Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Post-Downtime Edition

First of all, I must apologize for the lateness of this post - Typepad (who hosts this blog) had a major denial of service attack overnight and just now was able to fix it.

The very talented author/blogger Patti Abbott is taking today off from hosting the weekly Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature, so I am collecting the links in her absence. Scroll down the page for all the FFB goodness. If there are any errors or omissions, please let me know via the comments or [email protected].

First off, though, my own contribution this week:  A Different Kind of Summer by Gwendoline Butler (after a few 80-degree days being followed by this week's freezing temps, I'm ready for any kind of summer...).

 

Gwendoline Butler (b. 1922) had limited success as a writer before she began a police procedural series featuring a young Scotland Yard Inspector, John Coffin, penning eight Coffin novels between 1956 and 1962. When Butler's husband took a job teaching in St. Andrews, Scotland, the author decided she wanted a change from Coffin and found her inspiration one day when she saw a young red-haired Scottish policewoman. She later asked the local police chief about the young officer and was told she was a recent graduate on a rapid promotion track. Thus was born the character of Detective Charmian Daniels of the fictional Deerham Hill CID and, as some have given credit to the author (written under her pen name of Jennie Melville), the birth also of the woman's police procedural.

Melville also dipped her pen into the romantic suspense well for a time, evening receiving a Romantic Novelists Association Major Award in 1981, but eventually returned to both Inspector Coffin and Detective Daniels. She went on to write over 70 novels and was a recipient of the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1973 and shortlisted for the Golden Dagger for another novel.

One critic elevated Melville/Butler to a status equal to the Four Great Founding Mothers: Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh, not only due to their writing, but in light of how many other elements they had in common: all well-educated (Butler lectured at Oxford), all prolific writers, all wrote on subjects other than detective fiction, and four of the group had supportive husbands. If she is not as well remembered as the others, it may be due to the fact that writers who she helped paved the way for, such as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, eventually eclipsed her in acclaim.

Melville's writing of her female detective, Charmian Daniels, shows elements of early feminism and as the character grew through the years, Detective Daniels also reflected the changing roles of women and attitudes toward them, particularly in a traditional man's field, law enforcement. Daniels grows in her career through time and is eventually promoted to Chief Superintendent with a move to Windsor. In an interview with Clues: A Journal of Detection in 2000, Butler said, "I was determined she [Daniels] should be a success and I suppose in a sense I was basing her on what would have happened to me if I'd remained in academic life when on the whole in my day, even more so now, women do climb the ladder. I was in the generation that was expecting to be successful as a woman in whatever field they ventured."  

In Melville's A Different Kind of Summer, dating from 1967, the fifth outing for Detective Daniels, Daniels is still a sergeant when an unidentified body arrives on a train into town in a coffin minus head or hands. It's up to Daniels to figure out which of many missing women this could be, including an increasing number of young girls vanishing in London. As she gets deeper into the case, she tries to stay objective and focused even as she starts receiving menacing phone calls and has to deal with a new young assistant, Christine Quinn, and a hysterical troublemaker who claims she's lost her sister.

There's been a lot of hue and cry lately about the amount of violence against women in crime fiction novels, and a mutilated female corpse would fall into that category. But in a commentary included in the original publication of A Different Kind of Summer, Melville said that she was interested in people committing crimes and why some people, usually women, form the "victim syndrome," in that the bad guys sense these victims are afraid (a reason why policewomen acting as decoys often fail to lure attackers, because their sense of confidence is too obvious).

Melville has a low-key writing style, blending social commentary with quirky characters, detailed plotting and thoughtful writing for the most part, although in general, it's her novels with Inspector John Coffin where she's had her greatest success. One wonders if writing from a woman's point of view was too close to home to provide the inspirational distance required or if perhaps the fact the author's brother was Warden of the Toynbee Settlement in London gave her more of a first-hand experience with male protagonists. In either case, with Melvill's Daniels or Butler's Coffin, there's a lot of good material there, enough to show that grouping her with the "Four Great Founding Mothers" isn't that much of a stretch. If you're a fan of the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, then you'll enjoy these two series.

