Complaining about _A Desperate Game_

[walkitout]

JAK has been re-releasing some of her older books (like, from the 1980s) as e-books. For the most part, I've been ignoring them, because I caught a lot of them when they were rereleased in the 1990s or possibly a little later, I believe as Mira paperbacks. I wasn't really overjoyed about them: they were categories originally, and as much as I enjoy JAK (most of the time), my tolerance for categories is ... limited.

If you are google impaired, and want to know what I mean by categories, well, here you go:

http://www.romancewiki.com/Category_Romance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel#Category_romance

Anyway. I made an exception for the first in the Guinevere Jones series, _A Desperate Game_. It's set in Seattle during the mid- to late 1980s, and there were no indications in the reviews that there were icky rape-y encounters (romance as a genre has improved in step with cultural mores). When I read a "contemporary" which was written decades ago (which this was!), I start to think of it as a historical, and I start to watch for historical errors. In theory, there shouldn't be any. At all. Because it was written in the time period that it was describing. But remember, this is an e-book rerelease, and it has a new publication date. I don't really know how much JAK reworked it, so I'm watching.

And boy, howdy, there's at least one paragraph of rework and I know why she did it and it was probably a good call but slams you right back into the present, doncha know.

Earlier in the book, Zac was riding in Hampton Starr's car, which had a car phone and Zac was wondering if he'd ever get Free Enterprise Security, Inc. successful enough to have a nicer car and a phone in the car. He himself drives a boring Buick. This is Fabulous 80s color. It's perfect. In a "historical" (please join me in laughing raucously) set in the 1980s, we'd all be shaking our hips and waving our hands in the air, we'd be so happy. Then this happens 2/3rds of the way through:

"He pulled out his cell phone and called the offices of Camelot Services. When there was no answer there, he dug Carla Jones's number out of information and tried it."

In the paper original (if anyone has it, please check!), Zac probably went downstairs and found a payphone, but someone reread the book and said There Are No Pay Phones, kids these days (which is to say the 30 something audience the rerelease is hoping to connect with and I now feel really, really middle-aged) won't know what one is. Zac may have called information, but more likely he picked up the paper phone book dangling from the shelf and was surprised that the pages he wanted were still there. Again, totally mysterious behavior if you are born after about 1980. (*sob*)

There are _many_ points in the book where access to a cell phone would have dramatically changed character behavior, and it was super cool to read a book again which highlighted how much our world has changed. Zac pulling the phone out of his pocket just totally destroyed that. Now, everyone is some sort of weird luddite that doesn't have a phone and where's their fucking phone just google it! Gaaah!

Also, IBM PC. (<-- For clarity, I loved the IBM PC. That's not a complaint about rewriting. That was in the original and it was Oh So Right.)

Look, I'm not saying that JAK should have rewritten the whole thing. But that paragraph really bugged me. I'm all better now.

ETA: I should note that when I read Dickens' _A Christmas Carol_, I did complain about a historical error, but it wasn't because the history was anachronistic -- it was because Dickens' misunderstood the waste/scrap/recycling/rag-and-gone industry of his time and created a shop which recycled both fats/rags AND metals, which of course Never Not in a Million Years. And which misunderstanding people have been pointing out in that particular book more or less since the thing was published.

ETA: A few paragraphs later, Zac puts the receiver down. Of the cell phone. Yeah, he sure does. Later, when Guinevere goes to the hospital to see Larry Hixon who is being visited by her sister Carla, Carla says she tried to call her cell but she didn't answer. As near as I can tell, that's it for cell phone usage in the book (I did not actually search it. Probably should.). Also, Guinevere drives a Laser. In Seattle? I don't think the Ford Laser had any US distribution? Unless it's a different Laser.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Re A Christmas Carol: rag-and-bone men did take scrap metal as well, according to Henry Mayhew. Are you saying they wouldn't have been stored at the same place? Why not?

men vs. shops

[walkitout]

Rag and bone men would have collected everything as they went door to door (<-- strictly speaking not true, but certainly rag, bone, fat and metal). They would then sell it to shops. The shops they sold to were distinct: they sold the rags and bones/fats to distinctly different shops than the ones they sold the metal to. Nor is it a matter of storage, per se: it's a matter of business to business transfer (the door-to-door collector being one business and the shop he sold to being another business). I don't feel any responsibility for explaining _why_ the world works this way; I am merely noting that it _does_ work this way, altho I suppose I could whinge on about specialization and value add and blah blah bleeping blah.

