In
his excellent mystery My Late Wives
(1946), John Dickson Carr, writing as Carter Dickson, tells the story of serial
killer Roger Bewlay. With a wittily observant eye, Carr shows how Bewlay
targets vulnerable virgins of a certain age (early thirties, considered past
marriage in those days) and woos each according to her ruling passions. One he
takes to the symphony; another for long walks along the beach promenade at
Brighton, and so forth.
The
result, in each instance, is the same. The lady in question falls head over
heels in love, marries him quickly, signs over all her property to him, and
they go off on an idyllic honeymoon, from which only Bewlay and the lady’s
property emerge. A chance occurrence leads police to become suspicious and
another allows them to close the net on Bewlay. But at the end, he slips away
and vanishes into the vastness of metropolitan London.
And
that’s just the first 12 pages. The rest of the book takes place 15 years
later, when it appears that Bewlay has returned to his old ways, and the
detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, attempts to catch him once and for all.
Telling the Story Succinctly
Carr,
a master storyteller if ever there was one, was able to cram enough material
for an entire book into a fairly short chapter. In today’s world of mysteries
and thrillers, the opposite seems to be happening. More and more books seem to
be taking 250 pages of story and stretching it into 350-400 pages.
How
and when this happened is a mystery to me, but I can trace some examples. One
successful author began writing about 30 years ago and originally wrote brisk
250-page books. Then she started adding characters, and in subsequent books,
each character had to be brought in, often to the detriment of the narrative.
On the other hand, she sells way more books than I do, so either the readers
don’t care, or they like her enough to put up with it.
The
bloat in book size affects even older books. I have in hand a recently
published copy of Agatha Christie’s Why
Didn’t They Ask Evans? In this version, the spacing between lines is
generous to a fault, as are the margins. That makes what was probably a
225-page book originally come out at 279 pages.
When
I wrote my mystery, The McHenryInheritance, I deliberately tried to keep it to 200-225 pages so it could
be read on a cross-country plane flight or on a rainy afternoon. It came in at
200, but I wonder if anyone appreciates the brevity.
Longer Movies, Too
Movies,
like books, seem to be getting longer as well. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, writing
about her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, noted that a number of the films he
made for Warner Brothers in the 1930s were an hour and ten minutes long. These
days, it’s hard to find any movie that comes in at less than two hours. It
seems as if fewer directors today know how to move a story along, the way
directors like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks used to do.
In
1935, MGM made a movie of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, starring Greta Garbo and Frederic March. The book is more than
800 pages, but after some competent scriptwriters got through with it, and it
was turned over to veteran director Clarence Brown, he was able to get Anna
under the train in a brisk hour and 35 minutes. If they tried to make it today,
they would sink so much into stars, costumes, props and locations, it would
turn into a three-hour epic and probably be less entertaining than Brown’s
version. Less is often more.
