Prequels and Preludes: The Short Story and the Detective Novel Series
Although the detective short story was both popular and remunerative in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Golden Age onwards, most widely read authors of the genre have concentrated on novels, considering it wasteful to dissipate a good idea on a short story when it could be use...
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| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | Although the detective short story was both popular and remunerative in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Golden Age onwards, most widely read authors of the genre have concentrated on novels, considering it wasteful to dissipate a good idea on a short story when it could be used in a novel. This tendency has increased as the market for short stories, and the price paid for them, has diminished over time. However, some authors who have made their name from writing crime novels, often featuring detectives who acquire a substantial fan base, have used short stories either to satisfy readers’ curiosity about their detectives or to experiment with a new detective and see whether he/she captures the public’s imagination. Although these prequels or preludes are often character-based, they provide an opportunity to depict a context which is, or will be, important in the novel series. Ellis Peters’s “A Light on the Road to Woodstock” (1985), written at the same time as the eleventh Brother Cadfael novel, and Kate Charles’s “Through a Glass, Darkly,” published three years before the first novel in the Callie Anson series, are both closely integrated into the series they complement. Although they can both be read as one offs, they acquire their full meaning in the context of their protagonists’ other adventures and shed light on the situations already in place in the first novels of the series. |
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