SubscribeMembers of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's online discussion group spent nearly two months considering and debating hundreds of titles recommended by mystery booksellers throughout the country.
"Fortunately, since we were working online, no blood was spilled in the creation of this list," commented IMBA director Jim Huang. "It was a lively and contentious process, with each of us pulling for cherished books."
"We agreed that each author would appear on the list only once," Huang added, "in order to represent as many of our favorite writers as possible." Some of the genre's greatest and most prolific writers had several titles nominated.
What, then, is the spell of the detective story that has been felt by T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More but which I seem to be unable to feel? As a department of imaginative writing, it looks to me completely dead... the detective story proper bore its really fine fruit in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Poe communicated to M. Dupin something of his own ratiocinative intensity and when Dickens invested his plots with a social and moral significance that made the final solution of the mystery a revelatory symbol of something that the author wanted seriously to say.
"What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so -- which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence, the centre of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The centre, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.If you like to read into things, a good mystery gives you something to read into; real life events are rarely ever so meaningful. Or satiating.
The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eye, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence."
« Older Part of your world, the Little Mermaid's song, sun... | Enjoy some silent film this we... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by smackfu at 8:18 PM on December 2, 2007