Good Bye, Mystery!

~ Clarissa

I have realized that I need to stop reading mystery novels because I don’t enjoy them any longer. Maybe I grew out of the genre or something. It’s so sad because I’ve been a great fan of mystery for 26 years, since I read Agatha Christie’s phenomenal The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Am I doomed to only reading serious literature now? Nothing trashy? That is so sad.

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Published by Clarissa

14 thoughts on “Good Bye, Mystery!”

  1. A couple of quotes from one of my favorite writers:

    By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

    In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Hiney, Tom; Frank MacShane (2000). The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. pp. p. 77. ISBN 0871137860.

    Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

    From The Simple Art of Murder Atlantic Monthly. November 1945

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  2. There are seasons in reading, and tides, and perhaps you will find some other kind of ‘mind candy ‘ reading to enjoy, or come back to mysteries… It’s sad when old comforts stop working, though, isn’t it?

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  3. Maybe you’re becoming more …..hmmm…. neurotypical? It might be that if you lay off the mysteries and find some other genre for fun then after a few months or years you’ll enjoy mysteries again.

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  5. I can’t read contemporary fiction at all any more. It either bores me or pisses me off; maybe I have just had really bad luck picking books in recent years. I also can’t reread books and rewatch movies, as it turns out I remember everything too well and I am again bored. I don’t like fantasy, I can’t see the point — there is no effing magic, and medieval times were nothing to romanticize.

    But I have found out I really love science fiction, so that’s my go-to fun genre these days (aliens! robots! space travel! terrifying depths of space!).

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  7. Maybe this means you are now ready to write a mystery story of your own?

    Is there any particular reason why you find yourself bored with them now?

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  8. Very well, you shall have a serious book that also includes a few mentions about Agatha Christie …

    David Burke’s “The Lawn Road Flats”, at Amazon US:

    “A number of British artists, sculptors and writers were also drawn to the Flats, among them the sculptor and painter Henry Moore; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; and the crime writer Agatha Christie, who wrote her only spy novel N or M? in the Flats.”

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