Oh, God, Wilkie Collins- I gave up on The Woman in White about twenty pages in, but I was reading for pleasure: it gave me none. Ditto Sheridan le Fanu, who I tried to read after reading Gaudy Night the first time.
I think another part of the problem is that the Victorian detective novelists were largely writing works under the influence of people like Ruskin who advocated for pure imagination as opposed to naturalism and causality; it's a weird guiding philosophy for crime writing but casts a long shadow in stuff like American Psycho.
Julia, crime as metaphor and comment on larger society isn't exclusive of crime as scientific puzzle solving, viz Gaudy Night itself, but that divide persists
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I think another part of the problem is that the Victorian detective novelists were largely writing works under the influence of people like Ruskin who advocated for pure imagination as opposed to naturalism and causality; it's a weird guiding philosophy for crime writing but casts a long shadow in stuff like American Psycho.
Julia, crime as metaphor and comment on larger society isn't exclusive of crime as scientific puzzle solving, viz Gaudy Night itself, but that divide persists