I’ve read some mysteries though I think of them as crime novels. Above all, Raymond Chandler and some of the hard-boiled boys. The Parker novels of Donald Westlake (dba Richard Stark) and the early books of George V. Higgins. I’ve never been able to finish a Ross Macdonald novel, despite the heavy lobbying of Eudora Welty. I haven’t read the Sherlock Holmes stories since 1968. No Agatha Christie, Rex Stout or Patricia Highsmith. What may have started as adolescent snobbery evolved into entrenched adult indifference, though I’ve watched The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep at least a dozen times each. As with many readers, my standards are relaxed when it comes to movies. Exhibit A: The Godfather.
Of course, Dickens
wrote mysteries. So did Sophocles. The
Golden Bowl is a mystery, as is The
Good Soldier. A mystery is absent knowledge, whether or not a crime has
been committed. What used to be called “detective fiction” attracts
lifelong devotees, including Jacques Barzun, W.H. Auden (“the reading of
detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol”) and J.V. Cunningham. It has seldom attracted me, and that too is a mystery. Here is
Howard Nemerov’s “A Reader of Mysteries” (War
Stories, 1987):
“He reads to
pass the time, and it seems to work:
Time passes.
Often as not, he reads in bed
In the
winter evenings at the edge of sleep,
Aware of the
digital clock across the room
Sending him
numbers in an emerald light
Remindful of
the tomb.
The
mysteries he reads
Are soothing
to death, which now is not the end
But the
beginning, the motive and the spring
For all
succeeding, as the psychopomp
Follows the
unknown through the labyrinth
Solving for
x and blackboarding to the group,
Until in a
secret chamber of the dream
He meets and
renders up his minotaur.
“This is
recurrent with him, and if sleep
Has not
arrested him before the end
He starts
another, still unsatisfied
And often
enough unable to understand
Or even to
remember the extravagant
Unscrambling
of the false appearances
Or merely to
see the little numbering light
Of the
revealed truth. Very like life itself,
He tells
himself, as the addictive drug
Takes hold
and sleep comes down to overcome;
Very like
death itself, his murder done.
“Maybe be
taken in the middle of one
Unsolved,
and never do find out who done it.”
Psychopomp is a rare old noun dating from Shakespeare’s day:
“a mythical conductor or guide of souls to the place of the dead.” The poem’s epigraph
is from the fourth stanza of Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”: “a
book too mad to read / Before one merely reads to pass the time.” Nemerov picks
up from there. He plays with the ambiguous senses of “mystery”: literary genre
and epistemological category. What could be more compelling, more obsessively
sought-after, than what we likely will never
have?
3 comments:
I confess to being an addict. In high school I discovered the "hardboiled boys" - Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald (I think I've read all but two of the Lew Archer novels), John D. MacDonald (I prefer the singletons of the 50's over the Travis McGee books. "A Bullet for Cinderella" - what a title!). I've recently read two of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels and was surprised to find that Mason never set foot in a courtroom in either book.
It's something inexplicable, I suppose, like a taste - or antipathy - for a certain kind of food. I recognize the art present in the best mysteries, but ultimately, I don't think it's the art that I'm reading them for. Certainly Evelyn Waugh wasn't a Perry Mason fan because of the felicities of Gardner's style! (The Great Snob actually wrote Gardner a fan letter once.)
My interest in mysteries began and ended with Hammett and Chandler, right up until last year, when I read that Evelyn Waugh thought Erle Stanley Gardner was America's best author. So I held my nose (at first) and read through a Gardner anthology. I was bowled over by the speed and concision of his storytelling, combined with the complexity of his plots. You learn his shorthand quickly, and carry it from book to book. There is something to be learned there.
P. G. Wodehouse says, in an introduction to a new Jeeves book, that critics have accused him of writing (in a non-Jeeves work) a book with the same characters under different names. Now, says Wodehouse, he has outgeneralled those critics by producing a new book with the same old characters with the same old names.
It's often so with detective stories. We find the same old characters under different or even the same names. Yet, for some authors, the very formulaic nature of the works can induce a pleasing and relaxed humour. When, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Five Red Herrings, set in Scotland, Lord Peter Wimsey's man servant Bunter encounters a cut of meat that is known by another name in England: Bunter asks whether he should use the Scottish term while they remain in that country, ‘It would be a graceful concession to national feeling, Bunter, if you can bring yourself to do it.’ Silly, of course, but charming too. And literature is broad enough to encompass many incidental pleasures from artfully employed writing.
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