Books to Die For Page 16
And every detail is correct.
It falls to Robert Blair, the unlikely chevalier, to find the truth and exonerate the austere and unfriendly women who are doing almost nothing to help their cause. But as he digs, his own doubts grow.
I’ll say no more, except to beg you not to wait as long as I did before reading this masterpiece of detective fiction and human nature. Like the best crime novels, it’s not so much about the crime as the people involved. And, as with The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair is based on an actual event: the eighteenth-century case of Elizabeth Canning.
Josephine Tey was the pen name of the Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh. She also wrote under the name Gordon Daviot. Sadly for us (and certainly for her), Ms. Mackintosh died in 1952 at the relatively young age of fifty-six, having written eight mystery novels under the name Josephine Tey: eight glorious works that have inspired me, and prove less is more—and a suggestion of horror is far more powerful than any demonstration.
Louise Penny writes the Armand Gamache crime novels, set in Quebec. Her books have made international best-seller lists including the New York Times and London Times. She’s won the British Dagger and the Canadian Arthur Ellis as well as the American Anthony, Barry, Macavity, and Nero awards. She’s the only writer in history to win the coveted Agatha Award four years in a row. Her books are translated in twenty-five languages. Louise lives in Quebec with her husband, Michael, and their dogs. Visit her online at www.louisepenny.com.
The Little Sister
by Raymond Chandler (1949)
MICHAEL CONNELLY
* * *
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) turned to writing crime fiction at the relatively advanced age of forty-four, publishing short stories with “pulp” magazines such as Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939 and featured the private detective Philip Marlowe. In total, Chandler published seven novels, all of which featured Marlowe. He also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, adapting James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder, and adapting Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1951) for Alfred Hitchcock. The Blue Dahlia (1946) was Chandler’s only original screenplay; it was nominated for an Academy Award, as was Double Indemnity. Chandler’s final novel, Playback, was published in 1958. His essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944, is regarded as a seminal piece of critical writing on crime fiction.
* * *
There I was in the darkened theater when the movie ended and the lights came up. I was sitting by myself in the student union. It was a Monday night—dollar movie night, to be precise. I was nineteen years old, and I had just seen The Long Goodbye, the 1973 Robert Altman–directed film adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. The Monday-night movies were usually followed by a discussion led by a student or graduate assistant from the film school. The discussion that followed this showing was spirited because some of those who had watched the film hated it and some loved it. I counted myself in the latter group. I was blown away by its depiction of contemporary Los Angeles and most of all by Elliott Gould’s sardonic, sarcastic portrayal of private eye Philip Marlowe.
Listening to the discussion, it didn’t take me long to determine that the reason the haters were upset with the movie was because they had read the book on which it was based and objected to the liberties taken with the classic novel. The film took the character of Marlowe—a tarnished knight with an unbreakable code of honor in the book—and made him into a man with a code that allowed for vengeance and murder.
At the time I was a consummate consumer of crime fiction in books, in films, and on television. But I had not read a single book by Raymond Chandler. I was interested only in contemporary stories. I wanted to learn about the world as it was, not read old stories about a bygone world that didn’t exist anymore. Chandler was the 1940s and the 1950s. I wasn’t interested in those times.
Until I saw that movie. The film, and the discussion that followed it, sent me to the bookstore on Tuesday morning. There I found the movie tie-in, the paperback of The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould as Marlowe on the cover along with his cat (the cat that appeared in the movie but was not in the book!).
I hustled back to the room I shared with two other students and started reading. Thus began the forty-eight hours that changed my life. From movie to book and then to the other books: I finished The Long Goodbye in a day and went back to the store Wednesday morning to buy all the Chandlers that they had.
From there I stopped going to classes and simply read and reread.
From there I changed my mind about a lot of things, including the direction of my life.
From there I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Not just a novelist but specifically a novelist who wrote hard-boiled stories about crime and the people on both sides, and in the middle, of the law.
Chandler had proved me wrong with his words. I learned that stories can transcend time. A story from and about the 1940s can mean something in the 1970s or the 1990s or even at the start of a new century. Chandler holds up, and in that alone is the meaning of art.
This essay is to discuss a favorite book. Well, the favorite writer is now obviously on record. Were I to choose one book by Raymond Chandler, I would have to go with The Little Sister. Of course, The Long Goodbye is the nostalgic favorite because it was what brought me to the table. But the desert island book has got to be The Little Sister. That’s the one I would like always to carry in my back pocket wherever I go.
