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 GENRES: THRILLERS vs DETECTIVE STORIES --
There are many sub-genres within the mystery realm -- gothic romance, gentleman crook, private eye, police procedural, crime and its psychology, spies and politics, courtroom, caper, adventure, village cosy, historical, etc. etc. etc. (one could go on and on into smaller and more specific sub-types) -- but there remains one primary issue: What is the difference between a Crime Novel (Thriller) and a Detective Story? The obvious answer is that the latter must have a DETECTIVE. Yet there are exceptions -- true detective stories without a detective per se, and thrillers with detectives but no true detection. A surprise ending or a totally unsuspected villain is also not the distinguishing difference, since either genre can have both (or even not!). Neither is the 'gross-out' factor a critical distinction, although it is emphasized more in the thriller. Yet every serious mystery reader can say right off that such and such a book is a thriller while that one is a story of detection. What it ultimately comes down to is that the detective story exemplifies the puzzle factor, logic, and the challenge to the reader's wits. And above all, fair play. The thriller is ENTERTAINMENT, the detective story is a GAME. In the first case, the reader is an observer, in the second a participant. A detective story is played out (without an umpire except for the professional mystery critic) between the author and the reader; that the author is not an active participant is one of the quirks of this sport.
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AVAILABILITY OF BOOKS --
The high price of paperbacks and the expense of producing them has led to a huge diminution, both in the USA and in the UK, of the number of excellent, but not blockbuster-standard, mystery novels currently in print -- in fact there is no guarantee now that 'medium' popular mystery writers ever even make it out of hardcover into paperback. Pan, Bantam, Pocket, Penguin, Dell, etc. -- whatever happened to their Murder Most British, Scene of the Crime, Murder Ink, etc. lines? Dover Books and the Harper Perennial publications of Golden Age mysteries were excellent and well selected. You need to be a Grisham, Hillerman, Grafton, somebody of that ilk (even, God forbid, Elizabeth George), or somebody like Christie whose pre-typeset books are on the computer and can be reissued cheaply just with a new cover and a price increase, to get into paperback now.
There are definitely enough mystery readers of the 'old sort' who would read them, but perhaps not enough under today's publishing economics to justify mass distribution apart from book-club hardcover editions (which, when you come down to it, are cheaper than paperbacks -- unfortunately, they also take up too much bookshelf space). This is a very discouraging situation for devotees of the classic detective novel. There is some help regarding access to the shorter stories in that many are now available on the Internet (especially once they are out of copyright protection, or the current holder does not object to such distribution). Whatever the future of Internet publication, there is the big problem of actual transcription into a suitable format. The demise of the used book market as a viable mode of dissemination is especially hurtful to collectors who now have to pay marked-up prices for just a reading copy of, say, a Philo Vance first edition that could have been picked up for a couple of bucks just 20 years ago in the now-defunct used-book center on 4th Avenue in New York. These books are not even to be found in public libraries anymore -- they were long ago disposed of as surplus. (Yes, there are book-barn type places in rural areas, but most of their offerings are moldy junk, Detective Club 3-deckers for the most part, and obscure stuff from rightfully forgotten hack writers -- although I always check out these places when I get a chance, because you never know!) I've been notified by readers of this site that House of Stratus has a bang-up list of reprints -- Michael Innes, R. Austin Freeman, etc. -- and have ordered several from Amazon.Co.UK. Unfortunately, they seem to be having financial difficulties and have cut back. Please support them! (And all small publishing houses of this sort.) |
