01.12.2008
La novela policíaca y Agatha Christie
El asesinato es un arte. Que nos gusta o no. Y es una de las artes más precisas y difíciles. Al margen de la subjetividad de cada lector, algunas voces se alzan para decir que esta “especialidad” ha perdido su encanto, aseguran que ha sufrido un bajón, que, desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial más o menos, está llevando el asesinato a un nivel definivamente muy bajo en comparación, por ejemplo, con la época de esplendor que vivió Inglaterra, país de grandes asesinos, entre 1850 y 1925.
01.12.2008
by George Orwell
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
01.12.2007
Cinema e letteratura:
di Matteo Poletti
Esce in questi giorni nelle sale DUE PER UN DELITTO (regia di Pascal Thomas), l’ultimo film tratto da un romanzo (“Sento i pollici che prudono”, 1968) della regina del giallo classico, Agatha Christie. Protagonisti, due detective dilettanti, marito e moglie, non celebri quanto HERCULE POIROT o la zitella sagace MISS MARPLE, ma comunque noti ai fan della Christie. Al di là della riuscita e della qualità di questo film, è interessante soffermarci sulla relazione, certamente fruttifera, tra l’autrice inglese e la settima arte: quale scrittore è stato più “saccheggiato” da cinema e tv?
01.02.2007
Monsignor Ronald A. Knox
1911
If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental.
01.01.2007
by Ronald Knox
LET it not be reckoned as vainglory if one who has been guilty of writing detective stories attempts criticism of the same branch of literature. For, when I speak of detective stories, it is self - evident that I mean detective stories other than my own. A poet may mouth out his own verses, either in solitude or, if his guests have no time to escape, in company; an orator may rub the bloom off his own periods by declaiming them beforehand in his bath; even the humorist can raise, now and again, the ghost of a chuckle at the echo of his own joke, suddenly reborn in memory.
01.12.2006
Monsignor Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957) was a British clergyman, editor, a literary critic, a humourist and a detective story writer himself who nicely laid out, with a gentle wit, the "ten rules" that guided detective fiction in its so-called Golden Age. They appeared in the preface to Best Detective Stories of 1928-29, which Knox edited.
01.11.2006
by Edwin Baird
I wrote the following for Ed Gorman's blog at edgorman.com, but since I got the raw material from one of our number (thanks again, Bill) and it includes an early reference to the “golden age, ” I think it might be of some interest here: Courtesy of Bill Vande Water, I have before me photocopies of a series called “How to Write a Detective Story, ” by Edwin Baird, which ran in the writer's magazine The Author and Journalist between December 1929 and December 1930. Baird (1886 - 1957) was the editor of Real Detective Tales, a former Weird Tales stable mate that despite the title featured fiction at that time, though it would later transition to true crime.
