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

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to ask that. Or to ask, "Why do publishers think this sells better?" When you have a series like the Wheel of Time or various Eddings, which require an entire volume to move the characters from one room to another . . .

Most '50s era F&SF novels were much shorter. Lord of the Rings and Dune were rarities.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Do we prefer them, or is that all we are offered?

Although as a biblioholic fast reader I can understand the attraction of something that will last me more than a couple of hours.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

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

It makes more sense to ask why publishers prefer the lengths they do, since I know I'm contractually obliged to turn in novels of no less than 90,000 words and no more then 110,000, whereas I know fantasies tend to have a longer contractually obligated length and mysteries and romances have shorter lengths.

I assume the reason publishers like those lengths has to do with how the books are primarily distributed. I will note that when the primary distribution of science fiction/fantasy novels was through supermarket racks, they tended to be rather shorter.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My fantasies don't. And they aren't, either. All my books are 93,000 words long.

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

I take my books dreamy and slow, like my men.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Fantasy and SF novels have to do a lot more than mysteries do -- not just setting up plots and characters, but entire worlds, societies, and laws of nature -- so it makes sense that they'd be longer.

The shorter SF books of Ye Olde Days were just trying to ape other genres' lengths without thinking about what really made sense, with the result being that the books were all way too short and felt like plot outlines in book form and had to mostly drop characterization anyway.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I have no idea, but I gotta say: I rather prefer my books on the shorter end of the spectrum these days.

Also, a lot of paranormal/urban fantasy tends to clock in at around 300 pages. I don't know if that's because 300 pages is a good length for the type of story that those tend to be or if there's something about the typical paranormal/urban fantasy reader that limits the length (with a few exceptions; the one I'm currently reading is pretty long, but it's also by one of the biggest authors in the subgenre).

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

Does that include King's Peace? Or was that originally meant to be two novels?

(Not trying to be snarky. I remember King's Peace as feeling much like two books together, in part because of what I remember of the act differentiation.)

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

I'm part of the problem. I like my big fat fantasy doorstops.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Maybe Mystery Readers take shorter bathroom breaks? Perhaps SF&F reader's diets have lead to a need for longer reading material.

Now where did I leave my asbestos underwear?

[barberio.livejournal.com]

There just appear to be natural lengths for different kinds of story.

I decided to give myself a challenge. I wrote a military science fiction noir murder mystery.

It's come in at too long for a 'normal' detective novel, and too short for a 'science fiction' novel. Seriously, considering the 80,000 printed word count that most publishers use as their cut-off, I'm stuck trying to find 10,000 words in an already finished story.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

To follow on to this...

There are two reasons that Detective novels are shorter.

The first is pacing. A detective novel is generally focused, and tightly paced, sidelines to the plot are truncated 'red herrings', sub plots tend to distract from the main 'mystery' rather than embellish so are avoided.

The second is that once the mystery you started the story with is uncovered, the story is over. It can be extended, but everything after the mystery is uncovered is going to be epilogue to the main story.

[cheshyre]

Frankly, I'd prefer mystery-length books than giant doorstops which can't finish a complete story.

Perhaps the more important question is why modern F&SF publishers prefer longer works?

[That said, SF&F usually requires a certain amount of worldbuilding that mysteries are not subject to.]

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

SF readers who like shorter plotty material have an alternative to short novels: novellas and short stories in magazines. It's a minority taste given low circulation numbers, but there are many more venues for SF novellas and shorts than there are for mysteries.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Perhaps mystery readers like novels that are easier to read in a single sitting? It could also be that the mystery market has optimized itself for the best length for content vs. the ability of its readers to wrap their heads around all the facts.

[redbird]

I have Dorothy Sayers novels that seem to be counterexamples: not that the story doesn't end quickly, but the bits about length and even focus. (At which point I note that, as peake pointed out a few months ago, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a rather good novel about the aftereffects of World War I, disguised as a mystery. And Busman's Honeymoon is, as the author noted, a love story with detective interruptions. But consider Have His Carcass with regard to length, compared to some of the earlier books about Wimsey; less cardboard and a longer book.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

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.

[redbird]

I'm not sure if that's cause or effect, though: there used to be a solid market for mystery short stories as well.

[justinhowe.livejournal.com]

I would love shorter fantasy/SF along the lines of most mystery novels. Something along the lines of the minor world of sword/spell-wielding individual with quark and more than just another snark-fueled first person POV urban-fantasy fiction. Ursula LeGuin or Peter Beagle are the only people I can think of who have even come close to something like this in recent years.

One thing about doorstops is that they give the reader the immersive quality they would get from a movie or video-game. And while I don't believe all that space is needed to detail the world, the majority of readers love to know where the linen of the main characters' pants was produced, and publishers are all too happy to give it to them.

Ultimately, it just bugs me that we have the doorstop to the exclusion of almost anything else.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

True. But as I've discovered, it's very hard to step outside the standard model of a detective story while still being a detective story.

ps. Yes. I keep meaning to start reading Dorothy Sayers, and it was on my research list. But it just keeps slipping my mind that I need to read those...

[barberio.livejournal.com]

It's also self-propagating now, since writers like myself are having to pad out to door-stop size stories they'd be happy seeing published at a shorter word count, because that's what we expect publishers to want.

[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.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The mysteries I have that are set overseas but intended for American and l'anglospheric audiences are not any longer than the ones set in countries the average reader can be expected to be familiar with. The ones set in Botswana are actually kind of short.

As I recall, Janwillem van de Wetering's [1] Grijpstra and de Gier books used canned footnotes explaining the ranks used by the Dutch and I think McClure just assumed anyone who wanted to read about South African cops would pick up on the peculiarites of Apartheid South Africa's legal system on the fly.


1: He died last summer and I managed to miss the news.

Huh. There's a Dutch TV adaptation of the Grijpstra and de Gier books. I wonder if it is any good?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And when I read a Peter Hamilton cluster of bus-crushers, I am never struck by how the story needed 1600 pages for world-building and characterization but rather by the all-consuming mystery of when the plot is going to show up.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Is there a reason publishers would be motivated by something other than "we think this is what the readers want?"