All these critics notice is that the mystery writers adhere to the conventions of the genre, and they take this as evidence of the writers' formula nature. Usually the conventions help, not hurt, the branch of literature they support. This creativity is abundantly obvious in the case of the great mystery writers. But I believe that even most bad mystery writers were in there trying. Their work gives evidence of a failure of talent rather than of a desire to grind out hack prose.
Most mystery writers display a sincere love of the form.
A second canard about mystery authors is that they are fiction factories, rapidly grinding out enormous amounts of prose with little care or attention. This seems to be not at all true of most mystery writers. Compare the bibliographies in The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection with those in any other literary reference work about mainstream novelists or dramatists, and one will see overwhelming evidence in support of this idea. Of course, a few mystery writers were unusually prolific, but I believe that they were the exception, rather than the rule, in mystery history. In the crime field, one can cite such enormously fast authors as Edgar Wallace and Erle Stanley Gardner .