Too many projects, too much procrastination

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Feb 3, 2012: Dorothy Gilman, ‘Mrs. Pollifax’ Novelist, Dies at 88

From New York times:  Dorothy Gilman, ‘Mrs. Pollifax’ Novelist, Dies at 88

Dorothy Gilman, an espionage writer whose best-known heroine, Mrs. Pollifax, is very likely the only spy in literature to belong simultaneously to the Central Intelligence Agency and the local garden club, died on Thursday at her home in Rye Brook, N.Y. She was 88. 

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her family said. 

In “The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax” (1966), the first novel in what would be a 14-book series, Mrs. Gilman introduces Emily Pollifax, a 60-ish New Jersey widow bored by the compulsory round of tea and good works.

In search of adventure, she offers her services to the C.IA. — who, after all, is going to peg a suburban grandmother as a cold war secret agent? — and adventure she finds. In the course of the series, which concluded in 2000 with “Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled,” she fetches up in Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, China, Morocco, Sicily and elsewhere. 

Clever, lucky and naïvely intrepid, Mrs. Pollifax employs common sense and a little karate to rescue the kidnapped; aid the resistance (when you are a suburban lady spy, a fashionable hat is ideal for concealing forged passports); and engage in all manner of cheery deception (when doing business with a malefactor who is expecting a can of plutonium, a can of peaches makes an excellent if short-term substitute). 

Reviewers sometimes quibbled about the improbability of the novels’ basic premise. But the books proved popular with readers: in a genre in which women had long been young and sultry, Mrs. Pollifax, with her peril and petunias, made an irresistible, early feminist heroine. 

The series was the basis of two movies, the feature film “Mrs. Pollifax — Spy“ (1971), starring Rosalind Russell, and the telefilm “The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax” (1999), starring Angela Lansbury.

The Mystery Writers of America named Mrs. Gilman its 2010 Grand Master. 

Dorothy Edith Gilman was born in New Brunswick, N.J., on June 25, 1923; she decided on a writing career when she was still a child. Planning to write and illustrate books for children, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Under her married name, Dorothy Gilman Butters, she began publishing children’s books in the late 1940s. 

Mrs. Gilman’s marriage to Edgar A. Butters Jr. ended in divorce. She is survived by two sons, Christopher Butters and Jonathan Butters; and two grandchildren. 

She was also the author of several nonseries novels for adults, among them “The Clairvoyant Countess” (1975), “Incident at Badamya“ (1989) and “Kaleidoscope” (2002), and novels for young people including “Enchanted Caravan” (1949) and “The Bells of Freedom” (1963). 

By the seventh Mrs. Pollifax novel, “Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha,” published in 1985, Mrs. Gilman’s heroine has remarried. But for the most part, she is quite content to leave her husband at home for the duration of the series as she gads about the world, a paladin packing peaches.

Jan 10 2005: Charlotte MacLeod, 82; Author of 'Cozy' Mysteries, Juvenile Books

From Los Angeles Times:  Charlotte MacLeod, 82; Author of 'Cozy' Mysteries, Juvenile Books

Charlotte MacLeod, mistress of the "cozy" mystery who penned more than 30 whimsical whodunits featuring warm, witty and downright wacky amateur sleuths solving murders by quicklime, ancient spear, stinging bees and other innovative means, has died. She was 82.

MacLeod, who also wrote a dozen juvenile books, myriad short stories and a biography, died Friday at a nursing home in Lewiston, Maine. The author spent most of her life in Boston but had lived in Maine since 1985.

Known for her ladylike manner, hat, white gloves and impeccable grammar, MacLeod was a perfect match for the "cozy" genre -- something of the opposite to hard-boiled private eye mysteries. MacLeod's cozy mysteries eschewed gore, graphic violence, sex and vulgar language and reveled in a dizzy pace, outrageous characters, a little romance and a lot of laughs.

