Golden age mysteries - am I wearing my slash goggles? I don't think so...

[charlie_cochrane]

I took a bag of books to my local Oxfam bookshop and inevitably emerged with another handful of reading matter, including Josephine Tey's first mystery, The Man in the Queue.

It's very much of its time (1929) so some of the language jars particularly in terms of both overt and covert racism, but that apart what struck me is that (like AA Milne's Red House Mystery) 80% of this book reads like a 2016 written m/m historical romantic mystery. The descriptions of young men and Inspector Grant's reactions to them are distinctly slashy; in fact, I'm reading Tey's book alongside Elin Gregory's Eleventh Hour, which is set in the same era, and I keep thinking, "which book was that bit in?"

Which shows how authentic Elin's sounds and how suspicious Tey's is.

Comments

[alexisjane.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this isn't the first time you've mentioned "unintended" m/m in a book written in that era. Wondering if there's already a list of these stories somewhere... I know I'd certainly be curious to try them x

Slash Goggles, or the Slippery Slope

[bauhiniakapok.livejournal.com]

I read (and loved) Red House Mystery last autumn, and saw no slash at all. Apparently it was before I'd run out of G-rated Sharpe fanfic, which I was trying to stick with to preserve my innocence, and got sucked into the slash stories because they were the only thing left. And then kinda started to like them. And THEN discovered Horatio and Archie, whom it's basically impossible not to slash, although my inner Mary Sue would like them to at least be bi, as Sharpe and Harper so clearly are. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I slash EVERYONE. Maybe I have a slash monocle.