Hounds and Beasts: Catching Up on Some Classic Mysteries

The most frequent suggestion in the course evaluations for Mystery and Detective Fiction over the years has been "more Sherlock Holmes." I've never been that engaged by Holmes, which is why I've always been content to represent him in the syllabus with just a short story or two, but there's no denying his importance to the genre, so for the 2010 version of the course I added The Hound of the Baskervilles--without actually having read it first (shhh!). It seemed an obvious choice, and is certainly acclaimed enough that I felt confident taking it on faith. Now that I've actually read it, I have no regrets about having assigned it: of its kind, it is certainly good. I remain, personally, not that interested in its kind, but it is suspenseful and clever, and well-written, too, particularly in its evocations of the brooding moors on which the mystery plays out:

'It is a wonderful place, the moor,' [says Stapleton], looking around over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges. 'You never tireof the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.'

Or there's this, from Dr. Watson, who gets more than his usual share of this novel:

In the evening I put on my waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the Great Mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the Black Tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself upon the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills. In the distant hollow oon the left, half hidden by the mist, the two think towers of Baskerville Hall rose above the trees. They were the only signs of human life which I could see, save only those prehistoric huts which lay thickly upon the slopes of the hills.

Though the competition between natural and supernatural explanations plays out just as we expect it to in a Sherlock Holmes story, the powerful atavistic forces evoked by this landscape with its stone relics of an earlier pre-scientific age give additional thematic resonance to Holmes's eventual unveiling of the truth behind the ghostly hound. Even knowing there must be a rational explanation for this apparition does little to take away from its chilling description--the stuff of nightmares:

A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have evern seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.

As is conventional in "Great Detective" stories, we are spectators to Holmes's work here: there are clues, of course, but there's a lot we can't know. Having Watson in charge for several chapters gives us the illusion of greater involvement for a while, but as ever, Holmes controls crucial information, and the conclusion is a typical display of his superior knowledge and ability. It's a polished performance--for both Holmes and Conan Doyle. I think my students will enjoy it.

I'm not as convinced about The Big Sleep, which I similarly took on faith as the obvious alternative to The Maltese Falcon (I've done Falcon in this class five or six times running and have felt it getting a bit stale). I recall that it took me a while to work up an interpretive apparatus for Falcon, so before I give up on The Big Sleep I should certainly read around a bit. But my first impression is very negative. The plot is extremely confusing, for one thing. Mind you, the plot of The Maltese Falcon gets pretty convoluted too, but it gets a lot of momentum from the relationship between Sam and Brigid right from the start. Also, Falcon has a sense of humour: parts of it are fun, even funny (Sam's first meeting with Joel Cairo, for instance, or pretty much every scene with Gutman), and I can't think of any fun parts of the Big Sleep. Almost everybody in it is nasty, and though I know Marlowe is supposed to stand for a higher, more chivalric code (yes, I noticed that knight in the window trying to rescue the lady with the "convenient" hair), it wasn't easy to see what he was fighting for. General Sternwood seems to get his loyalty, but not because he's especially admirable or worth protecting, that I could see; there's Harry Jones, I guess, but that's setting a pretty low standard. And the women! At least Brigid is really in the game, and much of her 'femme fatale' posturing is theatrical. I'm not sure what to make of Vivian Sternwood's play for Marlowe (Carmen, of course, is a psychotic nymphomaniac). Brigid at least never has a line quite as bad as Vivian's "'Hold me close, you beast.'" Is Vivian the damsel who needs rescuing? I guess her loyalty to her sister has a grain of something worth saving in it. Overall, anyway, I found the novel tiresome: sexist, homophobic, convoluted. Maybe I'll warm to it--or maybe I'll make a frantic call to the bookstore and see about changing back to The Maltese Falcon. Tips welcome on how to appreciate it!

Who Cares Who Killed ... Whoever It Was?

I've just finished reading the latest releases by two of my favourite mystery novelists, P. D. James's The Private Patient and Elizabeth George's Careless in Red. (I know they've been out for a while; I was waiting for the paperback editions.) Both books are better than fine as examples of their type--though George is in fact American, both authors write what we could call highbrow British police procedurals, leisurely in pace, attentive to setting, driven by character more than plot. Both write well; James's prose is more economical, while George's would (IMHO) benefit from more stringent editing, but both offer their readers intelligent complexity of language and thought. The depth of character and theme both achieve justifies James's repeated assertion that crime fiction provides a useful structure for the novelist without necessarily limiting the literary potential of her work.

Yet for all their virtues, I found myself unexpectedly dissatisfied with both of these novels, for reasons that are based in their form. Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of 'puzzle mysteries,' such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly "whodunnit." (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character's outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives--which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.