KNOX'S DECALOGUE UPDATED --
Here is Fr. Ronald Knox's famous Ten Commandment list for Detective Novelists (© 1929 Ronald Knox):
This is presumptuous, but here is Grobius Shortling's Revised Version:
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RADIO PLAYS -- Along with the fact that mystery novels in the older sense are rarely being written now, and the old ones except for Christie's and a couple of others are no longer being reprinted, there was another dissemination technique that has totally died: your weekly Radio Mystery Theatre or whatever each network called it. It never really caught on in early TV, apart from Perry Mason and a few others, keeps getting revived (as with Banacek, Columbo, Murder She Wrote, and so on) but usually without great success, apart from good series detectives who catch on with fans only as actor/personalites; somehow, a complex logical murder mystery is very hard to dramatize -- too much talk, not enough action. This sort of thing worked very well on radio, however, where the imagination rather than special effects and visual exhibition was more important. Of course, a very peculiar style had to be developed in that medium -- description had to be conveyed through dialogue, an ominous-sounding announcer had to interpolate voiceovers, music for fade-ins-and-outs was necessary, and you needed to allow periodic breaks for Rinso commercials [well, with TV too, except Rinso is defunct]. When one reads the old scripts, one has to interject this stuff into the reading (in one's head), read it mentally as being spoken rather than written word, otherwise it is dryasdust; you really have to have grown up with radio drama as part of your childhood to appreciate it. John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, among others, specialized in this in the 1940s and 1950s. As I recall, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on radio was far more interesting than Ramar of the Jungle on TV (with its stupid studio jungle, with tigers in the African rain forest, or lions in the Indian rain forest, forget which, and chimps pretending to be gorillas) -- the whole Great White North was conveyed with simple sound effects and the rest was all in your head. As a service to the blind (cf. 'audio books') and to those who like listening to stories, this medium should be revived. The BBC still has audio drama, such as 'The Archers', but it is defunct in America, replaced by weather/news/traffic channels and golden-oldies rock stations. Buy an old Sherlock Holmes radio tape and listen to it in the dark on a rainy night. You may love it!
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NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES --
I have alluded to the device of narrating a mystery story via eye-witness journals, letters, etc. in the comments on The Moonstone and Lament for a Maker. This is an effective way of covering up 'clues'; they are presented, but not perceived to be such because the observer does not recognize them. It also provides great opportunities for characterization of both the narrator and the other dramatis personae. Marvellous technique, but probably very hard to write. Most mysteries, especially of the 'hard-boiled' detective type, use the first-person narrative (I haven't actually kept statistics, but that's the general impression); this adds liveliness, and is also a good way to cover up clues ('I could have kicked myself for not seeing this at the time'), but lacks verisimilitude--Marlowe could never have made a living as a gumshoe if he spent all his time writing up novelizations of his cases. The straightforward third-person approach (whether or not using a 'point-of-view' stance in the preferred literary manner, or just sticking with outright omniscient narration) is probably the most effective, but is harder to pull off when it comes to following the play-it-fair conventions of the detective story. One has to put things in plain sight and still disguise them somehow. I think I prefer Carr's usual method of pretty much sticking to a single perceived-by-one-person account, with an occasional interjection by the authorial voice. Of course, this violates the standards of pure 'literature', where consistency of viewpoint is critical--but I'm not about to complain and dismiss mysteries as junk-food writing.
