Books to Die For Page 2
Or one might take the year 1947: it produces both Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, in which the seeds of what would later come to be called the serial killer novel begin to germinate, and Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury. Both are examinations of male rage—although Spillane is probably more correctly considered as an expression of it—and both come out of the aftermath of the Second World War, when men who had fought in Europe and Asia returned home to find a changed world, a theme that is later touched upon in a British context in Margery Allingham’s 1952 novel, The Tiger in the Smoke. But 1947 was also the year of the infamous, and still unsolved, Black Dahlia killing, in which the body of a young woman named Elizabeth Short was found, mutilated and sliced in half, in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. It’s no coincidence that John Gregory Dunne sets True Confessions, his examination of guilt and corruption, in that year, while the Black Dahlia killing subsequently becomes a personal touchstone for the novelist James Ellroy, whose own mother’s murder in California in 1958 also remains unsolved. The pulp formula in the United States then adapted itself to these changes in postwar society, which resulted in the best work of writers such as Jim Thompson, Elliott Chaze, and William McGivern, all of whom are considered in essays in this book.
Finally, it’s interesting to see how often different writers, from Ed McBain to Mary Stewart, Newton Thornburg to Leonardo Padura, assert the view that they are, first and foremost, novelists. The mystery genre provides a structure for their work—the ideal structure—but it is extremely malleable, and constantly open to adaptation: the sheer range of titles and approaches considered here is testament to that.
To give just one example: there had long been female characters at the heart of hard-boiled novels, most frequently as femmes fatales or adoring secretaries, but even when women were given central roles as detectives, the novels were written, either in whole or in part, by men: Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool (created under the pseudonym A. A. Fair), who made her first appearance in 1939; Dwight V. Babcock’s Hannah Van Doren; Sam Merwin Jr.’s Amy Brewster; Will Oursler and Margaret Scott’s Gale Gallagher (all 1940s); and, perhaps most famously, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s Honey West in the 1950s.
But at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a number of female novelists, among them Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, but also Amanda Cross and, in her pair of Cordelia Gray novels, P. D. James, found in the hard-boiled mystery novel a means of addressing issues affecting women, including violence (particularly sexual violence), victimization, power imbalances, and gender conflicts. They did so by questioning, altering, and subverting the established traditions in the genre, and, in the process, they created a new type of female fiction. The mystery genre embraced them without diminishing the seriousness of their aims, or hampering the result, and it did so with ease. It is why so many writers, even those who feel themselves to be working outside the genre, have chosen to introduce elements of it into their writing, and why this anthology can accommodate such a range of novelists, from Dickens to Dürrenmatt, and Capote to Crumley.
But this volume also raises the question of what constitutes a mystery—or, if you prefer, a crime novel. (The terms are often taken as interchangeable, but “mystery” is probably a more flexible, and accurate, description given the variety within the form. Crime may perhaps be considered the catalyst, mystery the consequence.) Genre, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, but one useful formulation may be that, if one can take the crime out of the novel and the novel does not collapse, then it’s probably not a crime novel; but if one removes the crime element and the novel falls apart, then it is. It is interesting, though, to note that just as every great fortune is said to hide a great crime, so, too, many great novels, regardless of genre, have a crime at their heart. The line between genre fiction and literary fiction (itself a genre, it could be argued) is not as clear as some might like to believe.
In the end, those who dismiss the genre and its capacity to permit and encourage great writing, and to produce great literature, are guilty not primarily of snobbery—although there may be an element of that—but of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fiction and genre’s place in it. There is no need to splice genre into the DNA of fiction, literary or otherwise: it is already present. The mystery novel is both a form and a mechanism. It is an instrument to be used. In the hands of a bad writer, it will produce bad work, but great writers can make magic from it.
JOHN CONNOLLY AND DECLAN BURKE, DUBLIN, 2012
The Dupin Tales
by Edgar Allan Poe (1841–44)
J. WALLIS MARTIN
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was an American author, poet, editor, and critic best known for his tales of mystery and imagination, many of them decidedly gothic in tone. For mystery readers, though, his fame rests on the three short stories he wrote about the character of Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, which Poe described as his tales of “ratiocination.” Intellectual yet imaginative, brilliant but eccentric, Dupin became the template for fictitious detectives to come, among them Sherlock Holmes, who name-checks Dupin in the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, albeit by describing him as “a very inferior fellow.”
