'And Never Do Find Out Who Done It'

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?