Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel by Julian Symons
Published 1972 · 272 pages · 75,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel to read?
Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Accessible critical prose with occasional genre-specific technical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Mixes concrete textual examples with broader arguments about genre evolution.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with titles, authors, and historical data compressed into continuous argument.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Direct critical argument with little rhetorical indirection.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Genre criticism in analytical rather than literary register.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Symons deploys dry irony when dismissing overrated writers.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Arguments are stated and resolved explicitly throughout.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Chronological survey structure with clear chapter divisions.
How Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel is regarded
Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.