Ohio, for reasons that ought to be obvious. 

Whether some speech is a “clear and present danger” is often in the eye of the beholder, as is whether some speech is “false.”

Certainly the endless screaming about George W. Bush as a “fascist” out to pull a coup to take over the country and void the Constitution was false–but we didn’t stop it, any more than we called for an end to nightly news talk about political “targetting” of Democrats by Republicans. 

Fox got one ofmy few nods of approval in its direction by spending nearly an hour the day after the shooting running clips of network news anchors and liberal pundits using pretty much the same terminology about aiming for Republicans as the Tea Party people have been using about aiming for Democrats.

If we went back a hundred years, we’d find a lot more.

Let’s try, for once, to get this straight:  we have “toxic discourse” in politics for two interlocking reasons.

The first is that we actually have real diversity in this country.

Real diversity.  Not the happy-crappy, we’re all going to appreciate each other’s differences kind.

Real diversity is not a bunch of different colored people sitting around enthusing at how interesting everybody else’s culture is.

Those people are not diverse, no matter what the color of their skins.  Those people are monocultural.  They all believe that their differences are secondary to their similarities.

In true diversity, however, people who believe that their cultures are absolutely right and that other peoples’ are absolutely wrong learn to live together, at least in part by learning how to leave each other alone on issues on which they are not neutral.

Real diversity is not happy, or pretty, or nice.

Real diversity is an angry and often hostile thing, and can’t help but be both.

And it has its dangers.

In a country in which issues are decided (at least more or less) democratically and in which government is allowed to make laws regulating the private lives of individuals and groups, the chances are very good that whatever group has the most children–and most clearly brings them to vote–will be the ones who set the rules for everybody else.

You may be in favor of gay marriage, but the voting public may not be.  You may be in favor of antidiscrimination law, but the voting public may not be.

There is absolutely no reason to assume that just because a country is democratic, it will also be socially liberal.

In fact, there are good reasons to think it won’t be. 

And that brings us to our second problem:  the idea that we have the right, through our laws and regulations, to regulate the private lives of people and communities.

There are actually two aspects to this, but let me clear out something else first.

If you think that you are not in favor of having the government regulate the private lives of individuals and communities, ask yourself these:

Are you in favor of laws against smoking?  How about laws to regulate the fat content in food?  How about a federal law banning traditional fund raising bake sales (cookies, cupcakes) in public schools? 

And I didn’t make the last one up.  It passed as part of a larger bill on child nutrition in the lame duck Congress.

Do you think that, if parents aren’t doing something about the “childhood obesity epidemic,” government has to step in?  

How about “hate speech?”  Or high school Christmas trees?  Or abortion?  Or protestors at abortion clinics?  Or a national curriculum for the public schools?  Or homeschooling?

Never mind.  I could go on for hours. The mark of a country with real diversity is that although we would all protest that we would never be in favor of allowing the government to pass legislation regulating the private lives of individuals and communities, we vigorously support just that when the issue seems to us unassailably right.

We used to have a method of dealing with this diversity–it was called federalism, and it meant that the states were allowed to make up their own minds about how the people within them would govern themselves on a whole list of issues.

During the Civil Rights era, federalism became “state’s rights,” and that got a bad name because the “rights” the states were trying to protect were laws that deliberately discriminated against some people for their race.

What’s more, there is no question that those laws should have been considered unconstitutional from off.  The equal protection clause says that the state and federal goverment must treat their citizens equally.

But what happened was that we transposed this argument to “all calls for federalism are bad and must be resisted,” and then we nationalized the debate on everything.

And it’s not just the Democrats and liberals who did it, either.

It’s the Republicans who gave us the No Child Left Behind Act–as William Bennett said, they might have run on the promise to abolish the Department of Education, but now that they were in power, hell, they were going to keep it and use it.

Of course our discourse is toxic.  Whoever wins this fight gets to force his morals down the throats of all his fellow citizens, no matter where they live or how they feel. 

And whoever that is won’t have to waste a lot of time worrying about the democratic process, either.  We’ve established an interlocking network of departments and bureaucracies, run by unelected and nearly untouchable functionaries, empowered to issue “regulations” having the force of law.

And when even that doesn’t work, we go to court and try to get our way that way.