That, I think, is very much what has happened with both James's Adam Dalgliesh and George's Thomas Lynley. Every one of their books is populated by a new array of people, but they are the ones with whom we have longstanding relationships--remarkably longstanding, indeed, as James has been publishing Dalgliesh mysteries since Cover Her Face in 1962, and the first Lynley novel, A Great Deliverance, was published in 1988. And though Dalgliesh and Lynley have always been complex and interesting protagonists, in recent books so much of significance has happened in their lives that I turned to these latest instalments motivated far less by curiosity about the latest corpse than by the desire to know how things are going with them. While actually reading the books, I took a fairly perfunctory interest in the investigations but I was keenly interested in what came to seem the regrettably few sections focusing on, for instance, Dalgliesh's relationship with Emma Lavenham (and not just because it's a little victory for English professors everywhere). The real novelistic potential of The Private Patient emerges, I think, in the scene in which Emma confronts Dalgliesh in his professional capacity and we see, fleetingly, the difficulty that even these two extremely intelligent and independent people might have reconciling law and love, justice and humanity. But this material is not developed, and in fact the novel in which it does become the focus would have to leave the genre of detection quite far behind. (Gaudy Night is a rare example of a novel that I believe successfully balances human and literary interests with mystery elements, partly by integrating the case so thoroughly with the personal aspects of the story and making both the detection and the romance converge on the same themes.) Careless in Red spends more time on Lynley's personal situation, but again his struggle to move forward after the tragedy of two novels ago (see how I'm avoiding spoilers, in case anyone hasn't already read this excellent series?) is subordinated to the case at hand--though George does set the case up with thematic echoes of his tragedy.

I can hardly fault either author for the relative weight they give to the professional, rather than personal, business of their characters. That's the kind of book they have undertaken to write. Also, as their protagonists are professional detectives, policing is integral not just to their work, but to their identities. But I do wonder if even James, the acknowledged Grande Dame of the genre, hasn't finally shown us the end point (dare I say the dead end?) of a commitment to this genre. Just introducing the kind of story arcs they have given their protagonists recently suggests that James and George might be chafing at the constraints of detective fiction, wanting to write a straight novel of psychological and moral development, a novel in which incident is second to character, a novel squarely in the tradition James has always claimed as hers--that of Austen and George Eliot and Trollope. At any rate, that's the kind of novel I find I wish they would write. Over the years they have succeeded in getting me quite emotionally involved in the lives of their main characters (and not just Dalgliesh and Lynley, either, but Kate Miskin, Barbara Havers, Simon and Deborah St. James...). The corpse and suspects, however, are never more than passing acquaintances.

On a somewhat tangential note, I was struck reading The Private Patient by the elegaic note on which it ends, in a passage which also echoes the wonderful 'squirrel's heartbeat' passage from Chapter XX of Middlemarch:

She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defense against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.

Though of course I would not rush to assume that a character's views are those of the author, it is hard not to read this final paragraph from a novelist who has spent nearly five decades telling us about "deeds of horror" as a reminder, even a consolation, that even in a murder mystery, death need not define life.

'Literary' vs. 'Genre' Fiction

At 'Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,' Kyle Minor offers some thoughts on the relationship between 'literary' and 'genre' fiction:

I did not set out to be a mystery writer or a crime writer, nor am I sure I am one now. That’s not to say that I don’t admire the genres, because I do. If forced to trade, I’ll take one Dennis Lehane, one Richard Price, one George Pelecanos, one James M. Cain, one Big Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett—any one of them, any day—over any ten “literary” writers. I mean it. Because all of these writers do all of the things to which literature ought to aspire—vivid evocation of character, an intelligent reckoning with thematic material that matters, an acquaintance with the music language can make—while, at the same time, giving us a sock-in-the-gut story in a time and place of consequence.

(I also ought to mention, while we’re speaking of it, that contemporary crime and mystery writers are lately doing another thing that literature used to do more often, which is to work out intractable social problems on a big canvas and consider the workings of groups and systems as worthy as the individual of their attentions. I might argue, in fact, that the closest thing we have to Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Dos Passos these days is HBO’s The Wire, a television show helmed by nonfiction crime writer David Simon, with episodes penned by Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos. But that’s an argument for another day, another essay.) (read the rest here)

This is well-travelled territory for anyone who teaches mystery fiction, as readers of this blog will know. The remark about 'The Wire' sounds a bit familiar too... But the distinctions between varieties of fiction do matter, if only insofar as our assumptions about them affect our reading practices--something highlighted to great comic effect in Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." The exercise of drawing up "a list of mystery stories that belong in the literary canon, and a list of canonical works of literature that are, at their core, mysteries" is fun, as drawing up lists always is. On the other hand, highlighting mystery novels that count as literary rather perpetuates the idea that most of them don't--an assumption I don't actually disagree with, but then, I wouldn't consider all "canonical" works equally literary either. Of Minor's list, I'd think the Hammett and Chandler hardly need defending on these grounds anymore. I haven't read Lush Life, but unless it is much better than Clockers, it wouldn't be on my list: I thought Clockers was well conceived and constructed, but not very well written. (Probably it would have seemed more original if I hadn't just watched all of The Wire.) Minor's list is also weighted towards American hard-boiled and police procedurals, but I would consider P. D. James one example of someone working within the British tradition who uses the strong structural frame of a detective story to do some very thoughtful and literary things (A Taste for Death comes to mind, as does An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). Ian Rankin, also, is an obvious example of a writer whose crime fiction shows both social and thematic reach and literary sophistication. But it's the conversation generated, rather than the lists themselves, that seems to me most valuable on these occasions: we should all keep thinking and talking about what qualities make some books better or more important than others, no matter where they are usually shelved in the bookstore.

