Serial fiction

“ It is understood now that no paper is complete without its serial story, and the spinning of these stories keeps thousands of wheels and spindles in motion. It is now understood that whoever wishes to gain the public ear, and to propound a new theory, must do it in a serial story. Hath any one in our day, as in St. ”

“ I like detective fiction, it always hits the spot, however poor in diction, however punk in plot; I like the sleuth who follows a clue o’er hill and vale, until the victim swallows his medicine in jail. I like all stories ripping, in which some folks are killed, in which the guns go zipping, and everyone is thrilled. ”

“ When a serial story is being told by a first-class story-teller, many persons attend the hall every night of the run. The story is usually a new version of an old tale, or an exaggerated account of the latest newspaper sensation. ”

“ In the worst cases of juvenile crime—or, it would be fairer to say, of juvenile insanity with a criminal tendency—of which I have had personal knowledge, there has been no fiction reading at all. The appeal to the imagination has been wholly lacking. ”

“ Believing that a judicious use of serial stories of the highest character is to be heartily commended, but believing also that the greatest care must be exercised lest in seeking to quicken interest and chain attention, we foster sensational tastes, we allow only our most trusted workers to prepare Serial Stories. ”

“ It is clever in conception and treatment, it holds the interest.”
“Granted its fundamental improbability, the plot is skilfully constructed, and the interest of the story is successfully maintained.”
“As a detective story, ‘The millionaire baby,’ is as clever as anything Anna Katharine Green has written. You will not lay it aside until you know the whole story.”
“As a detective story it is ingenious; as fiction in any other sense it is worthless.” ”

“ It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral apparitions—one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes him sputter in a mortal fashion. ”

“ There is a very fine pleasure in watching with awareness the doing of things that are done well. Hence, even for the casual reader, it is advisable to study the methods of fiction in order to develop a more refined delight in reading. It would seem that a detective story, in which the interest is centred mainly in the long withholding of a mystery, would lose its charm for a reader to whom its secret has been once revealed. But the reader with a developed consciousness of method finds an interest evermore renewed in returning again and again to Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” ”

“ The range of Weird Tales comprises every type of fantastic fiction: from the occult to science fiction, from ghost stories to the supernatural, from voodoo thrillers to vampire tales, from werewolf yarns to reincarnation, and from the mystic to the physic.
Other current magazines may occasionally print fantasyarns. Keep an eye on Argosy, Blue Book, Magic Carpet, Ten Detective Aces, Dime Detective, Thrilling Adventures, Doc Savage, the Science Fiction Digest, and The Fantasy Fan, and, in truth, any of the detective, air, and adventure magazines. ”

“ We had long been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism ”

“ We smile at the extravagance, while we acknowledge some kind of truth, which we cannot understand. These small traces of the little world of crime within the back room “with the window looking out on the dead wall,” long since destroyed and erased from the bigger world of which it formed a part and the shame, may be brought together and filled up by the imagination, with a certainty so far removed from the feeling of fiction, that we might scarcely regret the want of particulars. ”

“ It is an attempt to show how, given immense histrionic genius, a man without principle might use it to the confusion of Society and be responsible for seemingly inexplicable mysteries. The romance deals with modern days in London, and a phase of life hidden largely from Londoners themselves. An astonishing murder opens the way to the story, and the coroner’s inquest introduces to the reader one of the most original characters in modern sensational fiction. ”

“ Such stories readily fall into two classes, with as many sub-sorts as the invention of man may compass—those which are soluble and those which are not. Of the former, the detective story is the more common, followed at no very great distance by the tale which seems to involve the supernatural, but whose mystery transpires quite plainly in the end. Of the latter are all those inexplicable wonder-fictions dealing with shapes that haunt the dream-dusk, the whole shadow-land of wraiths and spirits and presences and immaterialities which cross the borders of experience at the call of fantasy. ”

“ The discovery had been made too late for the first editions of the morning papers, but those published on the following evening gave accounts of the tragedy, headed “Another Mysterious Murder: The Mystic Seal again,” in which the details of the crime were most graphically told, the facts exaggerated, and plenty of fiction infused; for that style known as the New Journalism seems to have been invented for the purpose of satisfying the craving for sensational reading. ”

“ The crime was done in a hypnotic state, and, as described by Violet Fane, seems much more probable than the actual hypnotic experiments recorded in scientific publications. This is the supreme advantage that fiction possesses over fact. It can make things artistically probable; can call for imaginative and realistic credence; can, by force of mere style, compel us to believe. The ordinary novelists, by keeping close to the ordinary incidents of commonplace life, seem to me to abdicate half their power. ”

“ In very badly constructed plays this lack of connection sometimes goes so far that the main and under plots seem like two separate serial stories in a magazine, in which the reader alternates from one to the other, but never thinks of them as one. ”

