More meandering on Crime Novels

[oursin]

I commented a few months ago on the advisability of hawkshaws having a posse - or at least supporting characters, I'm not sure Poirot or Miss Marple exactly have posses but they do have supporting characters who recur from book to book, like Ariadne Oliver or Marple's nephew and so on.

And having lately read that Lorac mystery with what seemed a rather colourless series 'tec (though maybe over the course of the series he develops or has more character?) I was thinking of all those freebie 'Golden Age' crime novels I have been sent (I still have no idea how I got on the distribution list), many of which were part of sometimes immensely long series, which also had distinctly unmemorable series investigator. Perhaps weighting the thing a bit more towards Puzzle or - perhaps? - Groups of Weird Suspects.

Query - in the case of Ngaio Marsh doesn't she rather start out with having Gang of Eccentrics or Eccentric Family into whom she drops Alleyn, and over the volumes he starts becoming a character in his own right, falling in love with a suspect, and so on.

(Wimsey was the ur-figure for falling love with the suspect, y/n? Campion I think had form for crushing on ladies mixed up in his cases but not actual suspects - in one case, Dancers in Mourning, the wife of a suspect.)

(I also had a thought here that in the old-school Golden/Silver Age mystery if the detective falls in love with a suspect, they didn't do it: in noir, of course they had.)

Then there's a point (I think?) when it becomes perhaps a little bit too much about the inner angst of the detective (Lynley, I'm looking at you), rather than just having one with, you know, interiority (e.g. Wexford). And do not get me on to the swathe (I have a definite sense that this verges now on the cliche) of central characters with substance abuse/relationship problems/job issues etc before a crime even happens.

***

On entirely unrelated subject, I spotted this on Ask a Manager this morning: My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance (#5 at link):

I will work for the University of California with my salary paid by a federal grant. I received my onboarding paperwork today, and along with all the normal stuff, it included an “Oath of Allegiance.”

Summoning the shade of Decca Mitford, who was invited to teach a course at San Jose State University in 1973 and got into an immense fracas over loyalty oath and finger-printing.