A question I keep meaning to ask

[james_davis_nicoll]

Seen in another thread scentofviolets said: Well, it's not just that the writers are older, or that the field is order; it is the basic tropes getting older as well.[...]

For a genre that styles itself as 'the literature of ideas', this is not a good sign.[...] If the genre wants to attract younger fans, it needs to come up with some new stories. If not, well, the only thing to do is add polish and technique.

My question, which I've been meaning to ask for a while, is "Do people have the same expectations of the mystery genre?"

I'm not saying that new things don't appear in mystery (and I am definitely not saying that mystery fans don't have heated disagreements over what should be in a good mystery book [1]) but is there an expectation that a new mystery should in some way be a progressive development over an old one?


1: I think we're all agreed that the presence of cats is an even worse sign in a mystery than in an SF novel and it's a very bad sign in SF.

Comments

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

People don't have the same expectations of mystery because obnoxious fans of mystery may do some annoying things, but they don't hold out their genre as the genre of ideas and exploration and the new. Obnoxious fans of SF do.

When the big loud cranks of a genre praise that genre for being unique and bold and imaginative and new (and note that this is why their genre is superior), that's the equivalent of the witness saying the stupid thing on Law & Order that lets the DA cross-examine said witness with questions that weren't allowable before but are allowable now. The witness opened himself up for character questions when he backed up his testimony with assertions of his character.

Honestly, I stopped watching not long after Jill Hennesy left, but I think the metaphor holds.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

You also don't have OSC or Pournelle type mystery writers who pine for the days before political correctness when they could use "jewish" as a general purpose adjective for lawyers and/or blackmailers*.

uh... right?

* Agatha Christie is not snarked on enough considering.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, I did get sent a mystery book by an older writer which seemed to me to accept as an axiom that mixed race kids are ugly and doomed.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

On a vaguely related note, average age of the winners of the CWA dagger:

2000s - 51 (not counting Ann Cleves, who I can't find an age for)
1990s - 47.7
1980s - 51.6
1970s - 47.8
1960s - 41.4
1950s - 46

So the winners do seem to be getting a bit older overall, but not quite as remarkably as in SF. Overall average is 48, which coincides almost perfectly with the Booker (49).

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if someone had worked up these figures, however how old a genre is mystery compared to science fiction?

Science Fiction really starts up in the late 20's and I think mystery was well under way.

One would need to look at other literary prizes to see if the trend is that in a mature genre authors who win prizes tend to be in their late 40's.

Perhaps this is because if they start in their 20's 20 years later they have a recognizable body of work that spotlights them for awards?

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

You forget: 51 is the new 26.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(not counting Ann Cleves, who I can't find an age for)

Anne of Cleves turns 493 next month.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Thanks, interesting. The winners here are old in general, in the 'over 40 sense', then.

Irrelevant Quibble

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

You're going to tell me there's a problem with Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers"?

Re: Irrelevant Quibble

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

Or The Wanderer (which I still think is a good disaster novel... but that may be a function of not having reread it in a while).

Re: Irrelevant Quibble

[jamoche]

Or Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon"?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

1: I think we're all agreed that the presence of cats is an even worse sign in a mystery than in an SF novel and it's a very bad sign in SF.

I'll take that as a challenge, then, shall I?[*]

("419" is going to be in no small degree a police procedural, albeit set in 2024 -- might as well throw in a cat, too.)

[*] "Accelerando" doesn't count -- AIneko isn't a cat, it's an AI wearing a furry cute-suit to put one over on the primates.

[(Anonymous)]

"419" is going to be in no small degree a police procedural, albeit set in 2024 -- might as well throw in a cat, too.

*dies*
I will so buy that one, based on that premise alone!
MOAR catz!!!

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Since this is something close to a bread-and-butter thing with you, could you tell me what a few of the newest tropes (or big Big Ideas for that matter) are? I like your product, but it seems like a lot of what you do is a sort of meta-commentary on older stuff. I thought you were close to one with the gaming novel, namely, that we don't need no stinkin' virtual reality. The support we have for gaming and inhabiting shared worlds is getting really, really good. Of course, back in the day, waaaay back in the day, pre-80's, when being a _______ (insert Paladin, Thief, etc.) whose orientation was ______ (insert lawful good, chaotic neutral, etc.) was the hottest thing in gaming, there were plenty of people who took that perhaps just a little too seriously then too.

