Thank goodness Lord Peter didn't kill off Mr. Campion

In today's ChaliceBlog, ChaliceChick connects to a piece of copyright law and the example it refers to.

This reminded me of comparisons that have been made between Margery Allingham's Mr. Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey gets his own Wikipedia entry and Sayers was a more successful writer, but Allingham's character is just more interesting -- at least to my eyes.

Both men were of about average height, slender but decently muscled -- well, Wimsey was probably more godlike, I admit -- blue/green/grey eyed, blonde/sandy/straw-colored hair, spectacles, and a generally witless look. Both were good dressers, although Sayers went into greater detail on clothes in general. Both men were younger sons in titled families: we never know Campion's real name but we meet all of Wimsey's family and they figure in many books. Both men are trusted (in unspoken ways) by the governments of their day. Both men are rich and clearly do not worry themselves about money. Both men live in Piccadilly: Wimsey at 110A Piccadilly, Campion at 17A Bottle Street.

They have their differences, though. Lord Peter drives a Daimler, Mr. Campion a Lagonda. Lord Peter was damaged by his participation in France in World War One, Passchendaele, perhaps? Mr Campion's service was interesting, high-level but unspecified.

Both have a lower-class sidekick: for Lord Peter it's the ever efficient Bunter, who saved his life during the war, is an excellent photographer and good cook, and is at least nominally a butler (he announces guests too). You would never, ever expect Magersfontein Lugg, Mr. Campion's man-of-all-work, to buttle, however ("all-work" doesn't go that far) and I don't think he cooks, but he probably does a good fry-up. Lugg has his ear to the ground in criminal territory and may be an alumnus of Wormwood Scrubs. He sneers a lot, and Mr. Campion sometimes refers to him (to his face) as "Mother Lugg's little boy"; they are mock antagonists.

Their ancestry is different too. Wimsey's ancestry goes back to the Norman Conquest and the ancestral property, at Duke's Denver, occasionally figures in a plotline. Campion, on the other hand, is either named Rudolph or his older brother is, which signifies something non-English, even if it's not clear what. He may be royalty. Wimsey is C of E (as aren't we all?); Mr. Campion attended St Ignatius College, Cambridge, which, although non-existent, is clearly Catholic (and Campion is the name of an English saint and martyr) BUT Cambridge is right in the middle of the Fens, with Cromwell's home of Ely not far away, so the clues go in several directions.

Their choice of free-time companionship is subtly different. Wimsey has a good relationship with Detective Parker, who becomes his brother-in-law Charles. He has male friends, some of whom are even Jews, which undoubtedly signified the cosmopolitan in London during the 1920s. Sayers's own stamping grounds, in a London ad agency and Oxford, provide Wimsey's friends. Well-born women, sometimes of puzzling morals, are in the background and it's acknowledged that he has kept mistresses. (Not in so many words! He has bought clothing for women.) Mr. Campion's choicest friends, who do sometimes assist him, in small ways, include people with names like Guffy Randall, whom we later learn is a lord. Oates and Luke are friendly acquaintances in Scotland Yard but neither man marries his sister Val, a famous fashion designer. Mr. Campion's heart was broken by Biddy Padgett.

Which brings us to their women.

Harriet Vane is as famous as Wimsey herself, even before she becomes Lady Peter (and the nicety of the naming is noted) ... She is a possible ... murderess! who attended Oxford, and is a writer, and ... has lived in sin. Check Sayers's entry in Wikipedia and you will see why Harriet might have killed her lover. Wimsey's mother approves of Harriet; it's a deft touch that given her public past Harriet chooses to be married in cloth of gold, referring us back to Wimsey's Norman ancestry.

