This post by Ed Simon marking the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s birth reminds me that I have some pretty interesting posts — if I do say so myself — on Mann at my big blog.
Several replies to my newsletter wanting — perhaps demanding is the word — pictures of Angus. Your wish is my command.
I wrote a longish essay on the “total action” of the detective story — and what obligations the author of such a story has (or doesn’t have) to it.
When Busman’s Honeymoon, the play co-written by Sayers and Muriel St Clare Byrne, opened in London it did so at the Comedy Theatre … which reminds me that decades later that venue would stage many Harold Pinter plays, and Pinter became its major patron. After a while he started hinting that the place should change its name to the Pinter Theatre. When management resisted, Tom Stoppard wrote to Pinter with a suggestion for resolving the impasse: “Have you considered changing your name to Harold Comedy?” (Lo and behold, the name was changed to the Harold Pinter Theatre, but only after the poor man’s death.)
Sometime in September 1935 Sayers finished Gaudy Night and sent it to her publisher, Gollancz. Victor Gollancz wired Sayers on 26 September to say that he very much liked the book. It was immediately copyedited, typeset, and printed, and hit the bookstores on 4 November. To any writer today that sounds impossible: Surely it was published in November 1936?? Nope: it went from submission to publication in little over a month.
In late 1936 the publishers Hodder & Stoughton asked Dorothy L. Sayers to complete the novel Dickens left unfinished at his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sayers firmly declined, saying “nothing could induce” her to try that. But of the many people who have completed the novel, none of them were as well-suited to the task she she was. I regret her decision.
This week has turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be, so I won’t be able to do my audio posts on Paradise Lost. But I have something better: the brilliant essays written some years ago by my friend Jessica Martin — in fact, I believe I got to know Jessica and her husband Francis Spufford through these essays, which I praised when I first read them — to introduce new readers to the poem:
Reading this series was what got me thinking about writing a book on Paradise Lost, which I had already been teaching for decades.