Monday, February 3, 2025

A Bad Habit

HERE'S a humorous article that reveals more about detective fiction and the reading habits thereof at the turn of the last century than the author might have realized:


Source: "The Last Chapter First" in "Literary Chat," Munsey's Magazine, July 1900. Online (HERE).

So we see from this that readers were expecting more from detective fiction than just blood and thunder, although there was already plenty of that. They were reading to see whodunit. Only later would the hardboiled school eventually eclipse the whodunit.

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