I just adore Lady Amanda Pontisbright, about as pleasing a female character as I have ever encountered. Mr. Campion becomes acquainted with her when he is about 30 and she, 16 or 17. She is red-headed, dressed up in a garment she made from old curtains, and wants desperately to rent him a room in the mill house where she lives in penury with brother, sister, and American cousin. Amanda is fascinated by electricity and hydraulics and possibly Mr. Campion -- at one point she asks him bluntly, "Do you ever think about Biddy Padgett?" (indicating that although she's a kid in the sticks, she has connections) -- and he admits it. After the bad guys are disposed of and the excitement dies down, Amanda falls asleep, having asked Mr. Campion to wait for her to grow up. With affection and amusement, he watches her sleep, and there ends Sweet Danger. Incidentally, Amanda does grow up and becomes an aviation engineer and if you want to find out what Mr. Campion did about it, you'll just have to go read some Margery Allingham.

I bring you this analysis because ChaliceChick's blog links to a copyright case about ownership of two very similar characters, and Allingham always claimed she hadn't read Sayers. In her defense, the Wimsey/Campion type is not a literary device. Those guys really exist -- not as detectives but as types. Sometime I shall blog on Sir Peregrine Henniker-Heaton as proof that those people really can be witless in the extreme.

Several months ago, housebound for several days and out of fresh mysteries, I fell back on a dust-covered stash found after a desperate search. Back-to-back, I read Sweet Danger and The Nine Tailors, and I found the latter so imponderable -- and Harriet's not even there to dull it down further -- I wondered what prompts the Wimsey addicts into their addictions. My conclusion on Nine Tailors: Sayers had an affair with someone who was into ringing changes and, feigning interest, she took good notes. What other reason could there be for page after page of change-ringing lore? (Wikipedia is hardly a match for the pages she takes up with this stuff.) Sayers was the daughter of a C of E clergyman and the picture she paints, in the C of E clergyman character, is Dickensian, the fuss-budget to end all fuss-budgets, and perhaps revenge on her father.

There's no question: Sayers is the better writer. Everything about the Lord Peter books is more richly done. She's great at presenting that time and those places and people like that. But it's often suggested that Sayers fell in love with Lord Peter -- though she always denied it -- and she lingers over him and his life in ways that make me itchy. (There is a brief bedroom scene where Peter and Harriet make love in Latin. Well, I probably would too, if I could.) Who can read about Harriet without feeling Sayers's longing to be Harriet? Ick.

But the Allingham book was much more fun to read. Just plain fun. if Sayers had tried a copyright suit against Allingham, it's clear to me that the end products are so different, subtly but adding up to two characters instead of one, that a judge wouldn't have found for Sayers.

Statistics now prove that Mother was wrong. You can look it up

Today’s NY Times tells us there’s a 100% correlation between women nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court and having read Nancy Drew as a kid. Yes! Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg and now, Sonia Sotomayor all read Nancy Drew when they were grade-schoolers.

In my family, it was a given that Nancy Drew was trash, a waste of time, and … something only badly-bred little girls read. To prove the point, Mother would draw on her sister Betsy, director of circulation for the Youngstown Public Library System, to confirm that none of the libraries in the system bought Nancy Drew books. Or for that matter, the Hardy Boys or Judy Bolton either.

So my memories of reading all those series are of books smuggled from friends and also from the libraries of older residents, people who had bought the series for their children who were now grown up and moved away. The series books I read were the oldest ones, all published by Grosset & Dunlap, of course, with covers barely hanging on and loose yellowing pages, musty smelling.

The most powerful memory called up is of visiting the Wynn family. Across US 224 from our farmhouse, a lane headed straight north for about a mile. Near its end, it dropped into a small grove of trees and there the Wynns’ ramshackle farmhouse squatted. Its lawn was full of rusting tractor parts and cars on blocks, and the front screen door was missing its spring, but I went back and back and back because I was always welcome to draw from their vast library of Nancy Drews and the others.

With my mind full of hardened criminals anyway, the walk to and from Wynns' was scary. Flat Ohio fields stretched away on both sides, and as the summer sun baked down, the only sounds would be the endless buzzing of bees, the occasional caw of a crow over the fields, and a far-off tractor. The sound of highway traffic would mute before I was halfway there. But I’d brave the silence and the solitude because the walk home with an armload of Nancy Drews was such a pleasure.

Jack Reacher, surrogate father

Lee Child’s latest detective novel was published last week. At least 50 have sold at Bookstore C, and our store is the chain’s smallest in the region. I was eager to read it myself but we’d sell out each day before I could grab one to borrow. In the meantime, I discussed the book with customers as I rang up the sales.

Here are sample customer comments:
“Jack Reacher is my dream man!”
“My daughter says Jack Reacher is her surrogate father.”
“I got a first printing, first edition of the first Reacher book just by accident and ever since then I’ve made sure to get a first first. I love the guy.”
“Jack Reacher is the coolest hero going.”
“I love Jack Reacher.”

Well, Reacher is a unique character, I grant you. He’s a military brat and grew up mostly on American bases overseas (his mother was a Frenchwoman his dad met on an early posting). Reacher had one brother, now dead. Reacher went into the service, enjoyed weaponry, and was a military policeman, but was downsized with full retiree benefits after the Cold War ended. Here’s where it gets weird: Reacher has no fixed abode and owns nothing but the clothes on his back.

So our hero: speaks fluent French and has a working knowledge of several other languages. Knows weapons well, even loves certain ones, but owns none. Is smart and well educated, with a trackable past, an income, and ongoing medical benefits. No wife, no ex-wife; no children; no parents, no siblings; no profession or credentialing or ambition or investments; no house, apartment, furniture, entertainment system or passion for Coltrane, books, garden, lawn, church or temple, neighbors, car or other vehicle, dietary fads, interest in cooking complete with recipes, or collection of arcana. Whatever I’ve left out he doesn’t have anyway.

Something I like about Child’s writing of Reacher is that there are no dei ex machina. Unlike Nancy Drew, he didn’t just take a course in scuba diving — he always knew just as much about diving as he needs to for the moment, and it’s marginally more than you and I know. Unlike the unbearable Cornwell’s unspeakable Kay Scarpetta, there is no niece Lucy in her helicopter with the latest in spook gear. Unlike Lincoln Child (no kin to Lee that I know of), Katherine Howe, or a dozen others, no mysterious and inexplicable “force” that appears toward the end and changes the whole equation. If Reacher needs another garment, he gets it at Wal*Mart, an army-navy store, or Goodwill. If he needs something more up-to-date, there’s a Radio Shack or place that sells batteries nearby, wherever you are.

What Reacher does have is: a decent education, a somewhat-but-not-too heroic past, a family upbringing, discipline, honor, and a reputation. People never forget him. In every book he meets a smart, clean, woman-who-asks-no-questions and they have very pleasant (undescribed) sexual interaction; she leaves smiling and so does he. Like Dickens, Child wraps up every plot device tidily. Each piece of equipment that attached itself to Reacher during the book — someone’s leather jacket on a cool day, that Glock he likes — is back in the hands of its owner or otherwise specifically disposed of. If he’s been in trouble with the authorities in the course of the book, he will have embarrassed them enough that they’re just willing to forget him. In the last chapter or two, he will have found a place to shower and shave and change into freshly bought cheap clothes, dumping the dirty ones. You know he’s going to hit the road. And the book ends there.

Child’s prose is brisk or he has the same good editor book after book. I admire his construct. It’s simple and clean. No extraneous characters to follow (no Henry Pitts and his brother William and Rosie the Hungarian restaurateur; no Italian mother who died too young leaving behind a love of opera and some good crystal; no baby Michael who was killed falling out of the crib). No sidekicks — no Doctor Watson and his wandering wound from a jezrail bullet, no Hawk talkin’ ghetto, no ditzy rich mother-in-law Laurel, no drunken pussy-whipped Clete. Just Jack Reacher.

The only loose end is outside the book. What do we think about a young woman who says that Reacher is her “surrogate father”? The books don’t leave me wondering about anything, but that response sure does.