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

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I think the books in some mystery series are growing longer.

I like police procedurals (preferably with British settings). The latest Peter Robinson I read was over 400 pages (the early ones in the series were definitely shorter. Reginald Hill's books are also getting longer--well over 300 pages these days. Early PD James' mysteries were quite short, not so recent ones (judging by the thickness of the mass market paperbacks, though that isn't always a reliable guide).

The series I read tend to have lots of personal stuff (including angst and romance)that add considerable verbiage to the basic mystery.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

(judging by the thickness of the mass market paperbacks, though that isn't always a reliable guide).

I was in Borders recently, and they had 5 copies of the trade paperback omnibus of Cook's early Black Company novels (from Tor), and one copy was literally twice as thick as the others. Same ISBN, same number of pages, but twice as thick.

I think the books in some mystery series are growing longer.

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

Not long ago I happened upon a 1970 copy of Ellery Queen. The stories were much shorter than those that EQ is printing now -- and they were much better, too.

It's a rare magazine story these days that I don't condense by reading until I get bored before reading the last page. Sometimes that means first paragraph and last page! If my sister and my spouse didn't also read them, I'd stop subscribing to EQ and Alfred Hitchcock. (I also no longer notice any difference between the two magazines.)

I read every last one of the old stories all the way through, even though there were more of them to the issue.