Joan Fleming

• Born: March 27, 1908
• Birthplace: Horwich, Lancashire, England
• Died: November 15, 1980
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Psychological; amateur sleuth; historical

Principal Series: Nuri Iskirlak, 1962-1965

Contribution

Part of the fun of reading mystery fiction is the discovery of an author with whom one was previously not familiar. Joan Fleming’s work is unique in that with each of her novels one has that same sense of discovery. It is not possible to be comfortable with Fleming if what one expects is to be able to anticipate familiar patterns, characters, settings, or turns in plot. It is possible to become assured, however, that each novel will have been painstakingly crafted, that it will be charmingly English, and that it will be altogether delightful.

Fleming’s goal appears to have been to write as well as she possibly could, and that she wrote well, there is no doubt. What the reader can question is whether it was her intent to write category novels or whether she meant to write well-crafted novels in which she could choose to use a crime or a mystery as a means of moving her characters from place to place and giving them something on which to act and against which to react. It would seem that the latter is true, for scene and character are what the reader comes to care about in Fleming’s novels. More than with “who” or “how,” one’s curiosity is absorbed with “why.”

Biography

Joan Fleming was born Joan Margaret Gibson, the daughter of David and Sarah Elizabeth (née Suttcliffe) Gibson. She was born in Horwich, Lancashire, England, on March 27, 1908. Her education was at Brighthelmston School, Southport, Lancashire, and in Switzerland at Grand Belle Vue, Lausanne, and Lausanne University. She worked in London as a secretary to a doctor from 1928 to 1932, when she married Norman Bell Beattie Fleming. They had three daughters and a son. Her husband died in 1968.

Fleming wrote more than thirty novels that are classified as mysteries (some are historical mysteries), at least five works of juvenile fiction, and a nonfictional volume concerning William Shakespeare. In 1962, she received the Gold Dagger Award given by the Crime Writers’ Association for that year’s best mystery publication, When I Grow Rich. She won the award again in 1970 for her novel published that year, Young Man, I Think You’re Dying. Fleming died on November 15, 1980.

Analysis

Writers are advised always to write about that which they know and with which they are familiar. Joan Fleming knew about many things; she wrote competently in her mysteries about subjects as varied as rare antique books, ancient Chinese porcelain, modern art dealers, receivers of stolen goods, drug addiction, Oxford’s academic community, and life and values in exotic places, to name only a few. One senses that Fleming was intent on giving herself as much pleasure in the writing as she hoped her readers would find in her work, and that it was toward such an end that she put new characters in new settings in almost every one of her novels. Even Nuri Iskirlak, as the principal, has a different set of characters to play against in each of the two mysteries in which he appears (When I Grow Rich and Nothing Is the Number When You Die, 1965).

Emphasis in Fleming’s work is on character. Her protagonists are often forced into positions or situations for which they have had little or no preparation, but in which they handle themselves gracefully. The best example of this is Nuri Iskirlak, the Turk who, seeking to help his friends and to see justice done, forfeits his own goals to put a stop to the link that the ancient Miasma has provided in the flow of opium-based drugs between his country and Europe.

Nothing Is the Number When You Die

Another well-defined character is the English aunt of Tamara, the woman Nuri loves in Nothing Is the Number When You Die. Nuri meets the eighty-two-year-old eccentric while he is in England to search for Tamara’s missing son. Lady Mossop first appears pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with horse manure with which she intends to dose her magnolia tree. Lady Mossop is described as “an enormously tall old woman wearing brown corduroy slacks, tied with twine at the knee.” Nuri says that her face is “by no means handsome,” but he likes the fact that she smiles at him, something Turks seldom do for foreigners. When Nuri reveals to Lady Mossop his fear that Tamara’s son, like some of his acquaintances at Oxford, may have become addicted to drugs, she assures him that the longing for affection is stronger than the longing for drugs can ever be. One is sure that Lady Mossop would have never been exposed to the world of drugs, nor would she have had any knowledge of it, had she not felt affection for the young man whom Nuri seeks. Lady Mossop is not happy about the situation, but with good grace she determines to participate in bringing about the reunion of Tamara and her son, meanwhile protecting him from his father’s murderer.

