PD James Kills Jane Austen

Elizabeth Zelvin

Celebrated mystery novelist PD James’s new Jane Austen pastiche, Death Comes to Pemberley, is the first book I downloaded to the Kindle I got for Xmas that wasn’t either my own work or in the public domain. It’s only the latest of a big enough bevy of novels to be called a subgenre—some mysteries and some I’d call historical chick lit—featuring either Jane Austen herself or her characters, most often Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, their fictional lives extended through marriage and parenthood.


The novel started well enough that I began to make notes for a possible blog post. James’s meticulous use of language and majestic pace, so out of sync with most of today’s crime fiction, serve her well as she sets her scene in Austen’s universe. She replicates Austen’s lightly ironic tone.


“The town has an assembly room...but...the chief entertainment takes place in private houses where the boredom of dinner parties and whist tables, always with the same company, is relieved by gossip.”


When social events are threatened due to the war with France, it is finally concluded that “Paris would rejoice exceedingly and take new heart were that benighted city to learn that the Pemberley ball had been cancelled.”


Unlike many of the authors who have borrowed Austen and her characters, James avoids anachronism in both language and content, beyond a few delicate references to marital love and pregnancy, on which Austen would have remained silent or even more euphemistic. It could even be argued that the lack of onstage drama—for example, there is no confrontation between Wickham, who plays a major role, and either Darcy or Elizabeth—is justified because overt confrontation would be out of character for Austen.


Unfortunately, the promise of Austenian delights is not fulfilled, nor is the hope of a good mystery. I’ve already seen one online review that perpetrated more of a spoiler than I think fair. However, I must say that there is no puzzle and no detection, that certain characters are introduced only for the sake of unwarranted revelations at the end about their role in the crime, and that James is self-indulgent in slipping in her own critique of Pride and Prejudice.


When Darcy’s sister Georgiana has a suitor, Elizabeth reflects:


Surely they were in love, or perhaps on the verge of love, that enchanting period of mutual discovery, expectation, and hope. It was an enchantment she had never known. It still surprised her that between Darcy’s first insulting proposal and his second successful and penitent request for her love, they had only been together in private for less than half an hour....If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?


James also drags in references to characters from Persuasion and Emma, who by coincidence are only two or three degrees of separation from the Darcys.


James commits almost every literary crime that new writers are cautioned against: endless backstory, telling rather than showing both character and action, lack of conflict and suspense, and avoidance of dramatic scenes or interaction between the characters in favor of tedious exposition and narrative musings. Yet within a month of its appearance, Death Comes to Pemberley had already been on the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks and will no doubt remain there for some time to come. Like me, an awful lot of readers were seduced by the combined names of Jane Austen and P.D. James and will no doubt be equally disappointed. Or will they even notice?






















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Succumbing to Kindle

Elizabeth Zelvin

I hope I won’t regret admitting publicly that I got a Kindle for Christmas. Or was it Chanukah? As a reader, I look forward to traveling without pounds of books in my backpack or luggage and never running out of reading matter. As a writer, I feel more ambivalent. Amazon’s world-changing e-reader has permanently debased the price of books (and therefore author earnings) and cut radically into the business of the independent booksellers and librarians who are the best friends of midlist writers like me. On the other hand, it provides opportunities that didn’t exist before to share my work with readers, and affordably, at that. I don’t want to add to the millions of words on the subject of the changing publishing industry that are already floating around the Internet. Instead, let’s talk about me as a reader with my first electronic reading device.


Can the reader be separated from the writer who inhabits the same brain and body? Maybe not. My very first download was my own story, “Navidad,” currently enjoying new life as an e-story on Untreed Reads, after originally appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As I write this, it occurs to me that if I actually read the thing, I’ll have a better idea of how this e-publisher presents its material. I’ve only thought of this because I noticed flaws in the formatting of the first e-book I did read: Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the very first Hercule Poirot mystery.


I know that HarperCollins plans to publish new editions of all 80 of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. Now, there would be a grand project for a Kindle reader, if it’s not prohibitively expensive. (I can’t imagine going out and buying 80 new print novels that I’ve already read, not to mention giving them shelf space. Can you?) But what’s available now for free or close to it consists of two novels, the first Poirot and the first Tommy and Tuppence, The Secret Adversary, which I also downloaded.


