I know I've asked this before

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was reading a mystery last night that turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected because the manuscript pages were single-sided. The book turned out to be less than 280 pages long. Despite this lack of length the author managed to fit an entire plot between the two covers.

It's comparatively rare for an SF novel to be that short and nearly unheard of for a fantasy novel to be under 300 pages. I've also never seen a mystery that came close to the brick-like dimensions of many F&SF novels. There seems to be a hard limit of about 400 pages over in mystery.

Mysteries also eschew the cliff-hanger ending and the book-fragment approach, which I greatly appreciate.

Does it make sense to ask why modern [1] F&SF readers appear to prefer longer lengths than do mystery readers?

1: I have a number of older books upstairs that come in under 200 pages and like the mystery they all have complete plots.

Comments

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Not very. The late eighties (iirc) movie was better. If you're looking for more Dutch police action, Nicholas Freeling's Van der Valk novels are quite nice.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Are the similarities within the set of books about Dutch cops strong enough to treat them as a subgenre?

One thing I liked about van de Wetering's books is that the cops don't see themselves as a caste apart, a small group of worthies in a constant state of siege from stupid civilians and nefarious criminals (ISTR that the old fellow who ran the police unit spent WWII in a Nazi prison and as a consequence was not keen on sending people to jail if there were workable alternatives).

I liked something from van de Wetering's background that never made it into the books as far as I recall: the fact that at least at one point in recent history it was possible to get drafted into the Dutch police (or more exactly, you could opt to perform your manditory N years of public service as a cop).

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Well, the Freeling books are somewhat older and depict a very different Holland: post-war, small, poor, hidebound and conservative, while van de Wetering is from the post-sixties watershed. Also, Freeling is of course an outsider looking into Dutch society which also shows in the books.