Hildegarde

Every once in a while, I screw up a blog post so badly that I have no idea where to start to correct the misimpression I’ve caused, and that turns out to be true today.

It seems as if most of you took me to mean that “hard boiled” was anything with a lot of gore in it and “soft boiled” was another name for “cozy.”

The first and most important thing to understand is that “the basic forms of the detective story” are not the same thing as “the basic forms of the mystery novel.”

There are all kinds of mystery novels that are not detective stories–police procedurals, action adventure, thriller, serial killer, Carl Hiassen…

Detective novels are specifically novels about detection.

Hard boiled is best characterized–in the historical form–as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.  In the modern era, think Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshavsky and, at least arguably, Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar.

Hard boiled detective novels are:  about professionals, almost always private eyes; usually in the first person told by the PI himself, and if not in third person SINGLE viewpoint from the PI’s point of view; and characterized by a cynical outlook on the corruption levels of local police and government, corporations, and rich people.

To be fair, however, the cynicism often varies its targets in more modern examples of the form.

Soft boiled is also a form of PI story–professional private investigator; first person from the PI’s point of view or SINGLE viewpoint third person from the PI’s point of view; much less cynicism and blood.

There’s lots of good soft boiled fiction out there.  In the Golden Age, both Nero Wolfe and the original pulp Perry Mason series would qualify as soft boiled.

Sue Grafton’s alphabet series is soft boiled.  So is most of Spenser’s Parker, although he tried really, really hard to be hard boiled instead.  Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlisle series is soft boiled, too.

Diane Mott Davison, however, does not write soft boiled novels–she writes cozies.

I didn’t include cozies on the list of basic types because they aren’t basic.  They’re derivative. 

Cozies are what you get when a writer wants desperately to be Agatha Christie but doesn’t actually get what it was Christie was doing.

In that way, they most resemble category Regency romances, where writers who want to be just like Jane Austen pick up on all the superficial exotic stuff and miss the point entirely.

That said, there are good cozies.  I give you Charlotte McLeod’s Peter Shandy series, for instance, and Joan Hess’s Maggody. 

I’m told that Georgette Heyer does excellent Regency, although the last one I read was thirty years ago, so I don’t know.

Traditionals have to have a detective, but he or she does not absolutely have to be a professional.

Other than that, they are characterized by the number of points of view they offer the reader–third person MULTIPLE viewpoint, with significant stretches of the novel devoted to the points of view of various suspects, NOT the detective’s.

You can see that in Agatha Chritie if you look–in Cat Among The Pigeons, for instance, the entire book is given over to points of view of suspects, and Hercule Poirot doesn’t even show up until the last fifth of the novel. 

There’s plenty of traditional being published today–everything P.D. James does is in the traditional form, with huge amounts of every novel being devoted from points of view of people other than any of the detectives.

And, yes, Gregor Demarkian novels are traditionals.

You may read them to get news of Gregor and Bennis, but if you look at the books, you’ll see that at least half of every novel is given over to points of view other than Gregor’s (or anybody else’s on Cavanaugh Street, unless they’re also suspects, as in Bleeding Hearts).

Hell, in Somebody Else’s Music, I could have cut out all of Gregor’s chapters and still have had a perfectly coherent novel.

Plenty of other people do traditionals, though–the Barbara Vine Ruth Rendell standalones, Scott Turow at least some of the time. 

I think all I was trying to say was that soft boiled seems to generate hundreds of volumes a year, and very few of them are Sue Grafton.  Mostly they seem to be this sort of mushy adventure maybe when we’re not talking about stuff and then somebody will solve it and it’s over.

And I just don’t see the point.