from
The Sirens Sang of Murder
by
Sarah Caudwell

“We are of course anxious,” said Julia, “to appeal to as wide a public as possible, and it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”

“But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got verysmellitude,” said Cantrip. “It’s all based on real life, so it’s going to have verysmellitude in bucketfuls.”

“I suppose,” said Ragwort, “that he is simply one of those all too numerous people who have no idea of the difference between right and wrong.”

“I suspect,” said Julia, “that he thinks things are wrong only if one enjoys them, and is able on that basis to regard himself as a man of the highest moral character.”

“The trouble is,” said Selena, with a certain wistfulness, “that you and I, Julia, have been brought up in an era of emancipation and enlightenment, and we have got into the habit of treating men as if they were normal, responsible, grown-up people. We engage them in discussion; we treat their opinions as worthy of quite serious consideration; we seek to influence their behaviour by rational argument rather than by some simple system of rewards and punishments. It’s all a great mistake, of course, and only makes them confused and miserable—especially men like the Colonel, who have grown up with the idea that women will tell them what they ought to do without their having to think about it for themselves. But I’m afraid it’s too late to put the clock back.”

“I suppose,” I said, “that he was rather bored by All’s Well That Ends Well?”

“On the contrary, he enjoyed it enormously, suspending disbelief to an extent that the producer can hardly have dreamt of. He took in particular a great fancy to Helena, whom he described as ‘a damned fine girl,’ and a corresponding dislike to the Count of Roussillon, whom he judged to be unworthy of her affections. So strongly, indeed, did he feel on the subject that in the middle of the fifth act he rose from his seat and shouted, ‘Shame, sir, shame, you’re a scoundrel,’ and I had some difficulty in persuading him to sit down and be quiet.”

She had never heard of such a thing—or at any rate she had never read of such a thing—or at any rate not in any piece of respectable crime fiction published since the beginning of the Second World War. A physical object, forsooth, with the initials of a suspect engraved on it—why, it was worse than a fingerprint. If we must have a clue of a physical nature—and in Julia’s experience the best authors nowadays wholly eschewed such vulgarities—then let it at least be one invisible to the naked eye and identifiable only by the most sophisticated techniques of modern pathology. If the progress of the past half century was to count for nothing, then one might as well go back, said Julia scathingly, to murders committed by means of arsenic or for motives of matrimonial jealousy.

“I do not doubt,” I said, “that in a crime novel having any pretensions to modernity, the pen would be quite inadmissible. As a mere historian, however, there is nothing I can do about it. Nature, as we know, does imitate Art, but I fear that she all too often falls short of the highest standards. Were you to turn your attention from fictional crimes to those reported in the newspapers, you would find that people are still leaving fingerprints and murdering unfaithful spouses for all the world as if they were living in the 1920s. In the more backward parts of the country they may even still be poisoning one another with arsenic. We cannot ignore the pen for the sake of literary fashion.”

The trouble with real life is that you don’t know whether you’re the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.