Future crime fiction artifacts?
Recent posts here at Detectives Beyond Borders about Fredric Brown's "The Wench Is Dead" (also his The Wench Is Dead) and Dan J. Marlowe's Strongarm raised the question of artifacts.
By artifacts I mean narrative and thematic characteristics or incidental features that make a story seem especially characteristic of the time it was written (In crime fiction a story's time usually means its decade), and I don't mean the term pejoratively.
Earlier this week, an article by Christopher Fowler's article in the Independent was decidedly pejorative about what Fowler sees as the stagnant state of English crime writing. Despite the profound social and demographic changes the country has gone through in recent years, Fowler writes:
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
By artifacts I mean narrative and thematic characteristics or incidental features that make a story seem especially characteristic of the time it was written (In crime fiction a story's time usually means its decade), and I don't mean the term pejoratively.
Earlier this week, an article by Christopher Fowler's article in the Independent was decidedly pejorative about what Fowler sees as the stagnant state of English crime writing. Despite the profound social and demographic changes the country has gone through in recent years, Fowler writes:
"(T)here is a part of England that forever has an alcoholic middle-aged copper with a dead wife, investigating a murdered girl who turns out to be an Eastern European sex worker. This idea might have surprised a decade ago, but it's sold to us with monotonous regularity. It's not gritty, it's a cliché."The line about murdered Eastern European sex workers struck a chord. Such a motif is likely to mark recent crime novels as artifacts of their time. What other themes or situations in crime stories of the last ten of fifteen years are likely to mark them as typical of their time?
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Labels: Christopher Fowler, Dan J. Marlowe, Fredric Brown, the Independent