A hundred years ago, if the people of Michigan and the people of  Mississippi didn’t agree on divorce, or smoking in public places, or whether they should call the big middle school concert in December the Holiday Show or the Christmas Show–well, they each went their own way, thought the other was nuts, and left it at that.

These days, whatever the issue is, everybody has to fight to the death every single time. 

Because we’ve got a choice–real diversity, which means people out there doing things that you thing are absolutely evil and unacceptable whether you like it or not, or monoculture.

And I don’t know how we get to monoculture from here.

It is simply not possible to impose a morality from above and suppress all anger and dissent at its imposition, and that includes American upper middle class morality. 

If you really want the “toxic discourse” to end, then you have to accept diversity as it really is, not as it is fantasized about in textbooks.  You have to accept that some states and communities will pass laws you find abhorent–they’ll refuse to recognize gay marriage or allow women to have abortions or not impose regulations requiring private businesses to be wheelchair accessible or whatever.

And along with accepting diversity you have to accept the obligations of democracy, which start with your need to convince a majority of the changes you want to make. 

If you think it’s more important to you to have the rules you want, well, you can have them–we’ve got them now, more than not–but what you will also have, and cannot avoid, is that unending “toxic discourse.”

Because when one side gets to impose absolute rules on the other, then each side must fight to the death.

I’ve said before on this blog that I’ve always thought that the hardest thing anybody can learn to do is accept the fact–and it is a fact–that other people simply do not agree with him.   They’re not racist.  They’re not stupid.  They’re not Communists.  They just believe different things.

And now, a second reminder–if you’re having trouble posting, send an e-mail to jane@janehaddam.com and we’ll get you in manually.

I’m going to go read a book.

Okay–a reminder before I start.  If the site won’t let you post comments, e-mail us and we’ll get you in manually.

That’s just in case.

But–back to cases.

I didn’t mean to imply, yesterday, that the problem that has arisen with the lack of an actual label for the kind of thing I do is something that effects only–or even chiefly–me.

Nor do I blame cozy readers for being angry when they pick up a Gregor and don’t get what they’re looking for.  If you bought a cookbook and got it home to find out that what was actually inside was a history of the War of 1812, you’d be upset, too.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no longer any name by which we consistantly call what used to be the traditional mystery–for what I do, and for what better writers than I do (like P.D. James and Elizabeth George). 

Sometimes publishers like to call these “literary” mysteries, but that’s a two edged sword.  What the publishers mean is “real books, well written, not mind candy fluff.”  What too many readers hear is “dull, boring, nothing happens and the characters are all upper middle class and annoying.”

But it’s difficult to understand what anybody is supposed to do with the situation as it presently exists. And I do think some excellent writers have gone down in flames because there’s no way to label the books properly, so that people who are looking for that kind of thing can find it and people who are not can leave it alone.

I’m fairly sure that is why neither of Margaret Kielstrop’s series found an audience–she did one series as M.K. Lorens and the other (historical mysteries set around the time of the American revolutionary war) as Margaret Lawrence.  (CAVEAT:  there is also a Canadian writer named Margaret Lawrence, who is not the same person.)

I also think that’s why Fidelis Morgan’s eighteenth century series didn’t fly as well as it could have.

We make a lot of jokes here and elsewhere that  publishers have no idea how to sell books, but in this case I think it’s literally true. 

Every once in a while I think of that exchange we had hear a while back with Steve’s blog, and the absolute astonishment some of the commenters there had that there had ever existed mysteries that were focused on the suspects and not the detectives–and yet that is Agatha Christie all over.  

It was, in fact, for decades, the most common and most popular form of the mystery.

And there are still plenty of them out there.  You’re just never going to find that out by reading jacket copy, or even reviews.

And I don’t know how to fix this. 

I actually have no idea why mystery readers decide to try new series or new authors.  I’m a bad person to ask, because I don’t read mysteries for the same reason most fans do, and I don’t pay for most of the ones I do read.

In terms of deciding what I want to have a whack at of the little pile that shows up at my doorstep every month or so, I tend to go by a) setting, b) topic, and c) whether or not I can read past the first five pages without wincing.

It’s harder to find books in that last category than you’d think.

In all my life, only one review of a book of fiction has ever made me go out and buy the book, and that was for perverse reasons.  It was in the early Eighties, I was just married and only newly published, and the Times produced a review of this poor guy’s book that was so over-the-top negative that it left me breathless.

I had to buy the book, in protest.

