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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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Maureen Tan Back in the early 1960s when I began reading mysteries, hundreds of yellowing, dog-eared paperbacks bought for a nickel introduced me to the conventions, jargon, and attitudes of decades gone by. I learned about roadsters and rumble seats and discovered that hansom cabs were horse powered. I could make change for a fin (had one ever been slipped to me), understood the painful implications of getting a tit caught in a wringer, and knew that it wasn’t good to have a spanner in the works. I didn’t stumble when someone cranked a telephone, sent a wire, found a crumpled carbon, or snapped a garter. Mysteries gave me access to tidbits of popular and quirky culture from decades past; entertaining stories of murder, deception, and ultimate justice helped me understand my elders and enriched my view of the world I lived in. Today’s popular entertainment — television and blockbuster movies — reflect a more uniform, colorless present and past than did the books of my childhood. No matter when or where stories are set, no matter that the larger sets and the characters’ dress are historically accurate-many of the beliefs, conditions of living, speech patterns, and attitudes portrayed are simply minor variations of today’s middle-class, middle-American culture. So what are my hopes for tomorrow’s mystery novels? I hope they provide the same things I love in today’s novels and in yesterday’s — preservation and appreciation of our past. Like snapshots or 8mm movies or videotapes, I want mystery novels to capture and present views of culture, locales, and personalities that are strictly bounded by time and place. I have no doubt that tomorrow’s writers will create stories that portray a diversity of races, professions, and locales. I hope that their books will also demonstrate how the context of a particular time affected the people who lived in it. I want a schoolgirl in 2010 to be surprised that only courageous women wore pants to the office in 1963 and that someone could be murdered for belonging to the wrong race. I want my grandchildren to figure out a scary puzzle in the context of the 1970s, when the Cold War was in full swing and the USSR still existed. I want tomorrow’s readers to be reminded of a time when people said things like "dude" and "no way" and when the internet and cellular phones were becoming common technology — technology that could be used with criminal intent. Finally, I’m looking forward to the year 2050, when I will be pushing the century mark and some clever young mystery writer will set a story in the "paperless" society of the 1990s, at a time when we worried about Y2K and some predicted that books would one day cease to exist. Maureen Tan is the author of two suspense novels featuring Jane Nichols, most recently Run Jane Run. |