Detectives - the dominant characters of the 20th Century Discuss

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think anyone who gets good enough within their field tends to be elevated and treated differently.
This is completely true.

In Adrian Mole he gets in trouble when working at the library cos he puts Jane Austen in the Chick-Lit Romance section... this demonstrates of course that Adrian is unable to recognise how Austen transcends genre, that he is such a boorish pseudo-snob that he thinks he alone is able to understand Austen and that by putting her in the correct place in a fluffy genre that he looks down on he has demonstrated the superiority of his taste and critical faculties over those of his fellow workers - whereas in fact he has just told them all that he is a massive cunt.

But in another sense he is right about Austen. Her books have romance and humour so why not call them rom-com? Perhaps it would be better to just admit that some books in that genre can actually be good rather than defining the genre in such a way that it's not allowed to contain anything above a certain level of quality.
 
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jenks

thread death
I don’t think the term literary fiction really existed before the eighties. Someone like Graham Greene was both serious and popular but the book trade seems to have forked with popular, bumpy cover books with gold titles, middlebrow sellers like William Boyd and then avowedly literary - ie not for the many but the few. There are breakout writers who travel across - Ishiguro and McEwan but not many. I think it’s why the publishers are happy to let the indie sector have the more literary stuff - there’s no money in it.
 

version

Well-known member
At what point does the detective thing go from the detective being in more or less complete control to the private eye in way over his head? Is it after WWI? WWII? Something evidently happened to switch the focus from the detective hovering above it all to being lost in the centre of it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Isn't this just what modernism and then post-modernism did? Narratives became fractured and confused, objectivity disappeared, and right and wrong was suddenly far less clear cut... detective stories are part of culture so they felt its effects, as did romance stories and war ones too I'm sure. Whether this sort of thing happened more or less quickly with detective stories though - and what that would mean - I dunno. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a bigger issue with detective stories than with other genres as it calls into question their very nature and purpose... I'm sure Poirot and Holmes would have thrown up their hands in horror at the suggestion that there was no such thing as an objective truth for them to try and uncover.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I've never read him and I don't think I know enough about these movements to say where a given person fits.
Or are you saying that his not knowing who killed the chauffeur is indicative of a modern approach? I think that was more of a cock up.
 

version

Well-known member
I'm saying you don't really hear writers like him referred to as modernists or postmodernists, but maybe he is.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I was pretty disappointed by chandler but I only read that one, the big sleep.

I thought Jim Thompson was really good, but he's not really modern or postmodern. He's a genre writer through and through but his characters, locations and dialogue are all very good. See also George v Higgins who wrote the friends of Eddie coyle, that's excellent.

These people are not trying to do everything, nor are they trying to combust things and do something new. They are just telling very well plotted stories.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, there's a distinction to be made between conscious modernists and the people who just happened to be writing in a modernist world.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The entirety of detectivist culture and certain story telling traditions in early historical sources have parallels. @jenks Gawain being a proto-gumshoe of the wasteland?

The Mabinogian and The Cattle Raid of Cooley exist almost as distilled surrealism. Their story tellers never allow you to figure out the plot because arcs and real lives were underpinned by geasa, taboos or prohibitions that are positioned as impossible to avoid. So, you know the fates are fucked, that one disaster will beget another. The craft in the Mabinogian and Táin is the play in their revealing, their allusion to dreams as divination portholes (Sopranos), transformations (Mr Benn), where the past has as much agency over the present as any detectorist has digging

The detective is how, why, who, when and where
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm saying you don't really hear writers like him referred to as modernists or postmodernists, but maybe he is.
I thought I'd seen him described as Modern, but don't quote me on that.

A quick Google throws up things like this

Raymond Chandler: Detections of the Totality - Verso Books

Raymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism.

And an essay called The Big Empty; Chandler's Transatlantic Modernism

So I guess some people categorise him that way.
 

version

Well-known member
I've seen Ballard described as a modernist before. Some of his stuff can seem a little detective-y too, come to think of it. PKD as well, although I think he'd be described as postmodern rather than modern.
 
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