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

Also, the rags were input for one industry (paper, largely, but other things as well), the fat for another (candles, a bunch of industrial applications, sometimes resold for cooking, ick), bones for yet another (crockery, I think, for the most part, altho I'm not really sure) and metal obvs became metal once again. Most of the money made through scrapping is made by having a network of contacts and knowing how much to pay/how much to charge, so specializing in one industry is really where the vale add comes from and it has been that way across time and place for at least centuries, probably millenia. People who need to make money off of bone/fat/rag cannot, typically, afford to get into metal scrapping and people who are in metal scrapping don't see any reason to put the effort into scraping off the fractional money in bone/fat/rag.

Re: men vs. shops

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I suspect there were several layers of sales, though, and that Dickens would have been quite familiar with dealers in marine stores (Krook in Bleak House is another example) who also bought rags, bottles, bones, etc. The London Gazette of November 27, 1857, mentions such a dealer:

"John Richard Hawkins (sued as John R. Hawkins), formerly of No. 125, Upper Whitecross-street aforesaid, Dealer in Rags, Bones, Bottles, and Marine Stores."

www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/22067/pages/4214/page.pdf‎

http://wellcomelibrary.org/moh/report/b18252540/224#?asi=0&ai=224 (this is from 1905)

"The Council's Inspectors visited 431 premises out of a possible total of some 600 in the County of London. At 23 of these a large wholesale trade was carried on, and at 374 the business was merely of a small retail character. At two premises fat melting was carried on; rags alone were dealt with in 38 instances; in the remainder, rags, bones, paper, and metals were all dealt with; and in 245 instances fat also was collected and stored."

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

If you read the whole report that you point to, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there was not much metal sitting around in these shops or even moving through these shops. Did they occasionally buy some brought in over the counter? *shrug* But did it look like this, from Dickens?

"Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal, nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury of calm retirement."

It's just really all but impossible to imagine a shop having that much metal sitting around and also processing rag, fat and bones. I thought it was a bunch of nonsense when I read it, and when I got a copy of an annotated Christmas Carol to read for book group one year, it devoted a chunk of space to explaining how Dickens Got This All Wrong, which was extremely satisfying to read, because I was just working off first principles (does this make sense as a business) rather than direct knowledge of what this particular kind of shop might look like.

For an activist such as Dickens, and as a person who did not participate in the industry, the confusion is utterly understandable, but nonetheless a little irritating.

This was not intended to be a controversial remark -- I only brought up the Dickens as an example of how even a contemporary writer can misunderstand the reality around them and thus misrepresent it in fiction. The other example I had in mind involved fictional depictions of prostitution from, well, just about every era, but I figured that would generate some controversy and just left it alone.

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

I went over to the Old Bailey website (which is really cool):

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

I had no idea that "marine store" = "even more disreputable than a pawn shop". Apparently has virtually nothing to do with marine anything when used in this way. You clearly understood that -- I had no idea, and am now sort of wondering how that term came to be used that way. There are also instances of people saying they run a "rag and bone" shop and then saying they specialize in "iron and lead"!!! They don't deal in rags OR bones, but apparently "rag and bone" shop meant "scrap yard" or similar, so in that case, the actual specialization was in iron and lead. Weird. And this is all from court proceedings, so there's a lot of reason to trust that was how ordinary people used language to describe their occupation.

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

Ah, scrappers behaving badly.

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 10 December 2013), March 1908, trial of MILLER, Charles (61, merchant) SEAR, Joseph (32, labourer) (t19080303-32).

Re: men vs. shops

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think I found the relevant footnote quoted online:

This comes from the footnotes in The Annotated Christmas Carol: A Christmas Carol in Prose describing Marine Store Shops and Rag and Bottle Shops. "They were pawnshops that dealt in all sorts of items, stolen or otherwise; they originally sold goods needed on shipboard... Technically what Dickens describes is a rag and bottle shop, because marine store shops did not trade in grease and other "Kitchen Stuff". Proprietors of the shops bought grease, drippings, etc for resale: the grease went to candle makers and soap boilers, the drippings to the poor as a substitute for butter."

