#hell benoit blanc now that we've met his husband

[fabiansociety]

it's not enough for a detective to be clever for them to be durable; they need to have a circle of friends to make them memorable. it doesn't need to be a large circle, but you need that grounding moment of familiarity to spring the mystery from. people invest in these characters, these familiar beats, more than they do in the working out of the mystery itself. there's the same pleasure in seeing how nero wolfe's household has weathered the war years as in seeing how kamurocho has changed since the last yakuza game. how are things going with watson and mrs hudson? the continental op has the old man and dick foley; richard diamond has helen and walt and sgt otis; perry mason has paul drake and della street. the same desire to simply check in on old friends drives a lot of narrative engagement, from mysteries to superheroes to soap operas to kaiju movies. the *absence* of that sort of domestic updating is one of the things that's made it hard to really invest in these miss marple books—she spends so much of the stories offstage that she's hard to connect with as an individual, and she doesn't have that wider circle of acquaintances that feed the hunger for mere continuity. how are things in saint mary mead? we're left in the dark, beyond some dark suggestions that perhaps everyone is actually just gone, driven away or displaced or maybe just killed by world war 2. we get a flashing mention of her writer nephew and his artistic bride, but then we've barely seen them, either, in any of the earlier books. jane marple is still, two decades and four novels into her literary career, mostly a cipher, a collection of small town anecdotes wrapped in a lace shawl, rather than an actual character. the books are getting better, or at least a murder is announced wasn't so baldly mechanical as the series has been, but they still feel very much work for hire.