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                                             June 27, 2014

Upon listening to the librivox reading of
J.S. Fletcher's "The Paradise Mystery" (1921):

There's a glimmer of an idea at the core of
this book: the amateur detective here is a
completely unsympathetic character who is        He's a cynical young man
trying to gather blackmail material to get       much like the hero of
a hold over his main murder suspect.             Stendhal's "The Red and the
                                                 Black"-- right down to a
   This is almost completely undercut            worship of Napoleon.  He
   by a lack of discipline in handling           has a scheme to win the
   narrative viewpoint-- it's told in            heroine over by applying
   third person, and as is often the             pressure on her guardian--
   case, that's taken as license to              which is to say he's a very
   float around at the author's whim--           unrealistic realist, but
   first, we follow the man who becomes          there are a lot of those
   the suspect, then we're with the              about.
   scheming "detective" for a long time,
   then abruptly we're following some
   police detectives, then back to the
   schemer for a stretch, and finally
   we land with someone else-- I forget    POV
   who, the original suspect I think.



   This *is* a mystery novel, you know:
   fundamentally, someone is trying to
   find something out about some other
   people.

   There are only two choices for handling
   this drifting POV: (1) either it never
   happens to alight inside the mind of
   the guilty party-- and anyone it does         Following this first choice,
   visit can be crossed off the list; or         it then turns out that the
   (2) the author can have the POV merely        story is largely about the
   pretending to be telling all to the           actions of a figure unknown
   reader, but actually holding back on          to us.
   certain things (things which really
   would be completely dominating their
   thoughts).                                    Following the second choice,
                                                 the characters that the
                                                 author is pretending to show
                                                 us may not really be on
                                                 display: there's a very
                                                 arbitrary cheat going on--


                                    For me, the *fear* that the
                                    author might be going for
                                    this sort of cheat hovers
                                    over the narrative and
                                    becomes a distracting element.


      Late in the story, when the POV leaves
      our young would-be blackmailer briefly,
      we learn from some other characters that
      he has apparently done something very
      suspicious-- something which slipped his
      mind when we were riding along inside it.
      Then this suspicious element is
      completely dropped, and left unexplained.
      (Red herring, ha ha!  Or something.)

      It's the sort of thing
      that leaves you
      wondering "Is this an             In general, the resolution
      unrevised first draft?"           of the mystery turns into
                                        quite a mess:

                                        Four different factions (by my count),
                                        have all independently descended on one
                                        small english town, without any
                                        explanation of the coincidence.







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