I was excited to start two period crime yarns, Robert Dugoni’s A Killing on the Hill and Jon Talton’s City of Dark Corners, both set in the Depression era, both in Western cities (Dugoni / Seattle, Talton / Phoenix). But now I have abandoned both novels. So what went on here?

The Dugoni lacks historical and city-specific flavor. The Talton does try a little harder in those respects.

Both books are written in a kind of Basic English that is uninspiring to say the least, with lazy use of first-person narration and of dialogue-driven narrative. The prose is simplistic: Neither of these writers gets beyond an 8th grade vocabulary level; neither has ever heard of a subordinate clause. The thoughts expressed are at that low unsubtle YA level as well.

I suppose this is the influence of television on fiction-writing since the 1980s: Keep it simple, keep it punchy, keep it mostly dialogue exchanges. And if you write at a level ABOVE 8th grade, you are severely restricting your audience these days, which for genre fiction especially has got to be a no-go.

Neither narrator seems convincing as a man of his time. Talton’s detective in particular is transparently a 2020s guy transplanted into a 1930s situation. Enlightened attitudes on race and gender, Mexican-American girlfriend who’s a professional photographer. I dislike this kind of pandering to palatability. If you’re going to write a historical, write it historically. Cleaning up the past is a wuss move.

So this is what I run into: I feel like I should read more fiction written recently, but when I try to, I am dismayed by the quality.