[Hitch]

Originally Posted by drjd

D..D..Don't you like it?

I love it. I do. ESG was a master of his craft, really.

Incidentally, I am arranging all my books of Erle Stanley Gardner in proper folders right now. He is one of my choicest writers and I have read all his books of Perry Mason, Bertha Cool & Donald Lam and Doug Selby series. I'm trying to convert some mobi format ebooks bought from Amazon years back, to epub format through caliber. I'm not an expert of Calibre though, and rarely use conversion. I'm also trying to find other ebooks of Gardner written under various pen-names, which seems a difficult task.

Good god. To this day, most of my books--the books I own--are still in print. I had some thousands before I started with eBooks, so...I have a ways to go yet. ;-)

And nothing on God's green earth would convince me to convert my personal library. NOZZING. I don't want to do for recreation what I do for work. No-thank-yew-verra-much.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My basic assumption for mysteries is that "playing fair" means all of the clues the detective uses to solve the case are revealed to the reader, and the reader should be able to also solve the case. The trick is revealing the clues in such a fashion that the reader doesn't realize they have been. Agatha Christie was the absolute master at that sort of indirection.

Indeed she was, and so is Gardner. And yes, my concept of playing fair is that we get the clues, and thus, we can detect the criminal. If we don't, well, that's our brains' faults, not the writer's. Good prestidigitation is a true art.

But I suspect Doyle was writing Sherlock Holmes stories before that notion of fair play became established. We do have fun watching Watson trying to use Holmes' methods and failing miserably.

Yes, the concept of "fair play" in mysteries really came later.

But some mysteries I read aren't "Whodunits". An example is later work by the late Nicholas Freeling (who wrote the Inspector Van Der Valk and the Henri Castang series.) Who the killer was is clear early on. Freeling is more interested in exploring the motivations, and why the killer committed murder. They are character portraits using mystery as a framing device.
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Dennis

To me, those are not really "whodunits," as you note. They are explorations of human behavior, etc. Somewhat like Columbo, in a weird way. Or other authors, where the enjoyment is in the "how" of how the protagonist traps the badguy, or even those that explore the depths of the kinky psyche. I enjoy those, but I don't perceive those as mysteries in any real sense. To me, deciding the whodunit is the joy of it.

(It's like watching something relatively mindless, like "Death in Paradise," or whatever it's called, or Father Brown in this newest iteration. The mystery isn't; you can figure out who did it in the first 5 minutes, tops. The enjoyment is the ensemble, or the comfort-food factor of the environment, the coziness of it, etc. Altho I suspect that "Death in Paradise" is probably DOA, given their filming location--after all, Guadeloupe, where it's filmed, is right next to Dominica, which I know ALL TOO WELL has been scraped naked by God's very own Grader, the last honking Hurricane. Utterly devastated Dominica, I mean...in ways that cannot be imagined if not seen.)

Hitch