Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Sarah Harrison 00:53
Today’s sponsor is our own Carolyn Daughters. Carolyn is a fractional chief marketing officer who builds and optimizes smart, actionable marketing, branding and communication strategies for growing businesses. She leads inbound and outbound marketing efforts, often scaling at startup speeds. Over the years, Carolyn has led more than 60 brand strategy workshops to empower organizations to own and communicate their brand identity, connect with their audience, and grow. She also leads persuasive writing workshops that position teams at the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, and businesses nationwide to tell compelling stories and build powerful business cases.

To learn more, visit carolyndaughters.com. Carolyn, we have our second episode with the fascinating Jennifer Kloester today.

Carolyn Daughters 01:46
I am so excited. This past episode on Death in the Stocks flew by. If you have not had a chance to listen to that one, do listen to it. It’s really great.

Sarah Harrison 01:57
Yes. If I do say so myself, Sarah was hilarious.

Carolyn Daughters 02:04
Our guest was also pretty good. I threw in a sentence or two. But Sarah was really the star of the show.

Sarah Harrison 02:14
You know who else is the star, Carolyn? Mindelynn Godbout.

Carolyn Daughters 02:18
I agree with this.

Sarah Harrison 02:19
She is our listener of the episode. And thank you Mindelynn for being a fantastic listener. And you can actually check her out. She’s on Instagram. And I think she also has a website, readfarandwide.com, where you can get her tips on reading different books for different locations. She’s based in Boston.

Carolyn Daughters 02:49
And she introduced us introduced you to Rebecca Heisler.

Sarah Harrison 02:54
Yes, our guest for The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Carolyn Daughters 03:06
This episode and last episode, we are talking about Georgette Heyer, whose name I still can’t pronounce. By our 15th or 16th episode on Death in the Stocks, I’m sure I’ll have it down. Georgette Heyer wrote many books, including Death in the Stocks. In the dead of night, a man in evening dress is found murdered, locked in the stalks on the village green. Unfortunately for Superintendent Hannasyde, the deceased is Arnold Vereker, a man hated by nearly everyone, especially his odd and unhelpful family members. The Verekers are as eccentric as they are corrupt, and it will take all Hannasyde’s skill at detection to determine who is telling the truth and who is pointing him in the wrong direction. The question is, who in his family is clever enough to get away with murder. Now, I’m going to argue that it’s not necessarily Hannasyde, who solves the murder, but we’ll get into that in this conversation. But I will say that The Times said, “Death in the Stocks is rare and refreshing.” The Sunday Times called Georgette Heyer “second to none.” And she received praise from one of our favorite authors, Dorothy L. Sayers. And we have a guest who knows all about Georgette Heyer.

Sarah Harrison 04:42
Every last thing about her.

Carolyn Daughters 04:43
Everything there is to know. The trivia portion of this episode is going to be fascinating.

Sarah Harrison 04:50
I’m gonna lose.

Carolyn Daughters 04:52
Sarah, tell us about our guest.

Sarah Harrison 04:54
Our guest is Jennifer Kloester, the bestselling author of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World and Georgette Heyer Biography of a Bestseller, and her most recent book, Society: Novels of Georgette Heyer, a celebration. She is a patroness of the International Heyer and a producer, the forthcoming documentary, Who the Hell Is Georgette Heyer. Jennifer is a popular presenter and public speaker, and in 2015, with Stephen Fry, she was delighted to speak at the unveiling of Georgette Heyer’s English Heritage blue plaque in Wimbledon. She has given talks, writing workshops, and public presentations on Heyer and the Regency in the UK, USA, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand. Jennifer also writes fiction her most recent novel, Jane Austen’s Ghost, is available on Amazon. Welcome back, Jennifer, to talk more about Death in the Stocks.

Jennifer Kloester 05:51
Thank you. It’s lovely to be here. So nice of you to have me.

Sarah Harrison 05:56
Jane Austen’s Ghost — is that a mystery?

Jennifer Kloester 05:59
It is, yes.

Sarah Harrison 06:01
We should have read it. Oh, my goodness.

Jennifer Kloester 06:05
Well, it’s not too late. It is a definite mystery. It doesn’t have a murder in it. But yes, it’s a quest that has to be solved. In writing it, I always wanted to bring Jane Austen into our world, just so that she could know how incredibly successful and popular she is. And I always wanted her to be able to see the 1995 Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I do have this delicious little chapter where my heroine, Cassie, Cassandra Austin, but “Austin” with an “in,” not an “en.” Ultimately, she and Jane get bound together, and they have to figure out how to get Jane free. You have to read it anyway.

Carolyn Daughters 07:05
So Cassie is sort of her her conduit to the modern day.

Jennifer Kloester 07:09
She’s been she’s been captive in Winchester cathedral as a ghost for 200 years. You have to read it. But, yeah, she gets bound to Cassie, anyway. They have to go on this journey, this quest, to figure out how to free Jane from the curse that has bound her. There’s this whole curse thing. I had a lot of fun with that, because I love Austen, of course. The great genius that she was. If you know your Austen, there’s lots and lots of little moments that are Austen history without being obvious.

Carolyn Daughters 07:53
Easter eggs to find.

Jennifer Kloester 07:55
Yeah, so there’s that mystery as well. But I do have this chapter I just had the best fun writing because Jane is a ghost. Cassie puts Pride and Prejudice on the television. She doesn’t know what a TV is. All these things that are completely new to her. Like toilets and showers and things. I won’t tell you anymore. But it’s just this lovely chapter where Cassie gets to watch Jane watching her book brought to life. Include the wet shirt scene.

Carolyn Daughters 08:30
That is a great scene. The 1995 adaptation is great. And Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth are amazing in it. I’ve seen it beginning to end many times. I used to have the VHS tapes.

Sarah Harrison 08:47
I have the VHS tapes.

