Summer syllabus OLLI @ Mason, July into August: Women’s Detective Fiction

OLLI at Mason Syllabus 2024 Summer June – July

Women’s Detective Fiction

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Wednesday mornings, 9:40-11:05 am, online
June 26 – July 31st (no class the fifth week)
5 sessions On-line (location of buildings: 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22 032
Dr Ellen Moody

Women in and Writing Detective Fiction (a continuation of The Heroine’s Journey)

We will explore the genre of detective stories of the mystery-thriller type from the angle of the woman writer, detective, victim & murderer: our two books are classics from and dependent upon classic and/or very popular at the time 1930s detective novels: Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night (set in a real early women’s college, which Sayers attended, it is also feminist academic and publishing satire & a lover story); and P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which in many outward conventions combines the popular and acclaimed type with what readers expected post WW2, so like Sayers written in puzzle-clue tradition of Agatha Christie (today carried on by among others Anthony Horowitz). We’ll read only 2 novels as we’ve no time for more, but I will discuss two others, one from 1950s, Josephine Tey’s much admired 1930s puzzle and clue type The Daughter of Time, the case being that of Richard III Plantagenet’s murder of his two young nephews; and Susan Hill’s Various Haunts of Men, an anxiety-producing gothic contemporary 2008 “crime” thriller. This to bring in a wider & longer perspective. We’ll also discuss (in class) a 1950s play/TV movie, J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (as rewritten by Helen Edmunsen and directed by Aisling Walsh in 2015) – to understand the transition to our contemporar concerns. I’ll ask everyone to see on their owm, Robert Altman and Julian Fellow’ Gosford Park, a brilliant parody of the country house 1930s detective style movie (Charlie Chan Agatha Christie &c sent up). This is a feminist literary history course, an outgrowth in one direction of the course I taught two summers ago: The [archetypal] Heroine’s Journey

Required Texts:

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, HarperCollins Bourbon book, ISBN 978-0-06-219653-8
P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Scribner’s, mostly recently reprinted 2019. ISBN 978-0-7432-1955-6

Required Movies:

Gosford Park. Directed Robert Altman, scripted Julian Fellowes. Streams on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu, and can be bought as a DVD with interesting features (e.g., voice-over commentary as you watch the film).

Supplementary:

There are audio readings of both books; and you can buy the full script for Gosford Park, complete with cast list and stills, essays but you do not need to. Gosford Park. Directed Robert Altman, scripted Julian Fellowes. New Market Press, NY, n.d. ISBN1-55704-53

Gosford Park — the house as first seen

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

June 26: 1st week: Introduction: the archetypal heroine, the 1860s – 195os (detective/spy becomes crime thriller versus politically engaged spy stories ; Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey style detective fiction. I’ll send by attachment essay by Sayers’ “Are Women Human?” and Valerie Pitts on “The Predicaments of Women” across Sayers’ oeuvre

July 3rd: 2nd week: Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, literary feminist masterpiece and Sayers’ life, whole career.

July 10th: 3rd week: Moving from 1930s into 1950s, then 1990s. I’ll discuss The Daughter of Time; the two now classic (both) An Inspector Calls. Relation of gothic to this mystery genre; importance of central detective; then recurring detectives and kinds of setting and/or places in P.D. James and her life and work

June 18th: 4th week: P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. The evolution of the women’s detective and recent police procedural mysteries (e.g. Jane Tennison and Prime Suspect); and P. D. James’ later career and James’ post-text to Jane Austen, Death Comes to Pemberley made into BBC TV 3 part movie –this last might be part of the 6th week

July 25th: 5th week: class canceled. I will be away. If you are interested, you could see one of The Inspector calls movies, read The Daughter of Time

July 31st: 6th week. We’ll spend the time on Gosford Park. And I’ll tell of Susan Hill’s career, the earlier gothics, the Simon Seraillier series, The Various Haunts of Men. If people want to, various class members could tell of favorite recent women dectective and detective story writer (Ruth Rendell, Sara Paretsky, Elizabeth George, Anne Cleves, Val McDermid –whatever you like a lot)

Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane (1987, Have His Carcase)

Supplementary reading:

Brabazon, James. Dorothy Sayers: a biography. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981.
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik. Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Univ of Illinois, 2012.
Corrigan, Maureen. Leave me alone, I’m reading. NY: Random House, 1995. Large sections about women reading detective novels.
Craig, Patricia and Mary Cadogan. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. NY: St Martin’s 1981. Begins with mid-19th century figures.
Gosford Parl. Directed Robert Altman, scripted Julian Fellowes. New Market Press, NY, n.d. Streams on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu, and can be bought as a DVD with interesting features (e.g., voice-over commentary as you watch the film).
Heilbrun, Caroline, Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990. Two sections on wwomen’s detetive fiction.
Hill, Susan. Various Haunts of Men. Simon Serailler series. 2004; London: Vintage; rpt 2008 US Version.
———–—. Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home. London: Profile, 2009.
Hughes, Dorothy. In a Lonely Place. Hard-boiled detective fiction by a woman
James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. NY: Knopf, 2009
Kenney, Catherine. The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers. Kent State, 1990. Superb close reading of all her writing
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd edition. Univ of Illinois, 1995. The best single book on women’s detective fiction, with the proviso she deals only with professional police officer-detectives.
Mason, Bobbie Ann. The Girl Sleuth. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975
Sayers, Dorothy. Unpopular Opinions. London: Camelot Press, 1946
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. Faber and Faber, 1972. The best of all the surveys on the development of this very contemporary violent type.
Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time. This exists in many editions. I have a 1988 copy of the Simon and Schuster Touchstone books, 978-0-684-80386-9; and another by Pushkin Press (a very pretty one), ISBN 978-1782278429. If you have never heard of Richard III, he’s a controversial figure. An excellent video on the unearthing of his skeleton will give you some insight into what is said about him. Tey’s book was of course written well before the skeleton was unearthed. Matthew Morris, The King Under the Car Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tAaGETTiLs&ab_channel=ArchaeologicalServices
Irony: one of the famous aspects of his character, that he was deformed, at one time disputed fiercely by the Richard III society, has become the basis for clinching the argument that the found skeleton is Richard III – especially by this society.
Young, Laurel A. P.D. James: A companion to the mystery fiction. McFarland, 2017

Girl detective series by a single author, Margaret Sutton’s Judy Bolton