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kgbooklog ([identity profile] kgbooklog.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] james_davis_nicoll 2008-12-28 03:56 pm (UTC)

Mysteries don't have any need for worldbuilding and readers don't expect character development (just like early SF) but they do expect the crime to be solved. Still, I can't stop myself from providing counterexamples:

There seems to be a hard limit of about 400 pages over in mystery.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost, 704 pages

Mysteries also eschew the cliff-hanger ending and the book-fragment approach

In Carole Nelson Douglas' Midnight Louie series, the primary love interest makes his first appearance in the final sentence of the fourth book. A later book opens with the main characters making a lengthy list of all the murders from previous books that hadn't been solved yet. I stopped reading when a fairly major cliffhanger was not resolved in the next book.

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