More British Library crime classics

I’ve been plowing through more of the British Library Crime Classics series and finding some real gems in there. I think my favorite so far is Somebody at the Door (1942) by Raymond Postgate, which has a dreamy, sort of postmodern style, told from about 8 points of view – all the people in a commuter railway car. The stories and the structure feel like city life in a particular way – that I think about while riding the bus or train myself – just that all the people around me are going somewhere and for their own purposes and are the central characters in their own stories. I liked Postgate’s characters – they felt like people with their own lives.

Postgate turned out to be an interesting character himself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Postgate

Shortly afterwards I read The Division Bell Mystery (1932) by Ellen Wilkinson and enjoyed that too. After I finished I looked up the author and found she was an MP herself – thus the (fairly minor) self insert character who was a Labor Party MP – She was a Fabian – And also she wrote A Workers’ History of the Great Strike – cowritten with Raymond Postgate! The conservative young MP protagonist of Division Bell has amazing moments where he thinks “Oh…. maybe these labor party people have a point after all” Because of the Bread Marches, which I had to look up but of course Danny didn’t.

The epigraph to Somebody at the Door was really good,

How often I have smiled to see, in a story which pretended to show me the life of Paris or of London, five or six persons, always the same, meet by chance in the most varying places. “From their box the Mortevilles suddenly saw the Duponts sitting in the stalls”; next, “on entering the enclosure the first pretty woman Jacques Dupont met was Alice Morteville”; next, “from the surging crowd of demonstrators Pierre Morteville saw rising the energetic head of Jacques Dupont.” The author may work as hard as he chooses after that in describing to us the immense surging crowd, the brilliant attendance in the enclosure, and paint in the background as much as he can; the poor man does not realize that his Duponts and Mortevilles, as soon as they “meet” and because they meet with such deplorable ease, annihilate all immensity around themselves, prevent me believing that Paris or London are anything enormous, where one may be lost, and make these cities suddenly little places like Landerneau…

The reader will not see this vast work arrange itself, according to traditional artifice, around a miraculously chosen central figure. He cannot count on a rectilinear action, whose movement will carry you along without troubling your laziness, nor even on a too-simple harmony between multiple actions, which in its turn becomes a convention. He will guess that very often the thread of the story will seem to break, and the interest be suspended or scattered — that at the moment when he begins to be familiar with a character, to enter into his cares and his little world, and to watch the future through the same window as he does, he will be suddenly requested to transport himself far away from there, and take up quite different disputes.

(Extracts from the Preface to Men of Good Will
by Jules Romains, restating the principles of Unanimism.)

The book didn’t disappoint.

I’m still in this autoimmune flare up and not very mobile, not working a lot of hours and not leaving the house — so let me know your book recs! I have some time to pass! I am in week 3 or is it more… of not walking at all and barely able to stand up. It is very frustrating when just recently I was walking so well and even thinking about bravely foraying out to the nearby cafe (a block and a half away) with only a cane or a walker. I was traveling confidently by myself, driving my car, walking with total freedom inside the house and going up and down stairs with barely any limp, feeling full of energy. Now I am slammed flat on my back. Actually it is too painful to even be on my back much of the time and i flop from side to side like a gasping fish. Low back, ankles, are just unspeakable and I am still on fairly high steroid dose which isn’t great either. It will pass, but It makes me so sad right when I was doing so well and getting so strong, to slide back into a giant flare up.