![]() Clearly he’s got some daddy issues with M.” And we know almost nothing about Bond’s childhood. Or get more of Vesper’s life before she met Bond to justify her actions. Or would an editor tell him, “Nice story, Ian, but you need to flesh it out a bit. Makes you wonder if Fleming’s spy classic could be published today. Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was 144 pages in 1953. Curt Cannon’s I Like ’Em Tough (“Me?” he says, “I’m a down-and-out private eye with nothing to lose”) delivered 143 action-packed pages a princely 25 cents in 1958. Raymond Chandler’s The High Window was a scrawny 206 pages when it was published by Pocket Books in 1945. Many Golden Age mysteries were 150 to 200 pages LESS than today’s mysteries. Once they were as slender as that deadly dame in black. Many are twice that size.īut thrillers and mysteries didn’t used to be so big. The average mystery weighs in at about 325 pages. ![]() Most commercial mysteries are 75,000 words or so. It’s a question about what causes them:Īre modern mysteries too long? Are we forced to produce bloated books? This isn’t about how to fix the sagging middle in your novels. Yep, I’ve been running into lots of those: Highly touted bestsellers that make excellent doorstops. Does your mind wander when you read the hot new thriller? Does that blockbuster mystery sag worse than a flophouse couch?
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