|
When I was in high school or maybe college, I came to the conclusion that bad popular fiction was that which was quite easy to read but every once in a while used a word that I was completely unfamiliar with. It's my recollection that this idea came to me while I was reading Leslie Charteris.
It was my suspicion that he deliberately threw in the occasional head-scratcher to make the reader believe that he was a better and more sophisticated writer than the book would lead the reader to believe; and that the book was higher class than it was.
|