Carolyn Daughters 08:52
I’ve seen I’ve seen it beginning to end many, many times. Listeners, don’t skip out of this episode on Death in the Stocks, because this episode is going to be good. But afterward, you’re going to probably want to catch that version of Pride and Prejudice.

Jennifer Kloester 09:07
Jane Austen’s Ghost has lots of delicious moments in it, I think.

Carolyn Daughters 09:13
That’s well, we want to talk some about this really interesting mystery, romance, character study. I had mentioned in the last episode, it had, for me, Oscar Wilde-ish interactions. I want to start with that. AI have a quote here that really made me smile reading it. I really thought Oscar Wilde. So there’s a character named Roger Vereker. And he is this long-lost brother, and everybody has presumed that he died or maybe they were told he died seven years earlier in South America. And lo and behold, he emerges, and here he is alive and well. And he is, to me, the funniest character in Death in the Stocks. Every time he spoke, I was just transfixed. At one point, he’s being interviewed by the superintendent, Hannasyde, and Hannasyde’s grilling him, and all the characters, including Roger, are very evasive, or they just flat out lie. “No, I wasn’t there. No, I didn’t do that. I have no idea!” Anytime they say something, you can pretty much assume it’s the opposite is the truth.

At one point, Roger says to Superintendent Hannasyde, “If I know just how much you know, it’ll save a great deal of bother. I mean, it’s no use my telling you I went to the zoo, if you’re going to prove I spent the day in the British Museum. I don’t want to tell you anything I needn’t. You see my difficulty.” It’s like, just come on, just tell me what you know, and then I won’t lie about that stuff. I’ll lie about other stuff. Help me out here! I was grinning when I read that. So let’s talk about like this banter, this humor of these characters in Death in the Stocks. Sarah, I think you had a pretty strong response as well to these characters.

Sarah Harrison 11:21
Yeah, I thought they were very funny. And you mentioned in the last episode on Death in the Stocks, Jen, about how Georgette Heyer became known for the suspects cracking jokes over the body of the deceased. I’d like to hear more about that.

Jennifer Kloester 11:37
Well, I think it was something she took a lot of delight in, actually. Because she does it quite a lot in her novels. If you read, No Wind of Blame, which is another one of her very funny novels, a detective novel with murder in it, of course. She has a Russian prince, Varasashvili. And the heroine’s mother has a dog called Prince. And so you’ve got people calling Prince, the dog. And then you’ve got the guy called Prince. She took a lot of that. And then the heroine of that particular novel is a young woman who loves to take on a different persona every day. She dresses according to the days’ persona, whether she’s being a drama queen, or a tennis star, or whatever she’s being, and she takes real delight in sending the police off in different directions.

But she’s impossible to pin down, and I think Heyer herself had a great sense of humor in her own life. Sometimes quite blue, I think, quite risque, which doesn’t come through in her novels quite as much unless you read the subtext. But her humor across all her novels is one of the things that she’s renowned for. So it’s not just the detective fiction that her Regency novels. I mean, if you meet another Heyerite, there’s a sort of a code. You can say to someone “thirty” and “nemesis,” and they will laugh.

Jennifer Kloester 13:24
Why? But it will because the joke in Friday’s Child, there’s a character called Ferdy Fakenham, who’s one of those foolish Wodehouse-ian kind of characters. He’s a bit dim, but he has his wonderful running joke through the whole novel about nemesis, and he talks about, “I’m dashed if that Greek thing hasn’t got after Monty to Sherry.” So there’s this Greek thing, and he says he was at Eton. And Sherry, the hero, will say, I don’t remember a Greek fellow at Eton. And he’s talking about the goddess of retribution, nemesis. But he can’t remember the character’s name. So he keeps talking about this Greek person who creeps up behind you. And it’s just a running joke. It’s very, very funny.

Heyer is renowned across the world for four generations of readers for her humor. This, in fact, was one of the things that drew me to her. It wasn’t just her incredible world building. It was her ability to make me laugh out loud. And Death in the Stocks is one of her really funny novels. Hannasyde becomes her more consistent detective with Sergeant Hemingway, but it’s actually Giles Carrington, the gorgeous handsome solicitor in Death in the Stocks who really solves the murder.

Carolyn Daughters 14:51
Interesting. I didn’t expect that. I kept thinking okay, Hannasyde’s going to emerge and be this preeminent detective who saves the day and solves the crime. And he seems quite competent and rational and I liked him quite well. But it’s Giles Carrington who’s actually the real detective in Death in the Stocks.

Jennifer Kloester 15:19
That’s exactly right. And in fact, I think, I think perhaps one of Christie’s and Sayers and Allingham’s great strengths, also Ngaio Marsh, these writers of the golden age of detective fiction, one of their great strengths was their consistency of their detectives. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are iconic characters. Heyer never really quite pulled that off. And that’s because in the first few books she has a different detective for each of these novels. And it’s only after Death in Stocks that she has Hannasyde and Hemingway for the next few. But she never really establishes that iconic detective in the way that Sayers and Christie and the rest managed to do. And some of the male writers, too, of course, Inspector Morse later and some of the others.

I think that was always one of the things that that stopped her becoming iconic as a detective writer. She’s certainly touted as one of the queens of detective fiction on her books, but she’s not known in the way those other authors became known. She certainly has her detective story fans. And I think she certainly deserves a place in the pantheon of great detective writers. But she’s very different in that way. And her focus tends to be much more on the humor and creating these visceral characters who really live for the reader, like the Verekers, Roger and Antonia.

Sarah Harrison 17:09
As Carolyn said, we started with Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve been working our way through. It feels like so few of the authors have really attempted humor in their detective novels. There was Nick and Nora in The Thin Man from Dashiell Hammett, and there’s a little bit in Sherlock Holmes. Inspector Bucket is pretty funny in Dickens’ Bleak House. But Death in the Stocks was just so light. It was so rolling. It was so successful with its humor. It really surprised me.

