/lit/ - Literature

why should it be?

Mystery is the worst genre fiction imo. I've never read a good mystery.
Even the "classics" (Christie, Doyle) are total garbage

>>5911845
Mystery is similar to every other genre but one of its distinctions is that most authors that work solely within its bounds write according to a well established formula. A good mystery novel, just like a good comedy is very hard to pull off. I recommend reading The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It's the best I've read. If you know the language pick it up in the original French.

>>5911845
i agree with this dude, even the edgar allan poe's "mystery" tales are worthless, they're all the same

>>5911444
because the wiki is for good books

>>5911871
i almost used him as an example. Poe's mysteries were obviously forward-thinking as shit but they're not fun to read.

>>5911845
idk, imo it's no worse than action novels like anything by le carre, and doyle did escapism about as well as anyone else.

it hasn't been approved by the general public like 98% of lit's taste

Nice trips.
Christie is a very basic writer, it's something you read in the train or while sunbathing. Even as a thriller writer she isn't too good, the solution always goes away from the initial bounds (which defeats the process of showing clues to the reader) and at the same time she's always so evident and unidimentional that you guess what she's gonna contradict. She was just a best seller writer a la Dan Brown, nothing more.
It's cool if you like it though, you can like whatever shit you want.

>>5911845
The thing is that the perfect mystery novel could perfectly bend into just literary fiction, the central point that moves the genre can be easily taken away from the genre qualities.

>>5914186
>the solution always goes away from the initial bounds (which defeats the process of showing clues to the reader)
Well, same goes for Doyle, and as far as I am aware, he invented the genre, didn't he?

>>5914238
It's said that Poe invented it, but there are older works that could be considered part of the genre if we drop the urban/police angle (which is a pretty big part for some people)

>>5914277
Dubs checked.

Which older works would be considered pieces of the mystery genre? Maybe I have a brain fart, but I can't name any. They are probably rather obvious.

>>5914314
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective_fiction#Beginnings_of_detective_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_crime_fiction#Crime_fiction_in_history

There are some mentions of the bible and the thousand and one nights, but the genre is tied to the police and I guess it needs at least the concept of law and modern society to work. The idea of solving a mystery has always been part of human consciousness, someone dedicating their lives and getting payed for doing it not so much.

>>5911444
Christie is a very poor writer. She did wrote great books (like "And then there were none" and "The Secret Adversary") but most of her stuff is garbage.

In particular, the solution for the orient express is unbelievable and ridiculous.

>>5911845
I'd say that Raymond Chandler wrote ok books. Not very good but far from being garbage.


>>5914238
>Well, same goes for Doyle, and as far as I am aware, he invented the genre, didn't he?
I disagree. Lots of Holmes stories have a solution that falls in the expected boundaries and deduced from the clues found in the novel; now, it's worth saying that usually they have a pretty obvious solution in which the reader can hardly be suprised.