The Butler Did It

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Snobbery and murder, all served up perfectly for you on a silver tray. NB: There are spoilers in this episode! Please check the list of books mentioned below and come back later if there are any titles there for which you don’t want to hear any major plot details. Consider yourself warned! Books and sources: —The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rineheart —The Door by Mary Roberts Rineheart — 20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories by S.S. Van Dine —“The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” by Arthur Conan Doyle —“The Strange Case of Mr Challoner” by Herbert Jenkins —Something Fishy or The Butler Did It by P.G. Wodehouse —“Why do we think the butler did it?” by Nate Pederson in the Guardian —“Should we be concerned by the limitless popularity of period dramas?” by Caroline Crampton in the New Humanist —“Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work”, International Review of Social History, Volume 59, Issue 2, August 2014 , pp. 279-314 —Snobbery with Violence by Colin Watson —Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh —The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie —Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers —Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie —Black Coffee by Agatha Christie —The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie —Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer —Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers —A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thebutlerdidittranscript. Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Download the mp3 of this episode here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sometimes running a business can feel like cycling uphill, with square wheels!
0:07.0	But zero online accounting software can help predict the future cash flow of your business.
0:15.0	So you can stay one step ahead.
0:18.0	Soon it'll feel more like free-wheeling downhill.
0:20.0	Wuho!
0:21.0	On a tandem!
0:22.0	Alright, mate! With a mass sir on the back.
0:25.0	Oh that's nice.
0:26.0	Search Zero with an ex because healthy business is beautiful business. Here's a riddle that you might find in a detective story.
0:38.0	Which character is ubiquitous, yet invisible, vital, yet overlooked.
0:47.0	At the country house party, he's never out of sight.
0:50.8	Yet nobody ever really sees him. The answer of course is the butler, always in the background,
0:59.7	anticipating the guests every need before they can voice it,
1:04.0	commanding a platoon of servants below stairs to do the master's bidding.
1:08.0	He's the true mastermind behind the highly choreographed social events that are regularly depicted in crime
1:14.6	fiction from the 1920s and 30s. But his status is not secure. When a crime is
1:22.3	committed, an escape- scapegoat outside the privileged
1:25.2	family circle is needed. What could be more convenient than to point the finger at
1:30.0	the butler? All of the class boundaries and snobberies of British society are there in the detective
1:36.6	fiction from this time too, for better and worse. And pushing the blame onto the servants quickly became a cliche of the genre,
1:45.6	avoided and toyed weird by generations of writers.
1:49.2	Regardless, I feel I have to investigate further.
	...

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