In Murder In Black Letter: Kintyre.
In Murder Bound: Lauring. (Scroll down.)
In each of these mystery novels by Poul Anderson, the character named above is a more prominent viewpoint character than the detective, Trygve Yamamura.
At least, currently rereading the third novel, I have not yet looked ahead but, so far:
Chapter i, Conrad Lauring's point of view;
ii, Yamamura's pov;
iii, Lauring.
Yamamura seems to be squeezed out of his own books.
The opening paragraph of iii informs us that Lauring:
spends Saturday "...shopping for a used car..." (p 25);
buys a Citroen;
is "...still under the delusion that ten thousand dollars to his name made him wealthy." (ibid.)
POV Cop
That entire paragraph is narrated from Lauring's pov except for the second half of the concluding sentence. Lauring cannot know that he is under a delusion. Therefore, it is the omniscient narrator who comments by using the word "delusion." To remain within the character's pov, the text would have had to read something like: "The car was expensive but he was still well off with his ten thousand dollars," with the readers hopefully well informed enough to know that this is not the case.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I remember being bothered by how Trygve Yamamura "...seems to be squeezed out of his own books" when I read them. While of course a good mystery is not focused entirely on the detective investigating the case, we should see more of him. Which is we what we get in the mysteries of A. Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, and Robert van Gulik (to list some of the mystery writers I read). I thought it a weakness of Anderson to show us so relatively little of Yamamura in those three novels.
And, in 1959 ten thousand dollars was still a lot of money! More than a year's salary for many people. Of course that before inflation ravaged the dollar.
Sean
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