Unfortunately, the reviewer was absolutely right.

That said, I haven’t found reviewers much use in this particular areas. Even the good ones–like Jon Breen, who used to (and maybe still does) review for Ellery Queen–don’t really give this kind of information.

And I’m not even entirely sure how they could.  What, exactly, do you say about things like this?

The result, for me, is that I almost never find new mystery writers I want to read, and at least some very good mystery writers out there are crashing and burning without ever finding their audience.

Because I’m convinced there is an audience–I don’t think I’m the only one out here trying to find this sort of thing.   If I was, James and George would not be on all the best seller lists.

I once had an editor tell me that “at least [your] books deserve to be published.  A lot of the ones out there don’t.” 

I remember thinking to myself at the time that that was the single most bizarre thing anyone had ever said to me.  It also made me very worried.

Publishers are in business to make money, and nobody would get published at all if they didn’t do that.

But I think it’s very odd that some of these people seem to have an easier time selling what they don’t like than selling what they do.  It violates some basic law of salesmanship I’m sure I read about somewhere.

And, I have to admit, in spite of this mess, I haven’t done badly.  Considering what’s happened to a lot of the people whose work I’ve admired, I shouldn’t bitch.

It’s just that I can’t help thinking that there’s something enormously wrong with this picture. 

Readers like me are out here, and we want to buy books.  Where are the books?  And why is it that there has yet to be a web site, a magazine, anything, that will make the kind of distinctions I need?

Robert says he thinks fantasy and science fiction fans go by covers, but covers are no use to me, and jacket copy is even worse.   It’s also often inaccurate, and sometimes full of spoilers.

So, here I am.  I’ve given you a problem with no solution, and we can all go off and be glum together.

But I am not feeling particularly glum today.

I may not be able to find anybody new to read, but I’m still winding my way through Dame Agatha, and teaching doesn’t start until next week.

Maybe I should put on some Bach.

Before I get started today, I want to point out that we just had another problem with the program refusing to let people sign on to post comments. 

So, you know, if you have the problem, e-mail me, and we’ll register you manually.

And, back to the blog–

First, the Natalie Maines thing.  

What Maines actually did was to go on stage in England and apologize for the United States.  The fans in the audience didn’t boo her.  In fact, they cheered. 

Where she got into trouble was with country music fans in the US, who are self-consciously and vocally patriotic, much the same way that rock fans are usually not. 

Dixie Chicks records, airplay and concert attendance actually went UP after that incident, since they had a large crossover audience in rock and pop who saw nothing at all wrong (and something right) about what Maines had said.

But the Maines incident is not the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Maines made her statements on her own–they weren’t the subject of her song, for instance.

And country and rock both are perfectly happy to allow artists to use political, religious or other themes in their work.  Yes, country expects those sentiments to be pro-American and rock expects them to be anti-American, but nobody disputes the right of singers and song writers to write about politics.

What goes on with cozies–and with category romance in the Eighties–is very different.   It’s a demand that writers not write about politics, or religion, or anything else that might be “upsetting.”

Cozy readers these days do think of Agatha Christie as a “cozy” writer, but it’s because her work was written far enough in the past not to seem real.  There is, for the average cozy reader of the type I’m talking about, no difference between Agatha Christie’s villages and the fey imaginary small towns where the local knitting shop owner has to solve all the murders.

The demand is not for politics the readers agree with, it’s for no politics–that causes strife and dissension and pressure.  They read to get away from politics (somebody actually wrote me that).  

With religion, the demand is a little more complicated–there’s no problem with presenting a sort of fuzzy-warn “spiritual” point of view where religion means being nice to everybody.  There is a problem, though, with presenting a family being torn apart by disparate religious views, because that is, again, “upsetting.”

This is, I think, why I get so crazy when people tell me they read to “escape.”  This is the kind of thing I think of–the demand for a fake world with all the kinks ironed out of it.  Nothing really bad ever happens.  Even the murders are kind of cute.  And there are no intractable problems, no pains in life that can’t be somehow smoothed over with platitudes and folksiness.

This is not a world that lacks political statements the readers dislike–it’s a world that lacks the very fact of politics, because politics is “upsetting.”

I agree that this kind of fan is in the minority, but it’s not only a very vocal minority, but a powerful one.  It has its own conventions, its own awards, its own web sites and magazines.   And it’s willing to yell, scream, bitch and throw a fit if it doesn’t get what it wants or (more likely) gets what it doesn’t want.

