I have a friend who has been known to read all the novels of a author sequentially. And not just the short ones: the oeuvres complètes of Herman Wouk, for example, or of Tolstoy. Many people seem to do this in less ambitious fashion with murder mysteries, and I can see the attraction. A good mystery writer is worth her weight in gold to the enthusiast, a dependable voice that delivers a trademark experience again and again. I’ve just never been able to stick with it. I’ll read a book by one author—three in a row at most, I find—then move on to someone else. But I am interested in what an author can show, during her brief interview, about the craft of mystery writing, because I harbor the conviction that mystery writing models pretty much everything about the craft part of writing a modern novel.
It would be going too far to say that all modern novels are mystery novels, but I do think the reverse may be true of British mysteries. I find that the better British detective stories differ from the “literary fiction” of the Isles only in their overtness of genre. Perhaps this bespeaks an undue influence of one genre upon the whole of an art, but I think the similarity may be due to a cultural backdrop that a British author, unlike an American one, can still safely assume: a concept of manners taken seriously, the presence of clearly delineated social classes, a concealment of self in everyday discourse that implies a mystery at every turn. There’s a chance these are pet fictions, but I’ve heard tell of ’em.
Amazingly, I had never read a P.D. James novel till a few days ago, when I finished An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, the first of the two Cordelia Gray mysteries (the other being The Skull Beneath the Skin, which I’ve just started). I found it, in its way, perfect of its kind, paradigmatic of the sort of manageably short detective fiction that leaves one entertained, mildly cathartized, and not feeling cheated of literary respect by the author. Unsuitable, for one thing, is the perfect airport-bookrack length of 250 pages (60,000 words, the paperback publisher’s answer to the fashion industry’s size-6 dress).
It’s been a while since I have read an Agatha Christie novel. I used to enjoy them because my parents’ generation did—that vicarious nostalgia that one’s own parents may never have felt but that one adopts out of love for them—and gradually I came to appreciate the wiles of the British crime story. In my childhood years, a Sherlock Holmes phase was as de rigueur as a dinosaur phase, and I went through mine. From late teens onward the fear of not seeming sophisticated enough set in, and I veered from stodgy mysteries to “serious” fiction. Strangely, this didn’t keep me from reading science fiction, but my parallel career as a nerd-in-training will have to wait for another entry.
I suppose I was just out of college when I read Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, and that blew me away. For the first time, I realized that a mystery story need not operate in a morally coherent world, that everyone was “guilty” in his own way, and that not even a culprit was needed, or rather, there were inevitably many culprits, and the choice of which one to assign to the crime under investigation was largely arbitrary, an artifact of societal focus on the “smoking gun”—in this case, a body transplanted from belfry to grave. (I hope that wasn’t too much of a “spoiler.” Incidentally, Tailors also demonstrates how, against every intuition of common sense, bell change-ringing turns out to be of absolutely critical importance.)
Next came a brief obsession with Georges Simenon, who continued my re-education in the mystery genre. I learned from him that temporal order is overrated, as is the perspective of the detective; the perpetrator’s experience can be just as interesting: a whodunnit can be recast just as profitably as a why-dunnit or a how-dunnit or even a will-he-do-it. But there was always something a bit drab about reading a Simenon story, for me. Maybe it was that he wasn’t English (or American, but I confess a greater affinity for British mysteries). I lost interest in what I came to think of as “straight suspense” for years, until I rediscovered it in more savory form in Patricia Highsmith’s novels and novellas.
In fact, when I made an abortive attempt, a few years ago, to write a novel, it was going to be a suspense story, not a mystery. This wasn’t because I had abandoned mysteries but because I felt suspense was somehow more approachable, from the maker’s point of view.
My thought was that, when writing suspense, both my story and my own writerly consciousness could run in tandem (living in the present of the story or, as they say in philosophy, under the “A-series” view of time). Writing a mystery, I reckoned, required not only a sense of the present as the reader would experience it but also a synoptic view (the “B-series” of time as conceived eternally). The author had to know the whole truth of the matter, of which only dribs and drabs would be dispensed to the perplexed but tantalized reader. At the time this seemed to need a lot more art, although I now think that’s a load of malarkey: Every author has the choice whether to lay out his entire story ahead of time—like Nabokov with his notecards on the living-room carpet—or take events as they come—like Vonnegut, who famously said he couldn’t imagine writing a story if he knew how it was going to turn out.
It feels better just to write that. Maybe my next first novel will be a mystery.
Ephebe's Journal 