Locked Room Mystery Discussion

Jason Rosenhouse over at EvolutionBlog is writing an (at least) two part series on locked room mysteries and his favorite authors, along with some less favorite ones. I usually read Jason’s blog for evolutionary science, but he also frequently writes quite vigorously on atheism, and he gets some of that in here.

I was not acquainted with John Dickson Carr, which he says exposes a large hole in my literary education. To be honest, I can’t recall any of my literature teachers pointing me in the direction of mysteries, at least relatively modern ones. I found those all on my own.

For the moment I will only add that I think often that the quality of characters in a novel is substantially in the eye of the beholder. A writer rarely writes all the details, yet sometimes we fill them out as full characters and sometimes we do not. For example, I find Dorothy Sayers’ characters more interesting than her plots, which seems to be the opposite of Jason’s view.

Nonetheless, any post that points out good authors I haven’t ever heard of is worth reading.