And so, generally, it does get it–but that also explain why the other kind of fan won’t touch anything labeled “cozy” with a ten foot pole.   They see things labeled “cozy” and they think, “oh, it’s got recipes and the cat solves the mystery.”

I agree with everybody here who said that, in the long run, writers who write not what they believe but what they think fans want to hear will fall off the face of the planet–but that’s the long run.  In the short run, they’ll get invited to present keynote speeches at convention banquets, get written up on a dozen web sites, and have small bookstore owners with a cozy bent stage parties for them.

The total sales will never be what a “serious” mystery writer makes, and the run won’t last that long–but it will be a nice little run while it does last.

And, in the meantime, publishers tie themselves into knots trying to find a word to describe “cozies” (in the Dilys Winn definition) that aren’t “cozies” (in the standard fan definition), because if they don’t come up with a different word, they end up selling the book to people who don’t want it and not selling the book to people who do.

This is, by the way, the reason a lot of you here say you have a hard time finding new authors you’ll like. 

There’s just not a word out there for what you–and I–like.  

I’m not a fan of “police procedurals,” which tend, to me, to be like having to watch a Law and Order marathon.  I would never have picked up a novel by P.D. James–my all time favorite mystery writer–if it had been described to me like that. 

My guess is that there has to be a word out there that would fit, but we haven’t found it yet.  And I’m stuck in the position where, if I’m looking for a traditional mystery and I pick up a cozy, I don’t get a traditional mystery but a piece of exaggerated fluff.

And it’s worse than you think, because I don’t even have zero tolerance for exaggerated fluff.  MacLeod did exaggerated fluff quite often, and I liked a whole lot of it.

I have absolutely no idea what we’re supposed to do about all this, but it’s the reality we’re living with now.

And I’m trying to launch a new series.

So, I’ve been thinking.

One of the advantages–or drawbacks–about blogs like this is that they attract not just readers, but certain kinds of readers.

And because that’s the case, and more importantly because it’s the case that things like this do not attract other kinds of readers,  it’s easy for this kind of reader to think he or she is the only kind there is–or the most common kind there is.

Okay, confused yet?

If I was dependent on what I put on this blog to determine whether or not I could write in English, I’d be shuffled into an ESL course faster than you could sneeze.

Let me go back to Robert’s comment that the cozy as I defined it is not the cozy as readers define it, but the cozy as publishers define it.

He’s got that exactly backwards.

The cozy as defined in the 1977 volume of Murder Ink–and I don’t remember if that’s the one Dilys Winn did or the one Carol Brener did–was written by a New Yorker.  In fact, it was written by a Manhattanite with close ties to the publishing industry.

That definition is in fact what the publishers use when they label a mystery a “cozy.”

But that definition is not the one the vast bulk of the fans use.

If you don’t believe me, I’d suggest  you try a little experiment. Go look at what the Mystery Guild offers as cozies, and what Malice Domestic highlights as well.

What you’ll find is not Dilys Winn’s definition, but the one I gave–and that definition tends to be mightily enforced by fans who will not permit very much in the way of definition.

This is true when it comes to sex and bad language, but it is especially true when it comes to things like religion, politics, and anything considered serious or “controversial.”

And I’ve got the “fan” mail to prove it.

I’ve had mail from “fans” telling me that politics has no place in a novel–any novel, mind you, not just a mystery–and they’re never going to read anything else I ever write if that’s the kind of thing I write about.

Cozy readers are as close as I’ve seen to the category romance writers of the Eighties.  There’s a general tendency to assume that the readers own the writer–that the writer is sort of like the hired help whose only value is to make the readers happy, and the readers have the right to demand that the writer do whatever they want no matter what the writer herself may think is good or valuable in writing.

Before somebody goes completely off the deep end and starts railing about how that’s the point, the writer needs to write things the readers find interesting–that’s not what I’m talking about.

Certainly writers must write what at least some readers will find interesting and valuable.  But the usual thing is for the writer to write what she herself finds interesting and valuable and then to put it out there hoping to find like-minded people to read.

Sometimes the writer puts out something completely new, or something that’s going to end up being a minority taste, and doesn’t find many readers, at least at first.  Sometimes the writer puts out something that hooks into a vast collective subconscious and turns into Harry Potter or The DaVinci Code.