And now for this week's links, with more books to add to your To Be Read pile:

• Sergio Angelini - So Long as You Both Shall Live by Ed McBain
• Les Blatt - Necklace and Calabash by Robert Van Gulik
• Brian Busby - Doing Right by Robert Fontaine 
• Bill Crider - Flesh Avenger by J. X. Williams (a/k/a Harry Whittington)
• Martin Edwards – The Sunset Law by John Buxton Hilton
• Curt Evans - The Corpse Wore a Wig by George Busby
• Roy Garraty - Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips
• Ed Gorman - Cross Country by Herbert D. Kastle
• Rich Horton -  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
• Nick Jones - The Assassination Run by Jack Gerson
• George Kelley - Johnny Mayhem: The Complete Series by Milton Lesser
• Margot Kinberg - The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman
• Rob Kitchin - Tropical Freeze by James W. Hall and Margin of Error by Edna Buchanan
• Evan Lewis - The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
• Steve Lewis/William F. Deeck - The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
• Todd Mason – FFB Redux - by Carol Emshwiller and more
• Neer - Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• John F. Norris - The Body by Richard Ben Sapir
• Juri Nummelin - Four crime novels by British writer John Wainwright
• John O'Neill - The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine
• James Reasoner - The Streak by Max Brand (a/k/a Frederick Faust)
• Karyn Reeves - The Big Heat by William P. McGivern
• Richard Robinson - Torch Town Boogie by Steven Womack
• Gerard Saylor - Burnt Offering by Richard and Francis Lockridge
• Ron Scheer - Big Timber by Bertrand W. Sinclair
• Kerrie Smith - The Inspector Barlach Mysteries by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang - Fast One by Paul Cain
• TomCat - The Case of the Weird Sisters by Charlotte Armstrong
• Prashant Trikannad - "Anne" by Fanny Stevenson (Scribner’s Magazine)
• Rich Westwood - Death Walks in Eastrepps by Francis Beeding

Comments

[Sergio (Tipping My Fedora)]

Thanks for including me in the roundup BV (and Happy Easter)

[BV Lawson]

Happy Easter to you, too, Sergio!

[George Kelley]

Thanks for hanging in there, BV. We all appreciate you hosting FFB despite the web site difficulties!

[BV Lawson]

Thanks, George! Hope you have a lovely weekend with some equally lovely weather.

[Todd Mason]

Indeed, an elegant presentation, no thanks at all to Typepad and its foes...thanks, Bonnie.

[BV Lawson]

Thanks for offering to pinch-hit for me in case Typepad stayed offline all day, Todd. I would have hated to impose, but it made me feel better knowing I had a backup. Hope you have a terrific weekend, too!

[neeru]

I hadn't heard of Butler before but now I'll like to read her. Thanks for highlighting her works.

Thanks also for including my link.

[Kevin]

Thank you for doing this!

[rob Kitchin]

Thanks for hosting and posting FF this week. Loads of potential books for the TBR.

[BV Lawson]

I was very happy to help out, Kevin. And thanks to you two for participating! What are the chances that I agree to do this for Patti and Typepad has a denial of service attack that same day? But I'm just very glad everything worked out eventually.

[BV Lawson]

You are welcome, Rob! And yes, there were a LOT of really interesting books posted this week. The other books already in my To Be Read pile on my dresser are scowling at me right now. I can hear them muttering, "We've been waiting here longer, you know."

[BV Lawson]

That's the beauty of FFB, isn't it, Neeru? Patti Abbott is to be congratulated for organizing this weekly feature that allows us to widen our book and author awareness. (Now if she would just post a way to clone ourselves so at least one clone could spend all day reading, that would help.)