While up in
Point Reyes a few weeks ago, doing revisions for my second Quill Gordon mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, I found myself in an interesting market for reading
material.
During the
days I was working away on the book, and after dinner I would typically put in
another hour or two, depending on what I needed to hit my work goal for the
day. That left me in the position of having an hour or hour and a half before
bedtime for free reading, and though it might seem like a busman’s holiday,
what I wanted was to read mysteries.
The problem
with that was that I couldn’t be sure how much (if any) time I would have the
following night or the night after that. I was holding myself to strict work
goals and couldn’t really predict how long it would take to meet them. So I
didn’t want to start a novel and have to set it aside for a few days. I wanted
something I could start and finish in that night’s time.
The Virtue of the Novella
For that
problem, there’s a perfect answer — the novella or novelette. Longer than a
short story and shorter than a novel, it can typically be read in the time I
had most of those evenings. The problem is finding a suitable supply.
Even in its
heyday, the novelette was the funny uncle of fiction. It was pretty long for
most magazines and too short to be bound up as a book. The authors who wrote
them typically published books that collected three or four works in the genre,
and that was what I wound up with. (Interestingly, owing to the popularity of
ebooks, novellas and novelettes are making a bit of a comeback, with some
authors issuing them individually, at lower prices than a full novel.)
A couple of
weeks before the trip, at Barnes & Noble, I came across Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Mews, a collection of four
shorter cases of Hercule Poirot. It was originally published in 1937 under the
title Dead Man’s Mirror, which was
another of the stories in the book. There were four stories in all, ranging in
length from 39 to 106 pages.
Can Be Read in One Sitting
Typically
the stories a mystery writer does as novellas or short stories are ones that
have a good idea, but one the writer doesn’t want to flesh out into a
full-length novel. This was early Christie, from the first 15 years of her
50-plus year career, so you’re mostly reading the stories for plot and
atmosphere. Of course, if you’re reading for plot, you could do a lot worse
than Agatha Christie.
In any
event, the novellas got me through two of those six dark winter evenings I was
alone in the cottage. (I’d read two of the stories before I left.) For the rest
of the week I worked on a short-story anthology I’d picked up at a used
bookstore and brought along.
That book
was Famous Stories of Code and Cipher,
edited by Raymond T. Bond and originally published in 1947. It had everything
from classics such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and M.R. James’s “The
Treasure of Abbot Thomas” to works by writers that even I have never heard of
(Harvey O’Higgins, Lillian De La Torre). I now know more about code than I
think I want to, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to work a code or cipher
into one of my mystery novels.
Oh, and by
the way, one of the stories in the code book was by Agatha Christie. She did
everything.