How to Live Dangerously

Another appealing Fleming character is Martin Pendle Hill (How to Live Dangerously, 1974). For thirty-five years he has lived comfortably in an eleven-room maisonette above the flat of elderly Miss Smite, who owns the building, which had been her family home before its conversion to separate units on the death of her parents. Pendle Hill decides to ask Miss Smite whether he might take in lodgers, as his unit is much too large for his needs. Once her shock and dismay have subsided, the two of them develop a brief but pleasant relationship. Pendle Hill, meanwhile, wonders to himself again and again why he had spent so many years avoiding Miss Smite, when during all that time they could have been good friends. Miss Smite is murdered, and Pendle Hill discovers the body. Despite his years of retirement and the pain of a broken hip on the mend, he feels compelled to discover the reason for her death. He, too, is one of Fleming’s innocent bystanders, thrust into an unpleasant situation but capable of rising to its demands.

A strong characterization in the same novel is that of Mrs. Rafferty, Pendle Hill’s housekeeper and devoted defender. She boasts that she knows him “through and through,” and Pendle Hill is sure that the hardship would have been greater for him had she been the one with the broken hip. Mrs. Rafferty is deeply troubled when her master succeeds in taking a lodger over Miss Smite’s objections, because she fears that he will suffer because of it—and eventually he does. Mrs. Rafferty provides contrast in the novel to the somewhat stuffy Pendle Hill. Her language is that of the English tradesman, full of colorful slang, as is that of her husband, who listens dutifully to her concerns about Pendle Hill. The Raffertys remain loyal long after others, out of fear, have deserted the home of the late Miss Smite.

When I Grow Rich

The settings of Fleming’s novels are most often England; sometimes the action takes place in large cities and sometimes in rural villages, as it does in The Man from Nowhere (1960) and in Midnight Hag (1966). From all accounts, Fleming’s personal travels were the sources for her foreign settings. Whether it was her own experience or the accounts of others that inspired the use of Istanbul in at least two of her novels (When I Grow Rich and Nothing Is the Number When You Die), the city is given special treatment by this imaginative and capable writer. In When I Grow Rich, one’s sympathies are drawn to the city of Istanbul. One looks forward to more intimate knowledge of it on reading an early description of it: “Neither Eastern nor Western, it has a strange exotic flavour of its own, at times deadly dull and at other times causing such a penetrating wave of emotion that those who feel it never forget it nor do they get quite the same thrill anywhere else.” The reader suffers sudden culture shock when Nuri, approaching the home of his friend, Miasma, sees in the distance what appear to be bundles or sacks of rags in the road. Only when he hears from that same source the sounds of a funeral chant does he recognize that the bundles are not rags but human beings. In another scene, Nuri kicks a kitten aside when it cries in hunger, “because in Istanbul no one takes any more notice of a starving kitten than of a fallen leaf.” Whether Fleming uses for the setting of her story the city of Helsinki (You Won’t Let Me Finish, 1973), or Paris (The Good and the Bad, 1953), or a Portuguese fishing village (Death of a Sardine, 1963), the place is so important a part of many of the novels that it can be said to play the role of at least a minor character. That is true even of the house in which Pendle Hill has lived for so long.

For what is often a psychological approach to fiction, in which she examines the underlying feelings of those who must react in some way to a crime that has occurred, Fleming is sometimes compared to Patricia Highsmith, an American considered by some to be the best of her time at using human relationships to develop her crime plots.

Principal Series Character:

• Nuri Iskirlak is an impoverished scholar and philosopher of some repute in Istanbul. A bachelor, his goal in life is to visit Oxford, where he believes must lie the answers to all of life’s important questions. He becomes an amateur sleuth not of his own volition but because circumstances demand it.

Bibliography

Boucher, Anthony. Review of The Chill and the Kill, by Joan Fleming. The New York Times Book Review 70 (November 1, 1964): 26. Review of an unorthodox mystery mixing imagination and murder.

Boucher, Anthony. Review of No Bones About It, by Joan Fleming. The New York Times Book Review 72 (September 3, 1967): 20. Review provides analysis of one of her more popular novels.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Does not deal directly with Fleming but helps to place her among other female mystery writers.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Comprehensive overview of the development of crime fiction in the twentieth century helps place the nature and importance of Fleming’s distinctive contributions.

Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences, a History: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. This history of detective fiction, written by a successful novelist in his own right, places Fleming’s work in the context of the evolution of the genre from one concerned with puzzles and detection to one focused on the portrayal of crime and criminality.