The Love of Classic Mystery and Suspense Fiction

The term classic is two-fold in its meaning when attributed to anything from books, movies, TV programs, actors, rock music, or cars. Classic can refer to the age of the item or its overall quality. In the first sense, a book can be classic because it was written over 100 years ago, no matter what the quality of the mystery. In the second sense, a book can be classic even when it is brand new because it is 4 or 5 star quality. Ideally, classic should be used for both terms simultaneously, since not everything old is well written.

When referring to classic mystery fiction, stress is emphasized on the age of the novels and short stories written, in particular when an author was first published. In this assessment, a very late novel in Agatha Christie's career such as Third Girl can still be considered classic, because Agatha Christie is a classic author: this despite the fact that Third Girl is not viewed as favourably as mysteries in her hey day such as Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None. In the earliest decades of the genre, readers could quite often solve the case long before the detective-regardless of whether it was a Whodunit or a Howdunit-because writers thought they were being clever in making the criminal the least likely subject. All a reader had to do in a Whodunit was pick out the person who had never been suspected, and voila! the reader is not even half through the book and is smarter than the detective. With a Howdunit the so-called locked room mysteries later perfected by John Dickson Carr were not so locked out after all. Therefore, readers can look at a book such as Mystery of the 13th Floor by Thayer and wonder at why it is considered classic when it is easy to solve.

But these early mysteries were the starting ground for later, more complex mysteries in the careers of even the same authors who had been writing these early mysteries. Age simply *must* be considered essential when looking at assessing whether or not the term classic is appropriate for mystery and suspense fiction. The Golden Age of Mystery and Suspense is generally considered to be the period between the World Wars, even though the authors who began writing in that time period-as well as those who had started their career earlier that 1918-continued writing for decades to come. This is because everyone writing in that era -and there was a treasure trove of names-was writing at high quality book after book and/or short story after short story.

This is true of hard boiled fiction as well. Today, hardboiled fiction is one of the most widely read sub-genres of mystery and suspense. The private eye is everywhere, and several of them are female-created by Marsha Mason, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. But they all owe their start to early writers such as Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and Dashiel Hammett. These writers in turn were inspired by the dime store novels and comics written even earlier by names some of the general public have forgotten. But they are well known among people who write hardboiled fiction.

But for mystery and suspense books in particular, there is a third sense of the term classic: new books that are written in the style of or are set in the time of classic mystery fiction. Someone alive today can write books that read as if they are set in the Victorian time of Sherlock Holmes-often with Holmes or Irene Adler as the main detective, or in the style of the Murder Most Cozy that Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham made their staple style of mystery and suspense. There will probably never be a time when a new Sherlock Holmes isn't published, as long as there continues to be an audience for them. Judging from the degree to which classic authors continue to sell their work after death, the audience isn't going away anytime in the future.