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POSTAL SERVICE -- Consider what we call 'progress' in the days of E-mail, fax machines, the Hubble Space telescope, and genetic engineering; now consider that up until about 1950, you could pop a letter into a mail box in the morning and be sure it would be delivered by that same afternoon. So many mystery plots depended on that very fact. Also, what happened at midnight would be in the morning newspapers. Is that just convenient for the authors or was it really true at that time? It couldn't have been that perfect, but it was probably reasonably certain. When was the last time you ever sent a telegram -- or if you did, expected it to be delivered by hand within an hour or so? In fact does Western Union do anything at all now except send cash transfers? Note also that postmarks were legible and time-stamped. Here is a summary from a book set in 1937 where the detective is trying to determine when an anonymous letter he received at dinner time was actually posted (from Death of His Uncle by CHB Kitchin):
I left the office earlier than usual that afternoon, went to the post-office nearest my flat, and posted an envelope there, addressed to myself. I noticed that the next collection was at 5.15. The collection after that was at 6.15. I then went to the pillar-box at the end of my street, hoping that it was a fair sample of all the pillar-boxes in my neighbourhood, and posted another envelope there, which I had marked '2'. The next collection there was at 4.45 and the one following was at 5.45. I was eager to find out, if I could, how late in the day a letter could be posted, so as to reach me the same night.... [and he does two more, blah blah, then a couple of hours later...]This beats even Federal Express! In a similar vein, a murder on a Monday night would be in the Tuesday morning papers (or if it happened outside of London, in the afternoon papers). None of this is just a factor of the one book quoted -- it happens in nearly every detective story that involves these subjects. I could make further comments, about the value of money, etc., but that would be pointless, because inflation makes nonsense of all that. A legacy of 100 pounds was worth killing for in 1920 -- but that was something like two-years' salary for a house servant back then. Rich uncles left a Fortune of about 100,000 quid, har-de-har. But that really was a lot of money if you weren't in the Carnegie/Vanderbilt orbit; there were probably less than 2000 people in the 'millionaire' class, apart from royalty, in the whole world. JP Morgan and JJ Astor might have been the richest people in the world then, but Bill Gates could buy them out with his pocket money under modern conditions (and probably would have, although he might have met his match against Morgan, who would have eaten Billy alive, burped, and said, 'bring on Millken and I'll have Jack Welch for dessert -- and who is this Greenspan chap? sounds Jewish to me'). |
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MEN'S HATS, etc. -- This is trivial, and more a matter of fashion and things like that. Beards were out, mustaches were in (especially the stupid-looking Hitler upper lip cover called a 'toothbrush'). Both 'affectations' as opposed to clean-shaven were enough to mark some character in some way as suspicious and/or eccentric -- the latter signifying some sort of dry-as-dust accountant type who was a Milquetoast obviously up to no good in a very quiet mousy way. The hat thing -- bowlers, top hats, homburgs, fedoras, boaters, etc. -- is absurd by modern standards, although golf/baseball caps are standard for men these days. In an old mystery, if somebody does something 'eccentric' with his hat, gloves, or walking stick/umbrella -- such as leaving it behind or god-forbid going out in public without it, that is an automatic signal that something is screwy. [I am just noting that as a cultural thing, since I never wear a hat, even in a blizzard, because (a) it will make me go bald (so I believe), and (b) I cannot stand -- almost at a phobia level -- having anything touch my head, and even a baseball cap has the psychological effect of one of those medieval instruments of torture, so that something like having a haircut is unpleasant and if I get 'bumped' on the head even slightly I am likely to lash out with my fists, which has had unfortunate results both for my fist and for low doorposts, ceilings, etc. -- that foible may have come from a childhood injury when I got bashed on the head by a metal swing in a playground in Riverside Park NY.] |
