A Mystery for Amalia

Amalia, in comments to the previous post, said, I love SF, and I don't think I've ever in my life read a mystery.

The challenge is on to suggest some mysteries Amalia, a devotee of SF, might like.

Loretta suggested: ...perhaps she'd like Sayers' The Nine Tailors, Allingham's The Fear Sign (aka Sweet Danger?) or Stout's The Doorbell Rang? Or perhaps Ellis Peter's Cadfael novels.

Here's my attempt:

The traditional SF problem story and the traditional mystery have a lot in common. So I'm suggesting stories in which the solution logic is tight and the reader has a fair chance to solve the crime.

I therefore recommend the mysteries of Ngaio Marsh, a New Zealand writer, who in my view is the most logically rigorous mystery writer ever. Which is rather odd since she was an actress and stage director, but there you are. Skip the first in the series and read the others in almost any order. I think among her best are A Surfeit of Lampreys and Off With His Head. (US titles may vary.) Marsh wrote from the 1930s to the 1980s and her detective reflects the period.

I've just finished reading A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell, set in early Nazi Berlin, and it is brilliant and logically tight. I'm sure it would be SF-reader friendly.

I second Loretta in thinking the Cadfael stories of Ellis Peters might go down well.

I'm assuming everyone's read the Sherlock Holmes stories, but if not, they're mandatory.

Isaac Asimov wrote a series of mysteries: Tales of the Black Widowers. Coming from an SF background they might be an easy introduction.

Does anyone else have suggestions?

Genre and MICE

Because I feel not enough people hate me, I thought I'd offer some comments about genre.

Genre is defined by various acknowledged plot devices. Mysteries have a crime to solve. Romance has a relationship to bloom. SF has a future or alternate world to explore. A pedant can get arbitrarily picky about the definitions and go looking for exceptions until it seems no definition fits any genre, but the clear reality is we all know genre when we see it.

The only type of writing which doesn't get boxed into a genre is literary fiction. It's always surprised me that people don't consider literary fiction to be a genre in its own right. Surely literary fiction is the genre in which nothing much happens?

By definition, if something interesting happens -- a murder, a romance, a war, a conspiracy, a plot to destroy the world -- then the book falls into one of the genres, and so it's not "literary", with the implication it's not as well written as if it were literary. Which is ridiculous because I have rarely come across a literary novel I considered as well written as the best genre novels, and when I have it was because the literary was among the best of its own kind. All that means is a top quality book is just as good as any other top quality book irrespective of genre, and a cruddy book can't be saved by being literary.

The SF writer Orson Scott Card talks in his excellent and perceptive books on writing about what he calls the MICE quotient: Milieu, Idea, Character and Event. His idea is these four attributes characterize any given story. Every story carries all four attributes of course, but in differing degree and mix. Mysteries and SF tend to be Idea stories: there's an intellectual problem to solve. Military adventure tends to be driven by the grand event, usually a war. Fantasies often exist only to show off their world: they are predominantly Milieu stories. In fact most books major in one of the MICE attributes, minor in a second, and the remaining two trail along.

In this scheme the mysteries of Agatha Christie are Idea first, Character second, followed by Milieu and Event. Solving the intellectual problem of the crime is always dominant for her, and she peoples her stories with all manner of eccentric characters. The milieu may add to the charm but is much less a consideration. Grand events play almost no part in her stories.

The MICE categorization of my historical mysteries is probably Character first, Milieu second, then Idea, with Event trailing a distant fourth. That's despite me writing a genre in which the mysery to solve would normally be dominant, but I know from reader feedback that my characters steal the show, and the unusual period I'm writing in becomes almost a character in its own right. This is only my own guess and if any of my early readers see this I'd be fascinated to know what MICE quotient you'd give me.

Orson Scott Card's idea makes a great deal of sense to me. Note that it does away with genre altogether and is much more about the style of the book rather than the plot devices.

I suggest most people are consistent in their preference for books with a given MICE categorization, at least by the first two letters. For example an IC book is probably (but not certainly) either SF or a mystery. Is there a strong cross-over between SF and mystery readers? Yes there is.

The forces of blackness assault Bill Cameron

My agent-sibling Bill Cameron once said he was psychologically scarred for life because his step-mum made him eat Vegemite as a child. (I gather she was of an antipodean disposition).

It was Bill's trauma which inspired me to take Vegemite on my trip to the US, so I was devastated when he decided not to go to Bouchercon. Two kind ladies called Carrie and Jeanette saved the day when they offered to carry Bill's jar back to Portland.

And here is the result:




I didn't mention this until now because I wanted Bill to, errr, appreciate the surprise. Thank you Carrie and Jeannette!

Temples faced the rising sun

The amazingly brilliant Dr Alun Salt has published a paper called
The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples in which he demonstrates that temples were oriented when possible to face the rising sun.

This instantly caused me to say, "Uh oh," and go back and read every temple description I'd ever written. Luckily for me I'd only once committed myself, and I got it right that one time because Pausanias had told me the answer.

The title link is to the actual paper. Or you can read Alun's own blog article on same, or else read the article in the Times Online (!), or else read Mary Beard's commentary. Talk about making a splash.

Alun is a regular reader and occasional commenter on this blog. He's even been known to link to me, which frankly I take as a huge compliment because he's a for-real professsional archaeoastronomer and seriously knows what he's talking about.

Negotiating the fate of characters

Every now and then my wife forbids me to kill a character. A good example is Bathocles in my short story The Pasion Contract where, even as I was writing it, she told (ordered) me, "Bathocles has to live."

The moment Helen wants to protect someone, it's a signal for me to maim, mutilate or destroy the guy, because it's the characters you care about that mean something when they suffer. I've never actually diverted the plot to run over a character Helen likes, but then I've never really needed to since if you're stuck in one of my stories then you're already in great danger.

This has led to some conversations that would be considered unusual in most households, such as an intense and prolonged negotiation over how many toes I was allowed to cut off one nice but care-worn fellow, Helen arguing for none and me for all but one per foot. The decision turned on how many toes were required for the character to hobble about for the rest of his life. Some of the negotiation was carried out in a public eatery and I wish to apologise to the people sitting next to us.

This reached the stage where I said, "You do realise, don't you, these people don't actually exist?" She did, but apparently it doesn't matter, which is good news for me because it means the characters are working, but probably bad news for the characters. The moral would appear to be, try hard to stay out of my stories.