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

I think of mysteries as being a pretty calcified genre these days. Christie and a lot of the folks up through the, I dunno, 40s or 50s were pretty innovative, but after that the innovation has mostly tapered off in favor of character development* and genre faithfulness**.

*Mysteries have a lot of long series these days, which seems good for character development and bad for innovation.

**Mysteries also have a lot of defined subgenres these days, which seems like either an indicator or a cause of a lack of innovation.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

There is some expectation of new/original ideas in the mystery genre for books set in the modern day, I think. If it's a book with a cat on the cover, no one expects it to be original. If it's set in 1892, no one expects that to be original either, unless it's a re-working of Holmes or Jack the Ripper.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Has anyone done JtR from the point of view of a prostitute? I know there have been Victorian era stories that get close.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Mysteries are often all about restoring status quo, which means that they're not so much about new.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

See, I think whether or not that is true is somewhat correlated with the kind of mystery it is. A cozy is cozy because there are proper rules and violations of the social order will eventually be put right. Mysteries like the ones Hammett wrote or Mosley writes or Paretsky writes don't assume the existing social order is good or that it exists how people think it does. Outrages are not exceptional and any happy resolutions that do occur, assuming they are possible at all, only occur because of the hard work and determination of an exceptional person or persons.

[daev.livejournal.com]

If you were being devious, you could consider The Yiddish Policeman's Union primarily as a mystery rather than SF. Then it forms the next step in a progression of making mystery novels into a showcase for meeting other cultures. First you have someone like Tony Hillerman with his Navajos, then the paranormal writers and their imaginary urban subcultures, and finally the full-out creation of an alternate American state to host murders, cops, and detectives.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

You don't have to be devious to consider this. Chabon has said it's an homage to his favorite mystery novelists.

Creation of an alternate American state for non-SF novels goes back to Sinclair Lewis's Winnemac.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Before James posts, there's Ed McBain's Isola.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

edited for intemperateness

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

"Do people have the same expectations of the mystery genre?"

I'm suspecting that, at a very deep level, the answer must be "no".

In their 1989 book, The World Beyond The Hill [ISBN 0-87477-573-6], Alexei & Cory Panshin purport to provide a social psychology of all of SFnal literature, especially in the period ~1920-1970.

Their thesis is simply (well, I can't do it justice, really, by simplifying it, but anyway) that society as a whole needed this genre of literature ("classical SF") as a cultural activity, in order to help it undergo the collective conceptual shift required to mentally accommodate the scientific revolution of ca. 1900-1950. And, they sort of conclude, the digestion having been more or less accomplished by the time the moon landings happened, "hard" SF sort of died as an innovative cultural enterprise.

And, they have something of a point: recall that while Neil Armstrong landing on our principal natural Moon was watched around the world with awe and wonder, and led to a torrent of editorials, sermons and derivative art (i.e., culturally assimilative behaviours) -- by the time Apollo 17 came around, just a few years later, it was greeted rather differently (http://www.google.com/search?q=apollo+17+complaints) -- in a way that implies a very different public, with a very different sense of their place in the universe, and of the universe they have a place in.

In other words, by the time Soylent Green hit the movie screens, the populace had long since outgrown the need for its Skylark of Space and its Caves of Steel, etc.

So, since (I suspect, in my ignorance) the Mystery genre never carried anything remotely resembling such an imaginative purpose, as a social-psychological construct, we can't have expected as much of it, nor been as jarred when it fell from its high purpose (since it never had a comparable one -- though others visiting here may differ with me about that).

Well, just some thoughts ...

[kattas.livejournal.com]

There is a fair bit of SF that still - in my opinion at least - is quite new and fresh. As such I think the question is somewhat invalidated. The other problem with the question is the assumption that mystery as a genre is trying to be new. The typical mystery is -as several people have already stated -a consevative narrative. Mystery is also less concerned with progress ethan SF, which leads to much less speculation about potential issues, and more focus on common extant issues - most frequently crime, and in particular murder. On the whole this results in fewer plot tropes, and by extention more focus on the particulars of a given narrative rather than the form the narrative takes as a whole.

This is not to say that there have not been innovations in the genre, but the majority of them have tended to be related to evolving social settings, such as the advent of hard boiled fiction, and later additions such as police procedurals and legal thrillers, where the focus is on characters within what is portrayed as a "realistic" setting for the public perception of crime and punishment.