(via.)

Paul Auster, City of Glass

I've just finished reading City of Glass, one of many suggestions I've received for expanding the reading list for my upcoming 'Mystery and Detective Fiction' course.

Unprofessional reaction: I hated this book. It's too clever by half, full of cute intertextual, metatextual jokes and tricks, and all too predictably and preeningly post-modern about the elusiveness of meaning, the fracturing of identity, and the gaps between signifieds and signifiers. It's fiction as word- and mind- games, all metaphysics and no humanity.*

Professional reaction: This book is utterly unlike the other novels on my syllabus, and yet deliberately and intricately engaged with them and what they represent and investigate (I realized that all by myself, even before I read through this smart critical essay). You could say that it offers a philosophical and theoretical as well as literary response to the rest of the syllabus. In its own way, it takes the metaphysical premises and literary conventions of detective fiction more seriously than any of the other assigned works--and, again in its own, postmodern, self-conscious way, does more with them (or should I say, to them?). Pedagogically, I can certainly see the case for teaching it, and I'm sure I and my students would learn from the experience.

So here's where I'm left for now: I hate the novel, I'd be happy never to read it again, it's everything I don't like about postmodern fiction (and theory)...but it just might be the right book for my course, and assuming I can learn to engage with the novel intellectually, my visceral dislike of it will either be rendered irrelevant or even subside. Maybe.

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* Update: This review of Auster's recent Man in the Dark over at the TLS tells me mine is not a wholly idiosyncratic response to Auster: "for the first time, perhaps, in an Auster novel the heart is more important than the head."

Mysterious Reading Plans: Another Idea

I'm still struggling with the question of what, if anything, to add to the reading list for my winter term course on 'mystery and detective fiction.' Just to reiterate, it's not that there aren't lots of good mystery novels out there, but I'm trying to see what type of novel I might assign that isn't already represented on my list, what author or book models some kind of significant recent development rather than a modern twist on a familiar genre (such as the hard-boiled private eye, or the British police procedural).

Here's my most recent thought. I've just finished watching the last season of The Wire. I'd love to incorporate television crime drama into the course--but I lack the expertise to do so responsibly, and even if I thought I could study up, there seem to be a lot of logistical problems. I was thinking about what I admire about The Wire, though, and part of it is the way it uses its 'cop show' framework for broad (or do I mean deep?) social criticism: many critics have used the adjective "Dickensian" for it, and I think they are right in that it resembles a novel like Bleak House in the range of its interests and in its strategy of showing not just connections between, but also variations on common themes across, a wide social spectrum. In other words, among other things it is an updated take on the 'condition of England' novel--though of course it's the 'condition of America' that's at stake in The Wire. I don't have anything on my syllabus that is so overtly ambitious as social criticism, though of course many (perhaps all) of our readings are at least implicitly critical of key aspects of modern life (The Moonstone and The Maltese Falcon being the best examples). Ian Rankin uses his detective fiction for something like this purpose: Fleshmarket Close is one that comes to mind. But I like Knots and Crosses, already on my syllabus, for its twist on Gothic fiction. Still, I could replace it with one of Rankin's more socially and thematically capacious novels. Or, it occurs to me, I could look at the books written by the guys who wrote for The Wire: what about Richard Price's Clockers, for instance, or his more recent Lush Life? The problem is, I haven't read these yet--and also Clockers appears to be 600+ pages. What about David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets? It's non-fiction, so perhaps that's out of line. I'm reading Denis Lehane's Mystic River right now. It's certainly compelling, but it's as much a thriller as a detective novel, and it's an inward-looking psychological drama too, not unlike Knots and Crosses (both remind me of the line from Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story": "What is done in youth can never be undone in age!"). Lehane (and Price, and George Pelecanos) have a lot of other books between them, but Clockers seems to be among the most critically praised. If it is the kind of book it sounds like, it would bring the course around in an interesting way to Victorian ideas about crime and society and about fiction's role in addressing these issues--but in a 'gritty' contemporary way. But then maybe I'd need to cut something.

I have about three weeks now before final book orders are due. Sure, I can read another 600-pager. No problem.

Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling

The Calling is a really creepy book. Although it is ostensibly a police procedural, following the efforts of D. I. Hazel Micallef's efforts to solve a murder case that begins in her small home town of Port Dundas, Ontario, its cover identifies it as "a novel of suspense," and that ultimately seems the more accurate category for it. Edgar Allan Poe, often considered the founder of the detective story 'proper,' wrote short stories in two categories: horror and ratiocination. The former (such as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat") are extensions of or variations on gothic elements and give us human nature at its most perverse, frightening, and inexplicable; the latter (such as "The Purloined Letter") hold out the promise that reason can prevail. Though the detective work in The Calling relies to some extent on ratiocination, on evidence and deduction, by choosing as its criminal a religiously-motivated psychotic* and by the nature of its denouement, the novel overall continues that first tradition, the gothic/horror tradition. But it does so without linking its specific story in any compelling way to some underlying idea about human nature (as Poe does, with his interest in the shaky borders between sanity and insanity) or about social institutions and their impact on individual personalities (as I think Ian Rankin does in, say, Knots and Crosses). Micallef and the other 'good guys' are well-drawn characters and the community they work in is nicely evoked, but I would have been much more impressed by a story that arose somehow out of that community, out of its history, its landscape, or its people. Instead, what Wolfe (whichever "well-known North American writer" he or she might really be) has given us is a grim, sometimes shockingly gruesome, but cheaply sensational cop-vs-psycho story--my least favourite kind of crime fiction, as it turns us into morbid voyeurs as we hang on for the inevitable last-ditch confrontation between good and evil. I thought the cross-country crime odyssey was inadequately motivated, as well: we get some back-story, but not enough, or not deep enough, to offer insight into the factors (whether psychological or social) that might give rise to such a character. Though a brief attempt is made to connect Micallef to the killer ("it was as if they had become twins"), the comparison is totally undeserved and undeveloped, so, again, the gothic potential remains untapped. The jacket blurb (unseemly, I think, in its effusive praise, which should surely come not from the publisher but from the book's readers) says that this "dazzling novel" is "the first in a series." It could be a good series, if it takes what is honest and human in this book and finds the tragedy, pathos, and police work in that. But I certainly won't assign this one in my class. For one thing, I don't find a teachable contribution in it, either to the mystery genre or to our thinking about crime as a literary theme or a social problem. But also, I felt awful while reading it, sickened by being a witness to its events, and while of course it would be foolish, even disingenuous, to be squeamish about violence as such in crime fiction, I want the violence to be treated as more than spectacle, and here, I wasn't convinced that it was.

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*This is not a spoiler, as we follow his thoughts and actions from the first chapter.

Sue Grafton, T is for Trespass

Well, that was OK. I appreciate that Grafton is experimenting with different forms, here the alternation between Kinsey's first-person narration and third-person narration from the perspective of the "chilling sociopath" Kinsey ends up in a sort of cat-and-mouth game with.* The effect is to switch genres, from mystery to suspense. I think the strategy would have been more interesting and exciting if there had been more ambiguity in the second narrative: knowing she's evil, we're just waiting for Kinsey to catch on, and knowing Kinsey is a series character, we're pretty confident she's not going to get taken out, so the suspense is always constrained. I did appreciate what may be our first outside look at Kinsey: before this, did we know she has green eyes? The book ends on an oddly didactic note; perhaps taking a cue from Sara Paretsky's fondness of taking on current social issues in her mysteries, Grafton has taken on elder-abuse here, but she has kept her series so carefully in the past that it's not obviously appropriate or logical for Kinsey, back in 1989 or whatever, to urge us to "make a difference." The back-dating does let Grafton have a little fun remembering a time when computers were expensive and rare. The writing is competent, but I don't see why she gives us quite so much detail. Do we need to know what Kinsey does down to specified 15-minute intervals?

The back jacket quotes Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post Book World claiming that the "Millhone books are among the five or six best series any American has ever written." Maybe he doesn't read much?

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*The phrase "chilling sociopath" is from the inside jacket, which has to be one of the worst-written book blurbs I've ever read ("The true horror of this novel builds with excruciating tension as the reader foresees the awfulness that lies ahead.").

Mysterious Reading Update

I've begun working my way through some of the books I'm considering as additions or alternatives in my Mystery and Detective Fiction course (thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and advice). So far, I'm not sold on any of the ones I've read.

I really didn't enjoy Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers: like Miriam, I found it nearly "unreadable," perhaps, as she proposes, because of a poor translation, but also I didn't like either Wallander or the crime story particularly. To be sure, I don't have to like a book to assign it, but then I need to see it as offering something important and new to the class, and I already have an example of a gloomy police procedural featuring a dysfunctional, divorced, hard-drinking detective. I also don't have to assign the first book in the series and maybe they get better, so I'll probably browse a couple more to test this first impression.

In a strange way, I did enjoy Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem, which is certainly one of the more surprising books I've read in any genre. It's not really a detective novel: I think it's best categorized as a "caper" story, or, as one reviewer in the cover blurb says, a "mayhem" story. It is grim and violent but surreally comic at the same time. One of the more spectacular scenes is a car chase through Harlem featuring a hearse loaded with a dead body and a trunk supposedly containing gold ore. An excerpt will give a sense of Himes's striking, high-velocity prose as well as the outlandish character of the novel:

When Jackson took off in the big old Cadillac hearse down Park Avenue, he didn't know where he was going. He was just running. He clung to the wheel with both hands. His bulging eyes were set in a fixed stare on the narrow strip of wet brick pavement as it curled over the hood like an apple-peeling from a knife blad, as though he were driving underneath it. On one side the iron stanchions of the trestle flew past like close-set fence pickets, on the other the store-fronted sidewalk made one long rushing somber kaleidoscope in the gray light before dawn.

