The story of a crime, or Nathaniel Hawthorne and crime fiction
_-_Salem,_Massachusetts.jpg) |
| The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts |
- Portrays the slow ripple effect of a crime.
- Speaks with sympathy of a socially low character cheated out of his land by a socially prominent one.
- Is neither Scandinavian nor French.
What crime novels can you name that portray a crime's effects on those not directly involved with it, years or even generations later?
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Labels: Massachusetts, miscellaneous, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 6:25 PM
4 Comments:
Hi Peter,
Interesting thoughts on Hawthorn. Never thought of him that way. Novels showing a ripple effect? A number of Ross MacDonald's novels follow that pattern - crime in the past effecting others, usually the children of the culprits, years later: THE GOODBYE LOOK is one like that, as I remember, and so is THE UNDERGROUND MAN. A bunch of them really. That was his basic story.
Scott
Hawthorne, with an e, I should say.
Scott, you get a pass on Hawthorn. His ancestor, a hanging judge at the Salem witch trials, spelled the name Hathorne, so you are only honoring a tradition of orthographical uncertainty.
I've read little of Ross Macdonald, and I've had more to say about his overblown Freudianism than about other aspects of his stories. But he's a good choice. Here's a bit from my post about The Galton Case:
"Previous authors had made the long-buried family secret a motif. Macdonald made it the substance of this story, and he unfolds the suspense slowly and relentlessly."
Freudian analysis is highly accommodating to slow ripple effects.
Serendipity. I had Hawthorne on the brain last night and started thinking about "Rappaccini's Daughter", and downloaded it for my Kindle. It's been decades since I read it, and all I have is just the vaguest notion of the poison garden and the poisonous woman.
I can't think of any crime books with a ripple effect, but so many of Ruth Rendell's books as Barbara Vine take place long after a crime has been committed, often a generation, so the effects of long-buried secrets are central to the story.
Post a Comment
<< Home