Swatithought.Mehul, I'm wondering if perhaps your list is in order from 1 as your least liked and 21 as your most liked?
As for an anti-American possibility, Edgar Stick was English - that doesn't make Enid anti-English!
Swatithought.Mehul, I'm wondering if perhaps your list is in order from 1 as your least liked and 21 as your most liked?
This quote always made me chuckle in WW II documentaries .Lucky Star wrote:...the behaviour of US forces whom they described as "overpaid, oversexed and over here"?
That's a good point about Wodehouse's depiction of American's Ming. As both he and Blyton were contemparies I guess that was the common perception of "Yanks" at that time, possibly fuelled in part (as Lucky Star suggests) by wartime experiences.Ming wrote:I found Enid's depiction of the French far more interesting than that of her Americans! All the Mamzelles, and Claudine, were very bright, fun and jolly characters and somewhat unscrupulous! - with the exception of Mamzelle Rougier (?) of course. She was a nasty piece of work.
I think Enid's Americans and P. G. Wodehouse's Americans are quite similar - loud, usually rich, and slightly foolish.
I think Patricia Highsmith equalled it. She has a way of creating lots of atmosphere with very few sentences.walter raleigh wrote:Wodehouse has a deceptively simple prose style that is often imitated but rarely equalled.
Not sure about the war/post-war events influencing Enid's decision to make Mr. Hemming an American. She would have needed the character to be very rich and to not be British, so American seems the natural choice.Maggie Knows wrote:EB needs to exaggerate the awfulness of Junior and his Dad to create a proper enemy, because the unusual thing about the Finniston Farm story is that it lacks a proper villain.Maggie Knows wrote:Junior is a pest but Berta was portrayed as a nice, likeable kid in a tricky situation, so I think it balances out.
Mr Hemming is quite within his rights to offer to buy old stuff from the farm, and he enters into a contract to excavate the castle site. Nothing he does is actually illegal, so the author has to make him/Junior seem rude and uncultured in order to justify the actions of the Five. I am not sure why she needed to make him American, but maybe she had a thing about the postwar relative decline of Britain and Pax Americana ?
I've said it before: there no real justification for any of this given the amount of loot from around the world that lies in British museums and stately homes...
What a co-incidence! My husband is just sitting at his computer creating a cover for "The Boy Next Door" which I bought in Alton on the day before the EB get together at the Spade Oak & Old Thatch in May. He's a bit frustrated, because there is only the front cover of the later reprint (with the boy in the Indian clothes outfit which I actually like much better than the original old cover from 1944), but that has no backside of the dust wrapper. So I convinced him to just combine it with the backside from the original cover. That's good enough for me. He's such a perfectionist .Courtenay wrote: By the way, Sarah, I appreciated your description of Kit Armstrong - I'll soon be reading The Boy Next Door for the first time, not knowing much about it, and he sounds like a very intriguing and appealing character to get to know. No spoilers, please!
I'm not sure why that would be the natural choice, though? Wouldn't other nationalities, such as Canadians, or maybe the French, be just as rich as Americans? I'm thinking of the many times in Agatha Christie novels where children are sent to relatives in Canada to start over, which makes me think that there would be a huge number of British expats in Canada too.Spitfire wrote:Not sure about the war/post-war events influencing Enid's decision to make Mr. Hemming an American. She would have needed the character to be very rich and to not be British, so American seems the natural choice.
Well, I got the opposite impression when I was reading books on Americans in the early 60's. Taking 4 or 6 weeks off in the summer for a long European vacation was something that many Americans did (today they cannot get off more than 2 1/2 weeks for a trip the most), especially in the 50's and 60's. There are several novels and movies out there.Ming wrote: Finniston Farm was first published in 1960, and it was the in 40s that the Great Depression ended. I am aware that WWII played a huge part in recovering USA from the Depression but this was just 20 years after the Depression. I might be wrong (and I probably am) but it does seem like during that time there wouldn't be very many extremely wealthy Americans about.
Thoughts?