Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 95

Magic Regendes

91

literary novel (and why A.S. Byatt's lush documents in the case in
Possession succeed). It explains, indeed, the difficulty in merging
literary and popular forms. When literary fiction, which has a
vaguely defined framework, dominates popular elements, a bad
literary novel results. John Cawelti has observed a similar
phenomenon in movies that attempt to merge the Western with more
"serious" filmmaking. Cawelti says of Heaven's Gate:
Cimino tried to treat the conflict between ranchers
and the fanners in terms of the contemporary themes
that he had explored so effectively in The Deer
Hunter . . . . The result simply exploded the limited
boundaries of t he Western genre" (15). Unforgiven, on
the other hand, successfully contains literary content
within a characteristic Western frame.
The pitfalls of such combinations are illustrated well by Cut to
the Quick, a Regency mystery by Kate Ross (1993). Mystery
frameworks divide generally into the cozy and the hard-boiled. In
the latter, readers expect graphic violence and often sex, violent
emotions, and detective and/or police procedures. In the former,
readers expect rational inquiry and polite behavior masking violence
and strong emotion. Both types emphasize the restoration of social
order over individual resolutions, though both may take legal
questions into their detective's hands. Even in cozy house party
mysteries, romance and personal solutions are secondary.
Of the two types, cozy mysteries, with their rigid social
structures, are obviously more compatible with lighthearted Regency
frameworks than hard-boiled novels of crime. Georgette Heyer,
indeed, adapted her own Regency characters to country-weekend
mysteries quite successfully. Mean-streets mysteries are much more
likely to break the fragile Regency structure of artificial hierarchy.
Ross’s plot features a dandified, eccentric Regency gentlemen,
Julian Kestrel, who seems a distant ancestor of Campion and
Whimsey. But while the mystery takes place at a country mansion,
its plot involves not only an arranged marriage and family pride, but
the murder of a young woman. In Regency plots a woman's reputation