The Ending

[John McFetridge]

A recent article in McLeans Magazine (kind of Time or Newsweek for Canada) was called, Dead: happily-ever-after endings and included:

“Romance is not seen as high literature right now,” says Russell Brown, professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto. The Jane Austen ending, in which the couple wanders off into the figurative or literal sunset after much hardship, has apparently become passé in the age of cynicism and conceit. “Modernists didn’t trust closure, and contemporary authors have opted for an even looser definition of an ending. It’s not as much happily-ever-after as it is nothing-ever-after,” Brown says.

The whole article can be read here.

Now, I guess happy endings for couples in crime fiction are quite rare, but there is usually some kind of closure in that the crime gets solved.

So, is there too much closure in crime fiction?

[Jack Getze]

I'm sure there are lots of people who want to read about misery and sadness, but I get enough on the news. As a reader, I want to be entertained by a good story, one that doesn't dwell on suffering.

[John McFetridge]

I guess the challenge then, when writing about crime, is not to make too light of it for the purposes of entertainment.

of course, we don't have to write about crime....

[John McFetridge]

Some people might say that's one of the differences between literature and genre - one represents life as the author sees it and one as the author would like it to be with justice served and closure and all that.

[Dana King]

It drives me crazy when books that are about murder or other violent crime wrap everything up into a "happy"ending. Bittersweet is probably the best we can hope for. The criminal can be caught and punished (often killed), but the victim is still dead, the ripple effects on family and friends continue. I like books that acknowledge in some way that this might be the best we can reasonably hope for from the situation, and am far more forgiving of books that give us less than that at the end than I am of those that give more.

[minervaK]

The discussion here puts me in mind of the book 'Night Train' by Martin Amis. Anyone read it? The crime is 'solved' at the end, but it's extremely unsatisfying, and damned if it didn't make me want to go and find more books by Martin Amis. Sadly, none of them were mysteries, so I only read one other, which I didn't care much for, to be honest. Still, that book sticks in my mind as one of the wildest literary rides I've ever taken in the genre.

MK
www.minervakoenig.com