Jennifer Kloester 17:43
I think she’s certainly one of the originators of the black humor style of detective fiction, the idea that you can laugh over the corpse and also give the police a really hard time, not because you’re being cynically or spiteful or maliciously evasive, but because you that’s who you are, and you’re having fun. And you want to give the police a hard time. And you actually see it quite a lot. I noticed it quite a bit in some of the modern detective series. Vera, for example. Do you watch Vera?

Carolyn Daughters 18:20
I do, yeah.

Jennifer Kloester 18:21
I love the Vera. And Ann Cleeves. You do see quite a lot more of that provocative behavior with the police. And Heyer was just really good at it. She does it a lot in the later books. I’m just thinking, not The Unfinished Clue. Oh, Behold His Poison. That’s another really good one. Again, in which one of the people who solves a murder is not the police. I mean, he helps the police. So it’s not that Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, where they are the ones who really take charge and take control. Heyer does do that quite a bit. In Behold His Poison, it’s Randall, Randall the Snake, as he’s known. He’s charming and cynical and not to be trusted and he to make those jokes. And then A Blunt Instrument, which some people consider her cleverest detective novel because the murderer is a bit unexpected.

Carolyn Daughters 19:30
It was in Death in the Stocks as well. The murderer was unexpected.

Jennifer Kloester 19:37
That is true. And then her last detective novel, Detection Unlimited, I just find hilarious because one of the characters has all these dogs, the ultimas. All the dogs’ names start with “U.” There’s just all these incredible names, and you’d have to call out for the dogs. I think she had a fantastic sense of humor. And this is one of her hallmarks, both in her historical fiction and in her detective fiction. She was doing something new and different. And she does get acknowledged for that. Hang on while I grab this edition of one of her books. [Jennifer gets a book.] So they say things like Georgette Heyer is second to none in her ability to make detective stories entertaining. And I think that is a very accurate summation of one of the reasons she became so popular. Because her detective fiction did become really, really popular.

Sarah Harrison 21:02
I felt like Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s a funny character for Dorothy Sayers, but it’s not like the book is full of funny characters like you have in Death in the Stocks. We’re everyone’s kooky, and they’re all quipping together.

Jennifer Kloester 21:17
Yeah, that’s right.

Carolyn Daughters 21:20
It’s not a complete farce, though. Giles Carrington, and Superintendent Hannasyde, are serving the role of the straight men. If you had everybody, including Giles and the superintendent behaving crazily and every conversation was just totally mad, I think Death in the Stocks wouldn’t have worked. But you have a baseline of what regular behavior is. You know Georgette Heyer tapped into something that is not complete lunacy. So that when they’re talking to the other characters, and all of the banter is flying around the room, it elevates it, because you can see Giles and Superintendent Hannasyde standing back from it and not being a part of it.

Jennifer Kloester 22:11
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And that’s always been one of the challenges with Georgette Heyer, because obviously, we’ve all wanted her to come to the screen, large or small these days, for years. And she sold many options on her novels over the years to be made into films, and also into TV series. And it’s still something that is trying to people are trying to make that happen. And one of the challenges is that incredible subtlety and nuance of her humor. That is, what happened with the Broadway play of Death in the Stocks. It easily fell to the playwright, it became farcical, and she doesn’t write farce. She writes really intelligent, often subtle humor. As you said, quirky characters, very memorable characters. But she always manages to find that incredibly delicate balance between over the top humor and farce. And it’s very hard, I think, to recreate it.

You need a really skilled screenwriter or playwright, to recreate that and to bring it to life. Death in the Stocks. The book that preceded Death in the Stocks, The Unfinished Clue, is also very funny, but Death of the Stocks is really where she finds her metier for the detective fiction. That’s really where she finds her voice for this black humor, but really well-balanced with the other characters in the book. And, of course, there’s always a romance, just gently, running through it. As there is in Christie and Sayers. Everyone loves a romance, of course, even though they may not admit it.

Sarah Harrison 24:06
That is true. I just want to share this funny story. So my son wanted to watch The Fox in the Hound for movie night last night. But he hates the parts where they’re chasing the fox. He runs out of the room. He hates it. What he loves is when the fox marries the other fox. He loves the romance of The Fox and the Hound, which I just thought that was hilarious and melted my heart a little bit. I’m like, they’re not gonna catch the fox. You’ve seen this before. He just likes the romance part of The Fox and the Hound, a really unappreciated romance.

Carolyn Daughters 24:46
I never thought of it as a romance before.

Jennifer Kloester 24:50
Your son sounds like he’s got great discernment.

Sarah Harrison 24:53
He does actually.

Jennifer Kloester 24:55
It’s funny how romance gets just denigrated so much. I’ve always found that extreme. really odd?

Sarah Harrison 25:01
Tell us more about that. Because that is true. Mystery does too, sometimes.

Jennifer Kloester 25:05
Mystery does too, but not as much. I think mystery has the rather unfortunate credibility of being seen as a male-dominated genre. Which is actually not true. But it’s certainly seen that way. It’s become a very interesting question, actually. I was recently on a panel at a literary conference here in Melbourne. Sorento, fantastic writers festival. And I was on a panel called from Jane to Georgette: Why These Great Authors Continue Selling. And the guy who introduced us without any Malice Aforethought or anything. As he was introducing the moderator of the panel, he said, I’ve never read a romance. And I’m thinking, I’m pretty sure you have. If you’ve got a book, you’ve probably read a romance.

