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Genre Fiction Monographs
Of Sex and Faerie
further
essays
on
Genre
Fiction
John Lennard

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Of Sex and Faerie
Further essays on Genre Fiction
John Lennard
HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks

Copyright
Text © 2010 John Lennard
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Contents
List of Illustrations 7
Acknowledgements 8
Foreword 9
1. Of Policemen and Poussin 10
Bill James’s Dance to the Muzak of Crime
2. Of Mean Streets and Mortgaged Castles 47
Walter Mosley, Easy Rawlins, and the G. I. Bill
3. Of Marriage and Mutations 70
Lois McMaster Bujold and the Several Lives of Lord Miles
Naismith Vorkosigan
4. Of Sex and Faerie 112
Meredith Gentry’s Improbable Code of Orgasm and other
Paranormal Romance
5. Of Voyages and Volumes 165
The Many Successors of C. S. Forester and Horatio Hornblower
6. Of the Western Shore 223
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Late Distillation of Fable
7. Of Criticism and Continuities 246
A Personal Account of Serial Reading in the Age of the Web
Bibliography 309
A Note on the Author 441

Further Essays in Genre Fiction
List of Illustrations
Cover. Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823–1903), Take the Fair Face of Woman,
and Gently Suspending, with Butterlies, Jewels, and Flowers Attending, Thus Your
Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things (private collection).
1. Nicolas Poussin, The Dance to the Music of Time (c.1634–6)
2. The film-poster for Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) …
3. Johann Heinrich Füssli, Die Elfenkönigin Titania (1793–4, detail)
4. Johann Heinrich Füssli, Prinz Arthur und die Feenkönigin (c.1788)
5. Graphs of the human sexual response cycle …
6. Three of the ‘Aids That Every Woman Appreciates’ …
7. J. M. W. Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar (1822)
8. Alfred Kroeber and ‘Ishi’, 1912.

Further Essays in Genre Fiction
Foreword
As its subtitle implies, this volume extends an earlier collection, Of Modern Dragons
and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007), in which I sought to bring professional critical
attention to bear on both particular genre authors and tropes, and the phenomenon
of ‘serial reading’—engagement, over successive years and volumes, with a series cast,
locale, and protagonist/s. That phenomenon is also central to this collection, for all the
essays are concerned with individual or grouped series, with most of which I have lived
for years, even decades, and the last with the praxis of serial reading (and writing) in
the age of the Web.
What (if anything) authors considered here have in common besides serial composition
of genre fictions and my extended attention is moot, but I have found myself
repeatedly concerned with relations between series, and between sub-genres, crossconnections
that insist on a far greater intergeneric fertility that either marketing or
criticism commonly allow genre work. Contemporary and recent history is also a concern
uniting crime, science fiction, and romance, sometimes blossoming (as in David
Weber’s Honor Harrington series) into full-blown engagement with military history, or
(as in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Meredith Gentry series) with our post-Darwinist sexual
self-understanding in a time of AIDS and Rohypnol. The passage and manipulation of
time in and between series novels also recurs across the genres. And all the essays are
arguments, implicit and explicit, for the qualities and relevance of recent genre writing
and its relations with older literature.
Given all the series discussed my bibliography is very lengthy—a deliberate fullness,
for many genre authors do not have available bibliographies of academic standard
(though the e-retailer fantasticfiction.com has done wonders). To provide complete
entries for all authors would have been extremely arduous—but readers who wish to
pursue any of the genre writers I mention, for pleasure or study, will find more than adequate
means of doing so. Additionally, my insistent provision, in main text and footnote
of authorial and publication dates, even at the cost of cluttering sentences, and in the
bibliography of data about awards, represents a deliberate historicisation in detail—a
grounding as essential to worthwhile genre studies as to all other literary criticism.
John Lennard
Cambridge, UK, 1 April 2010

