The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes
Скачать
Начало книги
Life for Alvy Singer in Annie Hall can be divided into two categories, the horrible and the miserable. I would add a third: the unbearably tedious. Reality, when it’s not simply hideous or depressing, tends to be largely unremarkable – or in other words, real. And if, like Sherlock Holmes and me, you “abhor the dull routine of existence”, then books and television shows whose mission is accurately to reflect the world around us will leave you feeling either suicidal or bored witless.
Of course there is a place in detective fiction for the gritty social document, but it’s not a place I’d want to go to for a holiday. Personally I like my dramas to be a little improbable and my comedies a little absurd. I like, I suppose, to be taken to the edge: to teeter on the brink of plausibility, where logic lives dangerously yet somehow still manages to survive. For me this is where storytelling becomes exciting: when the writer is prepared to take risks; to bend the limits of invention. And if for Holmes there was respite from the routine in the form of a seven-per-cent solution perhaps the rest of us can at least find solace in a good locked-room mystery.