When I got to speak, I said, pretty much every great novel or every great piece of literature has a romance in it, whether it’s Shakespeare or Dickens or Tolstoy, War and Peace, all these books have a romance in it. And yet romance as a genre is consistently denigrated. We’re not meant to like it. It’s called trashy, frothy. And it completely discounts the fact that if you look at our world, and you look at the great popular songs, art, music, literature, pretty much all of us love a romance. We all want the happy ending. We want to believe that romance is possible. That the one is out there. We all long for love, don’t we? So, I find it very hard to take when people go on about trashy romance. And I have often wondered if it’s because romance is equated with women. And I can’t tell you how many times when I was doing my PhD. People said to me, oh, Georgette Heyer. Oh, but is she read by men? As if an answer in the affirmative would give her credibility or validity or make her a worthy person to read. And I find this really a common question.

A common comment is that it’s men who, by and large, win literary awards. It’s men who whose books get reviewed. I mean, they’ve done surveys where they find that a vast majority of books that get reviewed by men. I’ve spoken about this a couple of literary conferences. When you look around at any literary festival, bookshops, it’s women who are supporting the festivals, who are present at the festivals, who are buying the books, who are or reading the books. It’s not to say that men don’t read them. But it’s women who by and large make up, a huge percentage of the people who support the publishing industry. So why are the things that we love? Why are the things that give women pleasure, why are these so consistently denigrated? Bridgerton, season one, had an audience of 82 million people. You can’t just go, oh, well, that’s just trashy women’s romance.

Carolyn Daughters 29:01
That’s too broad a brush. I can see that in Death in the Stocks for sure.

Jennifer Kloester 29:03
It’s ridiculous. And there are really badly written books in every genre.

Carolyn Daughters 29:07
Every genre, yes.

Jennifer Kloester 29:09
Written by every gender of person. And some books that are badly written a very successful. It’s a very subjective thing, but to constantly denigrate romance as somehow being lesser than any other genre I find really wrong. And very unfortunate, and I think it should change. What’s wrong with romance. And I’m sorry, Agatha Christie, biggest selling author in the history of the world, over two billion books, billion with a “b” sold, and every single one of her books has a romance in it. Every single one of her detective novels. You can usually pick the fact that he and she didn’t do the murder because they’re going to end up together at the end

Sarah Harrison 30:03
I haven’t looked for that, but now I’m gonna pay better attention when I read. Yes, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd does have a romance in it.

Jennifer Kloester 30:12
Yeah, true almost every time. Although not probably for Agatha Christie’s Mary Westmacott books.

Sarah Harrison 30:21
I haven’t read those.

Jennifer Kloester 30:22
Oh, after Death in the Stocks you’ve got to read Absent in the Spring.

Sarah Harrison 30:27
This is this is the problem with our podcast. It’s like a service survey. Every time we meet a new author, we’re like, This is fabulous. They wrote like 1,000 books we need to follow up and read. And we talk with an expert who knows so much more than ourselves about all of these authors and there’s one after another. It’s totally wacky.

Carolyn Daughters 30:58
This sort of conversation about mystery writers and men being associated with the genre. First of all, some people will say, Okay, there’s a cerebral element to a mystery. So that’s different than a romance.

Sarah Harrison 31:16
That was a meaningful sigh, Jen.

Carolyn Daughters 31:20
I hear it a lot. And then I will mention to the same person that one of my favorite mystery writers is Sue Grafton. I just love her. Now, I love Elizabeth George. I love Agatha Christie. And they’ll look at me like I’m a space alien. Okay, no, I meant mysteries. I’m like, yeah, I love her. I love her books. They’re fun. You get right in them. Kinsey Millhone. And they’re like, hmmm. There’s all these layers or judgments or expectations on genre. And on, is the author, male or female.

As we’re doing history of mystery, we have attempted, where appropriate to make sure we’re covering female mystery writers like Georgette Heyer, who wrote Death in the Stocks. Like Ethel Lina White, who wrote The Wheel Spins — coming up. We’re going to do our third Dorothy L. Sayers book, which is Gaudy Night. We’ve read Agatha Christie, we’re going to continue reading Agatha Christie, but also some of the lesser-known writers like Ethel Lina White, because we want to bring them to attention. We think their works are worthwhile. And it’s easy to just brush some writers or some books aside. And as you mentioned, Jennifer, there are books in every single genre that are brilliant, and books that are terrible, and everything in between.

Jennifer Kloester 32:58
I think the genre-ing — that’s not a verb, but I’ve just made it into one — is slightly unfortunate. I mean, I can see why publishers do it. And obviously, it helps book shops because you can direct a customer to that section. It’s funny, isn’t it? We don’t have men’s fiction.

Sarah Harrison 33:22
We have women’s fiction.

Jennifer Kloester 33:24
We don’t have men’s fiction. We have women’s fiction. We have Asian fiction, gay fiction, queer fiction. We don’t have men’s fiction as a genre. We have young adult fiction, we have new gen fiction, children’s fiction, but we don’t have men’s fiction. We have science fiction, right? Detective fiction, romance fiction, and women’s fiction. So I think it’s really interesting. But Georgette Heyer was read by everybody. So she wrote for men and for women, as you can see with Death in the Stocks. And one of the reasons that she wrote detective fiction, too, is because she developed a big following in the law. So Lord Somerville, left his entire short Georgette Heyer collection to the Inner Temple library in London. She wrote They Found Him Dead. And then she wrote a sequel with the same characters, Duplicate Death, because she’d been begged for it by members of the bar, the law in England. That was one of the things, that was her impetus, because she has this following among men in law.

Sarah Harrison 34:46
You’ve got me wondering now. Originally she was read by everyone, and now she’s maybe considered more of a women’s writer. Is it the concept of genre-ing — to steal your verb — that shifted that? What caused the shift in readership over the years?

