Many Gothics not Gothic enough?

[Penfeather]

. . . but I also truly appreciate well-drawn characters and good dialogue (sparkling, if possible, between hero and heroine). I intensely dislike poorly written, trite dialogue. I don't imagine anyone does like it. But I find it is rife in too many gothic novels.

I couldn't agree more. In mediocre Gothics, the characters lack complexity (especially the male lead) and the dialogue can be stagy. I don't require the dialogue to be realistic (real people don't always speak in beautiful, mellifluous sentences, even educated people in the 19th Century), but I do ask that it at least not ring false.

I'm currently reading a novella by Paula Minton, Portrait of Terror (terrible title!). The author is not without certain strengths, but these are sabotaged by a tendency to overdescribe minutiae (each scene begins with a list of set pieces that reads like a Sotheby's catalogue), coupled with some eye-rollingly twee dialogue (the pompous autocrat of the breakfast table who constantly puffs lines of the "Capital! Right-o, old chap! Pip-pip, carry on!" sort).

It seems that one of the pitfalls of writing any kind of period fiction is that it's easy for the characters to become stock comic book figures. The best writers in the field manage to avoid this problem. The dialogue in Holt and Stewart is elegant without being mannered or affected.