I’ve got a membership in the Stark House Press Crime Club. This is a small press based in California. Their primary focus is vintage crime and noir, but they published more than that. Science fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and stragiht-up adventure.
The way the Crime Club works is like a book club. Each month, I get a newsletter in my inbox describing the main selection and several ohters. There’s also the monthly Black Gat imprint. These are small paperbacks that reprint vintage crime novels. Think the early days of Hard Case Crime, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what they’re like except that the authors tend to be a little more obscure. I have a subscription to the Black Gat imprint and get a nicde dose of noir each month, whether I have time to read it or not.
This month’s lead title arrived the other day. It’s a collection of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone short stories, The Lost Coast.
I read the first two stories the other night while beeing snowed in.
And that got me thinking.
There’s something about detective fiction that scratches a mental itch, for lack of a better term, that science fiction, fantasy, and more conventional forms of mystery can.
I’m not sure why that is, but I’ve thought about it on and off, for probably thirty years or more. And there’s something about private eye stories in the short form that I like even better than novels.
I think some of the appeal is that the writer must set up a situation, a crime in other words, and have it resolved in a few thousand to a few tens of thousand words. Which is not the same as having it solved. At least if the story is to work.
And that’s a tough thing to do. Not every writer can pull it off.
There are aspects of the traditional private detective that appeal to me. The lone knight walking the mean streets, living according to his own code, fighting a fight that he sometimes knows is a lost cause. That general description, or at least parts of it, could fit more than one of my literary heroes. Robert E. Howard’s Conan or Solomon Kane. Poul Anderson’s Captain Sir Dominic Flandry. Just to name a few.
So I’ll keep reading detective fiction. And from time to time, I’ll try my hand at writing it. Both are fun.
There is a lot of power in the lone character with is own code. That’s why, for example, the Jack Reacher books are so popular. I don’t think much of them myself but it’s not nothing.
The lone character isn’t confined to mystery, either. It’s been a staple trope in westerns for years.
I’ve written both sci-fi and mystery short stories. The mysteries were harder to come up with and make convincing.
I’ve been writing more mysteries than anything else the last year, in part because that was what the assignments were in the mentorship I did. They can be challenging.