"She wrote specifically for people who did not want blood and guts, at least not a whole lot of it anyway," Alexandria Baxter, her sister and business manager who typed and proofread her manuscripts, told the Portland Press Herald in Maine. "Everybody drank tea and ate molasses cookies. It was that kind of thing."
Film critic Kathi Maio, writing in Sojourner magazine, once characterized the author and her work: "If, as I believe, mystery fiction's primary goal is to entertain, then Charlotte MacLeod is one of the most gifted mystery authors writing today."

MacLeod, who sold more than 1 million copies of her books, wrote two series under her own name, the Peter Shandy mysteries and the Sarah Kelling mysteries. She also wrote two series under the pseudonym Alisa Craig, the Madoc Rhys mysteries featuring a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, and the Grub-and-Stakers mysteries about folks in a town she called Lobelia Falls in Canada.

The author's first adult mystery protagonist, Shandy, was a horticulture hotshot professor at Balaclava Agricultural College. He was world-renowned for developing the Balaclava Buster, a rutabaga, and also infamous as Balaclava Junction's "unofficial man-about-the-trouble," solving screwball crimes in his spare time.

Kelling was a young impoverished widow of a prominent Boston family still struggling to remain on Beacon Hill by running a boarding house. She marries art theft investigator Max Bittersohn, and together they investigate crimes, often in disguise, and do good, while managing truly outrageous relatives.

MacLeod described one of those relatives, Cousin Brooks, in her 1998 book "The Balloon Man," for example, as "a trim, sprightly man only 5 1/2 feet tall, with the bright eyes of a chipmunk and the inquiring mind of an investigative reporter. A man of many talents, he was particularly authoritative on the subject of the crested grebe."

In 1994, MacLeod wrote her major nonfiction work, "Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart." Her subject, a contemporary of Britain's better-known Agatha Christie, was an early 20th century mystery writer and playwright whose autobiography had inspired MacLeod as a child.
As an aging fiction writer living in a house with three cats in rural Maine, MacLeod was often likened to Christie, and to fictional sleuth and author Jessica Fletcher portrayed by Angela Lansbury on the popular 1984-1996 television series "Murder, She Wrote."

Asked by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994 if she were the inspiration for the Fletcher character, MacLeod replied tartly, "I can't even ride a bicycle. I have eight pairs of glasses, and I'm lucky if I can find one. That's about as good as I get at solving mysteries."

MacLeod was born in Bath, New Brunswick, Canada, on Nov. 12, 1922, and moved to Boston with her family as an infant and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951.

An avid reader as a child, she soon started writing her own stories. At 10, she entered a newspaper contest and won $1 when her story was printed.

After attending the School of Practical Art, now the Art Institute of Boston, MacLeod worked as an advertising copywriter, first for Stop and Shop Supermarkets, and then the Boston advertising firm N.H. Miller & Co., retiring in 1982 as the firm's vice president.

On weekends she wrote short stories. In her 40s, she moved on to books, beginning with juveniles because as a child she felt there were never enough mysteries for girls to read.

She published her first adult mystery, "Rest You Merry" featuring Shandy in 1978 and followed the next year with the first Kelling mystery, "The Family Vault."

Highly disciplined, MacLeod began new books on a Sunday, wrote mornings beginning at 6 a.m., rewrote in the afternoons, and worked in her bathrobe to avoid the temptation of running out of the house to do errands.
In addition to churning out books, MacLeod edited two anthologies of short stories, "Mistletoe Mysteries" and "Christmas Stalkings."

She was a co-founder and past president of the American Crime Writers League and won five American Mystery awards and a Nero Wolfe award.

MacLeod, who is survived by her sister and a brother, often said she so enjoyed writing her books that she would continue even if nobody read them. "I always loved to write. I love words," she said in 1994. "I can get ecstatic over a semicolon."

 

Killing Agatha

From the Hindu:  Killing Agatha

Why every aspiring writer of detective fiction would like to go for Agatha Christie’s jugular...

Killing Agatha Christie is a popular sport with writers of detective fiction. It’s also something of a rite of passage. A public sneer at Christie is a practical necessity for the nervous beginner testing the waters. If one declares Hercule Poirot insufferable and Miss Marple certifiable, one is already midstream. The other side, the greener one, is literary fiction. The muck still sticking to the skin is detective stuff. The writer, gaining the shore, may yell her lungs out that detective fiction is literary, but nobody’s really listening until she attacks Agatha Christie. Shadow boxing with Poirot and Miss Marple just isn’t enough any more. One must go straight for the jugular, and murder Agatha Christie. 

