Saturday, May 15, 2010

Detective Fiction Read with The Maltese Falcon Reads Together

While reading The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, I read some detective novels from the present. Through Novelist, a novels-by-subject finder "the maltese falcom" brings up a novel by Joanne Dobson called The Maltese Manuscript. I read this detective novel and found that its series informs readers about women writers in the Nineteenth Century.
Within Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth Century America,, by Joanne Dobson, is an Emily Dickinson quote from a letter in which Dickinson comments about "newspaper reporting of industrial calamities". The comments are from Dobson:
Who writes those funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally? The author, too, relates them in such a sprightly way, that they are quite attractive.
Here the message pulls away from the subject matter; violence and personal calamity in a newly industrialized society are subordinate to matters of literary style, causing a fracture of expectation upon which the success of the passage, as a piece of writing, depends Through felicitous combinations, words are wrenched away from their meanings: accidents are "funny"…
(Perhaps this Dickinson observation about language led Joanne Dobson to write her series of detective novels to enlarge knowledge about women writers in history. )

1 comment:

NeS Project said...

I stumbled across your blog by just browsing through blogger blogs... I saw that you're a writer and I thought you might be interested to check out my project: the Neverending Story Project, which is a short story collaborative writing effort!

www.neverendingstoryproject.com

Ta! :)