The deep steady thunder of the supercharger spilled out behind. The open back-doors swung crazily on the bumpy road, battering the head of the corpse as it jolted up and down beneath the bouncing trunk.

He headed into the red traffic light at 116th Street doing eighty-five miles an hour. He didn't see it. A sleepy taxi driver saw something black go past in front of him and thought he was seeing automobile ghosts. . . .

"Runaway hearse! Runaway hearse!" voices screamed.

The hearse ran into crates of iced fish spread out on the sidewalk, skidded with a heavy lurch, and veered against the side of the refrigerator truck. The back doors were flung wide and the throat-cut corpse came one-third out. The gory head hung down from the cut throat to stare at the scene of devastation from its unblinking white-walled eyes. . . .

Jackson went along 95th Street to Fifth Avenue. When he saw the stone wall surrounding Central Park he realized he was out of Harlem. He was down in the white world with no place to go, no place to hide his woman's gold ore, no place to hide himself. He was going at seventy miles an hour and there was a stone wall ahead.

The climactic scenes involve a gender-bending character named Billie:

She was a brown-skinned woman in her middle forties, with a compact husky body filling a red gabardine dress. With a man's haircut and a smooth, thick, silky mustache, her face resembled that of a handsome man. But her body was a cross. The top two buttons of the dress were open, and between her two immense uplifed breasts was a thick growth of satiny black hair.

Billie knows how to defend her own:

She put her whole weight in a down-chopping blow and sank the sharp blade of the axe into the side of his neck with such force it hewed through the spinal column and left his head dangling over his left shoulder on a thin strip of flesh, the epithet still on his lips.

Blood geysered from red stump of neck over the fainting girl as Billie dropped the axe, picked her bodily in her arms, and showered her with kisses.

It's all sort of awesomely horrible. Honestly, I wouldn't know where to start if I were teaching this novel. But my curiosity about Himes is certainly piqued, so I'm going to look into his novels that focus more clearly on his detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones.

Stylistically, I'm impressed at what I've read of Yasmina Khadra's Double Blank, one of the few of his detective novels I found at my public library. (I actually don't read much literature in translation, so here and with the Mankell I was puzzled at where to lay the blame or credit for the qualities of the prose, but since I would have to work with the English version, what matters in the end is how well it reads.) But it takes me so far afield from what I usually teach in terms of historical and cultural context that I think it would be difficult for me to do an adequate job of it.

So: more to read, more to think about. In the meantime, I've also learned of what looks like an excellent anthology to consider as an alternative to the one I've been using, the Oxford Book of Detective Stories: the Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction. Just going by the product description, it seems to have a good selection of primary material but also an interesting array of critical supplements. It's not clear to me yet that it would be available for my class in an acceptable format. Perhaps its limited availability in Canada explains why I hadn't turned it up before, though it is not a new volume.

Mysterious Reading Plans

As I've remarked a few times in recent posts, I'm hoping to shake up the reading list for my class on Mystery and Detective Fiction. I introduced it in 2003, and the major texts have been basically the same each time I've taught it: some Poe and Conan Doyle and various other short fiction, depending on the anthology I've got; Collins's The Moonstone, Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Sue Grafton's 'A' is for Alibi, and Ian Rankin's Knots and Crosses.

I've been having a hard time choosing additions or alternatives, partly because I'm not really an avid reader of mysteries (too often I find them formulaic or gimmicky, or too grim) so the work of filtering out the good or the significant is unappealing. My own taste tends to wordy, British-style character-driven ones, but between P. D. James, Peter Robinson, Elizabeth George, and Ian Rankin, I don't run out of books to read, and when I want something pithier, well, Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis too keep providing me with new ones (just this weekend I whipped through Now and Then, and last weekend it was Spare Change). I've picked up some new authors recently: I like Deborah Crombie well enough, for instance, and for no good reason there are a lot of Reginald Hill titles I haven't read yet, so I've done some catching up. And I keep up with Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, though I have been finding them kind of flat lately. But what I feel I need for my course is not more of the same kinds already represented on my syllabus but more variety, and some indication of new directions the genre might be going, and no matter how many titles I bring home to take a look at, few leap out as significant or interesting enough to put on a syllabus. So I've solicited (and received) suggestions a couple of times here and asked around among my mystery-reading friends and family, and I've also been browsing a lot online, where of course there are many sources of information and recommendations, including the excellent blogs Petrona and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I had in mind a more diverse list of writers, perhaps something Canadian, perhaps something from the vast array of 'international' crime writers. Here is a list of the titles or authors I've come up with from which I hope to draw my new material:

• Chester Himes (probably A Rage in Harlem or Big Gold Dream)
• Henning Mankell (maybe Faceless Killers because I like to use the first in a series if possible)
• Helene Tursten, Detective Inspector Huss
  
• John Banville, Christine Falls (I remain ambivalent about this one)
  
• Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling

I've gathered most of these titles up from the public library and plan a serious course of crime reading over the next couple of weeks (when I'm not reading Adam Bede, of course!). I remain open to suggestions!

