In a discussion of crime/mystery series and whether they are “closed” or “open”, where “closed” means the characters don’t grow; they don’t marry, age or have children and “open” means the opposite, I had a thought:
Ed McBain, Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald and other long-term series authors are practicing what’s called “world-building” in the SF community. The difference is that the crime worlds they build are ones the reader recognizes; there’s no need for a bunch of definitions.
Tolkien had to define hobbits, Ents, Nazgul and Orcs before the reader could understand who the protagonists are. In crime stories the reader already knows what private investigators, cops and attorneys are; there’s no need for further explication. Furthermore, action in fantasy or much “hard” science fiction takes place in a world or on a planet much different from the one on which the reader lives, with its own limits and peculiar characteristics (What’s the atmosphere like? Do the inhabitants need to wear space suits?). In crime stories that’s not an issue.
Nonetheless, I think crime authors do engage in world-building. For McBain, the characters of the 87th Precinct have personal lives distinct from the mean streets they work on. How many of us have lived in the world Detective Carella does, wooing and marrying Teddy, a woman who can neither speak nor hear?
Similarly, I’ve never met anyone who lives like Stout’s Nero Wolfe, a vastly-overweight man who rarely leaves his home, has an orchid greenhouse on the top floor of his Manhattan (!) brownstone, and employs a man of action such as Archie Goodwin.
MacDonald’s Travis McGee lives in a slightly more recognizable world, although maintaining and living on a houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale is still a little quirky.
The authors have created characters who all work in a world we recognize, but their worlds are sufficiently different from the majority of their readers that some time must be spent defining them.
Agree? Disagree?
Here’s another one for you to consider: Lord Peter Wimsey, the brain child of Dorothy Sayers. If you read the Wimsey novels in chronological order, beginning with “Whose Body?”, you will learn to know Lord Peter as he matures, following a disastrous stint as an officer in WWI (in which he’s temporarily buried alive), eventually gets over his shell shock (what they used to call PTSD), falls in love with a woman who refuses to marry him (read the books!), etc.
All of this is set in an extremely recognizable world, England between the wars. Since Lord Peter is the younger son of a wealthy noble family, he himself is very wealthy in a way that anyone from that time and place would have recognized, regardless of their social status.
One interesting thing about Wolfe’s Manhattan is that Stout wrote a few novels about a different detective, Tecumseh Fox, set in the same universe. Although he doesn’t run into Wolfe or Archie, or even Cramer, Fox does talk with some of the same DA’s, meets Dol Bonner, and eats at Rusterman’s.
It’s sort of weird reading them. For one thing, they’re written in third person, which is probably just as well for I would’ve likely heard Archie narrating them.
If it’s not too off topic: I always liked the world building (as it was) in the TV show Magnum, P.I. It fits your genre of detective fiction but changes the medium, yes, but to this day I find myself asking “What happened next?”
Between the Ferrari, the mansion (and its contents and the free reign thereof), Rick, T.C., and their uses in the storylines, the experience in Viet Nam (not just in the general timely sense but also in what their jobs were there), the wife, the daughter, the “coincidence” of what Higgins did for the British military, and for the cherry on top? All was done under the auspices of Magnum having done a “favor” for Robin Masters, a well known, very popular writer of DETECTIVE FICTION.
I’ve always enjoyed David Bellasario’s shows at least a little bit. Ok, I could only stand the first half of the first season of JAG. But I also loved Quantum Leap. Uh oh, I’m pushing my luck here so I’ll stop. But he actually develops characters on his shows. I like that.
I hadn’t thought of of that way, but living on a houseboat is a fantasy, all right, even if people do it for real. It could be a kind of escape fantasy.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
https://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Sure, any series involves world-building, especially in the first book or two. The whole idea is to have created a set of characters and locations with fairly detailed attributes, and then be able to refer to them without describing them all over again.
Sherlock Holmes is another good example: he lives in a world where the police defer to him, clients seek him out, and he has a range of associates and support personnel, from the Baker Street Irregulars to Mycroft’s Foreign Office colleagues. All these relationships are on call, without having to be explained in detail in each story.