O dear, I thought this was going to be far more thrilling than it is

Mar 16, 2019 16:10


True crime grips London book fair 2019.
But alas, it is not Orrid Murder among the literati but apparently Big Book Deals for works on True Crime (sigh).
One of which has me boggling, because Y O Y? - 'applying her knowledge of modern forensic science to the murders in Agatha Christie’s mysteries' - what is the point? no, what is the point, because, knowing Dame Agatha, they are probably as correct in the forensic science as it was at the time she was writing as could be, and her knowledge of poisons is well-known to have been considerable, but as M. Poirot and Miss Marple so oft testify, it is all about the psychology of the crime rather than the blood-splatter and the cigarette-ash etc.
And I really do not understand this: What I saw from the Americans was that they were finding literary fiction difficult. They have become introverted in their reading, turning to buying stacks of self-help, psychology, diet books. In that environment, fiction can sometimes suffer.
We remark, cynically, that self-help, etc books may not be so very distant from the fictional realm: and that there are vast swathes of fiction that are not 'literary fiction'.
Also, we are not sure that 'difficult' rather than boring and irrelevant is the word.
Or, perchance, I am being as guilty of stereotyping litfic ('it's all sensitive adultery-in-Hampstead/male-midlife-crisis/haunting narrative of coming-of age') as any literary pundit dismissing sff/romance/thrillers/other genres? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2897838.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.

crime, psychology, genre, books, litfic, reading, stereotypes, murder, mysteries, fiction

Previous post Next post
Up