A waste

    This week's consideration of the works of Dick Francis and John D. MacDonald will cover a very irritating feature found in both. (Just kidding! I swear I'm not going to make this a recurring item.) OK, you have a sleuth. The first rule in detective stories is "Find the woman," so there's supposed to be a woman in there somewhere. Sometimes, the woman gets killed. In both Francis' and MacDonald's novels, when that woman is young and attractive, there nearly always is a lot of hand-wringing BECAUSE she's young and attractive, a lot of very creepy, almost necrophiliac-sounding "what a waste" type noises.
    For my part, I tend to feel that it's a tremendous waste if anyone-- young, old, male, female, pretty or ugly-- dies before their time, and feel very uncomfortable when pretty girls are singled out. Now, these are all or nearly all first-person narratives, so the opinion is meant to reflect the hero's attitude. And that again is presumably keyed to what the author thinks the reader's attitude would be. And maybe it's supposed to inspire in the hero a little added incentive to solve the case and catch the villains.
    I dunno; I'm a little insulted that anyone would think that any reader wouldn't be creeped out by that particular idea. A lot of fans think that Francis' novels were largely written by his wife Mary. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but if it were I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. Would that reflect a jaundiced view of men on her part? Or am I just overdramatizing authors' attempts to humanize their hard-boiled characters by introducing a softer, if creepy, side? Probably B.