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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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Mystery's Second Century In our November/December 1999 issue, we asked writers, publishers, booksellers and our reviewers to look ahead, and discuss their hopes and fears for the mystery genre's next one hundred years. We are continuing the conversation throughout the year 2000, and welcome your comments (email to: secondcentury@droodreview.com). We began this century without a clear concept of the mystery as a genre - both in a commercial and in a literary sense. It has not been that long since authors and critics began writing rules for mysteries, and while we can point to a few great examples of mysteries written prior to 1900, we recognize that as a form, the mystery really came into its own at the beginning of the twentieth century. The business of publishing for a mass readership is even younger - think, especially, about the fact that our current concept of paperback books is only about 60 years old. In its infancy - in this first century of the mystery genre - our field
has achieved a great deal: literary triumph and strong success in the
marketplace. We can declare with confidence that the best fiction being
written today is being written in our genre. And we can point to any number
of objective measures to show that the business of mysteries is healthy
today. We asked writers, publishers, booksellers and our regular contributors to look ahead, and consider where we're headed in our genre's second century. Original contributions (reprinted here from our November/December 1999 issue) by: Cathie & John Celestri Our regular contributors' comments (also reprinted from the November/December
1999 issue) by: Follow-up essays by: Barbara D'Amato (reprinted from our May/June 2000 issue) We welcome your comments on and contributions to this section. Selected comments will be posted here online and published in The Drood Review. Email us at secondcentury@droodreview.com |