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The Drood Review Mystery's Second Century A forum on the future of the genre Original essays Our thoughts Follow-ups This site is copyright (c) 2000-3 by The Drood Review. The Drood Review
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Pat Kehde If the present trend continues, as Dick Nixon so famously said when losing the election, I fear for the state of mysteries in the next century. Here’s why. If the world is more and more ruled by oligarchs under the guise of global business, rational governments ruled by laws that provide access to the common man will be slowly more and more impotent. Mysteries rest on the enlightened and democratic idea that one person can study an event, understand the immediate physical and emotional issues around that event, freely pursue the perpetrator, and justice will triumph. How can this go on in a world ruled by corporations so big that nobody inside the corporation has to take any responsibility? Where we don’t have any idea about the connections, rules, goals of the global combines that have power over our lives? It seems to me that the individual responsibility of the sleuth is going to be up against a vast, hazy and powerful mass. The second problem for the world and for mysteries is the possibility of widespread violence disrupting our fairly orderly world. Radical movements all over the world seem to me to be gaining strength, and of course there is the always present violence of our urban western world. If things get too chaotic, it’s difficult to have much faith that a PI or cop can devote his or her energies to a private crime like murder. It would be sort of like writing a mystery set in Sicily or Afghanistan. Too much corruption, too little power with the individual, and too much chaos. I hope these depressing visions don’t hold up and that we have many more wonderful books about various knights errant fighting murder and mayhem in suburban backyards, computer businesses, developers’ offices, and maybe even a vicarage in 2050. Pat Kehde is the owner of The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas |