How to Quickly Increase the Number of Classic Mysteries You've Read

The number of books included in the Crime Writers' Association (British) and Mystery Writers of America's lists of the top mystery novels of all time is daunting, totaling 149 entries. 

If you want to tally up your own been-there, read-that list, you could start with A Woman in White, the earliest entry, published in 1860. It also happens to be the longest, at 810 pages and 260506 words.

Instead, in its place, you could just as quickly read six shorter novels:  The Third Man, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Daughter of Time, and Devil in a Blue Dress. (You might be able to squeeze Little Caesar in there -- 160 pages, I couldn't find its word count.)

Here are the novels on the CWA/MWA list which are fewer than 65,000 words. Included are those that rank #1, 2 and 3 as the best all-time mystery novels, namely, The Daughter of Time, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and The Big Sleep (all available as ebooks for a quick download). I can vouch for these: they make for great reads. 

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Word Count Van Helsing, Part Five.

Did the Short Mystery Novel Have to Die?
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

Short novels make up some of the greatest representatives of the mystery art form. The following is excerpted from the first 30 selections of the combined American/British Mystery/Crime writers associations list of the top 100 mystery novels of all time. Presented in the table below are those novels with less than 70,000 words. By this standard, a full thirteen of the top thirty selections were short. 




These MWA and CWA lists were compiled in the 1990s and therefore the novels come from a time before that. In contrast, if you look at the past 25 years of the Edgar Awards for Best Mystery Novels, not a single selection ran less than 80,000 words. What happened?

Let's go back in time. The development of mysteries over the course of the 20th century were in part driven by the presence of the pulp magazines and cheap novels of the 30s through the 50s. Several of the all-time classics from that period were pulpy, punchy and short, for example: The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and I, The Jury. Many of the first generation of pulp writers had passed on by the time the seventies rolled in. Their immediate heirs were not supported by the pulp magazines but did continue the tradition of reasonably short novels, often with gumshoes in starring roles. These authors included Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Gregory McDonald and several others of the MacDonald clan.

A second tradition comprised a large part of this period of mysteries. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 1940s there existed the golden age of detectives. During this era Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, among others, wrote pithy, compelling novels. Agatha Christie continued on producing short novel bestsellers until the 1970s. These novels were often brief because they were dominated by the puzzle. But why did the "puzzle" mysteries disappear?

Other than the works of Agatha Christie, few novels on the New York Times Adult Fiction Bestseller Lists of the 1960s and 70s were brief. The lists were dominated by masters of the monster-sized novel: James Michener, James Clavell, Arthur Hailey, Leon Uris, and Herman Wouk. (On occasion, an author such as Erich Segal snuck in with Love Story at 28854 words. And then there was hard-to-explain phenomenon of Jonathan Livingston Seagull...)

Part of the explanation for word inflation comes from the fact that writers tend to write longer pieces as they mature, and, in the seventies, we did get a major crop of new writers , including James Patterson, Lawrence Sanders and Stephen King. Carrie, the first novel by King, ran about 66,000 words. Now, he is a major cause of deforestation. P.D. James wrote Agatha Christie-length novels in the sixties and then went on to write 200,000-plus words per book

Is this increasing bulk in part due to a lack of judicious editing? I enjoyed Stieg's Millennium trilogy, but I did wonder why I was reading the entire content of a bag of groceries. Is this lack of editing in part due to the relatively new phenomenon of the star power of authors? When reading Hannibal, I asked myself, do I really need an essay on the breeding of pigs for their teeth number? (I was thinking to myself: yep, Harris, you definitely researched that.)

I suspect that Alex Haley's Roots may have contributed to the demise of short novels. Published in 1976, at 278,020 words, it was adapted into a new form of television presentation: the mini-series. Running over several nights, it became the most watched program of all time. The market began rewarding supersized bestsellers. The Thorn Birds, Trinity, and Shogun became the prized standards for fiction.

Regardless of what caused the fattening of the mystery novel, did the short novel have to die? If novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Big Sleep, or And Then There Were None were released today, would they not succeed?

