Harry Potter and the Detective Paradigm

I had a thought about the whole spoilers phenomenon (which has generated its own media hype for the last two or three books) with Harry Potter novels, and what it says about the books' techniques and structures.

Most books can't be "spoiled" for a new reader by revealing a few lines about what happens at the end of the book.  Consider trying to "spoil" Framley Parsonage that way, or The Baroque Cycle, or even The Grand Sophy.  There are plenty of works which depend on the audience already knowing how something is going to turn out: Greek tragedies are like that, as are mediaeval mystery plays (imagine trying to "spoil" the Wakefield Cycle).  Note, also, that the predecessors frequently cited for HP in the school story genre, like Tom Brown's Schooldays and Enid Blyton's  Malory Towers books are pretty generally unspoilable in this manner.

What can be spoiled in a few lines, classically, are detective stories of the puzzle type.  Not only does premature revelation of the solution spoil the reader's entertainment, but withholding the solution does as well.  (That's the point of the bit in Bedazzled where the devil rips the last chapters out of Agatha Christie novels.)  If you ripped the last chapter or two out of The Last Chronicle of Barset it wouldn't spoil the reader's satisfaction very much, although it would impair it a little.

Epic fantasy, typically, builds up to an expected climax: the hero confronts the villain, or achieves the terms of a known quest, and the plot interest lies in how these rather difficult things are achieved.  The detective novel is about an unexpected climax: the solution to a puzzle where (frequently) the revelation is meant to be a surprise to everyone but the shrewdest reader.  (Whether this succeeds or not is another matter.)  The climactic details of the Harry Potter novels, along this axis, have more to do with the detective novel model than the epic fantasy model.

Rowling's great strength is in a detective-novel style plotting: putting foreshadowing clues out in plain sight and then pulling everything together in a way which surprises the reader, complete with "most unlikely person" aspects to the resolutions.  She shares the "typical" cozy detective novel's weaknesses as well: stock characters whose actions have to be constrained to the demands of the plot resolution.  (The parallel being Death 'Twixt Wind and Water in its original planned form, the Harriet Vane novel which starts out as a puzzle-type novel and then gets written as something else again under the influence of Peter and of the events at Shrewsbury College.)

For all that the New York Times review of The Deathly Hallows says that "In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the “Potter” books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis", one of Rowling's great weaknesses is in the actual fantasy end of things.  Her worldbuilding is poor in internal consistency (what is the wizarding economy like, anyway?  And what is the wizard population of the British Isles?  Why have they adopted, e.g. railways and motor-cars but not ballpoint pens?)  You don't read Harry Potter to enjoy the rigorous working out of  a limited set of presuppositions regarding the nature and history of the wizarding world.  Rowling doesn't lay out chunks of backstory (or work them in seamlessly) for the worldbuilding effect: what she is good at is introducing things and characters critical to later developments in the plot while concealing their true significance -- which brings us back to the detective story again.

Please, Sir or Madam, wont't you buy my book...

John Scalzi's noted the current Jane-Austen-gets-rejected-today little newslet.  This is an extreme form of the game which usually involves sending Casablanca out to agents with the title Everybody Comes To Rick's.

In terms of the rejections, I'll note that any market to which you could sell derivative-Jane-Austen books probably has editors who pretty well all recognize Jane Austen; or, at the very least, the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which is probably one of the ten or so most famous opening lines of a novel of all time.  The fact that he was rejected politely proves nothing; it would have been more shocking if his novels had been accepted.

However, I disagree with Scalzi about general saleability.  A writer with Austen's ear and general style would probably still be saleable -- but he/she wouldn't be writing Jane Austen novels, since Jane Austen novels are part of the foundation of the modern novel.  The author would have absorbed them, as well as James, Hardy, Joyce, and probably Powell, and be working with a much deeper repertoire of purely novelistic techniques behind than Austen had, writing half a century after Fielding. (As Eliot said of Virgil, "We know more than the ancients, and they are what we know".)  Susanna Clarke is good enough evidence, though, that using an early-nineteenth-century style (or one that sounds like it to most people: Jane Austen was the most frequent comparison I saw, although to my ears she read more like Thackeray) where the nature of the work requires or is enhanced by it will not hurt market exposure or sales.

One commenter in Scalzi's thread noted Heyer's continuing popularity.  One thing which I'd note is that Heyer and Austen aren't at all similar at a nuts and bolts level, however much they look the same from 10,000 feet up (a couple falls in love in Regency England).  As a minor example, just about every word Austen uses is still part of "standard" literary English; Heyer has her characters lard their speech with slang of the period.  Heyer is taking the reader on a tour of a strange and amusing country, highlighting its exotic character; Austen is writing comedies designed to drive home a moral in (for her) familiar and conventional surroundings.  Auten's tone is formal; Heyer's is formal as a narrator, but far more informal when providing characters' dialogue.