“ The detective or mystery tale, in which this last book is an experiment, involves in itself a problem for the artist, as odd as any of the problems which it puts to the policeman. A detective story might well be in a special sense a spiritual tragedy; since it is a story in which even the moral sympathies may be in doubt. A police romance is almost the only romance in which the hero may turn out to be the villain, or the villain to be the hero. ”

“ Cases like Barothy's give the lie to the assumption that serial killers are a modern - or even post-modern - phenomenon, a cultural-societal construct, a by-product of urban alienation, Althusserian interpellation, and media glamorization. ”

“ Serial killers are, indeed, largely made, not born. But they are spawned by every culture and society, molded by the idiosyncrasies of every period as well as by their personal circumstances and genetic makeup. ”

“ In other words she gives her story just that reality which a murder mystery has when unfolded day by day in the papers. I confess that, when I unwrapped the book and found that a polished artist like Miss Silberrad had written a detective story, I was a little shocked; but I need not have been. There are no dummies in this novel. Each character is as excellently drawn as if delineation of character were the author's main object; and in the matter of style there is no concession to the tastes of the cruder public which makes murder novels its staple diet. ”

“ Something of the same interest is given to the "crowded city's horrible street" by the suggestions of crime and romance, of curiosity and its gratification, which we find written with more or less cleverness in the enormous mass of so-called detective literature under which the press groans. Every bookstall has its shilling shocker, and every magazine which aims at a circulation must have its mystery of robbery or murder. ”

“ Many aspects of the occult appear and the psychic drama is popular, but the necessities of presentation on the stage inevitably bar many forms of the ghostly art that take their place naturally in fiction. The closet drama does not come under this limitation, for in effect it is almost as free as fiction to introduce mystical, symbolic, and invisible presences. The closet drama is usually in poetic form and poetry is closer akin to certain forms of the supernatural than is prose, which makes their use more natural. ”

“ Every paper is written for some reason. Ours is because we want to sell it and get money. If what we have written brings happiness to any sad heart we shall not have laboured in vain. But we want the money too. Many papers are content with the sad heart and the happiness, but we are not like that, and it is best not to be deceitful.—Editors.
There will be two serial stories; one by Dicky and one by all of us. In a serial story you only put in one chapter at a time. But we shall put all our serial story at once, if Dora has time to copy it. ”

“ Crime Stories: "The second class of publications referred to comprises publications usually known as 'thrillers'. These books are quite different from the ordinary detective novel and from the more traditional type of thriller. Many examples of this new type of gangster thriller have been flooding the New Zealand market in the form of paper-backs selling at 2s. 6d. or less. They are entirely devoid of literary or other merit and are devoted to the wanton depiction in gross detail of brutality, violence, and sex. ”

“ Granted a given series of events to be set forth, the structure of the plot, the means of character delineation, the use of setting, the entire tone and tenor of the narrative, are all dependent directly on the answer to the question, Who shall tell the story?
For a given train of incidents is differently seen and judged, according to the standpoint from which it is observed. The evidence in most important murder trials consists mainly of successive narratives told by different witnesses ”

“ Life is the great serial—one chapter printed here, another there—a seemingly finished comedy crowding a tragedy unrelated, yonder.
The discerning artist who, reading as he runs, brings these parts into line will have begun the great book. ”

“ No touch of fiction obscures the truthful recital. The crime which is here detailed was actually committed, and under the circumstances which I have related. The four young men, whose real names are clothed with the charitable mantle of fiction, deliberately perpetrated the deed for which they suffered and to-day are inmates of a prison. No tint or coloring of the imagination has given a deeper touch to the action of the story, and the process of detection is detailed with all the frankness and truthfulness of an active participant. ”

“ Not all detective stories, however, are so dangerous or so interesting as these. Most, rather, are amusing or merely entertaining; but we class them in the ingenious group because of the effort at pure plot. There are many crude attempts at writing detective stories, and the cheap, ten-cent-novel kind disgusts persons of taste; but the popularity of the type attests its excellence. When in the hands of such men as Edgar Allan Poe and A. Conan Doyle, it yields an artistic short-story. "The Purloined Letter" and the "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" are worthy of their fame. ”

“ The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture of irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. ”

“ An appendix indexes entries for writers in the biographical dictionaries and handbooks listed by Bleiler (and cites selected author Web sites) . Although some chapters would benefit from a hierarchical, rather than alphabetical, organization, Reference and Research Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction—based on an intimate knowledge of the works listed—is the essential first source for anyone engaged in more than cursory research in the field.
Literary Handbooks, Dictionaries, and Encyclopedias L905 Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Ed. ”

“ But inexpensive as it may seem to those of us who look to literature for enlightenment, for solace in the hour of need, for stimulus to stiffen the will in the never-ending struggle of life, the detective tale, as Poe contrived it, has merits of its own as distinct and as undeniable, as those of the historical novel, for example, or of the sea-tale. It may please the young rather than the old, but the pleasure it can give is ever innocent; and the young are always in the majority. ”