A question for internet-land

[forsyth]

Okay, so. Why exactly are there so many different series about old ladies solving mysteries? Books and TV shows, the whole nine yards. Is it just because there's a large market of old ladies who like to read mysteries (and like gardening, or anything British)? Or did it start out with like Murder: She Wrote, and then the rest of the knockoffs spawned a genre around it, kinda like superheroes did with Superman?

Comments

[frustratedpilot]

It probably started with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series of novels in the 1920s (or so), tho' it might not have been the actual first.

[frustratedpilot]

Just looked up Christie's bio in the house's dead-tree encyclopedia. Miss Marple first appeared in print in 1930. There was another writer who started the genre back around the turn of the previous Century, but Miss Marple was the first "star" of the housewife detectives.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

It's probably part of the supergenre of detective novels where the detective is physically weaker than the usual 'bad guys' and so relies almost exclusively on brainpower. The other end of the spectrum is the kid-detective novels. There's also the disabled detective and the wimpy/unwilling detective (Jonathan Creek etc), all of whom get much more drama out of being captured or attacked.

This is somewhat separate from the more well-known detective genres (hard-boiled, noir, cop/ex-cop), where the protagonists can (and usually do) go hand-to-hand with miscreants, kick in doors, engage in car chases and back-alley pursuits, fire guns and so forth.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

It's really a British vs. American thing. The British mystery writers, typified by Agatha Christie, have generally tended to work in the "tea cozy" mystery genre, the sort of story where the detective brins all of the characters together in the drawing room at the end and reveals which one of them did it. American writers, such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, have tended to work in the two-fisted detective genre, where the detective isn't all that bright comparatively, the clues and their implications are pointed out as you go (in a tea cozy, the important clues are only revealed to be important at the end), the detective gets attacked by thugs, people walk through the door with guns in their hands, etc.

The genres aren't entirely national (Rex Stout, an American, wrote his Nero Wolfe stories in more of a tea cozy style). And I'm leaving out a couple of other mystery genres that don't really fit into either of these, such as the police procedural. But it's close enough for jazz.

The point of a tea cozy mystery is to find out whodunit; they're like puzzles. In the American detective genre, the mystery is an excuse for plot; they're more like adventure novels.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure they can be neatly divided up by "British" and "American" at this point, what with the Internet at all, but I think you're on to something. Though I suspect the success and copycat things, plus the number of housewives who read mysteries probably helped, too. Very few things have just one cause.

Also, I think some of it's a male v female thing.

And Sherlock Holmes, of course, doesn't fit neatly into either genre, because he was around before they divided.

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

Does Poirot?