The Christies were not the first. My first visit to the Kindle store (which was not involved in the acquisition of my own short story) took me to two longtime favorite authors of whom I’ve read most but not quite everything in my lifetime: in order of acquisition, Louisa May Alcott and Jane Austen. My hardcover copies of Little Women (“special contents of this edition,” presumably the foreword and full-color illustrations, copyright 1946) and Jo’s Boys (Goldsmith Publishing Company, Chicago, no copyright information whatever) are falling apart. The spine of Little Women flaps precariously; the brittle brown pages of Jo’s Boys flake off as I turn them, trying to find a date. I still re-read them, and yes, I still cry every single time Beth dies. Um, is crying on a Kindle as bad as spilling coffee on a computer keyboard? If so, I might be in trouble.


I know I have my Pride and Prejudice somewhere, though I haven’t opened it in a while. It’s a trade paperback I got for an English lit class in college, which means it’s close to fifty years old. I don’t really need to re-read it to remember more than enough to enjoy P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley. Yep, I treated myself to a $12.99 current read I might otherwise have reserved at the library. P.D. James is not one of the hundreds of mystery authors I know personally, so I won’t pretend I would have bought the hardcover. But I certainly wouldn’t have failed to read it, no matter what. Anyhow, as Amazon assiduously tells readers, “This price was set by the publishers.” And there I go down the primrose path, buying books again.




























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Discover Joan Aiken!

by Julia Buckley
September 4 marked what would have been the 87th birthday of the wonderful Joan Aiken. Never heard of her, you say? Then you must check out this amazing website which highlights the more than 100 books Ms. Aiken composed in her lifetime, out of what seemed an endless well of creativity.

Aiken was never tied to one genre. Click on "books" on her homepage to see all of the avenues she travelled when in quest of a great story. One of my favorites is listed under "Wolves Chronicles" (see the picture with the wolf outside the castle). These great tales started with the lovely, Gothic, young adult tale called THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, which not only wins my award for greatest title, but which kept me spellbound as a youngster.

Aiken came from a highly creative family. The daughter of poet Conrad Aiken and the sister of Jane Aiken Hodge (another favorite from my youth), she never had university training, but began telling (and selling) her stories right out of school.

Aiken won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972, but she also won a Guardian Award (for Children's Literature), and in 1999 she was awarded an MBE for "her services to children's literature" (Wikipedia).

Perhaps I love her partly because she was so much a part of my own childhood; but Aiken's work has truly stood the test of time. Jane Austen fans should check out Aiken's works about that writer (click on the bust of Jane), and those who love fantasy should click on the unicorn--Aiken was writing tales of imaginary worlds long before JK Rowling was even born.

Do yourself a favor and read a book by Joan Aiken today! Her website alone is a delightful adventure.

The Indefinable Quality of Voice

Elizabeth Zelvin

If you ask agents and editors what single quality draws them to a manuscript by a new author, the majority of them, at least in my experience, will say “voice.” A strong writer’s literary voice is hard to describe. It may or may not be hard to imitate—but a work that does imitate an established writer’s voice immediately gets branded as derivative or mere pastiche or parody.

The singer’s voice makes a good analogy to writer’s voice. To start by saying what it’s not, I’m not talking about the easily discerned difference between Renee Fleming singing opera and Mariah Carey belting out a pop song. Opera and pop are different musical forms, just as a poem and a novel are different literary forms, and the singers or writers present each in an appropriate artistic style. Voice is more like this: you’re sitting in a greasy spoon in Wichita drinking coffee, and the radio is set to an oldies station. A phrase of vocal music floats past your ears, and you think, “Judy Garland!” or “Louis Armstrong!” Garland and Armstrong are both decades dead, but millions of people still recognize each of these great singers’ unique voice whenever they hear it.

When it’s in the first person, the reader may think of it as the character’s voice rather than the author’s. One of the great challenges to the writer is to shift voice when writing different characters. Some writers do it better than others. To use examples from mystery fiction, Charlaine Harris does it masterfully with the protagonists of her three series, Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard, and Harper Connolly. Ruth Rendell, after writing the Inspector Wexford books for years, took the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, in my opinion, less to write in a different subgenre than to write in a different voice. Robert Parker’s voice, on the other hand, is strong and unmistakable, but he doesn’t change it well, so that the Sunny Randall books sound—to my ear, at least—exactly like the Spenser books. Stuart Woods is similarly monolithic: the Holly Barker books sound exactly like the Stone Barrington books, a problem the author solved by getting his two protagonists together and into bed.

Voice at its best is both powerful and memorable. The three examples below came to mind immediately, although I haven’t reread any of these books in years. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1885. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than 70 years earlier, in 1813. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle came out in 1948. Like Judy Garland and Louis Armstrong, Huck Finn and Elizabeth Bennett and Cassandra Mortmain are unforgettable once you’ve heard them speak.

Twain:
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Austen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"

Smith:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided that my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.