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DEATH PENALTY -- Most civilized countries these days (except for bush-states like Texas and Florida and Afghanistan) no longer have a universal death penalty for simple murder any more, and haven't for a whole generation. In one way, that trivializes modern mystery novels, although usually the author will contrive a spectacular death for the villain in compensation. A reader wants revenge in some sort of Biblical sense, no matter what the culture. In the Golden Age novels, a really nasty murderer will be dragged off spitting and screaming to his/her fate, but half the time there was usually a partially 'legitimate' motive for the murderer and one thinks the author did not really subscribe to judicial murder, which is what an execution is. So there was often a contrivance where the Detective (not the Police, of course) would give the murderer a chance to commit suicide instead, hence being chided for allowing the Hangman to be Cheated -- which phrase always struck me as being the height of absurdity. They even go to lots of trouble to prevent a condemned prisoner from committing suicide -- WHY? Goering did the right thing, Eichmann didn't. Nowadays they call the avoidance of the hangman's public service a denial of the opportunity-for-closure, but it amounts to the same thing (viz. Timothy McVeigh's execution in 2001, where they want to broadcast it to the relatives but don't want it to be hacked and shown on the Internet). If execution is to have any effect, either for revenge or a demonstration of societal retribution, or even as a deterrent, it should be public and awful and a spectacle -- as it used to be 200 years ago. In Keep It Quiet (Richard Hull), there is actually a mention that Latvia passed a law in the 1930s giving the option to a condemned criminal to drink poison voluntarily in lieu of being hanged. That seems very rational to me, and the idea ought to be revived -- call it the Socrates Law. The main point of killing a murderer is to prevent his killing again, not to take any moral high ground about enforcing God's will or providing 'closure' (what a stupid term) to the survivors affected -- let them take their own revenge if they feel up to it, even if it amounts to a farce like the wrongful-death suit against OJ Simpson, where the families were avenged publicly but in effect got nothing except the satisfaction of convincing the world that he was, in fact, guilty of murder (not that it has affected his golf game). But the main point of this note is to emphasize that in the 'Golden-Age' days there was a real risk to a killer, no matter what the provocation -- he would be EXECUTED, period. It should also be noted that reprieves or commutations, and especially pardons, were extremely rare even when justified. Those silly judges (in England), once they put on their black cap, were regarded as having issued a Papal Bull, not to be denied by any political consideration that they could have been wrong or that the jury could have been misled by faulty prosecution evidence. Witness the stubborn idiocy of the Home Office in the case of Evans, who was hanged for a crime committed by the serial murderer Christie. (Fortunately, however, this travesty of justice helped lead to the abolition of the death penalty in England.) |
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TRANSPORTATION -- Was there ever any more convenient and efficient method of travel in history than the old railway, bus, and taxi services from about 1880 to 1940 (especially in England)? Like the old postal and telegram services, this is something we just don't have to that extent any more; airlines are a pain in the butt, apart from the speed, travel radius, and convenience once one actually gets airborne, but long-distance trains and ocean liners are things of the past. Sherlock Holmes could just consult his Bradshaw Guide and go anywhere he wanted to on a moment's notice. An escapee could catch a packet boat from practically any port to go anywhere without much more than a passport and a ticket, as long as he could escape a police cordon -- there was no paperwork trail to speak of. Even when people in English detective stories of the 1930s used cars, they never seemed to suffer much from traffic problems, although there were no four-lane highways around back then. In the more adventurous thrillers, one could just hop into a small airplane and fly off from a tiny runway in a farmer's field and vanish from ken.
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SERVANTS -- Even lower-middle-class families had at least a cook and a housemaid. Hardly any protagonist or other major character in a Golden Age mystery ever had so much as to boil an egg for breakfast or leave their bedroom in the morning to get a cup of coffee or tea. This is just an observation -- because I would resent and be embarrassed by being catered to in that manner. Bad enough when some lackey snatches your suitcase when you go into a hotel without your asking -- then how much are you supposed to tip him, and why should you? Also, Holmes, for example, would just grab some street urchin, send him halfway across London with a message, and give him a sixpenny piece for his trouble. How humiliating for both of them when one considers it now!
