The Curse of the Modern Crime Writer

We're still treading water, waiting for me to finish the last batch of Hoch stories so I can do my final round-up of impossible crime stories. But in the recent TBR posts I mentioned something about a rant about modern crime writing, didn't I? Don't say I never keep my promises!

As I said in that post, I have a problem with modern mysteries being too long and too unfocused. But first, perhaps I should mention what modern writers I've been reading so you know where I'm coming from with this.

And do please remember my definition of "mysteries", as opposed to "stories about crime", which I laid out in the first post of this blog. Short version: "mysteries" are fair play, puzzle plots, everything else is just "criminous stories".

The modern (and by modern I mean people whose main output has been in this, the 21st century) authors I'm following, or where I've at least read a couple of novels:

• Rhys Bowen - Her Royal Spyness series (8 of them)
• Carola Dunn - the Daisy Dalrymple series (all 22)
• M. C. Beaton - the Agatha Raisin series (2 or 3 of them)
• Alan Bradley - the Flavia de Luce series (3 of them)
• R. T. Raichev - the Antonia Darcy series (3 of them)
• G. M. Malliet - the St. Just series (all 3) and the Max Tudor series (2 of them)
• Frances Brody - the Kate Shackleton series (5 of them)
• Christopher Fowler - the Bryant & May series (5 or 6 of them)

As I mentioned in the TBR post, Bowen's stories are light, breezy reads and aren't really mysteries at all. Their main advantage is that the heroine is good fun. I guess they could be called cozies, but they really do not fit that definition completely. Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series is in quite a similar vein. There might be just a tad more focus on the mysteries in her stories, but they cannot be said to be fair play mysteries. As with Bowen's novels, there's a lot of focus on the protagonist and her life instead.

But if you're looking for cozies, look no further than M. C. Beaton's tales. They are extremely light and fluffy, and there's even less focus on making the mysteries mysterious here. Things just happen and then suddenly they fall into place and we're presented with a solution.

The other authors above are better in this respect, at least they are trying to write real mysteries. But here's their main problem: they're soooooooooooooooo slooooooooooooooooow.

Case in point: I recently read the fifth novel in Frances Brody's Kate Shackleton series, "Murder on a Summer's Day". Around 400 pages, of which 57 are dedicated to the mystery, 294 are dedicated to irrelevant and mainly unnecessary descriptions and analyses of 1920s life, and the rest are probably mainly white noise. (My eyes glaze over sometimes so... and take those page numbers with a pinch of salt, they're made up.)

THE FOLLOWING IS SOMEWHAT SPOILER-IFIC

To illustrate the point even more: This novel had a wholly unnecessary near rape scene. It didn't have any point at all, no bearing on the main mystery. The person who committed the rape attempt had already been established as a thoroughly bad apple, and that means that all we got from that bit is several pages with Kate Shackleton agonizing and trying to mentally get through the ordeal.

Yes, I get it. This is what life could be like (and still is in many parts of the world), and yes, it brings in some kind of realism. I absolutely do not condone this type (or any type) of assault on women. But on the other hand, this is not what I read mysteries for either. A mystery is just that - a mystery. There's no mystery here because it's all described in real time - the culprit is known all the time. There's just no payback on the mystery level, it's all just emotional manipulation.

HERE ENDETH THE SPOILER

As for the "real mystery", the one Kate Shackleton is trying to solve in this novel, there's no detection, there's no real investigation. At times, Kate sits around thinking a bit about what might have happened, and then she might talk to someone who was involved. But there's no real clueing and things just get revealed at certain points in the story.

I know I mentioned in a comment on some other blog on one of the previous books in the series - I think it was "A Medal for Murder" - that there was a problem with the pacing. There is a passage in the book, set in South Africa, which describes part of the motive for the murder.

Problem is: it's much too long. It also grinds the story to a complete halt, because up till then the book had been skipping along quite nicely, and then suddenly we switch gears and end up somewhere completely different. I made the comparison that if Agatha Christie had written the same story, this passage would have been a paragraph or two and had conveyed exactly the information needed. (Another thing that didn't help is that that part of the story was dead obvious, which of course increased my annoyance.)

Now it seems that I'm skewering Frances Brody, which isn't really my intent. Because she's not alone with these problems. It's just that I read her recently so it's fresh in my mind. The other authors above that I didn't go into more thoroughly have the same problems. Their books are much too long for what they contain.

And to be fair, it has to be said that Brody's stories are still generally readable. There are definitely several enjoyable things about them - otherwise I'd obviously never have read five of them.

Elsewhere, I know I've said that it seems to me that many modern crime writers take to this genre not because they genuinely want to write mysteries, but because the genre is a good way of getting readers. I get this feeling from G. M. Malliet's writings, to take another example.

She began with the St. Just series, which was a pretty good bunch of novels, with a good focus on the mysteries and some fair play. Then she seems to have stopped after three novels, just to start a new series with Max Tudor as the main protagonist. And that's a much worse crime series, from the aspect of fair play and all round "mystery-ness". It fits into the theory that she might have started with a more classic type of mystery to draw in readers, but now that she is established she starts writing the stories she's more interested in.

The biggest exception, I guess, is Fowler's Bryant & May. They're the ones most focused on the mystery side. However, and this is mainly MY problem, not the author's, I just don't understand parts of them. I'm not able to follow everything that happens in them. I don't know if there's too much subtext or if it's something cultural/language based. I don't think it's because I'm too stupid (I do understand complex puzzles from other authors), but sometimes things are referred to in these novels and I just don't know if that was actually something that happened before and I missed it, or if it was just implied, or if it happened in the background. I find them terribly bewildering, which is rather a pity since they come highly recommended...

Bradley's Flavia series has a touch of this syndrome as well, though not at all to the same extent. (My main problem with them is that I don't like Flavia the character at all.)

Note that I've not even discussed the grim noir-ish type of crime writing which is so prevalent today. As you've noticed someone like me could never be to blame for the pox of Scandi-noir, so please don't take me to task for that...

So, to conclude: I get that I'm a kind of anachronism in certain respects. It could certainly be that I'm the odd one out and that most everyone else enjoys reading this type of crime writing, with lots of complex characters and little of mystery. But since there are exceptions to this in other cultures - as we can see from LRI's publications, there are certainly other types of mystery stories in France and Asia, to name but two examples - I guess there must be some people who don't want that, or at least don't want that all the time.

Maybe it's just the English speaking world and Scandinavia where we have to settle for non-mysteries. Too bad for me that those are the only markets I can seek out on my own due to my (lack of) language proficiency.