As someone whose journey out of the womb was probably triggered as much by nascent wanderlust as obstetrical necessity, I love the current trend in favor of mysteries with foreign settings. Real travel rocks, but if vicarious is all I can get I’ll take it.
I kept hearing that the prior dearth was because “Americans won’t read mysteries with foreign settings.” Maybe, but it begs the question "which Americans?" A dozen xenophobic John Birchers... sure, I can see them agreeing. But a few thousand varied and voracious mystery readers… er, not so much. However, a couple recent reads reminded me that the claim probably has some substance when it comes to one issue—language.
Setting a mystery written in English in a country where that’s not the primary language means you’ve got to decide how to handle that native language. Ignoring it is probably easiest for both the reader and the writer, but it means passing over a helpful source of local color. You usually want to use some, just to add flavor, and you want to make that some enough to a) feel specific to your setting, not just some generic indicator that “we’re not in Kansas anymore” while also b) having a bit of rhythm and flow, fitting organically in the story rather than appearing as a blatant “local color found here” flashing light slapped on top. But at the same time, you don’t want to make your readers work too hard to deal with it, or you’ll turn a lot of them off. As is so often the case with writing well, it's a balancing act.
I’m currently reading Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant, set in modern India. Hall inserts a lot of local terminology, both where there is no real English equivalent (e.g. foods such as chat) but also where there is. He takes the glossary route to explain it all, with one in the back of the book that runs to several pages. Which is helpful, but... only up to a point. There's too much reliance on that glossary for my taste, shifting all the work onto the reader. Hall almost never even tries to make the words clear in context. You can sometimes get a general idea without looking something up, such as that this word must refer to some kind of food since someone is eating it. But not always and not in any detail. A minor issue if it only happens occasionally, but there are things on pretty much every page you need to look up, continually pulling the reader out of the story and seriously interfering with its flow. It also got to be just plain annoying for its own sake. I enjoyed the book otherwise, which had a lot of charm, more than its fair share of local color and an interesting, multi-thread plotline. And yes I suppose I could just stay ignorant and not bother to look things up (except me being me... sigh, no I can't). But because of this issue and how annoying it got to be, I’m not sure I’ll read another of this series. Which is a pity.
A Murder of Crows by P F Chisholm (aka Patricia Finney) is, amongst fans of the genre, one of the most eagerly awaited historical mysteries in years. It’s well worth waiting for, a great read in a unique, well written and well researched series. This book is largely set in London, while prior books were set on the Scots border marches. And even though it’s more Sergeant Dodd’s story than Sir Robert Carey’s, that means there’s a lot less of the Scottish border dialect. I'd forgotten until I read this one how frustrating I sometimes found it with earlier books being so very filled with similar sounding people and names and nicknames (and everyone had a nickname) to keep straight, along with a ton of dialect. It wasn't that you couldn't sort things out and it certainly wasn't that the results weren't worth it, it just kept pulling me out of the story to figure it all out and at times felt like more work than I wanted to bother with. Here where there’s less of it, it’s so much more effective, while there’s no feeling of struggle to get through what there is. The dialect not only makes it clear who Dodd is, it also reinforces how far he is from home both physically and socially—a key element of the story.
Pat McIntosh is another historical mystery author I really like. Since her books are set in medieval Edinburgh, she too makes liberal use of Scots dialect, complicated by period vocabulary that is foreign to modern ears. She doesn't include a glossary, but she does the best job I’ve seen of making it all perfectly understandable in context. Not only understandable but seamlessly so within the flow of the story rather than having the author or a character constantly stop to explain things to the reader. That's not as easy as it might sound, and it's surprisingly rare. A lot of authors get the idea that making things clear in context is a good thing, because it demands less of the reader, which most will prefer. But they tend to rely on the crutch of those pull you out of the story explanations to do it. Which results in their losing the reader for a different reason.
So yeah, I guess there might be one reason Americans won't read mysteries in foreign settings, or at least some of them, when the author doesn't, um, watch their language.
I love books with foreign languages I don't understand. The harder I have to work, the better. But then I'm English.
Posted by: Jane Steen | June 13, 2010 at 11:06 PM