Reading Wed– Thursday
Feb. 25th, 2016 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders. So, one day last week I had quite a bit of reading time scheduled (multiple long subway rides, eating lunch out – I have no problem eating in restaurants by myself, but I like to have a book when I do it so that I'm not just staring blankly at a wall the whole time – waiting for meetings, etc) and of course it was only after I was in another part of town that I realized I had forgotten my Nook at home and had nothing to read with me. Obviously the answer to this problem was to buy a new book. Luckily I was right by a bookstore; unluckily it was what I refer to as a "hipster" bookstore (Racheline argued that I should call it a "literary genre" bookstore instead because they tend to be more aimed at middle-aged people than the young, but in my opinion, hipster and literary genre are basically the same thing when it comes to bookstores). What I mean is those bookstores that don't have sci-fi or fantasy or romance or mystery sections, that cater primarily to people who want to be seen reading more than they want to actually read, that have huge displays of poetry and Camus and arty coffee-table books but don't sell anything on the NYT bestseller list. And therefore when I went through my fairly extensive list of books I want to read that I have on my phone, they weren't carrying any of them.
But! All was not lost. I noticed a copy of The Invention of Murder on a shelf, and remembered seeing it recced fairly often on FFA, and so managed to give the dumb bookstore some of my money despite their best attempts to avoid a sale. The book is totally shameless true crime, but I suppose the long subtitle makes it look academic and therefore respectable.
To get on with the actual review: The Invention of Murder actually covers a period a bit wider than the Victorian Era, encompassing all of the 1800s, with a few of the murders discussed even going back all the way to the 1700s. Flanders's focus isn't just on the crimes themselves (though she does cover the crimes, the trials, and the executions), but more how each specific case was reacted to by society. She looks at things like newspaper articles, broadsides, ballads, children's rhymes, Punch & Judy shows, short stories and novels (including quite famous ones; Dickens shows up multiple times, stealing plots and names from real cases, as does Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, William Makepeace Thackeray, and others), plays, puppet shows, exhibits at Madame Tussaud's, and on and on.
The book is vaguely organized in chronological order, allowing Flanders to look at how public perception changed over the 1800s, but she also takes several specific strands of change: the increasing use of science in trials and investigations (especially in regards to tests to detect the presence of poisons), attitudes towards the police, the influence of new technologies like trains, the telegraph, and photographs. She makes the point that public perception of crime often has little to do with the reality – murders have always been hugely uncommon, despite their frequency in newspapers and novels. Ultimately she argues (I am HUGELY simplifying here, just to be clear) there's three periods of how people both understood real crimes and depicted crime in fiction: the early 1800s were the melodrama period, where criminals are bad because they're villains and villains are bad because they're criminals and there's nothing more to understand, where the focus is mostly on the victims (who are of course always beautiful and pure and kind and probably poor). Then comes the period of Sensation FIction, where the focus is more on a secret being revealed – though not yet through deliberate investigation, but usually through coincidence or providence. The focus tends to be on how ~horrible~ the crime was, and both villain and victim are often middle class. Then finally we hit the end of the century with the emergence of detective fiction, when the focus is on the hunt, on the riddle, on figuring out what happened. The main "characters" are either the detective or the criminal, who is often seen as upper class, cunning, even artistic; the victim may be entirely forgotten, or not even appear on-page at all. Flanders argues that the enduring appeal of the Jack the Ripper cases, compared to the many other cases she discusses in the book, is that it fits the tropes of detective fiction so perfectly: permanently unsolved, with a literally infinite number of suspects and motives to guess at.
I enjoyed the book a lot; one drawback was that, since Flanders covers literally dozens and dozens of cases, there are way too many names to keep track of, and I often forgot who everyone was as soon as she moved on to the next case – which, since she often called back to previous cases to make comparisons, was kind of a problem. But that's not too big of a deal. Her style was easy to read, with frequent black humor asides that – I admit it – totally made me laugh, even if it was sometimes a bit ghoulish. There were lots of little interesting details to discover too: I was particularly pleased by the information that stories about female detectives have been popular from the 1860s on (long before the British police actually employed woman), and the sheer number and shamelessness of... I suppose you have to call them death tourists. If you think it's inappropriate for news channels to show funerals today, wait until you read about people stealing bloody furniture for souvenirs. or buying porcelain figurines of murders.
Overall, I recommend it highly, as long as you're into a fairly macabre history.
What are you currently reading?
The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva. Still working on this! Since I got interrupted by the quite long Invention of Death.