1. Of Policemen and Poussin
Bill James’s Dance to the Muzak of Crime
Allan James Tucker (b. 1929) has for five decades been a remarkably prolific,
entertaining, and interesting writer. Besides two works of non-fiction and five
novels published since 1960 in propria persona as James Tucker, there is a large body
of pseudonymous work—19 novels by ‘David Craig’, two by ‘Judith Jones’, and no
less than 36 novels and a collection of short stories by ‘Bill James’. This Jamesian
output includes (to date) 26 novels in the ‘Harpur & Iles’ series, chronicles of surprising
policemen and mannered criminals in an archetypal English port-city that James
began in 1985 with You’d Better Believe It and has ever since (despite switching publishers
mid-stream) unfailingly extended at a volume per year, with a double-tap in
1991 for Club and Astride a Grave. Such regular extent is relatively uncommon, and
the series is also marked by an extraordinary stylistic flair that has earned James rapturous
plaudits from many reviewers, as well as some curious literary comparisons.
Chief among these is a persistent linkage to A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75,
televised 1997), a great if notably patrician 12-volume roman fleuve by Anthony
Powell (1905–2000) —on which massive social chronicle of the well-heeled British
twentieth century James Tucker once published the first full-length critical study, The
Novels of Anthony Powell (1976).
This link is sometimes made explicit by higher-brow commentators—John A. Gould
of the Phillips Academy in Andover noticed The Girl with the Long Back (2003) in
the Boston Globe under the title ‘Harpur, Iles, and the shadow of Anthony Powell’ —
but sinuous implication is commoner, and perfectly caught (at least for now) on the
A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer’s Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady
Molly’s (1957), Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962), The Valley of
Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968), Books Do Furnish a
Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), & Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).
John A. Gould, ‘Harpur, Iles, and the shadow of Anthony Powell’, in The Boston Globe, 4 July 2004,
and at:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/07/04/harpur_iles_and_the_shadow_of_
anthony_powell/

Further Essays in Genre Fiction 11
Constable & Robinson webpage dedicated to James, which in its top-of-the-page
blurb admirably packs the necessary conjunction into a bare six lines:
BILL JAMES
Bill James lives in his native South Wales. He is author of a
number of crime novels and thrillers as well as a critical
work on Anthony Powell.
Reviews:
Another dodgy gavotte by the master of the revels … Quite
brilliant. Mordant hilarity and splendid, read-aloud quotes …
a modern morality play of epic scope.
The strange deprecation of “a number of crime novels and thrillers”—57 of them,
all told—is supported by adversion to the “critical work on Anthony Powell”, which
in turn allows a silent segue, via Powell’s dancing sequence-title, to its echo in that
memorably phrased “dodgy gavotte by the master of the revels”. This quotation appeared
in slightly fuller form (“Thieves and thief-takers at it like knives in another
dodgy gavotte …”) as a blurb attributed to the Literary Review on the dust-jackets
of most first hardback editions of ‘Harpur & Iles’ novels since Naked at the Window
(2002), but the trope can be traced at least as far back as a review of Astride a Grave
(1991) by Matthew Coady in The Guardian, which described that novel as “Another
movement in the savagely comic, expertly choreographed Jamesian dance to the music
of crime”—a quotation itself appearing in various truncations as blurb on most
‘Harpur & Iles’ novels between the UK first paperback editions of Club (1992) and
The Detective is Dead (1996).
Given that ‘James’ did indeed write on Powell the connection is understandably
irresistible, for the extended plot of the Harpur & Iles series does potently resemble
a dance, a whole lifetime of dodgy gavottes and corantos with shuffling partners,
between policemen and villains and within each fraternity. Most volumes introduce
new characters for a particular dance, but the principal protagonists and antagonists
are light-footed survivors whose shifting accommodations with themselves, one another,
statute law, and (supposed) civil necessity account for much of the bleakness
http://www.constablerobinson.com/?section=authors&author=bill_james. 13 February 2009. I
have for clarity changed faces as well as fonts, omitted an erroneous comma, and restored the final
dot of the last ellipsis to the same line as its fellows.

