Chris wrote:
". . . when Scudder takes an interest in a second case in any
one of the books, there's sort of a here-we-go-again moment
where anyone who's read a mystery before knows that the two
cases will be connected. That may not be real or
true-to-life, but the character of Scudder has those
qualities as down those mean streets he goes."
This kind of relates to some ideas I've been thinking about
lately, about the separation between the fictional world and
the reader's world. The reader has a certain genre knowledge
(and expectations) that the characters presumably don't
(unless it's some sort of reflexive exercise). So certain
things will immediately alert the knowledgeable reader, like
your example of Scudder's cases always dovetailing or, a
favorite of mine, if a corpse is unidentifiable at first,
it's never who it's assumed to be, the Laura model. So a
reader sometimes jumps ahead of a protagonist. When that
happens, the writer must make it understandable that the
protagonist doesn't know what seems so obvious to the reader
and the reader must suspend disbelief and make allowances for
it not being so obvious in the fictional world.
Peter Abrahams took this separtion between reader and
character to an extreme in Oblivion, where a tumor leads to
the hero's losing all knowledge of a case he had been working
on and having to reinvestigate it, so the reader is way ahead
of the detective, "remembers" a lot of information the hero
has lost. Unfortunately, the who that dunnit is so painfully
obvious to anyone familiar with the genre that I had trouble
sustaining interest.
Of course, a good writer can make this work for him/herself.
This separation can be used to build suspense -- I just read
a well handled open door scene where the reader's expectation
of the corpse built suspense until that corpse was found. Or
it can be used to surprise -- I recently read a book with a
corpse that took some time to identify; I was so sure it was
not who everyone thought it was, kept waiting for
"Laura" to reappear, that I was surprised when it actually
was who it was supposed to be.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it's been on my
mind lately.
Mark
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