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I think a lot about detective stories, preferably ones where the character doing the "detecting" is not a cop or even a professional at all. There's a YouTuber I really like, Chase Bridges, who uses his knowledge of mystery story tropes to try to solve different TV shows and movies. A lot of TV has quite mediocre worldbuilding and plotting overall, because people are doing their best within tight budgets and schedules, so Chase's guesses are often better than what the shows chose to do.
So I really enjoyed the recent novel Fair Play by Louise Hegarty, which is a rumination on violent loss and grief that's, in turn, cranked through the well worn machinery of the mystery genre. A contemporary story runs parallel with a parody of Hercule Poirot as he solves the case. The story is really about the clash between the unsatisfying non-endings of real life -- where things are messy, unsolved, or devastating --with the sanitized and carefully drawn paths in a Poirot type of novel. The reviews are quite polarized, which is common with anything experimental or postmodern.
Reading Fair Play sent me back in time to the 2011 novella Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life. It's an extremely personal memoir styled exactly like a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) novel, down to the cover treatment and fonts. I can't find this book on the publisher's own website or distributor, and I wonder if they had copyright issues because of the distinctive style and language of CYOA.
While trying to rustle up the (anonymous) author or the designer, I learned the word "bricoleuse": a tinkerer, someone who uses what is at hand.
All of this also shows why I'm excited about my colleague Alexander B. Joy's recent edited volume of stories featuring Flaxman Low, Occult Detective, written by E. and H. Heron in the late 1800s. My copy is on the way, but Flaxman sounds a bit like the Scooby Gang, using science to investigate the paranormal.
Thanks for reading.
Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by anonymous