As I write this it has been several years since I have read the book in its entirety, while at the same time not a year goes by that I don’t read from the book in short refresher segments. Therefore, I am hard-pressed to describe the book’s plot in detail. It is simply a “Quest” story in more ways than one. Orfamay Quest, from Manhattan, Kansas, hires Philip Marlowe to find her missing brother Orrin. Marlowe takes it from there and proceeds across a southern California terrain of movie stars, murders, and mostly untrustworthy cops. The plot is serviceable if not overly convoluted.
But the plot is not why this book is my favorite and why it so fittingly deserves mention in this book of favorites. This book is Raymond Chandler at his best, at his most cynical and sarcastic. It is where he captures the essence of character and place in the diamond-sharp bravura of Chapter 13.
Yes, I’m talking about one chapter. Really only four pages—at least in the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard trade edition I keep in my writing room. I know what you’re thinking: in your writing room? You just mentioned above that you haven’t read the book in years. Yes, that’s true. But you see, Chapter 13 I read often. I read it to be awed. I read it to be inspired. I read it because it is my favorite passage of my favorite book by my favorite writer. In four pages Chandler teaches reader and writer what it is to write for the ages. What it is to create art.
I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home . . .
So begins Chapter 13. The entire chapter has little to do with the plot or the case that has Marlowe ill at ease and “not human,” to use his own words. It’s about a drive in and around Los Angeles. Not feeling human, frustrated by his actions and the case at hand, Marlowe takes a drive around his city and he takes us with him. Along the way he describes the Los Angeles of 1949, but it might as well be the Los Angeles of today, or any city any time, when the chips are down and we feel powerless and taken advantage of:
All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
The writer’s job is to connect, to tap into the dark folds of the heart and soul
, to make the reader nod—yes, I get it—without even realizing it. Shared experience. Doesn’t matter if you have never been a cop, a private detective, or a movie star. If you are human, the connections are there. The great writer can find it in you and bring it out with his words.
Chandler does this. Cynical and hopeful at the same time. He does it in spades and in such a way that his words jump through time. They mean just as much now as they did when he typed them three-quarters of a century ago:
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.
I am a disciple of Raymond Chandler. I am a student of Chapter 13. I read it before I start every book I write. It’s a pep talk from the master. It reminds me of the higher game that is afoot. You can write about detectives working on cases or cases working on detectives. You can use a crime story to frame a greater story about the world we live in. And if you are lucky, and can learn well the lesson of the master, you can have them nodding their heads as they read, even if they don’t know it.
Michael Connelly has written twenty-five novels in twenty years, including his latest, The Black Box (2012). He is the author behind the long-running Harry Bosch detective series, as well as the more recent Lincoln Lawyer series featuring defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is a former journalist who covered courts and crime for newspapers in South Florida, where he grew up, and Los Angeles, where he lived for fifteen years and sets his novels. He currently resides in Tampa, Florida. Visit him online at www.michaelconnelly.com.
Brat Farrar
by Josephine Tey (1949)
MARGARET MARON
* * *
Josephine Tey was one of the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952), a Scottish novelist and playwright who found fame with a series of novels featuring Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. The most famous of these is probably The Daughter of Time (1951), which combined Mackintosh’s twin fascinations with history and crime by having a bedridden Grant investigate the question of whether or not Richard III was responsible for the murders of his nephews, the sons of Edward IV, commonly known as the “Princes in the Tower,” at the end of the fifteenth century. Grant also made a brief appearance in The Franchise Affair.
* * *
“Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cats.” So said Robert Graves, whose heart belonged to poetry.
Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1951), a Scotswoman who wrote historical plays under the name Gordon Daviot, seems to have had similar feelings about the crime novels she wrote as Josephine Tey. They were her show dogs, inferior to her feline dramas. The plays were moderately successful at the time, but if any are still being performed, I am unaware of it. Indeed, the only reason they are remembered today may be because Sir John Gielgud had his first popular success in one, and it has become part of his biography.
All of her crime novels, however, are still in print. Ask any group of middle-aged female mystery writers to name those eight titles and, nine out of ten times, you will get the complete list: The Man in the Queue, A Shilling for Candles, Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar, To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time, and The Singing Sands.
If Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie were role models for the generation preceding mine, Josephine Tey was the role model for ours. She was never as self-consciously learned as Sayers (The Daughter of Time comes closest to academia), and her plots were never as convoluted and far-fetched as Christie’s, but they are as deeply satisfying as anything those two icons ever wrote. Her prose style was simple and straightforward—“Nothing up my sleeves, folks”—yet her characters rise from the page as living, breathing, fully rounded humans. Although each of her books has its champions, my personal favorites are The Franchise Affair (which Louise Penny discusses elsewhere in this volume) and Brat Farrar. Both are my comfort reads when nothing else suits.
