- 31 Aug 2022 12:42
#15244954
"He credits Julian Symons with having written the best such history, “Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel,” first published in 1972. The book has been revised twice, most recently in 1993, but so much has changed, in terms of how we think and live, and how such changes are reflected — in the stories we tell and the writers doing the telling, in the kinds of detectives and villains we have created for the 21st century — that, in Edwards’s view, “the time is ripe to take a fresh look at how the crime story has evolved.”
Another is the fidelity with which mysteries reflect the values, desires and anxieties of different eras. The Victorian confidence in science and rationality gave us detectives (most famously Sherlock Holmes) who prevailed through the application of logical reasoning; the hermetically sealed puzzles of the Golden Age, by authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, served as an escape from the devastation of one world war and the fears of another. As the moral righteousness of World War II faded into the ambiguities of the Cold War era, we saw the emergence of spymasters like George Smiley who, in the course of John le Carré’s novels, has to reckon with the rottenness of regimes he has pledged to serve. We meet the cynical, self-destructive noir PI typified by Philip Marlowe, and the amoral antihero (think Tom Ripley).
Perhaps this is the reason for readers’ ongoing fascination with mystery and crime, through all its incarnations. We read these stories as a form of entertainment and escapism, to match wits with a fictional detective, to enjoy the resolution of uncertainty or deliverance of justice not always afforded by the real world..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/book ... wards.html
The Expanse, my favorite scifi, starts with a detective who gets assigned an odd case. He soon realises there is a lot more to the situation than anyone has guessed. Detective Miller leaves his life as a cop behind, pursuing this mystery.
The Automatic Detective is a classic noir detective story. But in this future, devices, on rare occasion, can reach sentience and apply for citizenship. The problem is that this device is a 700 pound war robot.
I'm a big fan of the genre, like Early Autumn, A Corpse in the Koryo, The Big Sleep, The Black Dahlia, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, and a hundred more.
It's an intensely personal genre. If you like violence, you might like Jack Reacher. If you want to see a different culture, you might like Coyote Waits, Corpse in the Koryo, etc. There's something for just about everyone.
"He credits Julian Symons with having written the best such history, “Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel,” first published in 1972. The book has been revised twice, most recently in 1993, but so much has changed, in terms of how we think and live, and how such changes are reflected — in the stories we tell and the writers doing the telling, in the kinds of detectives and villains we have created for the 21st century — that, in Edwards’s view, “the time is ripe to take a fresh look at how the crime story has evolved.”
Another is the fidelity with which mysteries reflect the values, desires and anxieties of different eras. The Victorian confidence in science and rationality gave us detectives (most famously Sherlock Holmes) who prevailed through the application of logical reasoning; the hermetically sealed puzzles of the Golden Age, by authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, served as an escape from the devastation of one world war and the fears of another. As the moral righteousness of World War II faded into the ambiguities of the Cold War era, we saw the emergence of spymasters like George Smiley who, in the course of John le Carré’s novels, has to reckon with the rottenness of regimes he has pledged to serve. We meet the cynical, self-destructive noir PI typified by Philip Marlowe, and the amoral antihero (think Tom Ripley).
Perhaps this is the reason for readers’ ongoing fascination with mystery and crime, through all its incarnations. We read these stories as a form of entertainment and escapism, to match wits with a fictional detective, to enjoy the resolution of uncertainty or deliverance of justice not always afforded by the real world..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/book ... wards.html
The Expanse, my favorite scifi, starts with a detective who gets assigned an odd case. He soon realises there is a lot more to the situation than anyone has guessed. Detective Miller leaves his life as a cop behind, pursuing this mystery.
The Automatic Detective is a classic noir detective story. But in this future, devices, on rare occasion, can reach sentience and apply for citizenship. The problem is that this device is a 700 pound war robot.
I'm a big fan of the genre, like Early Autumn, A Corpse in the Koryo, The Big Sleep, The Black Dahlia, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, and a hundred more.
It's an intensely personal genre. If you like violence, you might like Jack Reacher. If you want to see a different culture, you might like Coyote Waits, Corpse in the Koryo, etc. There's something for just about everyone.
Facts have a well known liberal bias
- By Saeko
- By Puffer Fish
- By Istanbuller