Well, that's simply not true -- if you look for "marine store shops" and "kitchen stuff" you find all kinds of contemporary references (jokes in Punch about cooks stealing the dripping to sell to marine store shops, etc.). Moreover, they were not all pawnshops by any means (the ones that were often had a doll hung outside and were known as "dolly shops"), though some of these businesses were fronts for illegal pawnshops and money-lending operations (and hence didn't have to be particular whether their goods actually made sense -- see, e.g., the description at http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications7/episodes-31.htm).

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

Well, I don't know. I'm sticking to my original claim, that a shop that deals in scrap metal does not bother with piles of rags and bones. The description does not ring true to me; it sounds like two shops combined, plus shady dealings as well. It is increasingly clear to me that the terms "rag and bone shop" and "marine store" covered a lot of ground, and people used them in idiomatic and variable ways even at the time. The foot note attempts to impose more order on the terms than it should have. However, I still think that the foot note is correct, that Dickens' description of the shop includes too varied a product to be a believable business.

Re: men vs. shops

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you're disbelieving an eyewitness here, and one whom Henry Mayhew himself praised as an observer. This is exactly the kind of shop Dickens grew up among. And even today, you can find any number of secondhand shops that appear to sell a senseless mass of stuff, and wonder how on earth they make any money at it. It's entirely possible that what they're actually making the money off of is about ten percent of their stock, and the rest of it just sits. Certainly it's more likely that one could let a mass of rusty iron sit in the corner for years, when one actually dealt mostly in fats and rags, than that one could let the fat sit around while one dealt in metal. I don't honestly see what is unlikely about this. After all, no one is claiming that it makes economic sense or that it's the most efficient way to do things, only that they saw both scrap metal and rags/grease/etc. in the same shop.

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

I disbelieve eyewitnesses in my life all the time, largely because I believe that people can only observe well what they have learned to see; none of us learn to see everything equally well. I find it _unimaginable_ that in Dickenss era, or for a long while after, anyone (poor) would let a pile of rusty iron sit in a corner for years; even a bucket of metal would have had more value -- and more readily realized value -- than the entire stack of rags and bones combined (having unsorted rags and bones also unrealistic, but I left that one alone). Dickens created, in the paragraph I object to, a setting where three people could run into each other while selling disparate things stolen from Scrooge's household after Scrooge died. Perhaps Dickens knew perfectly well that the shop he was depicting was unrealistic, and described it anyway as a narrative device. Certainly much more ridiculous devices have been used by authors to throw characters together so they could have a conversation to move the plot along. More likely, like most people who aren't somehow connected to the business, all scrap shops, however called, signed or labeled, were basically the same. They'd either buy the stuff you had to sell or they were not.

The economic argument I am making is a very simple one: no one ignores the pile of $20, while focusing with laser precision on the pennies, when pennies are what makes the difference in the food you eat every day. When pennies make the difference, you process the $20 items first (honestly, you really should anyway, but I do recognize that a certain amount of resources does enable a concomitant amount of foolishness).

Re: men vs. shops

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Now I think I see the point at issue. I think you have a distorted idea of the value of old iron at that time (which was quite a different matter from copper, lead, pewter, etc., and also different from iron articles that could actually be used rather than being sold to be melted down again). Mayhew says it was generally bought at six pounds for a penny, eight pounds for tuppence. The profit on it wasn't necessarily very great, either. Pig-iron from the ironmonger, presumably much purer, went for four and a half or five shillings the hundredweight, per an Old Bailey trial in 1838. (Carol is 1843.) I think a hundredweight here is 112 pounds. So you're looking at probably less than a farthing a pound in profit, whereas rags, waste-paper, and such would be over a penny a pound in profit, and usable articles might bring more than a penny a piece (e.g., a 2d. teapot sold for 3d.).

All of that eventually changed radically as rag, paper, etc., prices went down and the price of iron went up.

Re: men vs. shops

[walkitout]

This is indeed the point at issue.

I will commit to reading the relevant portions of Mayhew (or conceivably the whole thing, because he sounds interesting) to better understand what he discovered in the course of his investigations. I respect your knowledge of this time period, and your assessment of this source. I do not expect to have time to do this until January.

Thank you for putting in the effort to understand our disagreement, and thank you for identifying a contemporary, non-fiction source.

ETA: Roland thinks "old iron" was "wrought iron". "Pig iron" is not purer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron

Worked objects can't be made out of pig iron, afaik.