Sex & Sensitivity

Val McDermid, of all people, needed a sensitivity reader for the re-issue of her earliest crime fiction, the wonderful Lindsay Gordon novels. But hear me out: this is actually a good thing, not an indication of “snowflake culture” or generational divides.

I read the novels soon after they were published, and one of the things that McDermid incorporated was a blunt use of the homophobic slurs used by, well, homophobes. In the context of her lesbian amateur investigator/journalist’s life, this language usage was in no way gratuitous, as Lindsay encountered overt lesbophobia, as this Guardian piece notes: “The books she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s featured characters in law enforcement who used racial and homophobic slurs to reflect attitudes that were prevalent at the time.”

McDermid’s views diverge a bit from mine, and she deserves deference here as both an author and an out-lesbian in a brutally repressive era (and one that was not that long ago):

“McDermid, referred to as the queen of crime, said it was dishonest to make authors change their previous work to “conform” to modern-day sensibilities, The Times reported.

She said: “I had to have a sensitivity reader to read my Lindsay Gordon novels to tell me the things that I couldn’t say now. I argued the case that these books were of their time and that it’s dishonest to try to make them read differently.

“In most instances, I won my point. The few examples where I didn’t win my point were to do with race.”

Ah. Well, that’s a bit different, right? Because some of the 1970s to 1990s lesbian fiction, including crime fiction, is cringe-inducing when it comes to racial and ethno-cultural difference. Almost all of the published novels were by white women, and it’s perfectly possible to be ahead of one’s time when it comes to gender and sexuality and firmly a product of one’s time when it comes to race.

I don’t recall any specific characterizations, but I’m looking forward to reading the books as they are newly re-issued. And I would much prefer to re-read Agatha Christie without the slurs against everyone from Italians and sexually active young women to Black Americans. The virulent antisemitism of Christie’s work, in particular–and the same is true of Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels–is both historically accurate, in terms of the social prejudices of their eras, and entirely unnecessary (in my view) to the plots. There may be a few exceptions. I’m not suggesting we re-write Murder on the Orient Express to change the title or rehabilitate the portrayal of Russian princesses, for instance. I do wonder if future generations will feel differently.