Georgette Heyer's mysteries

I've had an odd yen for Georgette Heyer's mystery novels lately.

Georgette Heyer is not well known as a mystery writer, for good reason. She wrote about 12 mysteries (15 if The Quiet Gentleman, The Talisman Ring and The Reluctant Widow, more usually classified under her Regency romances, are included.) Of these, only three are any good as pure mysteries: A Blunt Instrument, Death in the Stocks and Envious Casca. (And possibly – this is debatable - Behold, Here's Poison.) The others are either deeply unpleasant (Penhallow, which I'm not rereading on this reread, because it makes for itchy, rather depressing reading, even leaving aside the homophobia), highly unfair (in the sense of not revealing critical clues until the last few pages), filled with ludicrous motives (particularly in They Found Him Dead) or otherwise flawed. And even in the novels with unfair clues and ludicrous motives, the murderer is far too easy to identify; the real question, which Heyer never answers, is "Huh?"

(In one novel, for instance, we are expected to believe that a husband would not recognize that his ex wife has been living in the area – and coming to have dinner with him every few works and joining him in other social events – for years. Heyer attempts to explain this away by a feeble, well, they were separated for about twenty years, and, yes, the husband is the self-centered sort, but, well.)

Most of the novels follow similar formats (even the somewhat innovative Penhallow): an unpleasant patriarch hated by everyone; a weak, fluffy, ineffectual wife, or a wife who has decidedly married above herself; an attractive young woman who is never, ever the real suspect and her romantic hero, who is occasionally suspected by police but of course never did it (this is not a spoiler); and various Entertaining Suspects, who provide witty dialogue and most of the jokes. The servants are generally stupid, unhelpful and untrustworthy. (This is true in Agatha Christie as well; it seems to reflect typical upper class attitudes of the time.) The snobbery can be breathtaking, even for aristocratic-adoring Heyer, although Heyer also has a wonderful scene where she describes the way a social climbing woman will be greasing her way up the social ladder, by providing a large check to a hospital patronized by a semi-noble patron; the patron will in turn invite the social climbing woman's daughter to all the best parties so she can meet the right kind of man.

Heyer generally treats murder as some sort of game; the victim (or victims) are rarely mourned, and in a couple of novels the characters reflect that it's all really wonderful that this happened because now they all have something to do, which may be the most unintentionally nasty criticism of upper middle and upper class British society ever. Even the more kindly patriarchs (most of the time, the patriarchs are the first victims – providing an easy financial motive) are rarely mourned. Everyone gets merrily into the detection game, happily guessing away at who might have done the crime and how. Only a few novels show any lingering stress from murder (Penhallow, Envious Casca, and, debatedly, The Unfinished Clue); most of the time the murder is regarded as a rather good thing for everybody, really. And that's a problem: if Heyer isn't taking the murder particularly seriously, why should her readers care, either? And Heyer seems to have no concept, like her contemporaries, that murder is an evil act, and that murderers can strike again; one reason to read an Agatha Christie intently is to see if Poirot or Marple will be able to stop the body count from climbing. In a Heyer novel – even one with multiple victims – the distinct sense is that once the murderer gets the money, that'll be it.

I suspect another problem is that Heyer was temperamentally unable to conceive of a motive for murder other than money or sudden rage; it never seems to occur to her, for instance (as it does to Christie and Sayers) that love and revenge are equally good, if not better motives. This is perhaps because, unlike Christie and Sayers, and for all of Heyer's reputation as a romance novelist, Heyer rarely seems to understand passion. Love, yes, infatuation, yes, but fierce passion for anything other than putting on a play or finishing a painting, no, and even then, not really. (This is true in her romances as well, and is one reason they feature little sex and should not be shelved in the romance section of U.S. bookstores, but I'll rant about that if I get around to chatting about her romance novels.) With limited motives, picking the murderer tends to become much easier.

So, now that I've ripped most of these novels apart, why do I continue to read them? Because, for all their flaws, they are (except Penhallow) highly entertaining, laugh out loud books with brilliant, snappy dialogue. If you ignore that everyone is speaking merrily about murder – and Heyer frequently does – these are marvelous comedies of manners, set in a world where the deserving get nice hot chocolate in bed and (usually) marvelous meals cooked for them by the less deserving. (I may have mentioned the snobbery, although it tends to be – this is difficult to explain – a sort of comforting sort of snobbery. It's always fun to imagine being one of those aristocrats, even while knowing that chances are excellent that you actually would have been one of the working servant class.) Everything (except in Penhallow) is wrapped up merrily and nicely, with delightful romantic banter. It's fun, and I have to admit to enjoying that sort of thing.