It's too late to comment on a complete stranger's journal from months ago

(Post linked via someone on my lj flist, irksome narking about this in the comments. Duh.)

But The Crimson Petal and the White is not only set a good decade before Jack the Ripper was prowling the streets of Whitechapel, but in entirely different areas of London. His activities were really very localised in time and space.

So that's why no-one was likely to be mentioning him in CP&W.

Plus, actually there was a huge range of prostitutes in Victorian London and not all of them were doing it against a wall for a glass of gin in the East End slums.

So please, commenter over there, not to be quite so sniffy about its historical accuracy from a position that's not quite as superiorly knowledgeable as you imagine.

ETA This seems to me to be the 'all the past was happening simultaneously' fallacy.

My sense is that Michel was actually being very specific about when CP&W was set: AND mightn't any srs writer working on this subject want to avoid the obvious? Esp as has been done (Wedekind/Pabst/Berg's workings of the Lulu story).

Genre-bendre

At the weekend I picked up a copy of Christianna Brand's London Particular (1952), a Silver Age mystery which has no great merits but which I have been wanting to get hold of since the plot turns on a young woman who is trying to access an abortion (so of some historical interest if no significant literary or genre merit).

It's a hardcover in dust-jacket, published by Michael Joseph.

And I was intrigued to see the list of 'In this series' ( on the back of the jacket )

It's far from being just moar murder mystereez: it's quite a broad range, including mainstream fiction, Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing, and even sf - The Day of the Triffids, no less.

I found this intriguing, given that these days everything has to have its genre and will be shelved by it. How recently did that all happen? There was presumably an assumption that the reader would very likely be equally interested in all those offerings.