If the writer is smart, she tries to be as intelligible as the subject matter and the circumstances permit.  If the writer is good, she doesn’t spend page after page lecturing readers on the evils of gay sex or the glories of Communism. 

But for all of that, the writer does what the old advice says she ought to do–she writes what she wants to read. 

What was wanted in category romance in the 1980s, and what I see wanted by cozy fans today is something much different.  It is a demand that the writer abandon what she wants to read to write what readers what to read, even if the writer herself as no use for it.

More, it is the demand that nothing matter to the writer but the opinions of her readers–not her own sense of what makes writing good, or what would make a novel interesting. If she develops an interest in something the readers don’t want, she is not to write about it at all, ever.  If she develops a point of view–on politics, on religion, you name it–that is similarly disliked, she must never mention it.

And yes, there are plenty of writers who will put up with this kind of dictatorial attitude, and within the ghetto of category-whatever,  they will be very successful.  Someone who attempts to write within the category who does not acquiesce to this sort of thing does far worse–and since the category itself has a bad name among more general readers, she tends to do worse, period.

Let me try to clarify this a little.

My problem is not that some readers want particular things and won’t read what doesn’t give them those things.

My problem is with an attitude towards writers and writing that says a writer is not a person with values of her own, or a value of her own, but a five-and-dime machine whose only values lies in regurgitating whatever the fan base wants.  The fan base made the writer and it can take her down–and will, if she doesn’t toe the line.

Somebody brought up the idea that “cozy” is a term that matches “hard boiled” on the other side of the continuum of possible mystery stories.

And it sort of does, but it doesn’t.

Hard-boiled had one great advantage over the cozy in the development of the genre–the attitude on the part of its fans that its writers were Artists, and therefore had to be free to take their work in any direction they wanted.

This is not a small thing.  Contrary to the fashionable ideas now current in creative writing schools, not only because they have to pay the rent, but because writing is, and always will be, first and foremost a method of communication.  And communication isn’t communication unless it goes at least two ways.

For whatever it’s worth, hard boiled is not a subgenre that does very well these days.  A lot of it was too stylized and formulaic.  Hard boiled is, after all, the ultimate example of books that sell because readers like to identify with the protagonist, and that particular style of protagonist doesn’t seem to be what younger readers want these days.

Even so, much of what is published now as “crime fiction” has its roots in hard-boiled.   The violence, the grittiness, the illicit sex, the sense that the world is corrupt to the core–all that came out of hard boiled. 

What has come out of the “cozy” is nothing–or at least nothing that will acknowledge it has come out of the cozy.

The readers who made Christie a best seller aren’t reading cozies, these days.   They’re reading P.D. James and Elizabeth George and anything else that can be labeled something else so that they can be sure it doesn’t have that sickly-sweet, meretricious cutsieness that drives them totally crazy.

Publishers, in the meantime, see a solid core of “cozy” fans–not enough to turn anybody into a blockbuster, or even a best seller for very long, but a solid core–and jump to label as “cozy” anything that doesn’t have a serial killer or a private eye in it. 

Except that they’ll happily label even private eye novels as “cozies” if they’re in any way funny.

I don’t know.  I suppose it’s possible that there isn’t any market any more for the kind of thing I like–not a market big enough to justify a real publishing run–but I do know I’m not going to consult polls to decide what the McGuffin the next mystery ought to be.

And I’m really not going to bore myself with serial killers.

But as annoying and obtuse as the suits at publishing companies can be, they aren’t responsible for what has happened to the term “cozy.”

The fans are.

Okay. I’m going to try this for the second time today. With any luck it will work, instead of doing one of the seventeen million other things it’s been doing to me so far this morning.

And I know that I’ve been a little spotty lately, and not exactly fixated on one subject for very long, but it’s been a big start to the New Year.

And, given the way things are going, it’s probably about to get bigger. I have a child who may or may not be sick, or have a medical problem, or whatever–he won’t tell me, or won’t say the same thing twice, so I’ve just called the doctor for an appointment and figure it can get sorted out there.

And now this program won’t double space between paragraphs unless I make it. Which I suppose is better than what it was doing before, which was refusing to actually exhibit any of the letters I typed. The cursor would move, but no type would appear on the screen.

This, I can at least function with.

