Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Mysteries

Most evenings after supper dishes are done, will find me at my desk working on one handiwork project or another.  My computer is my source of entertainment.  I don't own a TV.  I got rid of mine when I realized I hadn't found anything I cared to watch for over 6 months.  Sometimes I will find a movie on YouTube.  Sometimes I listen to music on Pandora.  Then I discovered YouTube had audio books.  Many of the offerings were newer publications.  And that's when I realized how much our society has changed.

Most of the books on my Kindle were gleaned from the Project Gutenberg website, where books can be downloaded in several formats, all for free.  They are mostly books that are out of copyright, so their publication dates range from the mid 1800's to around the 1930's or so.   My taste runs mostly to mysteries, but I have others like Dickens, Mark Twain and other authors of the era.

Upon browsing the audio books on YouTube, I found some of the older books, but also found many newer mysteries.   So I decided to try them out.  What I found was that while the older mysteries had great stories to tell, the newer ones seem to be written more for shock value than for the stories. 

Nearly every mystery contains a murder, and then the hero goes about finding clues to identify and ultimately capture the murderer.  The older mysteries follow a story line with a colorful cast of characters and various clues that lead to a conclusion in the last chapter and the mystery is solved often on the last couple of pages.

The newer books seem to lean toward graphically describing every torture, often prolonged, that the victim endures before having their life viciously ended by the murderer.  And often the bad guy is a serial killer so we can relive these tortures through several victims before he is caught by hard hitting, hard drinking detectives who aren't much better than the bad guy.

I realize that bad things happened during the times the older novels were written.  And sometimes those things are the subject of books.  But most of those authors didn't feel the need to rub our noses in every bloody, gory detail like they do now.

I read for pleasure.  I read to escape the horrors of the day.  If I want nightmares, all I need do is watch the news.

Me...I'll take Agatha Christie's novels any day.

12 comments:

  1. Trouble is, Vickie, no one's been able to come up with anything new of substance, so they rely on "shock value" to carry the day; gratuitous violence and sex are supposedly the tickets to fill the theaters and sell books, these produced by people who then tell us unwashed masses that we're "too violent" and immoral." The old "role models" have been re-cast as homosexuals and globalists, with even Superman renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

    Yeah; I'll stick with the older stuff too...

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    1. Pete...I have had all the garbage I can handle in all these 72 years. If I want violence and immorality, all I have to do is watch what passes for news.

      We could use a few positive roll models. There are no more left like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or even Captain Kangaroo or Mr. Rogers. Everything seems to be beat 'em up or shoot 'em down or torture 'em to death. Or put on display every perversion known to man. Maybe that's why I no longer have a TV.

      I like a book with a story that I can get lost in, wanting to see what is over the next hill or what the next clue is. I'm with you...I'll stick with the older stuff, too.

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  2. I agree with you about old vs new mysteries. My favorite old mysteries are the Nero Wolfe series written by Rex Stout. There are newer books in the series but they are written by Robert Goldsborough. They are very good -- he writes just like Rex Stout. There are a few good new mysteries too (without all the blood and gore -- Molly Murphy by Rhys Bowen and Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear are my favorites.

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    1. Mary...I haven't read the Nero Wolfe series, but I did find what must have been a TV series about Nero Wolfe on YouTube, and they were really fun to watch. Thanks for pointing me toward some authors I might enjoy. It is refreshing to find new authors to read that don't make me sick or give me nightmares!!

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  3. Entertainment today, in ALL forms, is geared toward the lowest class person who will use it.

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    1. Gorges...It surely isn't geared toward anyone who has more than two functioning brain cells. I like something that makes me think or makes me laugh. Not something that makes me shudder.

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  4. Your post reminds me of watching the movie "Seven". The ending left me very uncomfortable, and realizing some things are so terrible, they don't need to be brought to light as fiction.

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    1. Agreed, Jess...There is so much horror now in the real world that I don't need to read about it for entertainment. I know that terrible things happened in the past, but the writers of novels then seem to have concentrated on entertaining their readers rather than trying to out do each other in shock value as most appear to do now.

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  5. exact
    i like the drawing of characters by older authors. you can picture each one. i like hercule poirot because there is no blood just brain cells working.
    also like jane marple.
    tried patricia cornwell but only read two the last book i looked at i returned to the library after a few pages. i could tell what was coming. a handbook for sadists are what some of the new authors are writing.

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    1. deb...I like the Poirot and Miss Marple books as well. There was another series, too, the main characters being Tommy and Tuppence who were detectives. I can't remember the names of the books, but I enjoyed them as they had real mysteries to solve without the need to bleed all over the place. You are so right about so many now being handbooks for sadists. Those are not my idea of reading for pleasure.

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  6. I have found a liking to old westerns, John Wayne has a lot. Toss in a WW2 movie based on history. I also like the Marvel Movies. We pulled the plug on cable. just internet now.

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    1. Rob...My husband loved the old John Wayne westerns. He had a whole collection of the video tapes. Dad liked to read, especially the Zane Grey westerns. I like them too once in a while for a change of pace. It has been maybe 8 or 9 years since I had a TV. I don't miss it at all. I can find just about anything I want to watch the internet. Cheaper than cable, I think.

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