Sunday, May 15, 2022

Why the Mystery Novel Is a Perfect Literary Form

 From Crime Reads:

The Golden Age of mysteries was also the primeval age of amateurs, with a whole range of strange birds emerging. Queen of the era, of course, is Agatha Christie, who not only gave us one of the classic private eyes in Poirot, but also inspired a cozy crime wave with Miss Marple. The kindly old spinster with a mind sharp as a razor and nerves of steel helped spawn a thousand eccentrics in quaint villages whose residents have an alarming propensity to knock each other off. It was also a fertile time for aristocratic gentlemen sleuths who tracked murderers for amusement, like Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Whimsey, or Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Allyn, who set the prototype for the posh Inspector Lynley books by Elizabeth George or PD James’s poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. And then there’s Morse, the grumpiest, snobbiest intellectual detective of all, in the most highbrow of settings, Oxford. But maybe the oddest duck in the pond is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Catholic country priest who not only catches criminals, he saves their souls and convinces them to confess. This became its own mini-sub-genre, with Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi series, and now Sister Boniface on the BBC. (Read more.)

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