Jennifer Kloester 35:07
I think so. And also the book covers. The term “bodice ripper” didn’t emerge until 1980, actually, so it postdates Heyer, because she died in 1974. But certainly her covers during her lifetime, some of them could certainly be described as bodice rippers. And I think that was one of the really unfortunate shifts. Georgette Heyer is now published by the Folio Society. I don’t know if you’ve seen the books. I have. They make very beautiful books, don’t they? They’re really beautiful. This is the first one they did. This is Venetia. And Stephen Fry wrote a fantastic introduction, long introduction. Heyer superfan. They have these beautiful illustrations.

And he actually begins by saying … may I read this? “From the absolutely appalling italic cover art that has defaced her books since she was first published, you would think Georgette Heyer the most gooey, ghastly, cutesy, sentimental, and trashy author who ever did put pen to paper. The surprise in store for you, if you have not encountered her before, is that once you tear off, burn, or ignore those disgusting covers, you will discover her to be one of the wittiest most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable. Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight, these rise far above the genre.”

Sarah Harrison 36:52
That’s terrific. After reading Death in the Stocks, I have to agree.

Jennifer Kloester 36:55
That’s the beginning of a very beautifully written introduction to Georgette Heyer. I think that sums her up extremely well. But it’s not an uncommon experience for female or women writers to be pigeon-holed into certain things when, in fact, their writing, transcends genre, and Georgette Heyer’s writing, I think, in many ways does transcend genre. And she deserves greater recognition. I mean, she’s recognized among those who know and read her, which is millions of people. She still sells in the millions. She’s 50 years dead, and she’s still selling in large numbers in America and Britain and around the world. And those who know her, they totally get it. It’s those who don’t know, or don’t read her, who just tend to throw it down into the Barbara Cartland kind of pigeonhole. Which is their loss.

Carolyn Daughters 38:01
I write fiction, and I know a lot of people who write fiction and my own writing and several women that I know, because you have a protagonist who is female, a lot of people tend to chalk it up as women’s literature. I have come to not take that as a derogatory phrase, though the first time someone labeled it as such, probably the first 10 times, I had a reaction. “That’s not what I’m doing. This book is accessible to men, to women, to anybody who might be interested in the subject matter and the writing style.”

But at this point, I’ve come to terms with the phrase and decided, okay, this is a label by somebody who doesn’t know any better than to simply label things or put things in different boxes. Some of the female writers that I know are being labeled as women’s lit writers. I’ve read how amazing their work is. It’s a badge of honor. That’s all I can chalk it up to. Because people are going to pigeonhole or box different kinds of authors and books. That’s how they’re determining that this one’s potentially for me, and this one’s potentially not. And if they’re doing that with Georgette Heyer, then they’re probably writing off an author that they might well enjoy.

Jennifer Kloester 39:33
Oh, I absolutely agree with you, yes. And I think that does happen. I mean, as humans, we do like to create boxes for things. We like to put that in a box and put a label on it. And of course, it doesn’t ever really represent the true reality of anyone. It’s even in discussing Death in the Stocks or writing the Georgette Heyer biography. You very generously said that I knew everything about Heyer. Well, of course, I don’t. No one could know everything about anybody. I mean, it’s hard enough knowing yourself, never mind another person, you know? The best a biography can ever be is a rough approximation of a life. And this biography, which, I’m thrilled that people enjoy it, and they get a lot out of it because she was so incredibly private. I mean, she never gave an interview. She never appeared in public. She didn’t do book signings. Well, actually, she did give one interview in 1952, funnily enough to an Australian ex-war correspondent, Coral Craig, but she only agreed to the interview on the proviso that Coral Craig asked Georgette Heyer nothing about her books or writing.

Sarah Harrison 40:48
I want to hear that interview. Amazing.

Jennifer Kloester 40:52
She was living in Albany at the time. Do you know about Albany. So Albany chambers is still there. If you go to London, and you stand outside Fortnum and Mason, and you look diagonally across the road, you’ll see a big cobblestone courtyard, and at the back of it is this magnificent building. There’s a picture on the back of my hardcover. This is Albany chambers. It was built in the late 1700s. It was built for the Duke of York and Albany as well. It’s why it’s called Albany. But it was sold in about 1801 and turned into gentleman’s apartments. So Oscar Wilde lived there, and Noel Coward and Edith Evans, and loads and loads of famous people have lived in Albany. They have what are called sets, which we would call flats or apartments, but they’re called sets. And so Georgette lived there from 1942 to 1966. And she wrote a lot of her really great novels there. It’s incredibly private. You can’t get past the porter unless you have an appointment with one of the residents. It’s great fun to go up to the porters lodge and peer inside the hallway leading to the to apartment. She was incredibly private.

So she invites Coral Craig to her flat at Albany, and Coral reports that Georgette mixed her an excellent martini. And they talked about everything, except her books and her writing. And she found Georgette a gracious hostess. And really interesting. And she learned quite a few interesting things about her. She very rarely signed copies of her books. I have nine signed copies. But mostly she just wrote them to her family or her brother. And when her father was alive, to her mom and dad. She felt very strongly that if her books were good enough, they would sell themselves.

Carolyn Daughters 43:12
Which they apparently did, because she wasn’t publicizing them.

Jennifer Kloester 43:16
That’s exactly right. Word of mouth, which is your most powerful advert advertisement anyway, if any author can get word of mouth. Delia Owens is a good example with Where the Crawdads Sing, which just went nuts on word of mouth. That’s that elusive, impossible to make happen yourself. Which was very interesting. And the biography is really based very largely on her letters. Well, letters are great. And, and we certainly learn a lot from Heyer’s letters, but even a letter is only a captured moment in time, when you’re writing in a particular mood with a particular end in mind, that may be completely different if you did it the next day. My aim in the biography was to really let Georgette speak for herself as much as possible. And to really give you context, give you the history of the period, what was happening at the time. And to really try and give this woman to the world in a way that we hadn’t had it before.

Carolyn Daughters 44:49
In Death in the Stocks, there’s this word that is used a lot, and I would love to get an opinion on it. It’s “vulgar.” The characters are constantly saying this behavior is vulgar. That person is vulgar.