One final matter. Isn't it economically advantageous to a publisher to publish 60,000 to 70,000 word books? It saves on editing time and production costs. The reader finishes the book more rapidly and is ready for another. When done correctly, a quick read makes for a fun and bracing diversion. It is time to revive a lost art form.

Coming June 2015, Ransom Note Press

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Word Count Van Helsing, Part Three.

Who Killed the Short Mystery Novel? The Unusual Suspects and the Killer(s).

As I have put forward in Parts One and Two of this series, short mystery novels were a prominent part of the history of mystery. For those selected to be on either of the two top 100 mystery novels lists, one compiled by the Crime Writers' Association and the other by the Mystery Writers of America, 48% of the novels published from 1900 to 1979 were less than 70K words. During the 1980s, that number dropped to 10%.

I made a similar point about the Edgar Award winners in the category of debut novels. In this case, the gold standard of novel length, word counts, was not always available. For the 55 years of winning debut novels which I examined, word counts could be estimated for 28/56 (and only one of the 11 winners in the 1960s). Page counts could be found for all of the novels and, beginning in the 1980s, the number of pages increased from 218 pages to 368 for the most recent (last 16) winners.

For the Edgar Award for the Best Mystery Novel, word counts could be found for 46 of the 55 most recent winners going back to 1960. Here, the trend towards longer novels was equally pronounced. For the 1960s, the novels averaged 69,532 words. For the 2010s, so far, 123,304 words.

Edgar Award Winners Debut Novels.

Decade pages word count number with word counts
1960s 217.9 60001             1 of 11 (1 tie)
1970s 237.9 68264             5 of 10
1980s 304.5 111305            4 of 10
1990s 363.6 96203             6 of 10
2000s 380.6 107071            8 of 10
2010s 368.4 108722            4 of 5

Edgar, Best Mystery Novels.

Decade pages word count number with word counts
1960s 256.0 69532            8 of 10
1970s 285.9 78314            8 of 10
1980s 290.4 90137            5 of 10
1990s 365.1 100968          10 of 10
2000s 381.0 112700          10 of 10
2010s 384.0 123304           5 of 5

Word counts could be estimated for the last 25 years for the winners of Best Mystery Novel. Not one was less than 80,000 words. Words per page did not greatly change over the decades. For the Best Mystery Novels, there were 312.9 words per page in the 1960s, and 307.1 in the past 15 years.

So who killed the short mystery novel? 

As I stated in the last post, the disappearance of the short mystery novel began in 1981. In this year, the Edgar Awards were presented on June 20th. This helps us narrow down the list of suspects.

Rogues Gallery of 1981:

• In television, The Brady Brides debuts and is cancelled after ten episodes. Suspect: Jan Brady. Motive: Marcia drove her crazy with jealousy. Alibi: Off the air in April, two months before the Edgars.
• In cinema, one week before the Edgar Awards, Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered. Suspect: Nazis. Motive: They're Nazis. (I hate these guys.)
• In mystery novels, "Who Censored Roger Rabbit?" is published, later made into the movie, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Suspect: Doom. Motive: A desire to eliminate public transport which is great for reading short novels.
• On April 19th, the New York Times Best Sellers List for Adult Fiction, the novel, "The Covenant" by James Michener, concluded a run of 25 weeks in the number one position, bumped off by Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. Evidence: The Covenant ran 1201 pages. Seriously, dude, 1201 pages?  Audio recording: 3325 minutes. Estimated word count, 505,067.

So, James Michener was the killer? But wait, a surprise twist!
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The novel, "Noble House," by James Clavell, dominated the New York Times Best Sellers List for Adult Fiction settling in at number one for 15 weeks, covering the entire summer, including the time of the Edgars. It was 1154 pages. Unabridged audio recording: 45 hours 21 minutes. Estimated word count: 414,079.

Continuing a trend that started with huge novels that were turned into hugely popular miniseries, the short novel died in the crush.

Conclusion: The James Gang, led by Michener and Clavell, jealous of mystery writers, in a psychotic literary pact, killed the short mystery novel.

Coming up: Did the short mystery novel have to die?

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