Re:Father Knox’s decalogue: the ten rules of Golden Age dete...
by IgorPartola on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:58PM
(#29412710)
It seems like there was a decent amount of context missing here which leads to this ambiguity. Reading the original I can see it a couple of different ways but it seems to me that what is implied is that there was a genre of story in which the villain was always Chinese and that genre was full of shitty books that relied on racist cliches rather than clever plots or good writing. The advice then is to not follow down that path.
To me a modern equivalent would be if Spielberg decided to make a reality show to try to do a good version of it: at the end of the day the genre is just shitty and unsalvageable for more reasons than one.
Also it is hard to figure out if the original source was prejudiced against Chinese people or not from this alone. This is a discussion about good and bad writing, not about race directly.
Re:Father Knox’s decalogue: the ten rules of Golden Age dete...
by saghm on Thursday December 02, 2021 @12:15PM
(#29419085)
I was responding to the comment about the rules that the person who did the crime couldn't be a butlet/maid/etc., not the rule you mention, which is an entirely different can of worms
Okay, but it doesn't seem obvious to me why "detective story" necessarily implies "story about competition within a social class". If I read a blog post titled "20 rules for making pasta-based dishes", and one of the rules was "don't ever use cheese", I'm not going to argue that there aren't a wide variety of good dishes you could make without cheese, but I'd definitely walk away with the assumption that the author has some sort of bias if they think it's a universal rule.