Sarah Harrison 45:05
The word is “vulgar”?

Carolyn Daughters 45:13
Yes. To Georgette Heyer, what is vulgarity in Death in the Stocks? Is this tongue in cheek every single time Kenneth points to a character, it might even be his own fiance Violet, and he says, this behavior is vulgar. You are a vulgar person.

Sarah Harrison 45:38
Oh, is that where she used the word “personally”? Personally she’s vulgar.

Carolyn Daughters 45:44
I wasn’t sure if this was, as I said, tongue in cheek, where every character who says it, the reader is just smirking. Or is there some statement being made about what behavior is appropriate and not. Every time Violet, for example, is called vulgar, I kept thinking to myself, “in a strange way I identify with Violet. She’s a hardworking woman. She’s self-made. She’s not flitting about the house doing nothing. She’s actually an artist, even though her art is derided by a guy who seems to paint in his free time.” Can we just talk for a minute about what vulgarity is in Death in the Stocks?

Jennifer Kloester 46:30
That is a fantastic question. And it’s a brilliant segue from what I was just talking about with the fact that Georgette was so incredibly private. So for Georgette Heyer, and very much this is a real reflection of the time in which she lived and grew up and also her Victorian parents, vulgarity would be the one unforgivable sin. It’s very much an English class thing. It’s a reflection of class. To be vulgar, the meaning would be different today. But back then, to be vulgar would be to be ostentatious, would be to talk about yourself. Georgette would have thought it incredibly vulgar. For instance, if you had been at a dinner party, and you were sitting next to Georgette Heyer, and you said, oh, what do you do? She wouldn’t have told you probably that she was an author. She probably she would have thought that to talk to you about her books and writing was vulgar.

If you read her really brilliant book, perhaps, it’s very hard to ever pick a Georgette Heyer favorite. But one of her truly great achievements is a book called A Civil Contract. It’s a clash of class book. The hero is a viscount, and the estate is broke, his father has bankrupted the estate. In order to save the estate, he needs to marry an heiress, and the only heiress available is the daughter of a man who has pulled himself up from working class or poor origins to become a mega-millionaire. But he’s vulgar. And his idea of being wealthy is to be really ostentatious. So he remodeled their house for them, and everything is just done to the nth degree, no expense spared. He bestows a big diamond tie pin on his son-in-law. And the son-in-law struggled, he cringes away from what he considers his incredibly vulgar but well-meaning father-in-law.

So it’s this idea that you don’t, as Georgette would say, pop off your consequence. You don’t tell people how fabulous you are. You don’t sit around and talk about your art with a capital A. And she writes about that in her letters quite often. Francis, Brett Young, who was a huge bestselling author, in the 1930s and 40s. He would go and read his manuscripts aloud to his publisher before publication. Now, to Georgette, that was not only incredibly funny, but also incredibly vulgar. You don’t push yourself onto people. And so, when she uses the word vulgar in Death in the Stocks, that is a criticism from her point of view. That is a criticism about the person and in that case, about Violet. That is saying to you, Violet is not really a suitable partner for Kenneth. Kenneth is too well bred, he’s better born. She is really from a working-class background. She doesn’t understand his world in the way that she really needs to, and she’s not going to be able to adapt herself. Without it being false. It’s that idea.

You know that when you are aspirational from the lower class or the middle class to the upper class, you would cook your little finger when you were having your cup of tea. That is actually a sign that you’re not upper class. To the upper class, that’s a clear signal that you’re actually an aspirational person of a lower class, who is trying to ape their betters, as they would have talked about it in the Victorian and Edwardian era. So it really stems back to the very hierarchical society in which Heyer grew up. I think I say in the biography at one point that you could tell where a man sat in the social strata from the collar that he wore on his shirt, whether it had been starched, how he knotted his tie. There were a lot of indicators that told people whether or not you had servants, for example, where you sat in the socioeconomic hierarchy. And that’s what vulgarity is about. In her own life, it was the unforgivable sin.

Sarah Harrison 51:17
Well, that’s a really interesting mix. On one hand, it’s incredibly classist, but on the other hand, it sounds like what I would still consider good manners. To boast about yourself, to brag about yourself, to turn talk about your art with a capital A still. Now we would say like cringe, bad manners.

Carolyn Daughters 51:46
At one point Kenneth says, “These hands are worth more than all Arnold’s filthy money. And when he’s been forgotten, for centuries, people will still be talking about me.” And Giles refers to him as looking like a third-rate artist from Chelsea. So I kept thinking, Kenneth seems vulgar to me, and what is not defined as vulgar in Death in the Stocks is having a fiancée that you disdain and who you basically make fun of and cut down every time she’s present. And you basically tell her she’s simply a pretty face. So that’s not vulgar. So then it got confusing to me.

Jennifer Kloester 52:22
Well, it is. That’s right. And that’s Heyer. That’s exactly right. Some of that will be Georgette Heyer reflecting her own perspective on the world. And some of it will be Georgette Heyer being comedic, and funny. That’s Georgette Heyer poking fun at Kenneth for being vulgar in Death in the Stocks. Absolutely. She’s recognizing it. It’s very much the Jane Austen thing, where Mrs. Bennett is overtly vulgar. But in fact, Lady Catherine de Bourgh is every bit as vulgar. But it’s much subtler and more nuanced with Lady Catherine than it is with Mrs. Bennett. But the fact is, the two women are equal in terms of their vulgarity. And so that’s one of the reasons that Darcy has to blush for his relations. Just as Elizabeth has to blush for hers. And that is the genius that Austen is so good at. She’s so good at everything, but she’s so good at that. And the other thing, I’d love this point that I haven’t often made. I don’t know if it occurs to most readers, but Mrs. Bennett, for all her histrionics, is right. The thing she says on the very first page of the book, is what happens. It’s exactly what comes to pass. She is perceptive, intelligent. She is a prophetess, who is never going to be believed.

