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acknowledged her debt to it, and wrote the first novel-length detective story,
Lady Audley's Secret (1862). P.D. James has pointed out that the psychological
appeal of detective stories is that a crime has torn the fabric of society, and
repair is needed. Classically, the repair is made by a somewhat other-worldly
person (already present in Braddon’s novel) who applies mere thought to solve
the problem. With the perpetrator identified, society can function again. As the
literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov has proposed, this kind of story is really two
stories. The first is action, the commission of a crime. The second is the
investigation. In most whodunits the first story is vestigial. For seventy years,
part of the other-worldliness of the detective was immunity from injury by the
criminals. Then, in 1930, the first story, in Todorov’s sense, grew suddenly to
full size in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, in which rather than being
other-worldly the detective is worldly. This puts him in serious danger. There’s
less cerebration, more action. The thriller had arrived.
Popular as these genres are, has not something been left out:
exploration of why people commit crimes that tear the fabric of society? It takes
courage to experiment with a new genre. This is what Inger Frimansson has
done. Good Night, My Darling is not a whodunit and not a thriller. It’s a howcoLild-she-do-it.
Keith Oatley, University of Toronto
China Clipper, Pan American Airways
and Popular Culture
Larry Weirather
McFarland & Company, 2006
Larry Weirather’s The China Clipper, Pan American Air Ways and
Popular Culture is a comprehensive and well-wrought examination of the vital
role the Clippers played in defining, reflecting, and reinforcing many American
bedrock beliefs and values, such as manifest destiny, reverence for capitalism,
and technology as savior.
The author ably explains the powerful influence the whole Clipper
phenomenon had in holding together a nation threatened by the traumas of the
1930s and 1940s—the Great Depression and World War 11. And, as the book
clearly shows, the image of the Clipper as an icon and symbol of American
values persists to this day.
Mr. Weirather is a superb chronicler of people, places, and events. He
demonstrates a keen responsibility to scholarly detail but writes in a vernacular
accessible to the general reader. His book is a successful blend of historical fact,
complemented by anecdotal embellishment, all lightly seasoned with humor.