Nothing New Under The Sun

The blurb which I scorned in my previous post, thinking it exemplified the changing tastes in crime fiction, was actually copied-and-pasted from the original edition. The Passing Tramp's Curtis Evans blogged about it one year ago. The preference for "easier" (some might say, "dumbed-down") crime fiction is thus nothing new. That writers like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr were big at the time doesn't mean that everyone was looking for elaborate, deliberate and complicated plots. There have always been people looking for the cheap version. Murder, She Wrote would never have been a success otherwise.