I have never really enjoyed reading crime fiction and thrillers and related genres after a certain age. While I thought of that as some sort of limitation and being the mark of a somewhat cynical and elitist reader who looks down upon such stuff as lowbrow literature, I have now resolved the difficulty with the following paradox, that proves that good mystery thrillers are impossible :
Most often readers are wowed by the detective's cleverness because they are too distracted by the narrative (and cleverly disguised red herrings therein) to notice some very obvious cues sprinkled around that should have let them work out the puzzle well before the grand finale is consummated, and if such cues are not present, then it's not a rigorous mystery thriller after all since facts are being withheld from the reader (who after all is imagining herself in the position of the detective), and in this way the author wields an unfair advantage in that he can conclude the story quite arbitrarily. So detective fiction is either predictable or unfair.
So there is my formal justification of why crime fiction is indeed a lowbrow genre. ;)
Saturday, September 11, 2010
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1 comment:
I love detective mysteries so much that now I have decided to give in to my love for them completely and turned the detective fiction into my research interest. Then I discovered that professors of literature LOVE detective novels. The most well-attended conference I ever gave was the one on contemporary Spanish mystery novel. The room was so full that many people had to stand. :-)
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