It's Official---Only Halfwit Authors Write Mysteries.

...or so the British legal system has decided:

This week, Joan Brady - a talented American novelist living in Devon, who won the Whitbread prize in 1993 - received £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement from a cobbler close to her Totnes home. The novelist alleged that fumes from solvents used at the plant had caused her physical distress and mental distraction.

One example given of her problems [...]was that she had become so confused by the fumes that she was forced to abandon a serious novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and turn instead to mystery fiction, with Bleedout.

More at the link. This kind of stuff maddens me; there is no reason why a well-written mystery novel should be considered inferior to a well-written "serious" novel. Indeed, one could argue that the pretensions of "serious" fiction are inferior-making properties in themselves. "Plot-driven fiction" is, at any rate, directed outward, to the reader--it invites the reader into a mutual experience. In that way, it's essentially democratic and egalitarian.

Furthermore, we should note--as this commentator does--that many authors of "serious" fiction are now using tropes from mystery novels. In fact, they're using tropes from all kinds of genre fiction. The classes are melting together--just a bit--and a decision like this only shows how out-of-touch many "highbrow" people are.

The Death of the Indian Detective Novel?

Interesting article about the slow death of detective fiction in India. I find it interesting that it's been sixteen years since the last super-detective hung up his magnifying glass--while in America it's been more like thirty.

The interesting experiments with the adventurer-detective figure —- from the intent Byomkesh, the suave Feluda, to the spirited quartet Gondalu (Nalini Das’ adolescent girl-gang with names ending with -lu), Samaresh Basu’s streetsmart Gogol, and the maverick old butterfly lover Colonel Niladrishekhar (Syed Mustafa Siraj’s nature lover who ends up trailing no-gooders) —— arguably had shown the way. Critics, writers and fiction lovers thus find no reason why few tread the path. Though not quite expected, there seems to be a socio-economic jinx to the Bengali detective. Aveek Majumder, lecturer at the department of comparative literature, Jadavpur University, finds the changing tastes of the Bengali middle class a possible culprit. “In their better days, the Bengali sleuth and his exploits found readers in Bengali children from the middle class. The same middle class which can now afford an English-medium school for its children, a school which reprimands a child found speaking in Bengali.”

A major theme in the article is the slow phasing-out of the Bengali language--so I wonder if it would be impertinent to wonder if any of these are available in translation?

....

Reuters has an article about how the internet assists authors of crime fiction in their work; an interesting contrast to this piece, which claims that technology kills suspense, in movies particularly. So is what's good for the author bad for the art itself? One wonders.