After all that–once I finished reading Rich, Radiant Slaughter, I went on to rereading Martha Grimes’s The Man With A Load of Mischief.  That’s another book I haven’t read again since 1988 or so. 

I don’t know what my mania is these days with rereading things from around the time I first started working on the first Gregor, but here I am.  And I’m doing a lot of it.

A few things about what I did and did not remember about The Man With The Load of Mischief.

The first thing is that I distinctly remember reading this book, and being sure, at the time, that the chief character was Melrose Plant.  There was also Richard Jury, who was a CID inspector, but I thought of him as the necessary professional-to-provide-cover-for-the-amateur that a lot of detective novels with amateur detectives use to make things seem more plausible.

I also remember, as the years went on, thinking that it was too bad that Grimes had given up on Plant in order to focus more on Richard Jury.   I liked Plant more than I liked Jury. 

Now that I’m almost finished with rereading it, though, it’s obvious that Jury was the main detective all the time.   Plant was one of the suspects–albeit the one who is declared almost at the beginning to have nearly a perfect alibi–but under no circumstances the focus of the majority of the book.

Then there’s the matter of the dead bodies–halfway through the book, we’ve got at least three of them.  A little farther on (and I do mean very little) we have five.

I take a lot of flak, even now, when my books have three dead bodies in them, never mind five, and never mind having the five in totally bizarre circumstances.

In fact, multiplying bodies and supplying them with bizarre circumstances are two of the big no-nos in writing detective fiction these days.   You can get away with it, sort of, if you’ve got a serial killer who is supposed to be butt-wild crazy.  In that case you blame the dressing up of bodies in purple superhero costumes or the draping of bodies over highway overpasses on abnormal psychology, and it doesn’t matter if any of it makes any sense.

To do this kind of thing in a traditional detective novel these days, and especially one set in villages with cutely-named pubs, it to brand your book a cozy.   And to brand your book a cozy is the kiss of death for any kind of serious attention from anybody, anyway.  You’ll certainly never win an Edgar.

I know we’ve been over this before, but I’ll go over it again, just in case:  a cozy is not just a book set in a village with an amateur detective.  It’s a lightweight, cutesy, giggle-funny (meaning, not really funny) silly little piece of fluff, in which there is never any gore, never any swearing, and never any religion, politics or other topic that might be considered “controversial” or “upsetting.”

Agatha Christie did not write cozies, even though every cozy writer on the planet claims she (and it’s almost always she) is trying to write just like Dame Agatha.   Christie was a lot of things, but cutesy-pie was never one of them.  She took a light hand to the world around her, but what she wrote about was the world around her, and not some made-up fantasy land where everybody talked like they were on a sitcom.

Which brings me, of course, back to a topic I’ve go over before, but that I can never shake out of my head.

What usually happens when you have somebody who writes good books but the books have the characteristics–set in a village or small town, for instance, not a lot of sex and gore–of what would otherwise be labeled “cozy” whether it was or not, is that it gets labeled something else.

The books of P.D. James, for instance, are usually called “police procedurals,” even though you couldn’t learn much about police procedure from them and the detection largely maintains the structure of a Poirot.

With Grimes, however, what has happened is nearly unprecedented–everybody seems to just pretend not to notice.

There is, in this book, much of what makes a cozy a cozy.  There’s the village thing.  There are the cutely named pubs.  There are the exaggerated characters.

And those characteristics carried over into a good number of the books that followed in the series.

As far as I can tell, people just decided to pretend it wasn’t all there. 

And, I think, they were right.  Not only the sheer excellence of the prose and the construction, but also the sensibility, which is not cutesy and not fake, means that these are not cozies as I have defined them here.

But what I want to know is this–what did it take to get the media, the reviewers, and all the rest, not to treat them as cozies, and therefore not sink them into the ghetto that is cozy-dom?

Because I could list a good dozen mystery writers whose books have been condemned to cozy-dom and whose careers have never really gone anywhere because they were labeled “cozies” when they were not. 

Which means that cozy readers bought a volume and hated it and never went back, and the kind of readers who would have liked the books never touched them because those readers can’t stand cozies.

I just wish I understood what made the difference–what made so many people, first reviewing these, not slap the label on Grimes, and instead not only take her seriously, but allow others to take her seriously?

Bleh.

It’s a good book.  If you’ve never read it, you should.  I haven’t given anything away.

I’m going to go see what’s going on with the chickens.