Harrison, Colin. "Mrs. Corbett's Request". The New York Times Magazine. 17 Aug 2008, 22-25.

I don't have much to say about this one, just that it's the first time I've received the Sunday Times for enough of a stretch that I've been able to read one of its new Funny Pages serials every step of the way. And it was awesome. The story itself was no great wonder—a guy who works in some investigative capacity (for money managers?) in some large company in New York is asked to find some answers surrounding the sudden death of the late owner's middle-aged son—but the experience of reading it was rewarding in some easy, weird way.

Clearly, reading what may have amounted to a novel (how many words altogether, I wonder?) over the course of several months doesn't lead to a lot of retention. I remember that one guy who was a real private investigator, and the other guy who had a ton of money and lived under some kind of cloak of privacy out in the country, but their names? No clue. And how neatly did these weird characters fit into the central story, in the end? Not very well.

But it's a mystery, so who cares? I've expressed before how much I like reading longer fiction in serial format, and decried how rarely we get to do it. What other formats out there exist, anyone know? I've run across Five Chapters once or twice before, but haven't ever spent time with a story.

If I didn't have a string of Mad Men episodes to watch, I might take more time to talk about the Web as an incredible tool for the proliferation of serial fiction, and then some more time with some shallow ideas on how serialization can let a writer get away with more spottiness, or maybe even sloppiness, because of the way it gives us periods of time between episodes to forget everything other than the essentials. What are those essentials, though? I might answer this question, or try to. Instead: TV!

(Discuss: anyone know anything about this writer, Colin Harrison? I wonder, among avid fans of mystery fiction, whether this one holds up as a good one. He sure as hell beats dull Patricia Cornwell.)