November 8, 2025
With every Western country experiencing social collapse from a variety of unaddressed causes, such as the rapid loss of jobs to Artificial Intelligence, exhaustion of environmental and natural resources, feminization's replacement of the male role with sentiment and destruction of the male/female relationship, the loss of integrity and moral behavior to money, and the aggression inherent in the Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of hegemony, I am going to skip writing for today's posting another dire assessment of our multitude of unaddressed challenges.
Instead, remembering my previous essay some time ago about English murder mysteries and the authors, I am returning for this morning's posting to a civilized time in which all was in control. In the 1920s and 1930s, Great Britain, despite Sir Edward Grey stupidly involving Britain in World War I, Britain was still a great power in control of the seas and international trade. The British pound was the world currency. The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, looked upon British power with envy.
Perhaps Wilkie Collins with his books The Moonstone and The Woman In White was the first English mystery novelist. But it was Agatha Christie's 66 murder mysteries, most solved not by the British police but by private detective Hercule Poirot and private citizen, Miss Marple. With Agatha Christie you get a murder mystery, not a novel full of character development and psychological theories of crime.
In my view, Christie's only rival is Dorothy Sayers. Her sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey, is one up on Christie's super sleuths. Sayers only wrote a few murder mysteries before moving on to serious work. A couple are simply murder mysteries, but a love interest appears. Lord Peter sees injustice in the case of Harriet Vane, an Oxford University educated woman living in sin with a disreputable character who is murdered, for which Harriet is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Lord Peter takes up her case, proves her innocence, secures her release and spends five years over, if memory serves, two books, until she finally accepts him to the disgust of his sister-in-law the Duchess of Denver.
Lord Peter, the second son of the Duke of Denver, the richest aristocrat in Britain, is rich by his own ability. Lord Peter is a favorite of the Foreign Office and is sent everywhere in the world to maintain the British position. He is the most desirable batchelor in the realm, and he marries what is perceived as an Oxford educated slut. Remember, this was a century ago before female sexual liberation.
I have always been puzzled by accounts of male promiscuity. Sexual intercourse between heterosexuals requires a male and a female. If only males are libertines, who do they have affairs with?
But to get back on track. Once Harriet Vane appears, Sayers' murder mysteries become also the development of the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet. And more subject matter enters. Whey Sayers places a murder in an advertising, or perhaps it was a publishing, corporation, she first goes to the trouble of learning how these businesses operate. In what I think is her mystery masterpiece, The Nine Tailors, she first masters the art of bell ringing. So, a Sayers mystery can be more rewarding that a Christie mystery as it is a richer tale, not just a murder mystery.
My delight in the books is not the murders. Indeed, I can reread many times Christe's mysteries, because I don't remember the plots. Wondering about my memory, I realized that I don't read the books for the mysteries. I read them in order to escape current reality into a civilize time.
One wonders if the picture of police behavior in the mystery novels is correct. I assume it is, because the writers are addressing audiences in their own time and cannot present them with a fantasy. The police are very restrained not only by their own behavior but by what the suspects will accept from the police. Politeness and respect for privacy rule. Police have to be very careful in their questioning not to be impertinent. When have you last heard that word used? Do you know what it means? It means not showing proper respect. The police do not merely want a suspect with which, guilty or innocent, to close the case. The police only want the one who is guilty. Today they could not care less. They just want cases closed. The prosecutor just wants another conviction. The judge just wants a clear docket.
It is so different from today when suspects are browbeat both by their attorney and by the prosecutor to accept a plea bargain, whether innocent or guilty, that quickly disposes of the case, gives the prosecutor another conviction, and keeps the judge's court docket free.
The limits on the police in the British mystery novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unbelievable today. So is the behavior of characters in the story who refuse to help the police because it would require them to diverge a confidence. Imagine the contrast with today when no one can wait to incriminate someone else.
My conclusion is that I wish I had been born long ago and had passed on before our uncivilized time. Sitting at night reading before bed, I wonder at the civilized world that is lost to us.