I recently read a Rankin/Rebus book with converging
plotlines. I'm not giving the title so as not to give
anything away, but this would actually describe several in
the series. Block does this a lot in the Scudder series, too.
If you've read many investigatory crime novels in the past
decade or two, I'm sure you've run across this convention
where the book starts with two seemingly separate
investigations that converge by the end. Although one of the
crimes is often an old, cold case, I'm not talking about a
Ross Macdonald plot where a current case leads back to an
older one, or where the investigator seems to be sidetracked
from his partner's death by the search for a dingus. Both of
those plots are linear in their development, with one plot
leading to the other. Instead, I'm talking about books that
try to delay the reader's connecting the cases as long as
possible. Of course, by now it's become such a convention
that it'd probably be a bigger surprise if the plots didn't
converge, remained discrete at the end.
Anyway, I started wondering when this convention started. I
can't think of a single classic hardboiled/noir novel with
this gimmick. There are some hints of it in Chandler, as he
sewed his short stories together into novels, and in the
Roger Wade and Terry Lennox subplots of Long Goodbye, but
this still isn't quite what we see so often now. Can someone
better read in the classics think of examples? If not, when
and where this plot gimmick start? And how quickly did it
spread? Is it somehow tied to the longer books of today?
Chicken/Egg: Does it require more pages to give the two
plotlines each their due? Is it a way of filling out those
more pages that now seem to be the norm, offering the reader
two plots for the price of one?
Mark
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