12 Of Sex and Faerie
and mordant qualities with which James is also admiringly charged by reviewers. But
any serious comparison with Powell must soon run into real difficulties, not necessarily
to Powell’s advantage. To begin with, James himself does not mention Powell
as an influence, preferring to cite a very different model:
I am interested in the criminals as much as the police. My Harpur and Iles books
are about the impossibility of controlling crime by strictly legitimate methods.
Assistant Chief Constable Iles is suspected of murders in “a noble cause.” Harpur—the
ostensible hero of the books—tries to keep Iles reasonably decent.
The main influence on my work is George V. Higgins [1939–99]—though I
don’t know if he would be pleased to hear it. I admire the ability to mimic crook
vocabulary; and the skill at making a fink sympathetic in The Friends of Eddie
Coyle [1972], possibly the greatest crime novel I’ve read.
The connection with Higgins’s great debut novel, an immediate crossover success
highly praised by Norman Mailer and filmed in 1973 with Robert Mitchum, is potent
and more suggestive than that with Powell—to whom Higgins, an Assistant US
Attorney, was in most ways antithetical. Moreover, James has when asked directly
denied Powell as an influence, as in this interview with Anthony Brockway in 2004,
for the publication of Easy Streets:
In 1976 you wrote a book on the novels of Anthony Powell—it has even been suggested
that the Harpur and Iles series is a kind of inverted A Dance to the Music
of Time. Has Powell influenced your approach to series writing?
Bill James: No stylistic influence, I hope, though I do, in fact, love Powell’s style:
it’s elaborate, witty, mandarin, nothing like crime writing. Someone did an article
in the Boston Sunday Globe in the US trying to square my interest in an author
who writes urbane prose about the upper classes with what I do in my own lowlife
books. He thought the relationship between Powell’s narrator in A Dance to the
Music of Time, Nick Jenkins, and the villain of the Powell novels, Widmerpool,
mirrored the way my detectives Harpur and Iles operate alongside each other. The
other Powell influence would, of course, be that he deals in characters who continue
through a series, as I do. This can be good for reader loyalty. It can also make
readers sick of the same recurring figures. I’m ahead of Powell numerically: his A
Bill James, s.vv. ‘Bill James comments’, in Jay P. Pedersen & Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, eds, St.
James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (4 th ed., with a preface by Kathleen Gregory Klein,
Detroit, New York, Toronto, & London: St. James Press, 1996), p. 563b.

Dance... is 12 novels; Harpur and Iles will be 22 next year.
Further Essays in Genre Fiction 13
To deal with the same characters throughout a series of novels is hardly a notable
point of comparison, and Gould’s idea that the relationship between Harpur and Iles
mirrors that of Jenkins and Widmerpool works only at a very general level, invoking
animosity within supposed partnership across rank and class.
To be fair to Gould, his remarks were heavily qualified:
There are of course many more differences than similarities. Whereas Powell is
scrupulous about the passage of time—not surprisingly, given his title—for James
time is utterly frozen. Harpur is still in his late 30s after 20 volumes, and his girlfriend,
Denise, is forever young, bless her. Nevertheless, James wants us to be
aware of the history of his series, even providing a couple of footnotes to refer to
events dramatized in earlier books.
Obviously the men’s styles lie miles apart. Powell writes things like “There is a
strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose
that everyone else is having a much more enjoyable time than we are ourselves.”
Such Latinate vocabulary and construction are missing entirely from James, who
is something of a master of the adverb. After the ACC delivers an impromptu, sardonic
eulogy at Fay-Alice’s father’s funeral [in The Girl with the Long Back], in
which he names four drug dealers present at the ceremony, Harpur muses: “So this
was the pulpited Iles, and the real Iles, most probably.” That ‘”most probably” liberates
the sentence, scudding clouds of ambiguity over Iles’s passionate remarks.
Similarities exist, however. The most striking is the relationship between their
two main characters. In the seventh novel of “Dance,” “The Soldier’s Art,” the
watchful, reserved Nick Jenkins, here a wartime Army lieutenant, finds himself
working for his nemesis, Widmerpool, now a major. Widmerpool, ambitious beyond
measure, continually manipulates the military system for his own ends. He
is, Powell explains, one who lives by the will, and he makes Jenkins’s life miserable.
Here is the model for Harpur and Iles. Most fictional detective pairs seem to fall
into one of two categories. Either they are equals—Tony Hillerman’s Chee and
Leaphorn, say—or the sleuth superior in rank gets all the credit, like Holmes over
Watson or Colin Dexter’s Morse over Lewis. As ACC, Iles should be the main
crimebuster, but he is so clearly beyond the pale that we regard him with a sort of
appalled amusement: brilliant but bent, living entirely by the will. He doesn’t re-
Anthony Brockway, ‘An Interview with Bill James’, November 2004, at :
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/elizabeth.ercocklly/bill.htm. 13 February 2009.