That’s the M.O. But murder is not easy, not this one, and Christie has been, overlong, a serial murderee.

Why is she so difficult to kill? 

Let’s take a look at what her murderers have. 

Enough motives

The Motive, as Hercule Poirot sublimely remarked, is always money. Christie sells more than anyone else. (J. K. Rowling? Careful — oh-oh, disapparated already?) Wait on, there’s more — Christie dominates libraries, which takes her a notch beyond, and makes her also the most read. After the initial colic of envy, this could be a good thing for the literary writer. It proves how irredeemably vulgar Christie must be. Literary fiction, of course, can only be read by the truly literate, the sort who, horrid thought, cozies up with Edmund Wilson — today remembered for little beyond his neurotic “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945) tantrum in The New Yorker. 

Not only do her bad books sell by the million, but Agatha Christie is dead too, and that’s an injustice difficult to ignore. 

Think of it. The day your new book is out, nobody notices. On your way to work, the guy on the seat next to you misses his stop because he’s reading N or M? On the way back home he’s still reading the book and he misses his stop again. And just when did she write the darn book? 1941? 

Even his dad wasn’t born then, what’s he doing reading retro stuff when he could be normal and ask after your book? Not that you’d ever mention it, but it’s difficult to miss, title coyly peeping over the wraparound Economic Times. In a perfect world this is when he pulls the chain, stops the train, and smashes into the nearest bookstore to grab a copy. Except that the nearest bookstore has never heard of your book, but N or M? eyeballs you the moment you cross the threshold. 

These are strong currents, not to be quieted by the unguent of a good review or two. Wet work is called for, definitely. 

The Weapon — ah, no matter how they dress it up, the weapon’s always the same: Agatha Christie can’t write. Now this is a clumsy weapon to wield against a woman who wrote relentlessly for 65 years, unless you can get a bit specific. 

Which brings us to Opportunity. Things really lush up here. Almost every book offers an opportunity for attack: plot, characters, locale — they are all flawed, and my dear, have you even considered her prose?

Every murderer needs an alibi. Best not to look too closely at this one, or we might land up finding Christie characters and plots in the murderer’s own oeuvre. Even Colin Watson, after his satirical Mayhem Parva, went on to give us Miss Silver who is only Marple gone giddy on whisky and sex. 

All this worked well in the postmodern fug of mannered ennui and cynicism, but in the second decade of the third millennium, it reads so yesterday. We need to let in daylight now, and seriously examine why it is so difficult murdering Agatha Christie. 

At the end of the first page of any Christie novel, the reader is infected with a delicious sense of anticipation. Nothing has happened as yet — no corpse, no murderous thought, no simmering resentments — yet the page trills with excitement. In the voice of Dolly Bantry, the reader’s thought is “This is my murder, and I intend to enjoy it!” 

Christie intended to appetize us for murder. And how well she succeeds. We’re avid for murder before she so much as hints at the corpse around the corner. 

The trick is simple, and not easy to duplicate. Christie is not writing for the reader. She’s writing in real time, as she watches the story unfold. The excitement we feel is her own. 

If there is any skill at all to writing, it is this. A supreme lack of self-consciousness, an indifference to detail except for what moves the moment, the flow from now to next. 

I didn’t see that — did you? is the question the reader keeps asking because the scenery is flying past the window, and it’s all familiar, so how can we tell what we missed? 

Banal prose? Did I hear you mutter banal? When was the banal so dangerous as with Agatha Christie?

Christie limned society in shrewd spare lines (most of them spoken). The very economy of those lines gave her characters the annoying clarity of strangers glimpsed across the aisle: the little you saw or overheard compelled you to vividly imagine the rest. 

