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

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.