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

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The second is that once the mystery you started the story with is uncovered, the story is over.

I read something in the last year where this wasn't true. The last third of the book was spent dealing with the consequences of learning who did it. I thought it was an interesting approach (but obviously not so interesting that I can remember the name of the book).

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I'd probably have to say that'd feel like two separate stories to me.

Of course, on reflection, things are also complicated by stories that use McGuffins, albiet those tend to simply play around with where the true 'mystery' starts.