Am looking at starting this thread as a spin-off from the Lord Peter Wimsey one in “Cafe Society”, rather than risking hi-jacking that thread. Thoughts prompted initially by one of the posts on the Wimsey thread – quote follows:
“What impresses me a lot about her [ Dorothy L. Sayers’s] writing is the sheer level of detail she puts into them. Public figures, music-hall songs, detective novelists, politics, philosophy, snippets of French and Greek, classic literature, Bible references… She also crams in details about Britain in the 1920s, the motorcycle craze… the growing advertising field, and the challenges women in education face… [ the situation] when a great many women saw lovers and potential husbands killed in WWI, and were considered ‘surplus women’…”
Has me wondering whether anyone besides me, is a fan of the Daisy Dalrymple mysteries by Carola Dunn? Written and published largely over the past couple of decades – some two dozen published to date – and set in England in the early 1920s. Of the “cosy” sub-genre of crime fiction, and basically, it would seem, written to entertain, without high literary aspirations. I have found nearly all of the series, very enjoyable. I consider that in the main, the author gives – in the same way as Sayers, mentioned approvingly by the poster quoted above – a wonderfully accurate and wide-ranging picture of the time and place (which I find fascinating, making me disposed to like the novels by both ladies). Unlike Sayers, who actually lived though the era depicted, Dunn was born in 1946: she seems to me to have done her homework re an early-twenties-set series, superlatively well. Although Dunn’s novels are basically “lightweight and light-hearted”, they are all fraught with the many and assorted memories and consequences of the recent First World War – rarely do many pages go by, without the war being invoked in some context.
The novels by Dunn, admittedly lack the gravitas of those by Sayers; which I personally find not altogether a bad thing. Grand fun though the Wimsey novels IMO largely are, some of the elements cited in the quote above, have a tendency to irritate me as “Dorothy showily parading her erudition and throwing it in the reader’s face”. I find particularly annoying the passages in Sayers, sometimes quite lengthy, in various living or dead foreign tongues. I’m aware of the thing about how 100-odd years ago, anyone in Britain laying claim to a good education, would have studied French / Latin / Greek; and I’m afraid this stuff on Sayers’s part, still pee’s me off.