A brief synopsis: Brat Farrar, an English orphan in his early teens, runs away to America where he stumbles onto a ranch and falls in love with horses. A few years later, after oil is discovered on the ranch, he takes his severance pay and returns to England at a loose end. There he is accosted on the street by Alec Loding, a down-at-the-heels actor who mistakes him for Simon Ashby, a young man on the verge of inheriting the family fortune and the stud farm that goes with it. Eight years earlier, Patrick Ashby, Simon’s thirteen-year-old twin, died. He is presumed drowned, a victim of suicide from grief over the death of his parents. The body was never found.
Loding, who grew up next door to the Ashby farm and knows the family intimately, seizes on the chance to cut himself in on Simon’s inheritance. He wants to groom Brat Farrar to pretend to be the older twin, now returned from the dead and back to claim his rightful place. Brat is a decent young man and reluctant to become involved, but once he realizes that horses are a major part of the deal, he agrees. Loding is a born teacher, and Brat is such a quick learner that he is able to fool everyone except Simon.
The family consists of Simon, a calculating charmer who initially insists that the real Patrick is dead; Eleanor, a slightly younger sister who welcomes “Patrick” back with conflicting emotions; the ten-year-old twins, Ruth and Jane; and Aunt Bee, a superb horsewoman who has raised her brother’s children and kept the stud farm going. Each is quickly sketched, but so expertly that we see them in the round. We soon know their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes.
And not just the humans: even Tey’s animals have personalities.
Take the horses, the equine counterparts to their owners. There’s Simon’s Timber: conceited, vain, and an opportunistic killer. There’s Jane’s Fourposter, an old white pony with “no mouth and an insatiable curiosity”; Regina, who has dropped valuable foals for twenty years; and Bee’s Chevron, who “loved jumping and was taking her fences with an off-handed confidence. One could almost hear her humming.”
Brat himself is so decent, so likable, so hungry for a real family and a “belonging place,” that we find ourselves rooting for him at every close call even though he’s a liar and a usurper who uses the good memories everyone has of Patrick to insinuate himself into the fabric of the community. Only gradually do we come to realize that he’s in mortal danger and stands a very good chance of following Patrick to an early death.
Part of the pleasure of a Tey novel is the way in which she plays fair all the way. We see everything that her protagonists see, hear every conversation, and are even privy to their thoughts. Surprise endings and ironic twists are not what she aims for. Instead, we get a slow unfolding of plot until all is revealed in a thoroughly satisfying manner.
Tey has been my role model from the start. She is the one writer I still study each time I reread one of her books in an effort to learn precisely how she makes her people and places so vivid that one wants to keep reading about them even after the mystery is solved. As a slow writer, I despaired when I read that she tossed some of them off in six weeks or less. She called them her “annual knitting,” something to keep her hand in between the plays.
I will never stop wishing she had stuck with her knitting and forgotten about those plays.
Margaret Maron has served as national president of Sisters in Crime, the American Crime Writers League, and Mystery Writers of America. Winners of several major mystery awards, her Judge Deborah Knott novels are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature. In 2008, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. Her first series, set against the New York City art world and now available as e-books, featured Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD. Visit her online at www.MargaretMaron.com.
Strangers on a Train
by Patricia Highsmith (1950)
ADRIAN MCKINTY
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* * *
Patricia Highsmith (1921–95) was the troubled author of more than twenty novels and numerous short stories. Born Mary Patricia Plangman, she took her surname from her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, and had complicated relationships with both Stanley and her mother, Mary, who predeceased her daughter by only a few years, and was accused by Patricia of trying to abort her. Her first novel was Strangers on a Train, but she is probably best known as the creator of the amoral con man and murderer, Tom Ripley, who featured in five of her novels. Her great gift was the ability to make readers empathize with the most appalling of characters, forcing them to confront the darker corners of their own psyches.
* * *
I first got to know Patricia Highsmith’s fiction in the Belfast Central Library during the apocalyptic Northern Irish summer of 1981. It was the time of the hunger strikes: bombs were going off daily, and riots ravaged the city every night, but somehow the library stayed open. The helpful librarians were keen to push this thirteen-year-old boy who was mad about crime writing in the direction of a novelist that they considered to be at the classy end of a rather disreputable genre.
After making my way through the taut, excellent Ripley books, and the short stories, I was steered toward Highsmith’s back catalog. For some reason Highsmith’s second novel, the lesbian classic The Price of Salt, was only to be had on the Special Reserve Shelf, but her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, was available in a handsome first edition from the Cresset Press. I was instantly gripped by the plausibility of the story and its neat dissection of the poisonous nature of lies and guilt. I have been a fan of the novel ever since.