(In Country House Weekend murder cases are you, as guest, supposed to leave a tip on the dresser for the maid who makes your bed? Apparently, you are, unless you are an aristocrat, though I've only seen it mentioned a couple of times: guess the reader was just expected to know that, so it was rarely pointed out. For myself, I'm never really sure even in a motel, whether it is expected -- certainly not for an overnight stay, but for more than a day or two, well, probably yes, when considering what a low-paying and lousy job it is.) But let us also consider, in a Cadogan Square household or a small country manor, how many servants one really required. In the country, there had to be at least a gardener and maybe even a gardener's 'lad' to keep the grounds up to snuff, a gamekeeper if you had some woodland, a groom if you had horses; in Town, you could replace all of them just with a chauffeur, because of course you would never think of driving yourself. There had to be a cook/housekeeper, of course, and at least two maids, one for kitchen one for chambers. A lady would require a personal maid in addition, a gentleman would have to have a valet/butler. If there were children, of course there had to be a governess. A businessman would require a private secretary (male, naturally, if he was married). That's probably sufficient, because footmen were out of date after the First World War (most of them were dead!). These would all be separate roles, because doubling-up of household duties did not really become necessary until after the Second World War. In Edwardian times, the householders wouldn't even know who the kitchen maid was, in fact would never even see her*. Butlers and chauffeurs, however, would be definite collaborators, 'higher servants', to either the master or the mistress, or both, in their private affairs. The secretary, in the majority of mysteries of the 1920s, was the murderer, or at least the prime suspect or sub-criminal (being an embezzler, drug addict, or blackmailer), the butler having been abandoned as the villain some 20 years earlier. * I'm surprised nobody ever had the kitchen maid as the murderer -- she would certainly have had the opportunity and would have been like Chesterton's "Invisible Man" (the postman) and never noticed at all. However, Carter Dickson had a brilliant variation on this theme in Curse of the Bronze Lamp (hope I'm not giving too much away). |
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ANTI-SEMITISM, RACISM, and the GOLDEN AGE -- This is not a pleasant topic, considering what happened in Europe during and just after this period of our interest. However, it must be faced. In many cases it takes the form of Uncle Remus/Shylock stereotypes that had to be taken under Political Correctness controls in later times as with negroes/blacks in America. This does not negate these novels at all (neither should Amos and Andy be denigrated -- they were just actors in a very funny comedy show): not everybody was a Nazi, and no doubt most detective story writers didn't even think of what they were saying -- it was in the Zeitgeist of the period, like smoking. (After all, Agatha Christie titled one of her most famous books Ten Little Niggers, though that is NOT anti-black!). Jews were stereotyped as slimy money-lenders, capitalistic exploiters, and basically just sleazy -- olive skinned, dark-eyed, and hairy, often somewhat deformed. In the English tradition, so were Greeks, Italians, etc. When you encounter this stuff in a Golden-Age mystery, best just to laugh it off, especially when it comes in the form of 'he had none of the more exaggerated features of his race' (which is supposed to imply he's a decent fellow after all). It is surprising now to find this so taken-for-granted in the books of the 1920s and 30s, although of course in the 1940s and 50s it was Russians, in the 1960s and 70s it was Orientals, and now it is Arabs and other Muslims, who are capsulized just by describing their ethnic background, mostly for the worst by implication -- authors had to make an effort to redeem such a character, and many did, but sort of using the Good Samaritan ploy. That, by the way, was a Biblical parable pointing out the contradiction (Yasser Arafat is a Samaritan in fact by historical descent); the lessons of human history haven't changed. In any case, be warned before reading extensively in the Golden Age of Detection, especially authors like Chesterton. For the most part, the anti-semitism (and anti-woggism on the whole) was just taken for granted as part of the culture and was not intended to be malicious although there were some die-hard bigots, especially in England!
