Mastering the Mystery Genre: The Problem with Theory Divorced from Facts

When I published Masters of the Humdrum Mystery ten years ago, I felt the problem with the academic approach to Golden Age crime writing for so many years was that it was airy theory divorced from down on the ground facts.  Over and over I read that Americans of the period wrote left-wing, mean streets, hard-boiled mystery while the Brits wrote right-wing, pastoral country house and village "cozy" mysteries.  American mystery writing was "masculine" while British mystery was "feminine."  

The proof?  Why, it was in the half dozen or so Golden Age era crime writers academics would condescend to look at: Chandler, Hammett, Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh.  Obviously, this was a too-limited approach, even an ahistorical one, that gave only an incomplete picture of Golden Age mystery; but then most of the academics writing about the subject weren't actually historians by training, like I was.  They were, rather, English lit professors. Much of what they write is so theory and jargon laden it's unreadable to laypeople (and perhaps to themselves as well for all I know).  

So when I started reading a great variety of Golden Age mystery writers and got into the original sources from the period and realized how limited the typical academic approach was, I decided to write Masters, which is a far more rigorously informed, and I would say accurate, book.  Facts are what my anonymous Amazon critic disdains as "glutinous."  That's a word he derived from a critic I wryly quoted in my book, who said the same of the intensive facts-based investigative approach of Freeman Wills Crofts' indefatigable Inspector French.  

Facts may indeed be glutinous, because they stick.  The academic theory prevalent from 1980 to 2010 or so hasn't stuck; and it's been coming undone over the last decade, as the bloggers and "connoisseurs" (as my critic dismissively terms them) and the popular writers have done the real spadework and discovered where the bodies were buried.  Now, don't get me wrong, there has been good academic work in the last decade, but by and large academics have been playing catchup with the rest of us when it comes to the facts.  At least some of them have been paying attention to what we have been doing.  Smart boys and girls, those.

I come from an academic background; my father was a business professor who taught economics and international finance in South Dakota, Wisconsin, Alabama and Mexico.  I received my share of degrees, BA, MA, JD, PhD (I was introduced as a "professional student" once) and taught history for a short time.  I love good academic scholarship, but sometimes academia can be a bar to good scholarship, I have found. 

I was interested to find that one of the academics whose work I praised in Masters, Alison Light, is now an independent scholar.  Alison Light can really write and I have learned a lot from her.  Anyone who reads academic historian Douglas Greene's popular biography of John Dickson Carr, will learn a hell of a lot about the history of Golden Age crime writing through the life of one its masters (not humdrum at all); but of course traditional biography is frowned on by so many English lit types (not historians).  

I tried in Masters to engage with academics, but the book was ignored in the review journals.  It's since started to pop up in academic citations, as have my books on mystery writer Todd Downing and LGBTQ crime writers and themes, Murder in the Closet (Edgar nominated), but by anonymous Amazon reviewer gave me a taste of the academic response at its worst: petty, score-settling, deceptive and splenetic.  I sure don't miss that!

The internet is a mixed blessing.  Everyone has an opinion and freely expresses it, which is great up to a certain point, but not all opinions are equally informed.  There's a need for experts and they should be respected.  But in the field of vintage mystery studies, academics are not always the experts.  I think the profession could use a healthy dose of connoisseurship.  And that's where the internet really scores.  

The internet gives experts who aren't necessarily within the academic profession a forum.  My Amazon critic has a blog, but no one reads it.  (It's hard to read, both in terms of its opaque content and its execrable format.)  My blog is moving on its way to three million views.  Heck, even my critic professes to like my blog.  (I don't know how he will feel about the last few posts.)

To be sure, I wish my books sold like my blog is viewed.  That's why my next book, a critical biography, I want to publish with a commercial press.  It's the first book I have written with that goal in mind.  Masters was published with a scholarly press, which unfortunately is rather limiting, given that most such presses aim only to sell to libraries--Remember them?--and price accordingly.  The blog is all well and good (very good, really), but I wouldn't mind making some real money from my books, I'll admit.  Mercenary of me, I know.  But that's what happens when you don't stay in the ivory tower and must venture down mean streets.