The other thought I've had, as I work my way through The Wire (just wrapped Season 3), is that it would be exciting and appropriate to work TV in somehow. I've included Prime Suspect I in my seminar on Women and Detective Fiction, including this summer, and not only do the themes and action of the series work extremely well with the overall interests of the course, but the shift in genre and medium gives us a lot more to think and talk about. Crime shows are certainly a staple of television drama--but how can it be done? Also, of course, as a television (or film) critic I am a rank amateur, so how could I be sure to do it well?

P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

It's Reading Week here, which means a slight break from the day-to-day pressures of the term. Still, one's pedagogical conscience is never easy, so I've been balancing work and relaxation by reviewing P. D. James's memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, with an eye to teaching An Unsuitable Job for a Woman again in a week or two. James's subtitle is "A Fragment of an Autobiography," which rightly suggests a work that is neither tightly crafted nor expansive; it is an uneven but ultimately, I think, engaging mix of simple diary entries (her success has made her a very busy woman, we learn), recollections of her earlier life, and reflections on subjects of interest to her, from the history of crime fiction (of course) to current events such as the death of Princess Diana (the memoir begins in August 1997) or her experience serving on the jury for the Booker Prize, about which she is certainly frank ("Our final choice of Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger was only arrived at after a long argument which nearly made us late for the Guildhall dinner, and the choice was not unanimous"). (For what it's worth, Moon Tiger is one of my favourite books, and would probably have gotten my vote!) Throughout, her strong, if slightly crotchety, personality provides the unifying thread; she is opinionated and decisive, especially in her literary judgments (on The God of Small Things, for instance, she remarks that "it seems to me somewhat lush and overwritten, a beginner's attempt at a Naipaul or a Rushdie"), impatient with pretense and show, and unapologetic about her own chosen form:

I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer's internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn't expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution. (12-13)

She talks often, actually, about the particular importance of setting in her novels; this is a topic we will address at length in class as we work on Unsuitable Job, in which the beauty of Cambridge provides a particularly poignant (as well as thematically significant) backdrop for the horrors of the story. An expert on the history of her own genre, James is also widely read in Victorian and contemporary fiction, though she is generally more enthusiastic about the former than the latter. Here, in a passage that exemplifies the bookish, even erudite, yet somewhat meandering or incidental quality of the book, she quotes one of my own favourite lines about the novel, Henry James writing on Trollope (an unlikely alliance, perhaps?) then finds herself meditating on the changing role of fiction in society:

One quotation I would most like to see in any revised edition [of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, which she was reviewing for the Sunday Times] are the words of Henry James, writing of Anthony Trollope, "We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities." It is an elevanted ideal of fiction, but, thinking it over, I am not sure that it is any longer true. Dickens could write a novel which would move his readers to pity or outrage and act as a spur to action, but surely today it is television which, sometimes powerfully, sometimes superficially, examines for us the dilemmas and concerns of our age, reflects our lives and opens us to the lives of others. . . .

In particular, the so-called literary novel too often seems removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. The very description 'literary novel' is, for many readers, an indication that the work is not intended for them. With some notable exceptions--David Lodge is one--the worlds of industry and commerce, the very means by which society gains the wealth which supports our art and literature, are alien to the modern novelist, perhaps because they are worlds few of us have experienced. Have we a responsibility to break free from our cabined preoccupations, our fascination with history and our literary exploitations of the evils of the past and address ourselves to more contemporary themes? Is there a novelist today who could write--or would try to write--War and Peace or Trollope's The Way We Live Now with its brilliant portrayal of the financier Melmotte, the nineteenth-century Robert Maxwell?

Unless the novel, particularly the so-called literary novel, can reach the hearts and minds of ordinary people, reading will increasingly become a minority interest. . . It would be futile, and indeed silly, to suggest that novelists today can recover the hierarchical and moral certainties of Victorian England. Some writers would argue that we can no longer comfortably write in the tradition of social realism because we no longer know what we mean by reality. I suppose the extremes of literary experimentation are some novelists' ways of explaining the arbitrariness and chaos of human existence, an attempt to express the inexpressible. Thomas Hardy wrote that the secret of fiction lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal. But what adjustment can a writer make if, in a world governed for him by chance and chaos, he is no longer able to believe in things eternal and universal? (77-78)

On that note, it's interesting to note that James herself is a devoted, but not pious, Anglican, meaning she appreciates and participates in religious ritual but finds that compatible with what seems a fairly loose commitment to specific doctrines.

