Agatha Christie
If at first you don’t succeed …
Oh wow! I’ve been reading about assorted famous and hugely successful authors whose work was rejected multiple times before someone saw their true potential… and feeling decidedly sub-standard!
JK Rowling, (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)
Rejected by 12 publishers. Now one of the most successful series in history.
William Golding (Lord of the Flies)
Rejected by 20 publishers. Became a classic.
John Grisham (A Time to Kill)
Rejected by 28 publishers. He’s since written over forty books, selling a collective 275 million copies worldwide, translated into 42 languages.
Stephen King (Carrie)
His debut novel was rejected 30 times. He famously threw it in the fire but his wife rescued it! Published 65 books and known as the ‘King of Horror’!
Kathryn Stockett (The Help)
Rejected 60 times. The debut novel went on to spend over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles)
Struggled for 5 years before being accepted for publication. She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul)
Rejected by over 140 publishers. 500 million copies sold world-wide since.
Rejection is an inescapable reality in a writer’s life, but it still hurts. I am clearly not made of sufficiently stern stuff: I gave up trying to find a literary agent to represent me after three rejections! Puny!!!
GK Chesterton
Oh dear, oh dear; now it’s the turn of Agatha Christie‘s work to be re-written in order supposedly to conform to modern sensitivities. Agatha Christie! Only the most successful novelist of all time. Where will it all end?
Makes me treasure my store of pre-woke books even more. This week I’ve quite deliberately and stubbornly been with GK Chesterton whose character, Father Brown, I referenced recently on my blog. The book of short stories was originally written before the outbreak of World War 1, and my hard copy version has beautiful quality paper and is a joy to handle. The character of Father Brown has more recently been resurrected and reworked for a BBC TV series of that name, which meant readjusting my mental images in returning to the original. And yes, adjusting to language we wouldn’t countenance today.
So who is this Father Brown? He’s a Catholic priest cum detective who uses his deep understanding of human frailty to solve mysteries and crimes. As he explains himself:
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?
He differs from most other detectives – both real and fictional – in one small point: he never pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well. His remarkable but effective methods can irritate and upset those whose slowness is underlined by his cleverness, but for all his success he remains delightfully unassuming and humble. As modest as a primrose, in fact.
The first thing that hit me was that the TV priest is a very different character from the one in the book. His friends and associates are also unlike the people on the page. But I can perfectly understand why; they need to be more charismatic and memorable to appeal visually; the crimes he solves need to be more than psychologically engaging.
Each short story portrays the astuteness and sheer humanity of this little insignificant, apparently innocent, man of the cloth, whose long exposure to the way the human mind ticks, and the crimes of which it is capable, has revealed truths and insights unseen and unknown by the regular constabulary.
Then there’s the writing itself. A precision, a certain pernicketyness, seems to date it, but it has about it a wit and wisdom, an empathy, that warms the reader to him. It also includes some beautifully lyrical passages. I’ll share a few sentences that made me pause and re-read them:
A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm …
But the tempest had shouldered away the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke …
He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly the sort of man who is either mad or right.
… the British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about behaviour.
I defy modern sensitivity readers to produce anything half as brilliant. If the passages I’ve heard they’ve altered are typical I won’t be reading revised editions.
Oh, and the text is littered with Biblical references – a peculiarly apt touch given the profession of the central character, Father Brown. Throwaway lines by a devout Christian author, not ever labelled as religious, only detectable by those who know their Bibles. Would that too cause offence?
Having said all that, the book is certainly of its time – the tales are spotted with offensive-today epithets and descriptions, prejudices, assumptions, which would certainly merit the big scissor treatment. And his use of ‘Scotch’ instead of ‘Scottish’ wouldn’t get past any editor I’ve ever worked with!
Notwithstanding that, I personally hope this book escapes the notice of the literary police and remains exactly as it began – in Chesterton’s inimitable style suited to the Edwardian period of his day. OK, print a comment to recognise the issue for today by all means, if you must, but please, please, don’t bastardise the writing of a genius.
If I have a gripe it is that in the book the arch-criminal Flambeau is a reformed character. Hitherto wearing my ethics hat, I’ve been mesmerised by a priest capable of preserving the confidences of the confessional in the face of audacious flouting of the laws of good society. Can he? Should he? Will he? Would I?
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer. The name brings a warm glow to my day. In my teens and twenties I was a huge fan of her Regency novels and snapped them up whenever I saw them second-hand.
Some for one shilling each, as you can see. Others the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence! I owned and read all except one of them, I think, and marvelled that a girl of 15 could write something as good as The Black Moth, initially to amuse her convalescent brother, but later published in 1921.
By the time she died in her seventies, she was the acclaimed author of over fifty books, but in spite of being a huge fan of hers, I confess that till this week, I’d never read one of her twelve murder mysteries. Time to remedy that and relax my mind at the same time, then. I’m in sore need of undemanding recreation right now. 
Think shades of Upstairs Downstairs meets Agatha Christie. The book is Why Shoot a Butler?
