Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on July 13, 2010 at 02:38:24 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: AR's optimism posted by andyb on July 12, 2010 at 14:13:00:
In defence of "The Big Six", the plot is contrived because it is a detective story - a "police procedural" or "roman policier".
If one thinks of detective stories written during the Thirties by the great "Queens of Crime" - Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham or Dorothy Sayers, they all have contrived plots - it is probably impossible to write a classic detective story without one!
I think Ransome does brilliantly well in this book - he demonstrates that he can "knock off" a detective story in the standard form, but with children as characters, and at the same time he does something new for him and evidently dear to his heart by taking his readers into the world of the children of the skilled working classes.