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders. So, one day last week I had quite a bit of reading time scheduled (multiple long subway rides, eating lunch out – I have no problem eating in restaurants by myself, but I like to have a book when I do it so that I'm not just staring blankly at a wall the whole time – waiting for meetings, etc) and of course it was only after I was in another part of town that I realized I had forgotten my Nook at home and had nothing to read with me. Obviously the answer to this problem was to buy a new book. Luckily I was right by a bookstore; unluckily it was what I refer to as a "hipster" bookstore (Racheline argued that I should call it a "literary genre" bookstore instead because they tend to be more aimed at middle-aged people than the young, but in my opinion, hipster and literary genre are basically the same thing when it comes to bookstores). What I mean is those bookstores that don't have sci-fi or fantasy or romance or mystery sections, that cater primarily to people who want to be seen reading more than they want to actually read, that have huge displays of poetry and Camus and arty coffee-table books but don't sell anything on the NYT bestseller list. And therefore when I went through my fairly extensive list of books I want to read that I have on my phone, they weren't carrying any of them.
But! All was not lost. I noticed a copy of The Invention of Murder on a shelf, and remembered seeing it recced fairly often on FFA, and so managed to give the dumb bookstore some of my money despite their best attempts to avoid a sale. The book is totally shameless true crime, but I suppose the long subtitle makes it look academic and therefore respectable.
To get on with the actual review: The Invention of Murder actually covers a period a bit wider than the Victorian Era, encompassing all of the 1800s, with a few of the murders discussed even going back all the way to the 1700s. Flanders's focus isn't just on the crimes themselves (though she does cover the crimes, the trials, and the executions), but more how each specific case was reacted to by society. She looks at things like newspaper articles, broadsides, ballads, children's rhymes, Punch & Judy shows, short stories and novels (including quite famous ones; Dickens shows up multiple times, stealing plots and names from real cases, as does Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, William Makepeace Thackeray, and others), plays, puppet shows, exhibits at Madame Tussaud's, and on and on.
The book is vaguely organized in chronological order, allowing Flanders to look at how public perception changed over the 1800s, but she also takes several specific strands of change: the increasing use of science in trials and investigations (especially in regards to tests to detect the presence of poisons), attitudes towards the police, the influence of new technologies like trains, the telegraph, and photographs. She makes the point that public perception of crime often has little to do with the reality – murders have always been hugely uncommon, despite their frequency in newspapers and novels. Ultimately she argues (I am HUGELY simplifying here, just to be clear) there's three periods of how people both understood real crimes and depicted crime in fiction: the early 1800s were the melodrama period, where criminals are bad because they're villains and villains are bad because they're criminals and there's nothing more to understand, where the focus is mostly on the victims (who are of course always beautiful and pure and kind and probably poor). Then comes the period of Sensation FIction, where the focus is more on a secret being revealed – though not yet through deliberate investigation, but usually through coincidence or providence. The focus tends to be on how ~horrible~ the crime was, and both villain and victim are often middle class. Then finally we hit the end of the century with the emergence of detective fiction, when the focus is on the hunt, on the riddle, on figuring out what happened. The main "characters" are either the detective or the criminal, who is often seen as upper class, cunning, even artistic; the victim may be entirely forgotten, or not even appear on-page at all. Flanders argues that the enduring appeal of the Jack the Ripper cases, compared to the many other cases she discusses in the book, is that it fits the tropes of detective fiction so perfectly: permanently unsolved, with a literally infinite number of suspects and motives to guess at.
I enjoyed the book a lot; one drawback was that, since Flanders covers literally dozens and dozens of cases, there are way too many names to keep track of, and I often forgot who everyone was as soon as she moved on to the next case – which, since she often called back to previous cases to make comparisons, was kind of a problem. But that's not too big of a deal. Her style was easy to read, with frequent black humor asides that – I admit it – totally made me laugh, even if it was sometimes a bit ghoulish. There were lots of little interesting details to discover too: I was particularly pleased by the information that stories about female detectives have been popular from the 1860s on (long before the British police actually employed woman), and the sheer number and shamelessness of... I suppose you have to call them death tourists. If you think it's inappropriate for news channels to show funerals today, wait until you read about people stealing bloody furniture for souvenirs. or buying porcelain figurines of murders.
Overall, I recommend it highly, as long as you're into a fairly macabre history.
What are you currently reading?
The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva. Still working on this! Since I got interrupted by the quite long Invention of Death.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 02:10 am (UTC)One of my mother-in-laws (a retired university professor) is totally hooked on these types of books and she is over eighty! She has been for decades. Most of the stuff is really tedious--boring white people books, my son used to call them. I used to read a lot of her leftovers when I was in more constant contact with her--the days before I had access to reasonably-priced e-books and fanfiction! You're right so-called genre fiction is much more entertaining.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-26 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-28 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-03 08:18 pm (UTC)Hmm, I don't know; I haven't been there, so I can't really say. But if you enjoy it, it's probably not the sort of place that I'm talking about. It seems like no one actually enjoys them.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-07 10:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-08 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-01 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-03 08:15 pm (UTC)