Lorac and competent women
I started reading E.C.R. Lorac‘s detective novels recently as some of them are in the British Library Crime Classics series.
Death of an Author impressed me with its twisty reasoning — so many different what-might-have-happened theories! There were also hilarious debates on the mind of the female author, and whether one could tell the sex/gender of the author by reading the book, in which men argue with each other and sometimes change their minds. The main woman character in Death of an Author is notable for being super competent in many ways!
As I then went back to read as many Lorac novels as I could easily find I kept coming across amazing women who were more interesting than the detective main character.
Death on the Oxford Road has Miss Madeleine Hanton, who is not only perceptive and smart, as smart as the detective or smarter, but she also has a power wheelchair in around 1931.
“Her brother and niece disposed of, Miss Madeleine got herself settled into her electrically propelled motor-chair. It was a neat vehicle and assured her of “independent mobility” when she wanted to be on the move. This afternoon she decided to inspect the garden, particularly the shrubbery near the chauffeur’s cottage; if the Scotland Yard man were to arrive, Miss Madeleine intended to have a word with him.”
Miss Hanton was also a hospital Commandant in the war (World War I) and lets everyone know it:
““Rubbish, Waring!” snapped Miss Hanton. “How old are you? Twenty-three? Well, when you were seven years old, I was Commandant of a hospital in France. I’ve been bombed, and I’ve been torpedoed. I’ve bandaged men who were half blown to bits. If you think your corpse on the road is going to upset me, you’re making the mistake of your life. I only wish I’d been there,—I’m much more observant than most people, and corpses were commonplaces to me at one time.”
I thought back over many popular British detective novels of the time where there just weren’t ever women like this. There weren’t suffragists, or ambulance drivers, or nurses, or if there were they were undermined or mocked. Can you even think of a competent woman in an Agatha Christie novel who isn’t Miss Marple, who isn’t just like, the grossest and strangest stereotype?
Then I hit Post after Post-Mortem and while it had many intelligent women characters it seemed to leave it open to question whether too much intellectual activity and authoring might not be wrong for women, though it is the men (as usual) debating and questioning it. The subtext (to me) was that the intelligent, successful middle aged (?) woman writer was actually messed with and fucked over constantly by the men around her who supposedly admired and supported her. They could only cope with intelligent women if they were quite young, and thought that then the right thing would be for them to have babies, to keep them so busy they would not have time to be neurotic.
Ugh!!! Gross! I feel sure Lorac meant to be snarky about it.
In These Names Make Clues I’m still at the beginning but am charmed by Miss Susan Coombe (we are still in the 30s), who was a suffragist who had spent time in prison but post prison and post getting the vote, worked within the government (or with the government) to reform women’s prisons. She is instantly assessed by our detective as the smartest person around & a formidable intellect!
They are good books, not like earth shattering but a comfort read for me right now during this stressful time. There are often things to look up that send me down Wikipedia journeys – reading about what a Minty chair is, or last night, about the King and Country debate at the Oxford Union, from a casual line of dialogue in These Names Make Clues.
I’m glad I found Lorac’s work !