* * *
Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18–, I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.
So begins the story that many consider to be the earliest in which a private detective assists the police by solving a murder mystery. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first of three stories in which Dupin solves a case that has baffled police, and Poe’s importance to, and influence on, subsequent generations of writers of crime, mystery, and tales of the supernatural is significant. Consider the following passage, which might have been drawn from a story in which Sherlock Holmes or Poirot took the place of Dupin:
“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.”
Dupin obliges, and the benefactor of his powers of analysis can only marvel at him.
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was a sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and opens with the following observation: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural,” whereas in “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin is exhorted to help the police retrieve a letter stolen from a woman who is being blackmailed.
These three stories comprise The Dupin Tales, but as they have been analyzed elsewhere, I will not deconstruct them here. What interests me about them is what we can learn about Poe’s character from his portrayal of his alter ego (many academics agree that Dupin is undoubtedly that), for when introducing Dupin for the first time, the narrator of the story describes him thus:
This young gentleman was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By courtesy of his creditors, there still remained in his possession a small remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.
The description accords with what we know of Poe’s personal circumstances when he wrote the story. The narrator goes on to say:
It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city; and as my worldly circumstances were somewhat less embarrassed than his own, I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and furnishing in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire.
The �
�common temper” of which Poe wrote may have been a reference to the moods of elation and despair that plagued him all his life, and support a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Were he alive today, Poe might well agree with the diagnosis, for he was, in fact, aware that his moods were cyclic, and that they alternated in nature. In a letter to the poet James Russell Lowell, whose own temperament was deeply moody, he wrote:
I can feel for the “constitutional indolence” of which you complain—for it is one of my own besetting sins. I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious—by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the “mountains & the woods”—the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.
As is so often the case for those who suffer from bipolar disorder, Poe’s personal life was a disaster. He was reputed to be irresponsible, unstable, and impossible to deal with. The following is an excerpt from Poe’s letter to his guardian, John Allan, after the latter refused to pay gambling debts Poe incurred at university:
Did I, when an infant, solicit your charity and protection, or was it of your own free will, that you volunteered your services in my behalf? It is well known to respectable individuals in Baltimore, and elsewhere, that my Grandfather (my natural protector at the time you interposed) was wealthy, and that I was his favourite grandchild—But the promises of adoption, and liberal education which you held forth to him in a letter which is now in possession of my family, induced him to resign all care of me into your hands. Under such circumstances, can it be said that I have no right to expect any thing at your hands?
Poe’s accusation was grossly unfair. John Allan had in fact provided for him well, but he eventually lost patience with Poe’s appeals for money. As a result, the relationship broke down when Poe was in his early twenties.
Inability to handle money, and a tendency to overspend with scant regard for the consequences, are features of bipolar disorder. (Consider Poe’s purchase of three yards of Super Blue Cloth and a set of the best gilt buttons, bought at a time when he was almost two thousand pounds in debt!) So, too, is an ability to focus on a piece of work to the exclusion of all else. However, this was but a small part of what the manic stage of the illness enabled Poe to do. The illness blessed yet cursed him with a clarity of vision, a heightening of the senses which he describes vividly in “The Fall of the House of Usher”:
He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms and the general manner of their narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
And again, in this extract from “The Tell-Tale Heart”:
TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.
The period during which those who suffer from bipolar disorder experience a heightening of the senses can last for days or months before the decline into a depression that can be mild to severe. Poe’s depressions were deep, and following one such period, he wrote:
I went to bed and wept through a long, long, hideous night of despair—When the day broke, I arose & endeavoured to quiet my mind by a rapid walk in the cold, keen air—but all would not do—the demon tormented me still. Finally I procured two ounces of laudnum [sic] . . . I am so ill—so terribly, hopelessly ILL in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live . . . until I subdue this fearful agitation, which if continued, will either destroy my life or, drive me hopelessly mad . . .
