A pair of professors from Amherst College are the latest to notice that "serious" fiction has a crime side. Or did they notice that crime fiction has a serious side? You can decide when you read their article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The piece is a series of one-paragraph mock newspaper articles in the style of a roundup of crime news. I got a special kick out of the following, for reasons that will be obvious to readers who remember
this,
this and
this from Detectives Beyond Borders:
Prince Runs Amok; Many Feared Dead
(Elsinore, Denmark) – The heir to the Danish throne went on a rampage yesterday, killing, it is feared, most of the members of the royal family. Details remain sketchy, but persons close to the scene report that the Danish prince killed his stepfather, the king; one of the king's leading ministers; and the minister's son. The prince's mother also is said to have died in the rampage; the assailant himself was killed in an all-out assault by authorities. The prince, believed to be in his mid-20s, had recently been placed under suicide watch after the death by drowning of his fiancée. A college acquaintance confirmed that the killer had been haunted by visions and nightmares since the death of his father some years ago: "He liked to talk about death and killing and stuff, but no one really took him seriously. He'd been saying the same thing for years." Said another unnamed source, "Everyone knew he was a little off, but he seemed pretty harmless. I guess we were wrong."
You might also like the item about – But why should I ruin the fun? Click on the article, and see which literary classics you recognize from their criminous descriptions. (As a newspaperman, I compliment the professors on their good eye for headlinese, that sometimes weirdly compacted turn of phrase seen only in newspaper headlines.)
(image from http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/frailtyofhamlet/gallery/shakepictures/)© Peter Rozovsky 2008
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