Libraries and Learning
Getting Sand in My Beach Reads
July 19, 2017
Summer is traditionally when people feel permission has been granted to read for fun. I do it year round, with or without permission, and rarely at a beach. My escape pod of choice is crime fiction, but lately I find my tastes within the genre are getting complicated.
I picked up the mystery bug from my mom, an autodidact avid reader who favored Jane Austen, Angela Thirkell, and British Golden Age mysteries. She wasn’t an Agatha Christie fan, but she loved Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, so I did, too. The detectives’ families were in Debrett’s and characters were more likely to drink a tawny port than a pint. Police were generally sidekicks at best, and often less instrumental in solving a case than the gentlemen’s gentlemen, dispatched to conduct undercover work belowstairs. My working class mom knew the hierarchy of British titles as well as she knew the alphabet.
It was much later (after an undergraduate Russian literature binge) that I began to read the inheritors of the American hardboiled tradition, and my tastes began to align more with the claims Chandler made in “The Simple Art of Murder.” He thought the British amateur sleuth was a phony compared to the tarnished knight-errant private investigator, the honorable if bare-knuckled hero of the mean streets.
After women crashed the party (Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky in particular) and gave it a feminist twist for a few years, popularity shifted to stories about police, forensic scientists, and profilers (what Patrick Anderson terms the “Triumph of the Thriller”). I never cared for the serial killer trend – too much like slasher films, too much of a morality play in which heroes slay monsters – but there’s enough variety to choose from that I’ve always found good things to read whatever is flooding the bestseller list. Since I got credentialed as a reviewer a few years ago (not a difficult task these days as social media fills the gaps in newspaper reviews), books tend to find me.
Readers expect things from a mystery. It has to surprise, but can’t violate the rules of the genre – the solution can’t be pulled out of a hat, the reader has to have all the clues available if cleverly concealed, and there has to be some reassurance that justice can prevail (except in the case of classic noir, where things start out bad and get progressively worse). It has to be realistic enough to sustain disbelief. And it has to entertain at a pace.
Some readers insist that they don’t want real life issues in their entertainment fiction, but taking some sort of social position is inescapable whether your chosen heroes are a fusion of Bertie Wooster and Sherlock Holmes solving crimes among the upper classes or FBI profilers peering into the darkness of the not-entirely-human mind. Or for that matter (the latest trend to wear out its welcome) the psychological dissection of characters locked together in an unhappy domestic