There's much more of interest in the book, especially for fans of her novels or of detective fiction more generally. I'll end here with some of the rules she provides, first for reviewers, and second for those adapting books for television. First, from her advice for reviewers:

1. Always read the whole of the book before you write your review.
2. Don't undertake to review a book if it is written in a genre you particularly dislike.
3. Review the book the author has written, not the one you think he/she should have written.
4. If you have prejudices--and you're entitled to them--face them frankly and, if appropriate, acknowledge them.
   

And some sage words for TV people:

1. [her #6] Must we always have a car chase? Men may like them (although I can't think why); most women find them boring in the extreme. And if you must have a car chase, must it go on for so long? It need last only as long as it takes us to go and make the tea.

The book itself ends with her engaging address to the Jane Austen Society of North America on "Emma Considered as a Detective Story," well worth reading. Finally, if you want to listen to James speak for herself, try this excellent lecture on "The Craft of the Mystery Story," which she gave at the Smithsonian in 1995.

Ian Rankin, Exit Music

Not long ago I observed that I would be sorry to see the last of Ian Rankin's surly Scotch-soaked detective, John Rebus. Having now read Exit Music, my anticipated regrets are confirmed; Exit Music shows both Rankin and Rebus in characteristically good form. I don't have much to add to what has been said about it already in reviews and other blogs (Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor, for instance, has a nice post on it), except to remark that this series exemplifies the challenge writers in this genre face with characterization--most of the characters, for plot and suspense reasons, need to be a degree opaque--as well as the best way they find out of it, namely the series characters, whose characterization can be enriched across many volumes even as, as characters, they change and develop. In this series, of course, it's not just Rebus (who doesn't really change much, actually, though we know him better and better), but Siobhan Clarke who offers the human interest and complexity that move the books beyond the superficiality to which 'puzzle' mysteries are vulnerable. At the same time, Rankin keeps a careful balance between personal and procedural developments. The close engagement between Rebus and Edinburgh's history and politics, a thematic preoccupation since Knots and Crosses, is in full play here as well; in fact, Rebus's brooding here about the city's "overworld," which he finds as threatening and corrupt as its "underworld," reminded me very much of that first novel. Because we end up having relationships with series characters across long swathes of our own lives, Rebus's brooding on the way his work has dominated his life and identity, and therefore on what and who he will be after retirement, couldn't help but make me reflect on my own choices--and my own aging...in this respect at least, I appreciate Sue Grafton's decision to keep Kinsey Millhone back in the 1980s (no cell phone, never mind an iPod), though probably that is also one reason, among others, why that series seems to me rather to have stagnated.

Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her

What Came Before He Shot Her is a good idea: a "whydunnit," as one of the reviewers' blurbs calls it, the backstory of the 12-year-old boy arrested near the end of With No One as Witness for the shooting of Inspector Lynley's pregnant wife Helen. However, it is not, in the end, a very good novel. Its story is moderately compelling: knowing, as we do, more or less how it ends (or thinking we do--note the tell-tale "apparently" on the back cover), there's still some interest in seeing how we get there, George's characters are varied and carefully individualized, and many of the situations she imagines for them are full of pathos. But the book is primarily a treatise in criminology or sociology--a dramatization of George's understanding of what forces would compel a young kid to commit a horrible, and horribly random, murder. In her concern to cover the many failings in "the system," she seems to have let her literary sensibilities lapse almost completely. Particularly jarring to me was the dissociation between the narrating voice and the characters' perspectives. Of course, it is legitimate to incorporate commentary that comes from outside "story space" and offers insights not available to those acting out the drama. But too often here the comments have no bearing on the unfolding catastrophe, belonging to nobody in particular, as when one character gets a cell-phone, described intrusively as "the late-twentieth-century's most irritating electronic device" (183). Too often, as well, the narration sounds like it is excerpted from a textbook: Ness has "fallen through the cracks" at her school, for instance (62), or a counsellor does not realize that to her clients, she appears as "an adversary incapable of relating to a single element of their lives" (604). To Ness, the overheard sounds of her aunt having sex "comprised auditory torture, a blatant statement about love, desire, and acceptance, a form of imprimatur upon her aunt's desirability and worthiness" (330); later Kendra's emotional turmoil is summed up as "an amalgamation of the physical and emotional in a pitched battle with the psychological" (349). "In a society in which handguns had once been virtually nonexistent among the thieving and murdering clsses, they were now becoming disturbingly prevalent. That this was a direct result of the easing of borders that came along with European unification--which was, to some, just another term for opening one's arms to smuggling into the country everything from cigarettes to explosives--could have been mooted forever, and Sergeant Starr had not time for such mooting" (367)--we get it, here and everywhere--the author has been doing homework. But for me, at least, there's too much evidence of it here, too much the tone and attitude of a case study. The story of Joel's descent into crime is superficially plausible, but evaluating it requires someone with social science, not literary training. And don't even get me started on the fact that really, we are given 707 pages of "whydunnit" for the wrong "whodunnit" anyway...

Exit Rebus?