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AMATEUR DETECTIVES --
Wimpies, Big Macs, and Crème Brûlées How do you want your amateur detectives? Dithery old ladies, effete old men, aristocratic chinless wonders, bucolic poachers, retired civil servants, housewives, you name it, there is one of those, or any other, types in the literature. In later years it becomes harder to reconcile your amateur sleuth with current police procedures, although that was even a problem a hundred years ago (except nobody cared about that kind of verisimilitude back then). Unless an amateur detective is caught in one of those isolated-house plots, or has some expertise or specialty that is useful to the police, there is very little justification for interjection into an official investigation, especially when it happens over and over again over a whole series of books. A pity, but that is just not up with the times now. All the more reason to go back and read Golden Age mysteries as opposed to the modern mysteries that have to involve 'judicially official' personages or else have a comic element to induce the proper suspension of disbelief -- no matter how good the plots are. Perhaps that's why current detective story authors are so fond of writing in historical settings. Mystery writing has certainly not deteriorated, only its rationale for productions involving true amateurs. But to get back to the point: What kind of amateur detective do you prefer? Personally, I still admire the dilettante sort, however improbable, but have never had much truck for the milquetoast (Christie's Satterthwaite, Berkeley's Chitterwick, Frome's Pinkerton, etc. -- just those names are giveaways!). Modern versions of Wimsey, such as Melrose Plant, are just absurd, and Doran Fairweather must live in a vicarage in a very evil place like Arkham with a statistically huge murder rate for its size (well so did Miss Marple, or if it wasn't something about St Mary Mead it was her attractiveness to a personal poltergeist who inflicted murder wherever she went). Things turn around, but right now the Zeitgeist does not tolerate the true amateur detective, hence clever mystery plotters go back to past times, or into science-fictional settings. Making one's cops, or even licensed private eyes, eccentric, while laudible, is just not the same thing as featuring a gifted amateur. Everybody nowadays is a specialist in something and your normal reader (like me) who is not misses the Überjedermann (a coinage, but it sounds better than Superior Everyman) one would like to identify with in fantasy. |
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SMOKING -- Everybody smoked in the Golden Age of Detection: cigarettes, but also a lot more pipes and cigars than one encounters now. A non-smoker in one of these books is regarded as somewhat odd, like a vegetarian or some kind of health nut. (Same dubiety also applies to teetotallers, even at the height of Prohibition.) Of course, that situation is reversed now. As an unreformed smoker, much as I detest the habit and now the expense, all I can say is that no detective ever died of lung cancer nor any Watson of second-hand smoke inhalation. Get real, people! There are many worse threats to humanity than tobacco. And its benefits outweigh the harm (I think and hope, although in reality that may be fallacious). But there was a throwaway bit in a famous science fiction novel recently, forget which, where the movie editors of the future spend a lot of time recycling old classic films and editing out Bogart's cigs, and there was that disgraceful US stamp a few years ago where Bogie's fag was eradicated from the original picture. Just the brand names in the old detective novels no longer exist for the most part -- Philo Vance's Regies, Balkan Sobranies (who smoked them?), Lucky Strikes, etc. Then there were all those pipe tobaccos, stuff you untwined, cut chunks out of with a pen knife, your customized blend from a personal tobacconist, junk out of a Persian slipper. Even the descriptions of all the different kinds of pipes are as obsolete as men's hats: all we have now are briars and baseball caps.There is probably no class restaurant in the world now that would let somebody smoke a Meerschaum pipe at the table without the anti-tobacco Gestapo coming down. (It's bad enough in New York City now when you have to get up from your table in a restaurant and leave the building between courses, just for a nicotine fix -- very impolite even if unavoidably necessary -- and the proprietors keep an eye on you because you might be skipping out on the bill. And since April 2003 you can't even smoke in bars here any more, which is absolutely absurd since drinking and smoking go together like peanut butter and jelly. Staying in a non-smoking house as a guest is an older situation, but as long as there is a fireplace in the bedroom one can lie down in the fireplace and puff smoke up the chimney.) More and more detective stories these days spend a lot of time dealing with their detective's hardship in giving up smoking or not being allowed to in so many places -- probably a presentation of the author's own problems in that area. But the results of smoke deprivation date far into the past; click here for an example where the actual solution to the mystery is based on 'withdrawal symptoms'.
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LOST MANUSCRIPTS -- Quite often, a mystery plot involves the theft of a lost or unknown object of value (usually a manuscript). Examples are John Dickson Carr's Mad Hatter Mystery (a previously unknown Dupin story by Edgar Allan Poe) and Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding (Shakespeare's "Love's Labours Won"). As always happens in stories involving a 'lost manuscript', it gets destroyed in the end. I can see why, because if it survived you would have heard of it by now (ha!), but this is so predictable an outcome that one almost doesn't want to read further once it is known that this is a plot element, especially if the particular 'lost' author is one you particularly like. A further tease is usually added by the author in the form of a fragment in pastiche fashion. Very frustrating.
