The Dead McGuffin

A Rainbow Fart Post -- Today's Mashed Up Li'l Feelers

God save us all from Touchy Feely ivory-tower dwellers. I was roaming around the internet reading miscellaneous junk to no apparent purpose when I ran across this turgid little nugget:

On The Casual Sociopathy of The Traditional Mystery
Should There Be Such Thing As A "Comfortable" Murder Mystery?
https://crimereads.com/on-the-casual-sociopathy-of-the-traditional-mystery/

Click on the link if you want to inflict it on yourself, but if you want the short version (spoiler alert!) author Gytha Lodge seems to think that we're spending way too little time on the victim, and certainly not nearly enough time rending garments and being shocked, horrified, and all that shit about the crimes committed in mystery, detective, and noir books. To quote Ms. Lodge:

"Surely she (Agatha Christie) wasn’t quite so casual about death. Even for a wartime and then post-war writer such as Christie, this seemed excessive. Where death was much more an accepted fact of life, was there no sense of sadness about it? Or of respect for the dead? Was the victim really so unimportant?

"As I read on, it became apparent that the victim of this work was of no importance at all. She was given the vaguest of back-stories. She had been a dancer in Paris, and had apparently left to go on a cruise. She was not missed, and she had nobody to mourn her. Her story was, in fact, profoundly unimportant. The only story of real significance was the story of her killer. He, unlike the victim, had a voice. He had a chance to justify himself, and a narrative that was all his own. He had agency, and a personality that the victim absolutely lacked."

Uhmmm…..hello, what? Ms. Lodge has completely overlooked the fact that the murder (or whatever) is almost incidental to the story. Sometimes, in fact, the victims are complete McGuffins¹, as literally unimportant to the story as the Maltese Falcon is to — well, The Maltese Falcon -- and sometimes, at most, they're just another more-or-less important bit of evidence in the plotline.

But for Ms. Lodge the murder victim in the story needs to be treated with respect, with the proper degree of reverence, and with the appropriate shock at his/her unfortunate mode of checking out.

Am I the only one who thinks this entire line of thought concerning the rights, feelings, and treatment of PEOPLE WHO DON'T EVEN REALLY EXIST is dumber than hammered shit?

I regret to say that this particular poisonous wad of offended dumbassery is not the only place that 1984-level politically-correct Newspeak fascism turns up in writing critiques lately. I saw an extensive bitch session about a novel that has no "persons of color" or "leading women" anywhere in it. Well, I own that particular novel. It's a war novel set in the trenches of WWI France, which turns out to have been populated by an estimated ZERO women.

As for "persons of color", I've re-read it, and other than the description of one bristly-mustached red-headed Sergeant and a comment concerning "pale faces wide-eyed in the moonlight" there's not a single reference to ANYONE'S race, nor is there in virtually any other book I own.

I presume that since race isn't mentioned at all, getting on with mentioning it is the solution. Perhaps the "problem" can be resolved in the same way that a woman I was following for a bit on a "RiseUp!"² feed fixed a similar issue. She kept talking about the BLACK guy she was going to be out on a date with, as soon as they could get it set up. She'd periodically update us all with the details of her contacts with the BLACK gentleman, and how he looked to be a perfectly nice BLACK guy, and she's relieved that her opportunity to date a BLACK guy was coming up soon, because she's never dated a BLACK guy because, y'know, it just never came up, she's not a racist or anything, and how confident she is that the date with the BLACK guy was going to be perfectly wonderful. Oh, did she mention he was BLACK?

Good Christ, sweetie. Sorry. "Comrade". We all get it. You're going to go on a date with a BLACK guy. Which being BLACK is apparently his defining feature for you. And just as apparently, that dehumanizing virtue-signalling fetish doesn't strike you as a problem. I know I was impressed, and it should absolutely burnish up her "I ain't no racist!" cred with the collective. And fer shure it will with the BLACK totem she's gonna be dating.

Rich White Girl Being All Revolutionary An' Shit

I have no clue how it went, or if it went, if the BLACK guy took the opportunity for a 100% certain sexual score, or if she was so noxious he told her to fuck off and find another "cause". Frankly, after about a week of her bumper-sticker anarcho-bullshit on a wide range of subjects, I blocked the silly bint who, by the way, wasn't exactly a brain surgeon in the most generally annoying way you can imagine in the first place.

Anyhow, since she seems to be cut of the same clueless, useless, virtue-signaling, ever-offended, slacktivist cloth as Ms. Lodge, I can only presume that the WWI novel should have the word BLACK at least a couple of times on every single page, or devote a chapter to a powerful lesbian Nubian queen riding dragons and commanding troops in Central Africa only a few thousand miles from the main focus of the book. 'Cause that's how we know it's sensitive enough. And, by golly, that's REAL change.

So, the "takeaway" here is that in your next novel, y'all be sure to include a detailed and honoring description of EVERYONE, and by that I mean every single human on earth, since that's the only way to cover your bases and not "exclude" some sad-sack and his/her/its/their individual but proud bit of difference, and for sure type up a quick 30,000 words on the backstory, feelings, family, and angst of your otherwise unremarkable dead McGuffin. In fact, toss in another 10,000 words or so on how his/her untimely death affects friends, family — the whole world, really -- and how much you personally dislike having to respectfully, and with deep regret, corpsify him/her in order to write the damned story, which, by the way, is somehow no longer the point of writing it at all.


FOOTNOTES:

<sup>1. In fiction, a MacGuffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for film, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, and later extended to a similar device in fiction.↩

2. RiseUp! is a radical, extreme-left, anarcho-commune-volunteer-run collective providing secure email accounts, email lists, VPN, online chats, and other online services. RiseUp! was launched by activists in Seattle (surprise!) with borrowed equipment and quickly grew to millions of accounts, most of which are deader than Dillinger's dick. One of those (not-dead) accounts is mine. I spend a fair bit of each week on there seeing who's out and about, y'know, keeping up with strikes, whines, propaganda, and direct actions.  Know Thine Enemy, as they say.↩</sup>