From The Guardian this week:

Rankin readers have known for several years that some kind of end was coming. Most series' authors freeze their heroes' birth-dates: realistically, John Le Carré's George Smiley and PD James's Adam Dalgliesh would have been beyond the care of the insurance industry in their later adventures. Rebus, however, has always passed a birthday during or between books and so his retirement from the force was always scheduled for November 2006, across 10 days of which Exit Music is set. Even this, as Rankin has scrupulously acknowledged in interviews, is strictly fantastical. Most cops get out as soon as they have piled enough years into their pension.

But the novels have always made it clear that Rebus remains a policeman because there is nothing else he can bear to be - he has failed in spells as husband, father, even, perhaps, as human being - and so Exit Music is underscored with a double line of heavy regret, Rebus wanting to go no more than the reader wishes him to. (Read the rest here--don't worry, no spoilers!)

I'll certainly be sorry to see him go; I'm a big fan of this series, which shows how an author can work within the structures and strictures of genre fiction to accomplish a wide range of literary and other effects. (P.D. James, another of my favourites, has said explicitly that the clear structure of detective stories frees her up to concentrate on other aspects of her fiction.*) I have taught the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, twice in my course on Mystery and Detective Fiction (and plan to assign it again this winter), not because I think it's the best of the bunch but because Rankin works so well in it both with and against key elements of its genre that it 'teaches well,' as those of us in the lit biz say. Rankin claims that he did not intend to write a mystery novel (when I was prepping Knots and Crosses, I came across a story, perhaps an interview, in which he claims to have been dismayed to find it filed under mysteries rather than under fiction or literature). He was actually working on a Ph.D. in literature when he turned to writing fiction; he is wittily but ruthlessly dismissive of critical approaches to literature now (I've seen this in person, as he gave a reading and talk here a couple of years back)--this seems like a shame, as he is (despite his best efforts to hide it) clearly very knowledgeable about the history and craft of his chosen genre, as well as about literature and writing more generally. Does he think he'll alienate readers if he drops the whole "I spend all my time at the pub" routine? (He was very funny about that, though, claiming to pass Alexander McCall Smith's house on his way to and fro and always hearing the clickety-clack of the keys there heralding the completion of yet another bestseller.)

*To hear a wonderful talk by P. D. James on "The Craft of the Mystery Story," go here.

Robert B. Parker, School Days

Works for me every time! There is a certain sameness about the Spenser novels, to be sure, but their consistency is usually a virtue. And in this case, there's a good dose of social relevance (school shootings) along with the usual psychological and social commentary--admittedly, elliptical to the extreme, but one aspect of these novels that I appreciate is how much work gets done in the silences and spaces, not in any postmodern sense of the important elements being absences or anything, but simply that when Parker's on his game, the situations and characters are conveyed strongly enough that we can fill in the blanks, come to the conclusions, ourselves. The influence of Raymond Chandler is strong, of course, with the whole "down these mean streets a man must go..." model, but Spenser's readiness to get mean himself when his code of honour requires it is usually the most interesting aspect of the plot. I have long admired the relationship Parker establishes for Spenser and Susan (who should surely be played by Terri Hatcher, if she can control her more gawky mannerisms?) and found the sexual and the racial politics of these novels a refreshing break from PC pieties (while insistently alert to inequities and injustices, both systemic and personal). (While I'm thinking about it, I'll just add that I've always admired Dick Francis for a similar ability to imagine equal, mature , independent women for putting into relationships with his male protagonists.) I do wonder, though, about Parker's fascination with assertively sexual women, such as Rita Fiore. Her intelligence and skill are never in doubt, and in some ways it seems a positive thing to create a character who is both a powerful professional woman and a sex kitten: women have struggled long enough with stereotypes that insist intellectual prowess is incompatible with femininity or allure. And yet I also feel that Rita plays into other cliches (fantasies?) about the qualities that make women attractive to men (OK, she's a smart lawyer, but look at those great legs!). Because I find the ethos of the Spenser novels overall so advanced, it feels carping to fret this detail, and I don't think Parker has any obligation to match his characters up to any specific standard in this respect. I guess I'm just surprised. Maybe this is a way to put a positive spin on the sexpot characters from the hard-boiled novels--kind of an updated, she's on our side now, verson of Brigid O'Shaunessy? Gorgeous dames aren't necessarily dangerous?

Sara Paretsky, Fire Sale

While writing a series of novels featuring the same detective allows an author to develop the main character (it's a requirement of detective novels, after all, that many characters remain opaque or two-dimensional enough that we aren't sure if they "dunnit" or not, so character development is typically quite restricted), it also risks repetition, especially if the writer is fixated on a very particular social and political vision. Paretsky's determination to use her novels to expose the evils of corporate capitalism means that you can pretty much predict the villains (big business) and their motives (profit) in every novel, and her continuing characters aren't that interesting to me anymore. The near-death escapes strain credulity, especially as V.I. ages (Sue Grafton's decision to keep Kinsey Millhone stuck in the 80s has saved her from this problem). The plotting is competent and the writing is OK, but it seems to me that this is a series that just doesn't have anything new or interesting to offer.