Novels – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

Curious Facts about the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle investigates the fascinating facts behind some of the greatest detective novels

The rise of detective fiction is a fascinating topic (previously, I’ve chosen 10 of the greatest examples of the genre), and it’s no surprise that a book telling the story of classic crime fiction in 100 books should yield many surprising and interesting facts. This is certainly the case with Martin Edwards’ The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (British Library Crime Classics), a beautifully produced book from the British Library which charts the rise of crime fiction during the genre’s ‘Golden Age’ of the first half of the twentieth century.

Five Fascinating Facts about William Gibson

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. William Gibson popularised the term ‘cyberspace’ in a short story of 1982.

Defined as ‘the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs’, cyberspace first appeared in fiction in William Gibson’s 1982 story ‘Burning Chrome’ (no relation to Google Chrome, we’re told), a story about a couple of freelance hackers. (Before it was published, Gibson read this story out at a science fiction convention – to an audience of four people.)

Five Fascinating Facts about Vampire Fiction

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Vampires began to appear in literature in a big way in the early eighteenth century, as a result of a real-life ‘vampire craze’.

In the 1720s and 1730s, vampires became a big part of European culture, and even included the digging up of a couple of suspected vampires, Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole, in Serbia. Following this, there was a 1748 poem The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, as well as the narrative poem Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger.

Five Fascinating Facts about Georgette Heyer

The life and work of Georgette Heyer

We’ve recently been enjoying Jennifer Kloester’s Georgette Heyer Biography, published in 2011. Subtitled The Biography of a Bestseller, it’s a fascinating look at the life of an extraordinary writer or ‘publishing phenomenon’, as the phrase often used of bestselling writers has it. Here are five of our favourite facts about Georgette Heyer’s life and work, several of which we learnt from reading Kloester’s book.

1. Georgette Heyer’s earliest stories were written to cheer up her brother, Boris. Boris was haemophiliac and Georgette – the family surname is pronounced ‘hair’ rather than ‘hay-er’ – came up with her earliest forays into fiction as a way of entertaining him.

15 Great Quotes about the Novel

The best quotations from writers – about the art of the novel

What should a novel be? Writers down the ages have often decreed that the novel should be one thing or another. Here are fifteen of the best quotes from writers about the novel as an art form, as a mode of social enquiry, as a book of questions, and much else besides.

A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. – Randall Jarrell