Over the past few months, enervated by minor illnesses and the lingering nuisance of ingrown eyelashes that make reading for pleasure less than pleasurable, I have been busying myself performing the mentally undemanding task of cataloguing my digital collection of detective and mystery magazines, most of which, for the reason aforementioned, still await my perusal.
Not one to embrace chaos or relish disorder, I derive comfort from such indexing. The virtue of record-keeping is not simply its own reward, however. After all, owing to a dogged determination that some may prefer to label “anal retentiveness” or look upon as signs of life “somewhere on the spectrum,” I now have a fairly comprehensive overview of twentieth-century British and US American crime fiction, especially by writers active during the so-called golden age of murder mysteries between the two world wars, authors whose rules-governed puzzles resonate with us once more in a period of heightened global uncertainties and the attendant anxieties to which they gives rise.
I was just completing, for the time being, my currently 139-page-long single-spaced crimino-bibliography, replete with cross-references and annotations, when I happened on an item that brought home again how elusive and downright illusory any attempts are to escape, via fictional chronicles of crimes long solved, from the actual and ongoing illegalities of today, not least the enforced lawlessness in the rewilded West of the by now all but nominal United States.
Continue reading ““Trump … and Trump Again”: Pulp, Politics and the Impossibility of Getting Away from the One Who Gets Away with Murder”
Harry Heuser 