Goodreads feminist reviews - Gin & Daggers (Murder, She Wrote novels, #1)

 

 Book: Murder, She Wrote. Gin & Daggers (1989), by Donald Bain, the first of a series of Murder, She Wrote novels, based on the TV series of the same name.

2/5. Goodreads review also here. 

 I love Murder, She Wrote and adore Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, but unfortunately this book's characterization of her was not it. At all. This is my first foray into the Murder, She Wrote books, and I'm honestly quite discouraged to see that the same author wrote most of them, because I'm less than impressed - and more than a bit displeased - with the way he wrote Jessica's characterization. Not to mention the blatant male gaze present throughout the whole book.

I love Jessica Fletcher because she's just so refreshingly unconventional in every way. Firstly, we direly need more protagonists who are badass older women who subvert gender roles every day (Jessica loves both baking apple pies in her seaside town and solving murders everywhere she goes, and it's perfect xD). And I just love how Jessica combines badassery and kindness, doesn't care for money, fame or power in spite of having become a world successful writer of mystery novels, always keeps an open mind and constantly hones her curiosity for learning new things, for example, about other countries and peoples (she's not a typical EEUU citizen in more than one way welp), and she seems to always have a special affinity for the more oppressed minority groups.

Honestly, Jessica Fletcher is the intelligent, badass and supportive friend that we all need in our lives

The Jessica Fletcher of this book is quite dissimilar from this profile, though :S She is written as quite more conventional, displaying a somewhat narrower mind in her inner thoughts, and also displaying less of the badassery and aplomb that so defines her. And it's a shame.

But the main thing that really made me dislike this book more was the way that the male author displayed a blatant male gaze in each and every one of the descriptions involving women, particularly the young female characters in the story. The book is written in first person from Jessica Fletcher's point of view, and can there be anything more incredibly jarring than Jessica Fletcher describing the young women she meets while solving the murders in an incredibly sexist and sexualized manner that reeked of male gaze :S? The book kept describing women's outfits and how tight and revealing they were (sometimes combining this drooling male gaze with the misogyny of how they were sl*ts and dressed inappropiately). The descriptions focused on women's cleavage more than once, just freaking because, and generally made a point of highlighting how beautiful and seductive and sensual the women were (or not, depending on the author's tastes). Wtf. I would be angry about having to read about a man describing all women in this way anyway, but the fact that it's supposedly Jessica goddamm Fletcher describing them like that, in such a disrespectful and sexualizing manner? WTF. I'm personally offended on so many levels.

Jessica Fletcher WOULD NEVER.

The descriptions in the book also engaged in casual fatphobia, body shaming and ageism, there was a completely unnecesary subplot featuring strip clubs because more male gaze, one sole mention of a "*nasty* homosexual relationship" (wtf), and the author also proved that he followed the archetypal way of not bothering to learn geography beyond the United States - This Mediterranean European eyerolled so hard during a description of an Italian female character in which she was described as a 'sensual and exotic beauty' (bonus ethnic fetishism) with "Middle-Eastern features, perhaps from Lebanon, perhaps from Spain or Italy". The word he was looking for, if he wanted to use all three of those countries at the same time, would have been *"Mediterranean"*, and he would have been right, without any need to mix up the continents. Sigh xD.

Jessica Fletcher is way more knowledgeable than that, dude.

The plot was alright, I guess, and it made me want to finish the book to find out if I was right about every whodunnit's main question (who the murderer(s) are xD), but I also found the mystery to have less quality than the standard series plotlines, and it also left me a bit dissatisfied as I felt that the book didn't tie all ends in a satisfactory way.

Did that character really write the fictional murder mystery book the plot revolves around, then? And what happened to that other murder victim who is never mentioned again?

There are also way more male characters than female characters in the story, and the main points about all the female characters' plots revolved very strongly around men. Which is something that we can also see in various episodes of the series, and not every Murder, She Wrote episode includes the healthy dose of social criticism that I tend to enjoy (although more than one does), but the book was overall lacking more in at least the unconventional and subversive element that Jessica Fletcher always adds to every episode no matter what. So meh.

Without divulging any of the whodunnit's twists, I also didn't quite like how Jessica kept either thinking about her late husband, or crushing on a handsome inspector from Scotland Yard. Jessica does indulge in sporadic love interests and casual lunch and dinner dates at the end of various episodes, and that's perfectly fine and more power to her, but the book often had Jessica thinking in a more engaged manner about men instead of you know, solving the murders. In the series, it's pretty much the other way around.

If she's interested, Jessica doesn't say no to a casual dinner date with the episode's random guy of the day, but murders, books and travelling are her main thing, dear author. It's literally because she's widowed that she started writing, travelling and solving murders in the first place, and she's also not about to change that any time soon no matter how much she had loved her late husband, lol.

Finally, I felt that the characters of Doctor Seth Hazlitt and Sheriff Mort Metzger and Jessica's dynamic with them also lacked the characterization of the series in more than one respect, and I actually found it patronizing and intrusive how the plot decided that they would both just travel from Maine to London and stay a few days to help Jessica out - as if she wasn't perfectly capable of solving murders wherever she goes with the help that she already would have found at hand had she needed it, as we have already seen in twelve seasons of the series :S xD. The dynamic is not at all like that in the series most of the time, and what's more, Seth and Mort hardly added anything to the mystery solving per se, choosing instead to indulge in sightseeing and especially in a "boys' night out" drinking and enjoying the attention of lots of young, attractive women (eww). I felt like the author relished every opportunity to add more descriptions of sexualized women and men being icky and nope.

Jessica disagrees with all the unnecessary sexism in this book

I'm not sure that I'll be reading more books from this series any time soon, although knowing my perfectionism, I'll most probably read them all at some time xDD Let us hope that the rest of the books improve at least somewhat on these accounts :S!