I liked Richard Moore's comments, which seem to be more --
well, realistic -- than some of the fantasies posted
recently, based more on careless misreadings than anything
more serious.
Of course Chandler's judgment is __loosely__ correct. BUT
perhaps we ought to remember that the balance between fantasy
and realism in crime novels is a little more complicated than
some people seem to think. In real life -- you know, that
stuff outside your armchair there -- most murder is more rare
and a lot less interesting than the stuff we write and read
about. In the heat of argument, I sometimes want to say
Look, guys, in your heart of hearts you know perfectly well
that:
-most policemen, even, never get to deal with a murder;
-and PIs certainly don't;
-any more than the Vicar, Miss Marple, my thirtyish bookshop
owner, or your maiden auntie;
-most violent killings are nasty, unmysterious and
uninteresting, and done by killers whose motive and identity
is boringly obvious, largely either because
----they are closely related to the victims,
----or it was a kind of accident related to another
crime,
----or they are in some way insane,
----or several of the above.
From all this, I want to suggest that the elements that
really interest readers of all the genres are
-the fictional elements: characterisation, structure,
narrative twists, setting
-the moral debates in and arising from the story.
Perhaps by "realism" what we really mean is the extent to
which all that is going on in a book says something relevant
to us in our armchairs?
By the way, for what it's worth, the two books that most
engaged my imagination this year (I am NOT trying to
instigate a DorothyL Ten Best Books discussion here) have
been Paretsky's Hard Time and Teran's God is a Bullet.
Realism? Fantasy?
Marianne Macdonald
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