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Samizdata quote of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

I get the feeling that crime fiction is where ideas go to die.

– Brian Micklethwait

December 24th, 2011 |

10 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • PersonFromPorlock
    December 25, 2011 at 2:39 am

    Ideas? I used to say that what the World doesn’t need is a detective novel where by page three we’re reading about the Detective’s psychiatrist’s personal problems… and then I discovered that book exists! There’s worse things than no ideas, and ‘ideas’ is one of ’em.

    Give me a well-wrought police procedural with a fiendishly clever serial killer, an interesting heroine and a detective who has to look ‘angst’ up in the dictionary and I’m just as happy as if I knew better. But ‘ideas’? In a mystery? Bah! HUMBUG!

    Well, at least you put me in a Christmas-y mood.

  • Patrick Crozier
    December 25, 2011 at 4:25 am

    Universities certainly, but crime fiction? Wasn’t Agatha Christie rather forward looking having a foreigner and an old lady as her heroes? And, incidentally, having no time for the Nazis, communists or other forms of mumbo jumbo. And wasn’t Sherlock Holmes way ahead of its time having as its central idea that you could work out who had done what simply by examining the evidence?

  • Alan K. Henderson
    December 25, 2011 at 5:07 am

    If I had a knack for novel writing, I would have written about a murder at a butler’s convention.

  • Brian Micklethwait
    December 25, 2011 at 6:36 am

    Perhaps I should, er, clarify. As the politicians say.

    What I had in mind is the way that the detective protagonist in crime fiction often seems to embody (a) old fashioned decency and goodness (which never dies and only seems old fashioned) and (b) political notions which often are on the way out. Many detective protagonists were (politically) vaguely romantic individualists during the early twentieth century, and are now vaguely romantically socialist.

    That’s very roughly what I was thinking when I blurted this out. But I don’t really agree with myself. It’s only true in a few cases. Untrue in many others. And many of the ideas in crime fiction are new ideas begging to be elaborated and systematised.

    This quip is truer of universities, but something similar could be said about how they too contain and amplify good new ideas as well as bad old ones. It depends which faculties are being talked about.

    I am rather embarrassed by this.

    The red wine Michael J supplied was very good.

    Merry Christmas everybody.

  • Tim Newman
    December 25, 2011 at 7:35 am

    I don’t think this applies to Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, my two favourite detective authors by a mile. Even though the latter was a socialist through and through, fortunately his political views never made it into his books.

    And I think The Hound of the Baskervilles was way ahead of its time by having Watson having such an obvious man crush on Holmes that I was genuinely surprised they didn’t beetle off to that cave on Dartmoor at the end and go all Brokeback Mountain on us. I gave up on Conan-Doyle after that.

  • Kim du Toit
    December 25, 2011 at 8:24 pm

    Bah, humbug. Read John Sandford’s Prey series. An intellectual cop who drives a Porsche, beds countless women, shoots bad guys, plays dirty tricks on criminals… until he finds the woman of his dreams, marries her, has kids, but carries on shooting bad guys, driving his Porsche and playing dirty tricks on criminals…

    …all in Minnesota (motto: we’re almost as socialist as Scandinavia).

    And the novels feature some of the scariest bad guys ever put on paper.

  • Kim du Toit
    December 25, 2011 at 8:27 pm

    I would humbly suggest that science fiction is where good ideas go to die.

    [200-page supporting argument redacted]

  • Joshua
    December 25, 2011 at 10:04 pm

    And wasn’t Sherlock Holmes way ahead of its time having as its central idea that you could work out who had done what simply by examining the evidence?

    I would say it was *of* its time for that. Strict empiricism later became unfashionable – and this is actually pretty well reflected in Agatha Christie, whose innovation was that her stories always turn on motive.

    But I have read something to the effect that Sherlock Holmes’ methods were genuinely ahead of the police of his time. Am not in a position to say whether it’s true.

  • Roue le Jour
    December 26, 2011 at 9:32 am

    I second Kim’s praise for John Sandford, however I think Brian’s point stands. Lucas is basically a decent chap who likes the women he beds, who then run rings around him. (Given the number of times the phrase “fuck a bunch of Republicans” occurs in the novels I assume Sandford is a Democrat?) I’m not aware of any contemporary detective who treats women badly.

  • Richard Thomas
    December 26, 2011 at 7:32 pm

    An intellectual cop who drives a Porsche, beds countless women, shoots bad guys, plays dirty tricks on criminals…

    Yeah, gotta say, sounds like the suppressed fantasy of a lefty (and one that they like to project on others, particularly those of us who do happen to arm ourselves).

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