Carolyn Daughters 54:04
Extremely ambitious.

Jennifer Kloester 54:06
Yes. But she’s completely right, because her daughters do marry Bingley and Darcy.

Carolyn Daughters 54:11
Very well.

Jennifer Kloester 54:12
Very well. They marry very well just as she needs them to in order to make sure she and her other daughters have a future. And that is one of the geniuses of Austen. But Heyer does similar things. And she’s doing a similar thing with Kenneth. It’s all very well for Kenneth to disdain Violet. But it’s the finger pointing out at Violet. and three fingers pointing back at him.

Carolyn Daughters 54:39
That helps me. Because when reading Death in the Stocks at times I was thinking, okay, Giles and Hannasyde are the voices of reason in the story, and Giles, ultimately, is interested in Tony. We see that they’re going to build a life together. And because I like and respect to Hannasyde and Giles, when Giles says to Tony, “I would like you to be my wife,” I instinctually embrace Tony as a character. Whereas at times she put me off. But Kenneth is a very funny but very flighty character, from my perspective.

Jennifer Kloester 55:22
And conceited.

Carolyn Daughters 55:23
And very conceited.

Jennifer Kloester 55:24
You have to be very conceited, I think, though, to treat the police that way, to treat a murder that way. But there are people like that, who do that sort of thing. And Georgette Heyer herself could be dismissive of people. Oh, you’re just a pretty face, you’re not a particularly intelligent person. At the same time, and I think all of us are paradoxical and contrary and contradictory in this way, she could be incredibly generous and kind to people who might have been perceived to be her social inferiors. She made a great friend of her landlady when they lived down in Hove in her flat during the war. And she went on to be correspondents and friends right through the end of Georgette’s life, which might surprise some people. Because she could be a terrible snob.

But she could also be incredibly embracing. You see that in Death in the Stocks. It’s interesting that when she wrote They Found Him Dead, one of her detective novels, the hero’s mother comes back. She’s an explorer, she’s been off in Africa. And she comes back to find that her son has got engaged to a personal companion one of the other characters. And she makes his little speech about, “oh, no, I was always worried that Giles might marry something out of a tobacconist’s shop,” which is a terrible thing to say. But it’s a character speaking, not Georgette. But it probably reflects Georgette Heyer’s own attitude at the time in the 1930s. But she actually received a letter from a tobacconist assistant, who took great exception, quite understandably, to this horrendous little speech, and said that she was taking Georgette off her library list and would not read her books anymore. And Georgette wrote a letter to her agent saying, Well, that’s not the sort of person I write for anyway, and so I don’t really care. But she did care, because she never did it again.

And that was the thing about Georgette. She was never very good at conflict, direct confrontation, as most of us are not, really. But if you pointed something out to her, that perhaps was something that she’d done wrong, she never repeated it. She never repeated the infraction again. In her novel, The Grand Sophy, she has a scene with a Jewish moneylender. The only scene in all of her books, there’s the occasional Jewish character that turns up in a detective novel, but they’re always just passing through. But this is a scene with a moneylender, where the moneylender, he’s describing antisemitic terms. Now, she actually based him on the historic character of Solomon Goldshed, who was described by in this terrible antisemitic terms. And she also would have drawn on Fagan and Shylock, because she was a great Dickens and Shakespeare reader. The scene is important to the novel in that it shows the heroine as a feisty, strong character. And Goldhanger, the Jewish moneylender, is really described in very derogatory terms. Very similar to the way it’s described in the nonfiction book, Reminiscences.

So, we’ve actually resolved that with America, we’ve changed Goldhanger’s name, so it’s not in any way Jewish, and removed any sort of references that might suggest to you that he’s a Jewish character. He’s just a moneylender. And that’s good. We’ve done that. But I think it’s likely that this was pointed out to Georgette that that was not a great thing. She never did it again. There’s no other Jewish characters in her books from 1950 to 1974. She was not a malicious or spiteful person. She could be difficult and acerbic. She could be critical of people, but she was not a person who was malicious or bigoted. She was of Jewish heritage. So she was not consciously antisemitic. It’s unfortunate that some people have taken that sort of tack.

She certainly was someone who cared deeply about what her fans and her readers thought. But she also valued intellect. And it didn’t matter what class you came from. If you were intelligent, she respected you. If you were fluffy and adoring, she found that really vulgar, as you see in Death in the Stocks. She had a reader who used to write to her. This reader would write to the government requesting that they put up a statue to Georgette. And Georgette just found that laughable. She would have found that incredibly vulgar, and something she would never ever, ever have wanted. I think she would love the blue plaque that was put up in 2015 on her birthplace in Wimbledon. They only award 12 a year, so that was a really big deal. And her daughter-in-law and her nephew both agree, because they both spoke at the unveiling as well. Although she would never have said so, she would have been really pleased.

Sarah Harrison 1:00:58
That’s cool. I know we are at time, but I just had one more question for you if I could impose. And this is about the romance aspect. I want to know how typical it is for Georgette Heyer. We’re going through Death in the Stocks. And it took me probably halfway through Death in the Stocks before I could discover what the romance was because both characters Ken and Tony were engaged to people nobody liked. They didn’t like them either. Nobody liked them. It’s not the romance. And finally, Giles emerges. Is this sort of subtle romance typical for Georgette Heyer’s novels or typical for her mysteries?

