A novel approach to New Zealand’s wine

The last Saturday of lockdown — inshallah — and we were discussing literature. Specifically, when does a detective story become a novel? T.S. Eliot edited the World’s Classics edition of The Moonstone and gave a copy to A.E. Housman, with the inscription: ‘The best detective story in English or any other language.’ Surely Eliot was right. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are superb detective fiction. But they are not novels. Poor Wilkie Collins did try to write novels. Nobody read them. Nobody was wise.

We more or less agreed. Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers, James Lee Burke: all regularly cross the frontier into novelism. Perhaps we should adopt the French term: roman policier. Chandler, Rex Stout, Simenon, Donna Leon, Michael Connelly, Ruth Rendell, John Harvey, Peter Robinson: detective stories, though jolly good ones. It is impossible to read a chapter of Signora Leon without an overwhelming urge to catch the next plane to Marco Polo airport, and no one is better than Stout.