Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording

Deliberately

This sentence, not to mention one I reference in the previous paragraph, both begin with “deliberately.” Qualifiers such as these are common in Reeve’s scientific detective fiction. His modern, methodical detectives rarely make mistakes, and they do not simply stumble upon solutions. For this reason, Locke suggests detectives such as Kennedy are difficult for audiences to like. He writes: “Craig Kennedy is easy to admire, but difficult to like. The human connection is absent. He’s a savant who comes down from academia’s mountaintop to impart inscrutable wisdom. You want to like him; you want him to become human again after he’s exercised that super-efficient intelligence for the good of the law. After reading enough stories of his adventures, you realize you will never know him. And perhaps that’s why he passed from the limelight” (49).

This page has paths: