At 08:42 PM 3/21/00 -0500, Anita wrote:
>
>Although I am learning more about HB writers, my true
love are the Golden
>Age of Detectives era... authors whose names when
mentioned on this list
>gets hissed and egged. Gardner, fortunately,
qualified in both areas.
>
I actually
don't hate most of that stuff. I tend to like it when it is
at it's stupidest, with the map of the crime scene, the list
of characters at the beginning,etc.. It's sort of a period
piece thing. I enjoy the much-maligned Philo Vance books for
exactly this reason.
On the other
hand, sometimes these books come up with something so stupid
that even a child could not be satisfied. John Dickson Carr
is one of the worst offenders, as with the cases where his
victim turns out to be stabbed with an icicle or some such
Rube Goldberg idea. I am still trying to recover from the one
where the murder was carried out via an electromagnet
concealed in the ceiling.
However, as
Chandler pointed out when he could stop himself from just
deriding this kind of thing, even a persuasive cozy has to
sacrifice character development in order to develop the
intricate puzzle that the books depend on. I think that this
is pretty true....no reader believes in Inspector Flogbottom
or Lord Cutlery,etc., as humans, and no author expects the
reader to. The only cozy writer who nearly manages to pull it
off is P.D. James, and as time went on her books tended so
far toward the Police Procedural and the horror story that
they almost fit on Rara-Avis.
Obviously,
there are many hardboiled guys who are just as mannered and
incredible as any "Golden Age" author, but the best of the
gang have moments where they approach literachoor. I don't
think there are any of the cozy crew for whom the same claim
can be made.
My two
cents.
James
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