a new link

Rare that I find one of these (and I probably need to clean out my sidebar and get rid of blogs that have quit blogging) but I happened upon "The Passing Tramp" today - it's a blog about mysteries and detective fiction, including vintage mysteries. So. I had to add it.

Also, kind of scrolling through, I found this quotation, from "A Twenties American Newspaper":

The startling fact has recently been disclosed in a survey of the bookstores of Ann Arbor that while students at Michigan read poetry and essays, and professors' wives read biography and novels, professors read detective fiction.

Granted, in the 20s, I probably would have been more likely to have been a professor's wife than a professor myself (or I would have wound up something like a spinster schoolteacher), but yes. That makes me smile.

(Also, I wonder what college students read today? I remember when I was a student at Michigan I pretty much read anything, from Nero Wolfe novels (that's when I first got into mysteries) to "classic" novels to stuff like "And the Band Played On" (AIDS was still a new and very scary thing when I was in college)

I've often said I like mysteries (or detective fiction) because it carries within it the theme of restoration: the world goes wrong, something is upset. But someone, either a professional who's done this for years or an amateur who is just that clever, figures out who did the wrong thing. And the person who did the wrong thing is punished* and things are restored, as best they can, to how they were before.

(*Or in a few cases, punishes themselves - there is a famous Poirot mystery where the murderer commits suicide rather than face trial)

And I find that narrative oddly comforting: the idea that the broken world can maybe be fixed a little and restored. But also that someone who is intelligent, persistent, and attentive to detail is the one who saves the day. (Sometimes it seems a great deal of pop culture celebrates stupidity and loudness, so I like the celebration of intelligence and quiet that many detective novels are).

But I also wonder: could there be something about the professorial (at least of the old-school sort, and frankly, in a lot of ways, I am old-school compared to many of my peers) mindset that is drawn to detective fiction? Is it that it's a vicarious thrill? A puzzle to pick apart? Or are there others who like the idea of "a world restored"?

(My mother is also a fan of detective fiction and I know she once commented she had read that JFK had liked mystery novels. I have no idea if that's correct - I figured he'd have read spy stories, actually - but her implication was "this is something intelligent people like to read for fun" and of course I find that flattering, anyway).