In the above, Poe refers to having procured two ounces of laudanum with which to self-medicate. Another drug of choice was alcohol. Elevated rates of drug and alcohol abuse are often to be found in bipolar individuals, and premature death is a feature of the illness. It is likely that a combination of the two led to Poe’s premature death in 1849. “We know now that what made Poe write was what made him drink,” observed one of his biographers: “alcohol and literature were the two safety valves of a mind that eventually tore itself apart.”
J. Wallis Martin (PhD St. Andrews) is publishing director of the Edgar Allan Press Ltd. Her novels have been published internationally, and adapted for the screen. She lives in Bristol. Visit her online at www.wallis-martin.co.uk.
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens (1853)
SARA PARETSKY
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Charles Dickens (1812–70) was a prolific writer of short stories, plays, novels, nonfiction, and journalism, and also found time to edit magazines, collaborate with fellow authors, perfect the concept of the publicity tour, and father ten children. He was also a crusader for social justice, borne out of his own childhood, which saw his father, John, imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he was joined by all of his family except Charles, who, at the age of twelve, went to work at Warren’s Shoe Blacking Factory, and visited his family on Sundays. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published serially from 1836–37, and he died leaving his final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.
* * *
Dickens was prolix. His novels often depend on ludicrous coincidences. He also had a great narrative and storytelling gift. He is also the writer who most empowers me. Every time a reader zings off an angry letter, telling me they read to be entertained, not to hear about society’s woes, I think, yeah, well, tell that to Dickens.
If every crime novel in the world suddenly disappeared and only Bleak House remained, it would be a good place to rebuild the missing library. It contains the germ of John Grisham, Ed McBain, Anne Rice, and Patricia Highsmith, with a whiff of Mr. and Mrs. North, within its sprawling narrative.
Bleak House is a novel of lies and secrets, of crime and immorality. At its center is the famous case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which exposes massive abuse by the courts of law to perpetuate legal careers rather than to render justice. Along the way, Dickens also considers the crimes of abusing the poor and the homeless, crimes of keeping a large part of the population illiterate and underfed, and the hypocrisies, if not outright crimes, committed in the name of religion. There is, almost by the way, a murder.
Every form of the crime and horror genres is present here, starting with the vampire novel. The courts are the overreaching vampires, sucking the life out of parties to suits, often quite graphically. One litigant, Gridley, dies of a ruptured heart from the strain of twenty-five years of trying to get a will resolved. Dickens creates a physical vampire in a lawyer named Vholes, who consumes a young litigant, Richard Carstone. Richard, his cousin Ada, and Esther Summerson, the heroine-narrator of Bleak House, are three of the central figures of the novel. Esther is desolated by Richard’s succumbing to the seduction of the courts. She recoils from the lawyer Vholes, as any healthy, life-loving person would. Esther describes Vholes as
a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold, a red eruption here and there upon his face, tall and thin . . . Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner . . .
The gothic novel, with ghosts and highborn ladies, shows up in the noble Dedlock family, which h
as an actual ghost walk at the family estate in Lincolnshire. Lady Dedlock, whose secrets drive the novel’s action, is a noted beauty and leader of the fashionable world. She would be at home, up to a point, in a book by Georgette Heyer or Mary Stewart.
Bleak House is also that popular staple, a novel based on law courts and lawyers. And it is a detective novel, with a killer, and a detective. Inspector Bucket, a kind of deus ex machina of the novel, shows up anytime one of the characters needs to find a person or a document.
Bucket is busy everywhere. He knows so many people in London’s underworld that he can search its slums without fear of assault. He goes on the road looking for witnesses among people who are “on the tramp,” that is, moving from place to place, desperate to find work. He has contacts up and down the tightly clamped strata of the legal world.
Bucket appears in the lodgings and offices of clerks, law writers, stationers to the courts, and their servants and hangers-on. He also knows the powerful solicitor Mr. Tulkinghorn, lawyer to the rich and famous, including the Dedlock family. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn who is murdered.
In a modern crime novel, Tulkinghorn’s death would occur near the book’s beginning; the murderer would be revealed near the end. We’re three-quarters of the way through Bleak House before Tulkinghorn dies, and his death is quite unexpected. In a novel where every conversation is reported in complete—some might say, excruciating—detail, we learn about the murder in an offhand, underreported way: