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Colin Watson
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Snobbery with violence: Crime stories and their audience Hardcover – January 1, 1971

by Colin Watson (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
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'One of the most consistently busy of Britain's home industries during the past fifty years has been the manufacture of crime fiction. Some three hundred writers now contribute, more or less regularly, to the satisfaction of the public's appetite for books about murder, theft, fraud, espionage, arson, blackmail and kindred activities. . . This book is not an attempt to catalogue them . . . Its purpose is to explore some of the crime and mystery fiction of the past half century for clues to the convictions and attitudes of the large section of British society for which it was written.'In Snobbery with English Crime Stories and Their Audience, Colin Watson explores the social attitudes that are reflected in the detective story and the thriller. From Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace to Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, Watson takes the reader on an entertaining and informative investigation into the world of crime fiction. First published in 1971 Snobbery with Violence has become a minor classic of literary and social history and should grace the bookshelves of every crime aficionado.
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  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Eyre and Spottiswoode
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 1971
  5. ISBN-10
    0413284204
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0413284204
  7. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Eyre and Spottiswoode; First Edition (January 1, 1971)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0413284204
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0413284204
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

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Colin Watson

Colin Watson

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
25 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Robert Jase
5.0 out of 5 stars Popular stories & why they were popular
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2019
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This is a great read & reread, heck I'm on my second copy! Overview of the popular crime stories particularly if the 20's & '30's but not focused on the big remembered still popular authors & characters.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Analysis of the British Mystery
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2017
A mordant analysis of the British mystery by a member of the tribe. Taking a literary and sociological stance, he reviews the books and the social outlook of their writers and audience for the period ending ca. 1970. Watson provides us with a clearly conceived and executed analysis of "crime stories and their audiences" (quoting) Any one of us may not agree with some or all of his thinking but one can hardly fail to find solid substance with which to agree or disagree. However, this his is not an unfriendly approach. He gives credit to the authors for their ability to write with substance and style, consistent with that of their audience, so as to be among the few who could enjoy success, sufficiently great, as to make them among the view who could live solely on the income of their writings (although some did not choose to do so). The book is accessible to all potential readers in terms of readability of prose and substance of analysis.
As a life-long reader of the genre, from a time well before the term 'cozy', for example, came into use, and one whose reading has increased over a two decades of retirement, I can hardily recommend the book to any reader with an analytical bent. This "Mysterious Press" edition appears to be available at a reasonable price from various sources on the internet and, presumably, in the unfortunately declining number of "walk-in" bookstores
3 people found this helpful
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Damaskcat
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting study of the Golden Age of crime writing
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2012
Colin Watson has produced a personal view of some of the Golden Age of British crime writing. He does not claim to have covered all the authors writing at the time but he does cover a great many of them. Conspicuous by their absence are writers such as Josephine Tey and Georgette Heyer but space is devoted to such doyennes of the era as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers.

The author concentrates primarily, as the title suggests, on the snobbery inherent in much of the crime writing between the wars. Servants speak ungrammatically with many dropped `hs'. Aristocrats drop the final `g' in hunting, shooting and fishing. Perfect gentlemen's gentlemen abound and silly asses in the Bertie Wooster mould see amateur detection as being a good way to pass the time, don't you know. Attitudes to foreigners would earn many of the characters an uncomfortable time in court on a charge of inciting racial hatred today.

But in spite of all this, the main characters are always fighting evil and the gloves are off when it comes to how they treat the criminals though they are often given a chance to do the honourable thing before the trial and the hangman's noose. For modern readers a willing suspension of disbelief is needed to accommodate some of the behaviour and attitudes on display in many of the books the author refers to in his text.

If you read any of the famous authors from the Golden Age of crime then you will find this book of interest - not least for the chance to find other authors you might want to read. Many of the books mentioned are still in print today more than sixty years after they were first published which is a testament to the popularity of the genre.
7 people found this helpful
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Robert Beveridge
4.0 out of 5 stars Watson turns his jaundicedeye to nonfiction.
Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2005
Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience (Eyre and Spotswood, 1971)

I was expecting a survey with this book (rather like Moorcock's lovely Wizardry and Wild Romance), but got something altogether different: a critical assessment. Watson, a writer a notable crime fiction himself, looks over the state of things in relative detail from the turn of the century up to the emergence of James Bond (whose creator he calls "hopelessly derivative," then goes on to show examples from many other authors he covered earlier in the book). While there's a bit of a bibliographic feel to the narrative-- fans of crime fiction will certainly see a new name or two to hunt down in one's library's stacks-- Watson is more concerned with the morals and values to be found in both the fiction and the authors writing it, and what those morals and values said about the changing of British society in the twentieth century. It's interesting stuff to be sure, but something of a vertical-market piece. Those who think they'll find it interesting most certainly will. *** ½
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Mr. K. D. Perry
5.0 out of 5 stars An undiscovered masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2005
Undiscovered because although published in 1971 it is now out of print. A masterpiece because not only does it fulfil the Author's aim as cited in his Introduction,but unwittingly he has given something more. He uses the history of Crime fiction from inception to 1965 (about 100 years) to provide a contemporary reflection of the conventional attitudes & beliefs of ordinary members of the Public. In short it is a work of Social History. But more than this it is as Social History a brilliant exposition of the mores of aparticular strata of English Society in the 2 decades between WW1 & WW2. This strata was the English Lower Middle Class living in the suburbs of the great conurbations.Colin Watson himself belonged to this strata in his formative years & delineates this both positively & unconsciously when writing of other periods. Aside from the Social Historian the style & wit of the survey can be enjoyed by any reader of discernment
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Top reviews from other countries

RTB
3.0 out of 5 stars Amusing but often facile. Probably most notable for coining the term ‘Mayhem Parva’
Reviewed in Australia on March 26, 2020
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This is fluently written with a good deal of humour, but one wonders at the end whether Watson has really said that much that is not obvious. Anyone with a reasonable education and general knowledge and who has read a modest amount of inter-war British crime fiction will already know that it features a great deal of escapism, wish-fulfilment, and re-assuring fables (the forces of social havoc being frustrated by public school British virtues and so on) and they will not emerge from reading the book with much advance in their knowledge of the product, its market, or its creators, or its associated social history.
Watson has a propensity to over-generalise and over-simplify. This follows from the fact that he lumps disparate genres and authors and readers together. (It is not clear what the overlap is between readers of, say, Sapper and DL Sayers.) He offers proof by (selective) example, and speculation and assertion as argument.
He also has a tendency to attribute the views of characters to their authors … when this suits his purpose. On the other hand, when he finds an author he considers less objectionable he posits the same things as intended to be satiric or ironic. He never regards them, for some reason, as mere aspects of characterisation. For example, he claims an element of irony and satire for Reggie Fortune that I totally fail to see. (It is true that Reggie is intended, up to a point, to be a comedic figure, but his eccentricities are also meant to be reassuring. Note my use of ‘intended’ and ‘meant’ here.) Readers might be reasonably mystified by the amount of slack that Watson is willing to cut Bailey, as a graduate of Corpus Christi compared Sayers, a graduate of Somerville, in regard to very similar sins. I can suggest no explanation.
Some of Watson’s more particular judgments seem eccentric. Is it really possible for anyone to believe, as Watson apparently does (or did in 1971) that Chandler was an exponent of realism who ‘wrote about crime and criminals with “the authentic flavour of life as it is lived”’ and who replaced ‘mythical assumption with fact and perception … pasteboard figures with live characters … tritely worked out artificial puzzles with human problems that violence might change but could never solve’? (Perhaps I am hypercritical. Julian Symons seems to have held a similar belief – and of course it was promoted by Chandler himself, although that is not a reason for believing it.)
That is not to say that Watson is always wrong in his judgments. More often than not his generalisations are correct, as generalisations. But what he is right about is largely self-evident, he unnecessarily repeats himself, and his critical methodology is dodgy.
Some of his more specific comments are perceptive. These include his observations on the relationship between supermen sleuths and their motor cars and associated disregard for law and human life, and his identification of Horning/Raffles as a precursor to Fleming/Bond. (Incidentally, the onetime popularity of Raffles with adult readers is one of those puzzles to which many critics have offered solutions but to which there will probably never be a fully satisfactory answer.)
Watson’s discussion of the adaption of crime fiction to television and the cinema is also intelligent and insightful, although it needs reconsideration in light of what has passed in the last 50 years.
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Juliet Boddington
5.0 out of 5 stars Such an interesting book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2013
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I was attending a short course on 'the dectective in literature' and this book looked at a completely different angle - the reader - and posed the question of why we read crime stories.

The book is clear, amusing and well worth reading.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb !
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2019
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It is much more than a review of crime fiction , it describes the English at their xenophobic, class ridden worst, and gives the lie to literary lions from Doyle to Fleming.
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Jean G
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not good enough
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2019
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This is an entertaining run-through of themes and authors of the 'Golden Age' of crime fiction, relating the phenominal success of the genre to the demands of its middle-class readership and to the socially conservative approach of booksellers and libraries. But it reads a bit like a brilliant essay expanded into a full-length (if shortish) book without the deeper approach that a book really warrants. It's indicative that there is no bibliography, and one wonders just how much research Watson did into the attitudes of publishers, booksellers and readers.
I also found his sweeping condemnations unhelpful. Although he does distinguish between thrillers and what he calls puzzle books, the really awful cases of racism, sexism, schoolboy language and behaviour, etc., that he documents are in thrillers by the likes of 'Sapper', Rohmer or Horler which have rightly not survived their era. But by generalising his criticisms, Watson fails to explain the continuing popularity of the top 'puzzle' writers, Christie and the other 'Queens of crime'. They understood the distinction at the time: the influential Detection Club, to which almost all these writers belonged, barred thriller writers from membership. The objection was to the crudity that Watson describes. (See Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder.)
What's astounding is that Watson makes almost no reference to plot ingenuity, which is the whole point of the classic whodunit. For example, he writes off Christie (all of whose huge oeuvre is still in print) by claiming that all her books have the same plot: Of course she wrote pot-boilers, but she was also brilliantly innovative - see Roger Ackroyd, ABC, Orient Express and others. And although he gives an example of her irony he seems to have failed to see that almost all of her writing was tongue-in-cheek. Sad, because his frequent criticism is of authors lacking a sense of humour.
The book is definitely worth reading as a reference point to the genre. It is a well-documented analysis of the core of Watson's thesis, attributing these books' attraction to readers of the 20s and 30s (and the 50s in the case of Ian Fleming) partly to the desire of middle class readers to escape, in their reading, to the world of the rich and titled. Regrettably, since the phenomenon of the crime novel is still not regarded as worthy either of literary criticism or social-cultural research, there has been little written on the subject since Watson's day.
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Richard Newbold
5.0 out of 5 stars The Anatomy of the English Amateur Detective
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2017
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I'm a big fan of Colin Watson's Inspector Purbright/Flaxborough novels, and this book, his thesis on the phenomenon of detective and crime fiction from the Victorian period onwards, is also a manifesto for the satire and cliche-busting style that he adopted for his amiable, unremarkable but ultimately persistent detective.

Basically he skewers the snobbery of the genre by analysing the style of many writers, a remarkable number of whom (Sayers, Christies, Fleming, Allingham etc) are the stock-in-trade of the TV Christmas drama still, 100 years after the peak of the detective story in the years after the First World War. He examines the effect of this trauma on the national psyche and how the clean cut, straightforward (and from todays persepctive sadistic and xenophobic) characters were an understandable outcome of the nation's need for reassurance and simple motives in those post-war years. The whodunnit was based on the Victorian melodrama, the doyenne being Coonan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and Watson (Colin not Dr) has fun with the absurdities of the situations described, the conventions of sanitising the murders investigated, and particularly the social strata which is something of convention still for the literature of the "amateur" (I.e. insanely rich) detective involved.

My only criticism is that Watson rightly identifies the parody/satire which is seen in the detectives Campion, Wimsey and Marple - but doesn't take it further, so there is always the doubt whether crime authors (and their readers) take themselves and the novels entirely seriously.
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