Hard Boiled

[threemonkeys]

I read Classic Detective Stories - as you expect, a bunch of detective tales from the 30's onwards. Nothing to say specifically about the stories, they were a pretty good bunch of characteristic tales of the genre. They did get me thinking about the detective fiction genre and the parallels that it has with SF though. From the short story based start in the pulp magazines through to the novel and series based genre of today they have broadly the same path. It also struck me, that the detective and broader crime & mystery fiction genre has always been a step ahead of SF. It started earlier and got into novels in a big way earlier.

That got me a little concerned about one aspect. It is pretty hard to see any new crime genre short story collections about these days. At least when you look on the SF shelves there are still a handful of recent anthologies and author collections available. Plus, of course, there are still a few magazines around. I wondered, with some pessimism, whether the state of the crime & mystery shelves was a portent for the SF shelves when short fiction disappears altogether.

I am therefore somewhat relieved to record that a few short fiction crime titles can be found on Amazon. Even better, I am pleased to see that Ellery Queen's Mystery magazine is still being published - even if the covers still look like they come from 1941.

There is another point. Reading these classic tales, I came to the conclusion that I prefer detective fiction in the longer forms. Stripped down to its essentials of setup and solution it seems to lack depth - perhaps it was because I was able to immediately deduce the mysteries as soon as the scenario was developed. Shorter SF can have all kinds of depth and complexity. Perhaps that will let it keep its rather precarious grip on the shelves.

Comments

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I certainly know of a good few in the SF field and I assumed that would probably be true in crime & mystery as well. But that is, in itself, a symptom of the withdrawl of support for the short form from the major publishers. The money, such as it is, is still in paper.