Celebrating the classics

Article by: Janette Dalgliesh

Crime fiction is a relatively new genre, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have some glorious old titles. And because good crime fiction embeds us powerfully in the time and location of the story, those classics can give us a window into the author’s world, second to none.

I recently reread Dorothy L. Sayers’ wonderful Murder Must Advertise and it got me thinking. Sayers sweeps us into a world she knew well—the advertising industry in late 1930s London. It’s a long-gone world of newspaper ads and manual typesetting, where copywriters and artists quarrel over space on the page; where communications rely on freckle-faced messenger boys, and nourishment comes from the matronly charlady with the tea and cream cakes; where everybody is known as Mr— or Miss— and copywriters quote poetry expecting their audience to recognise it.

Raymond Chandler, by contrast, paints a dark picture of the America in which his characters roam: an urban jungle full of lethal men and femmes fatale, set against a backdrop of booze and sex and illicit highs. His language evokes more than simply time and place; it evokes a hard-edged and highly subjective view of life as lived by his narrator. That view has gone on, especially through film noir, to influence our view of mid-twentieth-century America.

And of course, Arthur Conan Doyle gave us characters completely immersed in Victorian England, replete with details of everyday life, in his classic Sherlock Holmes stories.

Time for a change?

But let’s face it, material written over a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, is bound to contain references that a new generation of readers may find incomprehensible.

Shakespeare has been paraphrased and adapted over and over, to make his narratives accessible to a wider audience. Is there now an argument for tweaking these classic stories?

Besides the obscure references, crime fiction from the past often contains material that can make us deeply uncomfortable.

Sayers’ early works include minor characters who use the N-word as a normal expression in everyday conversation—and nobody bats an eye.

Chandler’s heart-boiled detective Philip Marlowe is unremittingly homophobic, anti-Semitic and misogynistic. He frequently expresses a kind of shrugging acceptance of men’s violence towards women; even implies that the women often deserve it.

Holmes’ narrator, Dr Watson, is embedded in the militaristic colonial attitudes of his day, and doesn’t begin to question the rigid gender and class structures in which he lives.

Do I mind being made uncomfortable? In that red-hot moment, when the shock of the N-word or the casual acceptance of violence boots me out of the narrative—well, yes.

Yes I do.

Or maybe not…

But then I’m reminded, by that very discomfort, of how much our world has changed. We no longer see India as a rightful possession of Britain. We don’t nod in agreement when a man says he can see why a girl’s boyfriend would want to slap her. And most of us don’t use the N-word in casual conversation.

With reprints of old works by authors long dead, the mechanics of cleaning up and modernising these classics would be easy. We’ve seen it done often enough in children’s literature, for reasons of language shifts, clarity and—yes—political correctness. But we’re not talking about impressionable three-year-old readers here. We’re talking about adults.

So no, not for me, thanks. I will fiercely defend my right to read or see or hear a work in as close as possible a form to the one its creator originally intended.

I don’t want my Michelangelo sculptures covered up with fig leaves; I don’t want my Raphael women to go on the airbrush diet. And I don’t want an editor or publisher to muck around with Doyle, Sayers or Chandler. I want to see their worlds the way they did, raw and juicy; and if that means I have to squirm at the occasional racist or sexist remark, I’ll put up with it.

What do you think?

Since publishers have the ability and the opportunity to clean up the language, cleanup the social agenda and politics of the protagonists, make the narrative clearer—should they? Or should they leave well alone, even if it means we have to look up the meaning of an obscure reference, or blush at our heroes’ antiquated attitudes?

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