G K Chesterton & the dinner party murder genre

G K Chesterton, author of The Secret Garden,  wrote short stories about murder in a grand style, hinting at grievances and motives and dark danger merely by collecting persons in a room and describing them.  He uses plenty of big words and makes references to things we have not heard of.  That is part of how he uses allusion to engage us more in the story.

When we recognise the reference, we feel clever alongside the writer.  When we do not, so long as we recognise most of the text, then we feel part of the sense that the writer, who is fused with the crime solver in the story, has a huge range of knowledge that we can learn from, or work out clues to decide who the murderer is.

I looked up quite a few words and events when I read this short story!  Chesterton's account of a wealthy house in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century was important for setting up the genre of the dinner party murder mystery.

An example of Chesterton's writing: "A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his."
One strength is the use of imagery. This focuses us on the way in which the storm makes the moon come in and out of the clouds. The language of battle is used with the moon and the clouds, and it also seems mischievious with the mention of rags and tatters. Both the moon and the storm are personified and this gives the effect of the weather elements being powerful, and possibly playing with the humans. The second part of the sentence captures an aspect of Valentin's personality, where the idea of being wistful is unusual, and this also suggests that there is something unusual about this evening.


Please come to class on Friday 1 May with your thoughts on the short story The Secret Garden:  

• three ideas on what you liked in The Secret Garden
• three questions for me on The Secret Garden

Then, a fabulous comedy piece about dinner parrty murder mysteries, with thanks to Jameila for sending this to me:

Now we are going to develop our own dinner party mystery stories, focusing on two opening sections:

1. setting - where do we meet the characters?  How does the building develop our understanding of the world the characters live in (rich, poor, chaotic, oppressively tidy, multi-cultural, narrow minded, noisy, calm, rural, inner city, small town, welcoming, scary)

2. characters - what is distinctive about each character?  How is the reader invited to feel about each person?

Some of you will be ready to write in advance of the lesson, and you are very welcome to do that in a new document in your English folder on Google Drive.  We will be using Socrative to gather our writing (so we will be able to see each other's writing, but only I can see names).  I will open the task in Socrative during the lesson.

The student login for Socrative is here.
The room name is MSQUICK

Lockdown Learning Week Two: a crime story

In advance of our tutorial tomorrow, please:

1. Read this article by Renee on writing a crime novel. 
2. Choose a room in your house, and notice all the small details about it.  You are going to describe it as part of a murder story.  You can of course change or exaggerate the scene (I won't be visiting your house to check!) but the idea is to vividly bring alive the details of the room for the reader.

Lockdown Learning Tutorial 17 April 2020

Welcome back!

We will talk at the end of the session about the connections assessment, but for the first part, let's have some creative writing fun, inspired by a famous, anonymous graffiti artist.

Lockdown Learning Week One

Kia ora Level Two English Literature students
You have all been working super hard on your connectiosn assessments which are due Wednesday 15 April 2020, 11:59pm.  Please share the document with me when you are finished.  No workspace, so no need to submit it any other way.

We will start our writing portfolio learning on Friday in our tutorial slot 2-3pm.  I have sent an invite to this tutorial to everyone, and that has the google meet link on it. Also, here is the link for quick ease of use.

I don't expect you to do any preparatory work for the Friday tutorial, given how hard you have all been working on your assessment.

Regards, Ms Quick