The next accusation is that Christie was prolific — and what can be produced so fast but trash? The same argument is levelled at two other successful hacks whose anniversaries were recently celebrated — P. G. Wodehouse and Charles Dickens. There’s a paradox here, one generally overlooked. People wrote more, and much faster before computers. In fact, the messier the implements, the faster they wrote. Shakespeare wrote faster than Scott who wrote faster than Dickens who wrote faster than P.G. Wodehouse who ran neck-to-neck with Christie most of the time. 

So if Christie pulled off six impossible books before breakfast, how did she do it? She doesn’t tell. Her Autobiography, published posthumously in 1977, is her most accomplished work of fiction. It is completely opaque. 

The real story

Try reading a Christie novel without its detective. The book does not collapse. The story still moves. You realise then that the game in which you were earlier caught up, with its clues and red herrings and breathless denouement is merely impasto, an overlay on the real story, the one you’re left with when you close the book. Murder is merely a colour that makes one narrative emerge, but there are other stories in flux — like that other dystopia we call life. 

This is why Christie’s books are addictive. We recognise the dystopia because it locates familiar irrationalities, discrepancies, anarchies, misfits, and we’re asking all the time what if this means murder? The cannibalistic sadist, the tragic necrophiliac, even the cellar with its layers of bodies, seem puerile next to Christie’s respectable murderers. For her solid tax-paying men and women, murder’s merely another domestic chore. 

Time we saw this really, bcause when paraphilias are passé and axe murderers put to grass, there’s still the misfit, the discrepancy, the odd detail that nags, and we do need to find out what it means. And that is why it is impossible to murder Agatha Christie.

 

 

Culture Books Agatha Christie Agatha Christie Poirot book sells for more than £40,000 at auction

From the Guardian: Agatha Christie Poirot book sells for more than £40,000 at auction

Bestseller … Agatha Christie's Poirot Investigates from 1924 reaches £40,630 at auction. Photograph: D Winter Auctioneers

 

A rare early dust-jacket drawing of Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot has driven the price of a book that originally sold for 37p to a record £40,630.

The first edition of Christie's short story collection Poirot Investigates, from 1924, was put up for auction by the Dominic Winter auction house with a guide price of £3,000 to £5,000. After a fierce bidding war, a book that was priced on publication at just seven shillings and sixpence eventually sold for £40,630 to book dealer Christian Jonkers from Jonkers Rare Books. Dominic Winter believes this is the highest price ever paid for a Christie book: the most expensive previously sold is thought to be a £10,000 copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009.

The 1924 edition's dust jacket is the first to show the Belgian detective, depicting a smartly dressed man, shoes polished, cane in one hand, hat and gloves in the other. Just as Christie described him in her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, "his head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military", and "the neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound."

Dominic Winter auctioneer Chris Albury said the book was of particular interest to collectors because "it's the first representation of Poirot on a dust jacket, which is partly why the price went so high".

"The dust jacket is the key," Albury said. "It's pretty perfect, and usually dust jackets from this time have got a panel or half a panel missing. Here Poirot is completely intact … Pre-second-world-war dust jackets are far less common than postwar ones, too – they were often taken off books at the point of sale and put in bins, so they didn't even make it out of shops."

Poirot Investigates is Christie's first collection of short stories to feature Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. It sees the duo tackling mysteries including the abduction of a prime minister and the case of a film star and a diamond. The Times Literary Supplement of April 1924 was positive about the collection. "When in the first of M Poirot's adventures we find a famous diamond that has once been the eye of a god and a cryptic message that it will be taken from its possessor 'at the full of the moon', we are inclined to grow indignant on behalf of our dear old friend the moonstone [in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone]. But we have no right to do so, for the story is quite original," ran the review. "Moreover, if Captain Hastings, who tells the story, is a little like Watson, always anxious to display his cleverness and always getting snubbed, every detective has had a foil since the days of Lecoq. In fact M Poirot is a thoroughly pleasant and entertaining person, an admirable companion for a railway journey."

Christie went on to write 80 crime novels and short story collections and 19 plays, with a further six novels published under the name Mary Westmacott. The author, whose books have sold more than 2bn copies worldwide, died in 1976

 

 

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