undetectable
A down-graded storm.
There are of course other things I should be doing, even other things I should be reading, but just at the moment detective stories seem to be what I want. They are amusing and plotty and charmingly shamefaced. There’s not a one that takes itself too seriously, not one that claims it will last longer than empires, not one that poses or postures as anything but what it is: a detective story. Of course they do not mind nodding and winking at the reader, with protestations of ‘lawd, I wouldn’t believe it if I read it in a book’ or ‘you’ve read too many detective stories’ at some improbable turn of the plot – though one detective even goes so far as to credit a mystery he’d read with helping him to solve the case.1 Neither here nor there; suffice it to say that I’ve been reading detective stories and am not quite sure what will come of it.
- The Rasp, p. 230. [↩]