Friday, April 10, 2015

More shots in the dark, and a round-up of the usual crime suspects at Off the Cuff

(All photos by your humble blogkeeper)
Over at Off the Cuff, Dietrich Kalteis and Martin J. Frankson talk about crime fiction influences. They get to the usual suspects (Chandler, Hammett, and so on), but not before the discussion takes an interesting detour or two. Their exhange takes up a question I asked a while back in a post called "End of story, or what ever happened to plot?"  Read theirs, read mine, and discuss.

Dietrich again illustrates the post with one of my noir photographs (above/right), this one from especially close to home. And here's another recent shot of mine, not noir, but weird all the same, I think:

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Labels: , , , ,

4 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Perhaps the puzzle plots have been nearly exhausted and many writers are smart enough to explore the inexhaustible pool of characterization as the key to publication and sales. In other words, there are only so many ways in which a person can commit crimes, but there is no shortage of different personalities and behaviors.

Perhaps it also coincides -- a bit belatedly -- with the end of the conventional 19th c. novel, the transition to early 20th c. modernism, and the further evolution into mid-20th c. post-modernism. In other words, change is inevitable.

April 10, 2015  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

RT, you could be write. I wonder, to, if paranoia thrillers, both novels and movies, are a kind of mutated off spring of the old-time puzzle plots. The protagonist figures out who is committing the crime, but this matter for nothing, because the protagonist gets in the end anyway. It is surely no coincidence that a first flowering of paranoia movies happened right after people realized that there would be no Age of Aquarius.

April 10, 2015  
Blogger adrian mckinty said...

Peter, RT

I like puzzle plots, but they can feel awfully contrived if you dont work hard enough to make them believable. The best fun I ever had with a novel was writing the puzzle plot of In The Morning I'll Be Gone but Jesus it made my head hurt.

April 11, 2015  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

Adrian: I wonder how many crime writers who do not write traditional mysteries have nonetheless written a locked-room story, as you did in In the Morning I'll Be Gone. I suspect that most writers would take the easy way our and adopt a pseudonym for their puzzle books. That was quite a feat, to write a hard-boiledish crime locked-room mystery.

April 11, 2015  

Post a Comment

<< Home