The reason for this is that, while I don’t know if readers can tell this, it took me two or three books to learn how to become passable at constructing a mystery novel, and six or seven until I really hit a stride. When people at parties very kindly ask which of my books they should read, my second answer, after “none of them,” which I mean with all my heart, because writing books is a gruesomely embarrassing thing to do, is that they should read not the first but the 11th: The Woman in the Water, a prequel to the others in the series. Byatt, too), but it’s not the kind that can evolve the perfect problem. I don’t know what type of mind I have (I put this challenge squarely to A.S. I say all this as someone who’s written 12 mystery novels now, besides one unrelated literary novel. I would bet French has spent more time thinking about structure than Agatha Christie - who hatched her perfect plots in the bathtub, serenely eating apples - ever did. But that’s almost certainly a product of tenacity and intelligence, not instinct.

Her most striking gift is for voice, but if her plots aren’t flawless, you can see nonetheless how hard she works to make them very, very good, with just an occasional faint seam showing, nothing more. The contemporary novelist who comes closest to real parity between story and art may be Tana French. Meanwhile Chandler, whom many of the same people (rightly) revere, could never, as he freely admitted, explain who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. She’s an indifferent stylist, sure, but in most of the other ways a writer can be “good” - character, plot, imagination - she’s brilliant. This is why it’s funny when literary novelists who couldn’t write a competent John Wick novelization (I put this challenge squarely to A.S. Almost every writer seems to start out interested either in narrative or talking, story or language, before filling in the rest later. It has the ring of truth to it, unfortunately. “The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.”

“The perfect detective story cannot be written,” he said. I spend a lot of time thinking about a Raymond Chandler quote I once read.

The woman in the water by charles finch