And indeed it’s a complete mystery why anyone would choose to murder Dawson, the trusted old butler of Norton Manor – a stately old fossil. Frightfully keen on the done thing, found with a bullet through his body on a remote road. Three murders and two burglaries keep the bumbling police totally confused while a scornful, enigmatic and imperious barrister, Frank Amberley, unravels a complicated and involved plot of much more significance then the murders themselves.
So why does Amberley keep quiet information about a female person found at the scene of the butler’s death? What is so important about a book borrowed from a dusty under-used library? What is the strange young woman at Ivy Cottage concealing, and why won’t she confide her secrets? Who is the sinister new butler who appears out of nowhere bearing unverified references? Who exactly is to be trusted?
This time around I’m much more aware of literary issues with Heyer’s writing, much as I thoroughly enjoyed the witty dialogue and element of suspense. But after all, this one was written in 1933 – language, publishing, social mores, well, pretty much everything really, was very different back then.
Nowadays most editors would pounce on a lot of nitpicky points, from frequently changing points of view within chapters, through to numerous typographical errors. Modern authors are taught to keep the choice of words pared down to avoid distraction: he ‘said’ – not he ‘expostulated’, ‘ejaculated’, ‘retorted’, ‘interposed’, ‘asseverated’. The prose should show emotion not spell it out – bin the adverbs – ‘tetchily’, ‘grumpily’, ‘maliciously’, ‘tranquilly’. It would take a brave or foolhardy man to call a fiancee ‘dear old soul’, ‘old thing’, today, I rather think. So, a product of its day, then, but a diverting read for all that, despite all the anomalies and anachronisms. And in the character of Frank Amberley I was forcibly reminded of all the rude, supercilious, entitled cads in Heyer’s romances who rode roughshod over other people’s finer feelings but nevertheless won the heart and hand of the fair lady.
Thank you again, Georgette Heyer, you lifted my spirits and took me away from twenty-first century problems. Exactly what I needed. And now, of course, I’m wanting to read the other eleven mysteries.
Stephen King, master thriller-writer
Yep, I’m sure regular followers of this blog will have been wondering, when will she ever get to the king of thrillers! ‘America’s greatest living novelist‘! ‘When it comes to grabbing an audience by the throat and giving them no choice but to keep reading, King has no equal.‘
Well, I can confess, in the safety of my own blog pages, that my first experience of Stephen King proved decidedly underwhelming. Under the Dome simply wasn’t for me. Too far fetched. Too long-winded. A ‘so-what’ kind of book. So I deliberately gave myself time to distance from that before returning to give him a second chance.
Mr Mercedes is a very different kind of tale, billed as an ‘expertly crafted example of the classic race-against-the-clock thriller’. And I’m wanting the very best examples to hone my own skills. So, bring it on. A masterclass would be very helpful.
It starts off with a massacre. A twelve-cylinder Mercedes is driven through thick fog into a concentrated crowd of desperate people all queuing at a job fair. The driver is still at large. But shortly after his retirement, Kermit William Hodges, lead detective on the case, receives a letter from the man responsible, taunting him. And we have the kernel of the story, the cat and mouse chase, each goading the other, a race to prevent another mass killing.
And yes,now I could quite understand what makes Stephen King a giant among thriller writers. It’s the whole package really, but it might be helpful if I single out a few features.
The first stroke of genius is in the first chapter. King introduces three of the victims of the Mercedes massacre in the last few hours of their lives. In a few pages he makes us care about the young cash-strapped mum Janice Cray, and her croupy baby Patti, and the kindly stranger called August who lends them his sleeping bag while they wait for the job fair to open. It puts a human face on the tragedy. We’re shocked when these three lives are obliterated by the grey Mercedes careering into them. We want justice for them.
Then there are his main characters. With simple but deft strokes he fleshes them out, unlikely heroes and psychopathic killer alike, little by little letting us see into their past, follow their present, dread their future. No overload, no long-winded description, but four dimensional.
He’s also a past master at dropping in a sinister or significant fact without padding or fanfare, so the picture builds subtly and contributes exponentially to the spine-tingling tension. He doesn’t even hide the identity of Mr Mercedes from us. In Chapter 11, Brady Hartsfield is exposed in his natural habitat, selling ice-cream to innocent kids, solving computer glitches for naive technophobes.
And amidst all the sordid facts and coarse language and accumulating horror, King even drops occasional pearls of literary delight.
She has the bright, inquisitive gaze of a crow with its eye on a freshly squashed chipmunk.
… an apartment … with rooms as big as a political candidate’s promises
She frowns, transforming her face into a walnut shell with eyes
They’re wondering if I’m riding into the Kingdom of Dementia on the Alzheimer’s Express
… she sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe
And I love the delicious irony of Retired Detective Hodges considering the possibility that Mr Mercedes is actually a woman. ‘He supposes it’s technically possible, and it would make a neat solution for an Agatha Christie novel, but this is real life.’
Unputdownable indeed. I could never aspire to his heights but I can learn from his skills.
Down memory lane
This is the life! This week I’m rediscovering my childhood haunts – this time with grandchildren in tow.
Westcountry numbers amongst its famous writerly offspring: Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Golding. Hoping a little of their magic will rub off on me!