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STORY LENGTH -- What is the 'ideal' length of a detective story? There are basically these categories: (a) The Short-short (10 book pages or less), (b) the Standard Short story (10-35 pages), (c) Novella/Novelet (35-120 pages), (d) Normal Commercial (120-250 pages), (e) Long Novel (250-400 pages), and (f) Blockbuster (400-??? pages). These are just arbitrary classifications, but you will find stories in these categories pretty well mixed throughout the history of this genre. Fashions, however, change as far as preferences and predominances go. The earlier Victorians, for example, went for (f); the Holmesians preferred (c); Golden Agers for (e); the Digest Magazines and Newspapers for (a), mid-20th-Century for (d) -- with (b) always being a norm. Now, with paperback prices around $6 a pop, regardless of length, the Long Novel (e) has made a come-back since people feel they are getting more for their money (publishers are not so much concerned with the amount of paper and ink used as with marketing and distribution costs). The question remains, what is the most effective length for a mystery story? That has to be a matter of personal preference, so all I can say is that, regardless of classics in all categories, the novella (c) seems to be best, not too short to skimp on plot development, complexity, and characterization, and not too long to bore you to death, or overwhelm you with excessive numbers of victims to keep the plot spinning. The short-short (a) is like a quickie crossword puzzle to read on the john or on a subway ride, amusing and forgettable (but don't knock classics like Kemelman's "Nine Mile Walk" or Crispin's "Who Killed Baker?"). Standard short stories (b) are the staple of the genre, but necessarily depend more on plot surprises than on verisimilitude ("Hands of Mr Ottermole" is a great example, along with the Father Browns). Novellas and novelets (c) -- whatever the technical difference is -- remain the most satisfying for the reader, and least popular among book publishers because they have to be batched in trios to make it worthwhile putting out a volume (viz. Rex Stout's best productions). For many years, the standard length (d), 192/224 pages, or 12/14 'signatures' as most economical for book binderies, was the norm, and editors had the authors cut or pad to fit; this is also pretty much a perfect length for a standard railway or plane trip of two or three hours. In more leisurely times, authors went for the 400-pagers (e), especially in the 1920s-30s. A reader becomes impatient with these now, especially since they tend to move slowly, without any particular additional insight or plot ingenuity. The revival of this size, apart from the economics, also depends on much deeper character development and psychological complexity -- a modern murderer can't just be a greedy bastard any more, but has to agonize and get psychoanalyzed, as does the detective (who also has to have personal life complications and relationships to deal with). P.D. James's later books are good examples of this type, Elizabeth George's are not. Finally, the blockbuster (f) that really works is either outstanding ("The Woman in White" or "Name of the Rose"); the ones that don't (Harry Steven Keeler's products, for example, or "Armadale") are just too daunting to get through. Here is an informal poll (it will come to me as e-mail and I'll tote up the results, if any, manually). [Note: This poll is now on a data base, so if you wish you can enter your opinions directly by clicking Here.] Update to this comment in 2005:
I have just finished Elizabeth George's "A Place for Hiding," which is actually quite good. Unfortunately, it ran to nearly 800 pages. Why do most mystery novels these days run to 300 pages or more? Is there some sort of Dickens complex that implies a writer can't convey a story in less than that? That was fine for Dickens, who wrote long and complex stories with lots of characters, but is it really fitting for a detective novel? (Dickens himself could be concise enough for the story he was writing, such as 'A Christmas Carol', and you will find that the best detective novels that are considered classics run on only for 300 pages or less, usually the standard 192 or 256, whatever the binary or quaternerary system they used to use in bookbinding -- any excess blank pages would be utilized for front and back matter.)
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