Jennifer Kloester 1:01:45
It can be, not always, but very often. She was a great believer in friendship as the ideal base for love for a relationship, for people to come together. And some of her novels take a long time for the characters to realize that they are actually in love, or there for each other. So her novel Frederica, for example. Frederica doesn’t realize to really at the very end that she’s in love with the hero. He’s been in love with her for ages, but she doesn’t, she doesn’t see it. She’s too busy looking after her family and doing responsible things. And so you may know at the beginning who the couple is going to be, but not always, if you read Cotillion, which is one of her really brilliant novels and very funny, it’s not at all clear. You think it’s going to be this these two people, but in fact, it’s not necessarily what you think it’s going to be. She was brilliant at character arcs. So very often, her novels contain perfect character arcs. So whatever the character believed about themselves at the beginning, or what people thought about the beginning. is completely altered by the end. The Unknown Ajax is a really great example of that, where pretty much almost every character has a complete character arc, perfectly executed. I mean, she was a genius at plot, character, and dialogue, which is why her novels endure, I don’t think you get to go on selling, unless you’re really, really good at what you do. There’s plenty of bestselling novels today that probably won’t be being read in 50 years, or being written into two years. So it’s a pretty rare thing, I think, to endure. And she’s actually one of the few of her literary generation to endure. Certainly Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham is still read, but not in the way that he was in his lifetime. Francis Brett Young, Rebecca West, all big sellers in their day, still read a bit but not out there as great bestsellers. So Georgette Heyer is remarkable in a great many ways. But I think it’s just the sheer joy of reading her, that brings readers back to her again and again, and she had a big upsurge in the pandemic. I think escape is very underrated as a thing for humans. We love escape, and it’s why alcohol and drugs do so well. People are looking for escape, but I think a much healthier escape is to find a really good book.

Carolyn Daughters 1:04:40
I’m so glad we we found Georgette Heyer and Death in the Stocks, and I’m so glad we found you.

Sarah Harrison 1:04:47
Fantastic. We could probably do two more episodes.

Jennifer Kloester 1:04:52
Well, read Jane Austen’s Ghost, and I’ll come back and talk to you about that.

Sarah Harrison 1:04:55
That actually sounds lovely.

Jennifer Kloester 1:04:57
It’s been great fun. And I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you on your lovely, lovely podcast.

Sarah Harrison 1:05:08
Is there anything you want to tell readers about that you’re working on now, the documentary or anything?

Jennifer Kloester 1:05:13
Well, the documentary is a work in progress. It’s a step by step, often these things take time. But we’ve made really good progress with a director, and Stephen Fry has expressed his eagerness to be involved. That’s fantastic for us. And so we’re just in England for June doing quite a lot of work on Georgette Heyer there. In terms of my own writing, I’m currently writing at a psychological thriller, under a pseudonym.

Sarah Harrison 1:05:43
Can you tell us, or is it secret?

Jennifer Kloester 1:05:47
Two serial killers. One’s actually on death row and is due to be executed the very next day. But there’s another serial killer out there. He’s just killed his seventh person. And there’s a connection made between the guy on death row and the active serial killer. And so the police are now at the prison, trying to get the condemned serial killer to help them discover who the new guy is, and why.

Carolyn Daughters 1:06:25
Where is it set?

Jennifer Kloester 1:06:27
Set in California in 1970.

Sarah Harrison 1:06:30
Is there a romance involved?

Jennifer Kloester 1:06:35
Yes, actually, now that you mention it, there is, but it’s not it’s not a major thing. It’s proving quite a difficult book, because of the structure because you’ve got the day before, and then you’ve got now. The now is in the first person from the condemned serial killer’s point of view. And the then is in the third person, watching what the detectives are doing. I’m getting there. I’m a bit over halfway. Georgette Heyer wrote a lot of her novels in six to eight weeks.

Sarah Harrison 1:07:16
Oh, wow.

Jennifer Kloester 1:07:20
Longhand, a lot of them, and also straight to the typewriter. And her first drafts, you’ll hate me, Carolyn, were often her final draft.

Sarah Harrison 1:07:33
Whoa. Wow.

Carolyn Daughters 1:07:34
J to clarify, she didn’t do one million revisions like I do?

Jennifer Kloester 1:07:40
She’s write the manuscript type or longhand, and then she’d send that off to the publisher. She’d get back the proofs she’d amend the proofs and send that off. That would be the book. And then she burned the manuscript.

Carolyn Daughters 1:07:56
Wow. Okay. Something to strive for.

Jennifer Kloester 1:08:04
Anyway, read The Talisman Ring. It’s a really quick, gorgeous read. It’s a tongue-in-cheek comedy, but with a good murder mystery. You know who the murderer is, but that’s okay. And you’ll get a real sense of her comedy. And she wrote that book in under eight weeks. She had it roughed out in two hours.

Carolyn Daughters 1:08:26
Of course she dod.

Sarah Harrison 1:08:26
Wow. I can’t even write that fast.

Jennifer Kloester 1:08:31
I don’t know. What can I tell you? It takes me a year to write a book.

Carolyn Daughters 1:08:37
That seems reasonable to me.

Jennifer Kloester 1:08:39
Thank you.

Sarah Harrison 1:08:41
Jen, it’s been fantastic. I’m gonna link all of your websites and social in the in the show notes. We have so many books we talked about. We’ll put them all on our page. You can check it out in our little Amazon store.

Carolyn Daughters 1:08:59
And you’re on Facebook, Instagram, you have a website, which is JenniferKloester.com. And we’ll include links to all of this information for everybody to be able to find you.

Jennifer Kloester 1:09:13
And thank you for having me on Tea Tonic & Toxin to discuss Death in the Stocks. What a fabulous podcast. And thank you, Sarah and Carolyn. I’ve had such fun.

Sarah Harrison 1:09:24
Thank you.

Jennifer Kloester 1:09:26
My pleasure.

Carolyn Daughters
You can learn more about Death in the Stocks and all our 2024 book selections at teatonicandtoxin.com. You can also comment, weigh in, and follow along with what we’re reading and discussing @teatonicandtoxin on Instagram and Facebook. And you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.