Women writers — ‘Deadlier than the male’

Press, 28 April 1981, Page 17

Women writers — ‘Deadlier than the male’

By

ELISABETH DUNN

‘Sundav Times’

Why are respectable, mid-dle-class English ladies so good at murder? Not so much at doing it, you understand, as writing about it. . All the best thriller writers, the ones who realised Cyril Connolly's ambition to write a book which held good for 10 years afterwards, were women: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey. These were the princesses of the golden age of detective fiction and they remain widely read 50 years on. The question has intrigued Jessica Mann to the point where she has written an analysis of the woman detective writer, “Deadlier than the Male,” in which she airs a few thoughts on why this particular class of lady should brood so successfully on the violent and the macabre. Miss Mann is wellplaced to observe the scene, being herself an eminently middle-class English lady and the author of seven thrillers with an eighth due out in the summer. The writers she discusses are not held by anybody to be literary giants, but they had — and have — a huge attraction for the general reader. She writes: “Their experiences tended to induce in them (certain) assumptions: that stability was desirable and. when threatened, should be restored; that reason should prevail over violence; that the customs of a

secure and unthreatened s class had an intrinsic merit, v I think that the ethos they n expressed in fictional form e was .acquired during and t from their own lives and was e equally attractive and ad- t mirable to readers less able a to express it.” p Historically, Miss Mann ii

says, writing was the only way in which upper and middle class women could earn a penny or two. Anthony Trollope's mother, for example, churned out novels to support her family. Many a Victorian lady turned her pen to the darker side of the imagination.

Miss Mann quotes the novelist Elizabeth Stephenson writing in 1864: “Women who have been brought up in polite society, women who pride themselves on the delicacy of their sensibilities, who would faint at the sight of a cut finger ... such women can sit for hours listening to the details of a cold-blooded murder.”

Recognising this, the women of the Golden Age plunged in to their own fantasies, yet setting them in such familiar surroundings as to lend plausibility to an improbable story. By their own admission, their heroes were the direct descendants of knights errant and dragonslavers, plonked down in an advertising agency or a fashion house.

“None of the mystery writers whose success has been lasting,” Miss Mann observes, “met with crime or criminals during her career.”

Jessica Mann has much in common with her five heroines. The daughter of two London solicitors, she attended St Paul’s Girls’ School and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read archaeology and Anglo-Saxon. As soon as she came down she married an archaeologist (echoing Agatha Christie) and had three children in fairly quick succession while the family was living in Edinburgh. She was, she says, one of those graduates applying their degree to the washing

of nappies before it became a condition fashionable to chafe against. When her husband moved to Leicester University, she took a degree in Law and

prepared to be called to the Bar. A fourth child stopped her in her legal tracks and she took instead to writing thrillers. 1 “Women writers of my generation like Margaret

Drabble and Gillian Tyndall were writing those great expressions of emotion, laying themselves bare. I didn't think I had 80.000 words to say about Life like that, but I did want to write. “There is nothing quite like seeing a nice hardback volume with your name on the front: and writing crime novels you don't have to do this public striptease act that people do with straight novels.

“All the women in 'Deadlier than the Male’ were very reticent. People like Dorothy Sayers — and me— don’t want to bare their souls in public. She actually put an awful lot of herself into her books.”

Miss Mann lives in the tiny Cornish village of St Clement; three of her children are away at school or university. She lives with her husband, Charles Thomas, now Professor of Cornish Studies at Exeter University, and their nine-year-oid daughter.

She cares little for rural pursuits like walking or fruit bottling: her confinement to the study, therefore, is mostly voluntary though by no means total. She became a Liberal member of the Carrick District Council: “I got fed up with sitting at home grumbling about the way they did things, so I thought I would see if I could

do it better myself and of course I couldn't so I didn't stand again." She has just been appointed to sit on a quango — the Medical Practices Committee — a prospect which pleases because it means weekly trips to London. She does a little broadcasting —

Any Questions, Round Britain Quiz and, coming in the summer, a series on women crime writers for Radio 4, based on “Deadlier than the Male." While Miss Mann strenuously endorses the political aims of the women's movement. the inspiration for the

book sprang less from identification with the cause of women than from a commission from the publishers. It is a motive, after all. straight from the golden age of crime writing. Much the same could be said of Sarah Caudwell. whose first detective novel “Thus was Adonis Murdered" has just been published. With her short hairstyle, pipe clenched between her teeth and plunging neckline she may not look a typical middle'class lady, blit her book is in the strictest traditions of the Golden Age. She wrote it in her spare time because it was the sort of book she always enjoyed reading and she uses a penname to separate her fiction life from the real thing, in which she is a legal adviser to Lloyd's Bank. Her full name is Sarah Caudwell Cockburn; she is daughter of the journalist Claude Cockburn. “Thus was Adonis Murdered” deals with violent death in Venice and the wrongful arrest of a young English lady barristeran everyday tale of legal folk. Miss’ Cockburn set out to write the classic British whodunnit with legitimate clues and pointers to the identity of the killer rather than concern herself with the whys and wherefores of the more avant garde crime novel. The Golden Age. it would seem, is touched with immortality.