14 Of Sex and Faerie
ally solve crimes; he simply manipulates the crooks. Harpur, just clever enough to
understand what Iles is up to, is James’s Nick Jenkins, struggling to keep the beat
of his dance while the crime plays on.
So far as the particular situation in The Soldier’s Art (1966) goes this has some merit—
but Powell’s art does not turn more generally on that situation, for Jenkins throughout
clearly feels himself as securely superior in class to Widmerpool as he is fascinated
by what he thinks the man’s improbable capacity to prosper despite his bourgeois
origins and sufferance of repeated social insult. The qualities described by Gould as
“watchful, reserved” might also be glossed as ‘patrician, aloof, signally unable to understand
class-experiences other than his own’, and Jenkins’s narrative is heavy with
masterpieces of one-upmanship—particularly such scenes of ironised schadenfreude
as Widmerpool’s cross-country running at school, his very public humiliation by
Barbara Goring with a sugar-caster, or his death jogging naked in the rain with fellow-members
of a strange cult. And whether Jenkins understands the class-functions
of his own prose is moot, for the besetting weakness of Powell’s roman fleuve is an
analytical contempt disguised as detachment that blinkers social vision, acting with
endemic boulevardier comedy to trivialise whatever Jenkins cannot be bothered to
record, or simply does not understand because it falls outside his own social milieu.
This is not remotely the extended context of Harpur and Iles, and James—a child of
working-class Cardiff educated at Grange Council and Cardiff High Schools —has
as a novelist of manners always had a massively wider social vision than the Old
Etonian Powell seems ever to have found literarily congenial. Moreover, series-time,
though certainly slowed and distorted, is not “utterly frozen”: if Denise is “forever
young”, Harpur began the series a married man, was violently widowed, and has seen
his daughers grow into a changing world.
Gould’s “scudding clouds of ambiguity”, however, has a much more interesting
consequence, directing attention not to Powell but to the source of his title. Nicolas
Poussin’s tremendous painting of c.1634–6 for the minor poet and librettist Giulio
Gould, ‘Harpur, Iles, and the shadow of Anthony Powell’, closing paras, at:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/07/04/harpur_iles_and_the_shadow_of_
anthony_powell/
Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing (1951; London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 7–8; A Buyer’s
Market (1952; London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 77–9; Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975; London:
Flamingo, 1983), pp. 245–9.
Brockway, ‘Interview’, at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/elizabeth.ercocklly/bill.htm. 13 Feb.
2009.

Further Essays in Genre Fiction 15
Rospigliosi (1600–69), later Pope Clement IX (1667–9), now hangs in the Wallace
Collection in London, and Powell’s connection with it was celebrated in a centenary
exhibition of his life and work in 2005–06. The Handlist of Works Exhibited notes that
Poussin was “a constant companion, in the form of a postcard of the picture which he
kept by him when writing”, and it is by any standards a worthwhile companion—an
image at once (like all paintings) of utter stillness, acknowledged in the framing
stone-colours and structures, as well as the ground beneath, yet wholly a moment in
movement, from the unstable putti on right and left and the working, winged lyrist,
through the circling dancers, leaning trees, and tension between the stone Janus and
waiting tomb, to those scudding clouds and the strange quadriga with its foreflier
and glowing train careering among them. At the beginning of Powell’s first novel in
the sequence, A Question of Upbringing (1951), the mature Jenkins writes of seeing
workmen gathered round a brazier as snow begins to fall, tossing “the remains of
two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper” onto the coals, and after the flames have
died down, leaving or disappearing:
For some reason the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think
of the ancient world—legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier :
mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches
cantering beside a frozen sea—scattered, uncoordinated shapes from a fabulous
past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things
real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes
of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested
Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in
rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image
of Time brought thoughts of mortality : of human beings, facing outward like
the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure : stepping slowly, methodically,
sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape :
or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only
to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle : unable to control the
melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
Completing the sequence nearly 25 years and more than 3,000 pages later with another
winter scene and recollection of the workmen and their brazier, the last sentence
Anon., Dancing to the Music of Time: The Life & Work of Anthony Powell: Handlist of Works Exhibited
(London: Wallace Collection, 2005), p. 7, at:
http://www.wallacecollection.org/uploads/File/exhibitions/AP_Handlist.pdf
Powell, A Question of Upbringing, pp. 5–6.

16 Of Sex and Faerie
1 Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (c. 1634–6)
Wallace Collection, London
of Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975) observes that “Even the formal measure of the
Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence”.
These opening and closing invocations of Poussin are understandably popular with
Powell’s critics as the stated authorial template of action, but considered alongside
the painting prove remarkably thin descriptions. The novelist and short-story writer
William Trevor, introducing the Folio Society edition of Powell’s sequence in 2006,
added some pointed details:
The painting’s two infants at play are human; so are the four dancers that Poussin
has clothed in his familiar colours—his reds, his yellow, his softly luminous blue—
as they evoke the seasons. But the old party who plays the music has been given
Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies, p. 252.

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