Prologue

Hello, and welcome to my blog! Pardon the disorder, I’m still moving in and setting up (which is to say that there’ll be some changes made, layout wise). My purpose in starting a blog is simple: to review and discuss fair-play mystery fiction, what John Dickson Carr so rightly called “the grandest game in the world.”

As a bit of background, I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of mystery fiction since I was a child. Strictly speaking, my first exposure to the genre was through the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I loved. I don’t really count this though, since I didn’t know they were mysteries; in fact, I had never even heard of mystery fiction. To me, back then, Sherlock Holmes was sui generis, and so couldn’t lead me on to discover the larger genre. But a couple of years after first reading Sherlock Holmes, I read an Agatha Christie novel (specifically The Secret Adversary). Though this isn’t a novel that’s known for the quality of its mystery (indeed, it’s been argued that it isn’t fair-play at all), it was entertaining, and it made aware of the world of mystery fiction. After reading it, I quickly sought out more Christie, and eventually discovered other authors, such as Sayers, Stout, Innes, Carr (my favorite mystery writer), Caudwell, and Queen, to name but a few.

I’ve long considered starting a blog like this, since (like many mystery fans) I don’t know anyone else who reads this sort of book, and so have no one to discuss them with. However, I have always decided against doing so, because I worried that, sooner or later, I would fall out of the habit of writing for the blog. This isn’t just a groundless fear either; multiple times I’ve set myself the goal of writing reviews of the mysteries I read (not for a blog, just for my own reference), but these attempts never lasted long. The main reasons for this were a chronic lack of time and motivation. (After all, when you’re not doing anything with them except reading them at an indeterminate future time, writing reviews tends to take a fairly low priority…) I thought that perhaps having some project in mind might help, something that might allow me to impose at least a loose structure on what I wrote, but I had no idea what form that might take. Recently though, a promising possibility presented itself.

Earlier this week, on the blog The Detection Collection, a syllabus of detective fiction was published, aiming to provide a comprehensive historical overview of fair-play mystery fiction. The syllabus had been under discussion for a while, and I’m proud to say that I (along with many other, more knowledgeable fans) was somewhat involved in its compilation. While I am hardly an impartial observer, I think it represents an excellent resource, both for those interested in the genre’s history and for new readers. I was, however, somewhat appalled to see how many of the works listed that I hadn’t read, even after fifteen years of mystery reading.

Naturally, my first thought was that I should work through the unread titles on the syllabus, filling the gaps in my reading. It was only a bit later that I realized that not only would this project be immensely enjoyable, it would also supply exactly the sort of framework that I was looking for to keep me on track with writing reviews. For once the old idea of starting a blog seemed plausible. And so, here we are.

The majority of the posts I plan to write here fit into three categories. The first is simply reviews of various mysteries I read, watch, play, or listen to. The second, which is a subset of the first, consists of reviews of works that appear on the syllabus. In addition to discussing the works themselves, in these reviews I plan to look at how they fit into, represent, or have shaped the development of the genre. The final category will be posts not about any specific works, but about the characteristics, tropes, and devices used in mystery fiction. In particular, I have some topics in mind that I would like to write longer form essays on.

As yet, I’m not entirely sure what my posting schedule will be, especially as my schedule will change drastically once the next academic year begins. At the moment, I plan to post twice monthly, with the first review going up on June 1^st. It’s one I wrote a couple of years ago, about a novel that I consider to be among the best mysteries published in the past few years.

That’s pretty much all I have to say at the moment, except that I’m excited to start this project. I hope that you find my ramblings interesting or useful, and, of course, comments are always welcome.

(Come to think of it, I suppose that’s not quite all I have to say, as I should probably offer an explanation of the blog’s title. Its original source is from Act II of Hamlet, where the melancholy Dane refers to a troupe of actors as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” In his introduction to The Anthony Boucher Chronicles, a volume of collected reviews by author and critic Anthony Boucher, Francis M. Nevins uses the phrase in reference to Boucher’s view that “you could get a better idea of just what it was like to be alive in that time from reading the fiction of an earlier period than you could from reading a factual history.” Thus, mystery novels serve as the abstracts and chronicles of the time when they were written.)