Books to Die For Page 3

  A very quiet night . . . even [in] this wilderness of London . . . What’s that? Who fired a gun or pistol? . . . foot-passengers start, stop and stare about them . . . people come out to look . . . It has aroused all the dogs in the neighborhood, who bark vehemently . . . But it is soon over.

  A few paragraphs on, we learn that the cleaning crew discovers Tulkinghorn’s body when they arrive the next morning, but even then, there is more description of the Roman mural in the room than of the dead man.

  It wasn’t that Dickens didn’t care about detectives or police work. In fact, he was keenly interested in both. When the Metropolitan Police established the Detective Department in 1842, Dickens and Wilkie Collins followed the cases—quite literally. They traveled around England to where the most sensational crimes had taken place. They made friends of the detectives, were allowed to accompany them on their investigations, and wrote newspaper and magazine articles with their own theories on how to solve high-profile crimes.

  Dickens wrote several essays about Charles Field, the head of the Detective Department, for his magazine Household Words. Bucket’s methods, his disguises, his ability to melt into crowds, the way he spies on the people he’s tracking, were all based on Field.

  As Judith Flanders points out in The Invention of Murder, Bucket resembles Field physically. In Household Words, Dickens described him (under the very faint disguise of “Wield”), as having “a large, moist, knowing eye . . . and a habit of emphasizing his conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger, which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes or nose.”1

  When Bucket is closing in on Tulkinghorn’s killer, Dickens says,

  Mr Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation . . . When Mr Bucket has a matter of this pressing interest . . . , the fat forefinger . . . seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent . . .

  Tulkinghorn’s killer is a woman named Hortense, who has been Lady Dedlock’s maid. She is a Frenchwoman with such a furious temper that she is described throughout the novel as a wild animal. In Chapter 12 she is “a very neat She-Wolf, imperfectly tamed.” In Chapter 54, when she finds out that Bucket’s wife has been tailing her, she “pant[s], tigress-like,” and says she “would love to tear [Mrs Bucket] limb from limb.”

  Dickens drew Hortense from life, from the character of a Swiss woman named Maria Roux (Manning) who, in 1849, was convicted, along with her husband, of murdering her lover. The crime Hortense commits in Bleak House is completely different in motive and victim from the one that the Mannings carried out. However, when Bucket arrests Hortense, her furious language and her attempt to assault him come directly from the trial transcripts for Maria Manning.2

  Two of the original detectives of the Metropolitan Police, Jonathan Whicher and Charles Field, were famous throughout England for their impressive memories. They were famous, too, for their ability to make deductions about the lives and livelihoods of the people they watched. Dickens, who had followed Field and Whicher on a number of occasions into London’s bleakest slums, modeled Bucket’s analytical skills on theirs.

  When Bucket is taking a reluctant witness with him to a slum known as “Tom All-Alone’s,” he passes some people on the tramp and studies them. From their dress, he can tell that the men are brickmakers and that the women are newly up from the country. Bucket, and Field, made their deductions some thirty years before Sherlock Holmes produced his monographs on such subjects as clay, handwriting, or dress.

  Later crime writers, from Conan Doyle to Dorothy Sayers, turned the professional police into stolid lower-class men who needed constant help from Holmes or Peter Wimsey to solve their cases. It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century, with the cops of the 87th Precinct, or police like Dalziel and Pascoe, that the skilled police detective came back into vogue. But Dickens admired the Metropolitan Police and gave them their due.

  While Esther Summerson is the perfect domestic angel whom Dickens celebrates in all his heroines, the other women in Bleak House are brought to life with a passionate and compassionate pen. Lady Dedlock, nursing a guilty secret that sets the novel in motion, is a major masterpiece, as is her maid, Hortense. One of the hangers-on in the courts of law, Miss Flite, is a delicious character, with her caged birds named for the different aspects of helplessness petitioners feel around the courts. Miss Flite flits through the narrative like one of her own birds; she is not just an addict of the courts of Chancery, but can elucidate the addiction for Esther and Ada.

  Dickens writes with contempt of religious hypocrisy, and of the punishment religious folk mete out on so-called fallen women, or on the poor. He writes, too, with compassion about violence against women in his sections on Jenny and Liz, the brickmakers’ wives. Their husbands—called “their masters”—are always beating. Like battered women everywhere, Jenny and Liz move furtively, anxious to avoid further violence, but desirous as well of alleviating some of the suffering in the other destitute women and children among whom they live.

  In Bleak House the murder of Tulkinghorn is not the center of the novel, nor is it the most heinous crime Dickens describes. It is for that reason that the murder occurs so late in the novel and with so little fanfare.

  Two other crimes rouse Dickens to a tigerlike rage of his own. One is the courts of Chancery. This is the main current of the novel, and he writes scathingly, but wittily, of the courts and the enormous numbers of people the drawn-out legal actions employ.

  The other crime that is entwined with the novel is the abominable neglect of the poor in nineteenth-century England. Dickens brings a savage pen to this outrage, partly through the brickmakers and their wives, and partly through the character of Jo, who plays a minor but pivotal role in the novel.

  Jo has no last name, no recollection of his birth or his parents, and no life except to rise from his squalid dwelling early each day to sweep a crosswalk for pedestrians; if they tip him for the work he can eat, and pay for another night in the slum where he sleeps.

  A stationer, a Mr. Snagsby, occasionally gives the boy half a crown. When Bucket takes the unwilling Snagsby to find Jo in Tom-all-Alone’s, they go to

  A black, dilapidated street . . . where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who . . . took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery . . . Twice, lately, there has been a crash and a cloud of dust in Tom-all-Alone’s . . . and each time, a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled several beds in the hospital . . . the proprietress of the house—a drunken face tied up in a black bundle; and flaring out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-hutch which is her private apartment—[tells them where to find Jo.]

  In one of his comic masterpieces, Dickens has created the character of Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her family while she focuses on saving Africans in remote Borrioboola-Gha. Her gaze is remote: she is always looking at Africa and can’t see the squalor in her own household. She and her unfortunate children and husband dance through the narrative and both lighten and darken it, but Dickens uses her myopia to highlight the neglect of Jo and Jenny and Liz.

  Jo is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets . . . Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him . . . native ignorance, the growth of English soil . . . sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish . . . He shrinks from [other people]. He is not of the same order of things . . . He is of no order and no place.3

  It is Jo’s death, not that of the solicitor to the rich and famous, that Dickens describes in detail. It is the crime committed against him by an indifferent society—characterized by Dickens as the “To
odles and Doodles”—that Dickens cares about. It is the author’s passion for these crimes that elevates Bleak House from a run-of-the-mill detective novel to an enduring masterwork of fiction. And in the bleak house that is contemporary America, Dickens’s vision helps keep me going.

  Sara Paretsky is a novelist and essayist best known for her private eye V. I. Warshawski, who helped change the treatment of women in crime fiction. Paretsky’s awards include the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, the Edgar Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America, and Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year. Visit her online at www.saraparetsky.com.

  A Tale of Two Cities

  by Charles Dickens (1859)

  RITA MAE BROWN

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  Help! Murder! Police!

  Does this sum up the mystery novel? There should be blood and corpses somewhere, and the killer must be found.

  Since Dame Agatha Christie, the mystery novel has focused on a tightly plot-driven work of fiction, wherein the reader’s curiosity to know who killed X, and if Y and Z will be victims, too, becomes a burning need. This is why the ideal mystery review often uses the words “page-turner.”

  Dame Agatha’s plots, while ingenious, were inhabited more by stereotypes than by fully fleshed characters. The mystery writers who came in her wake, such as P. D. James, create living, breathing characters, and have moved the mystery novel some way out of the suburbs of genre fiction.

  For me a mystery novel is not circumscribed. While I might write within the genre tradition, I can be somewhat suspicious of it. My favorite mystery novel is A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859.

  Many of you have read this gripping novel by Charles Dickens. There were people alive when he was a young man who had lived through the French Revolution. As most of you also know, we are celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of his birth this year. Now there’s an excuse for a party every day.

  Why would I think that this novel—with the best opening line ever, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—is a mystery? Because it revolves around one of the oldest devices in theater and literature, that of mistaken identity. Solve the question of identity, and you solve the problem.

  You have many choices as to where you might like to pinpoint the beginnings of this device. Oedipus the King, a tragedy written by Sophocles (496–406 BC), used it to shattering effect. Plautus, the Roman playwright (254–184 BC), used it in his comedies. Shakespeare cribbed from Plautus, and both writers still make us laugh. Solving the question of authentic identity takes as much detective work as solving the mystery of who beheaded five men in exactly the same fashion, leaving their heads on the steps of St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church. (There’s a plot for an aspiring writer.)

  Until the publication of A Tale of Two Cities, the play or novel frequently ended with true identity being unmasked to tears or laughter. A Tale of Two Cities ends with the main character being believed in his false identity. It is one of the most emotionally affecting endings of any novel that I know. You are rooting for the mystery to remain unsolved.

  Dickens is showered with much-deserved praise for his characters, characters that leap off the page into your mind, your memory. Once you meet Uriah Heep you will never forget him, and you hope not to meet him again. The characters to whom you gravitate often reveal something about yourself. We all want David Copperfield and Oliver Twist to survive, no matter who our favorite characters are. We close these two volumes of Dickens hoping that the young men of the titles will flourish.

  We close A Tale of Two Cities knowing our hero will not flourish. We close that novel saddened, uplifted, and thankful that we didn’t live through France’s dreadful convulsion.

  Many a literary critic would say that A Tale of Two Cities is a conservative novel. Well, the mystery is a conservative form. Oh, the subject matter may contain sexual depravity, characters may toss f-bombs like grenades, and the hero or heroine is usually a deeply flawed character, failure ever his or her shadow. Some are even legitimate antiheroes. The form is still conservative. The fads of lengthy sex scenes, decayed corpses exhaustingly described, and descriptions of violence that occur about every twelve minutes cannot change the form. (And by the way, do we ever have a hero, antihero, or heroine who is impotent? If so, let me know. That would be something new. No matter how dreadful their past or horrendous their present, their parts work wonderfully well.)

  What is a mystery novel, anyway? What is the form? It’s simple: an incident occurs that destroys balance. The destruction may be to one individual, a family, a guild or a group, or an entire community. Economically describing how mistrust and violence undo a community was one of Dame Agatha’s great gifts. Indeed, as the story unfolds, the reader in a sense becomes part of this community. Who committed or commissioned this misdeed? Initially, the most believable suspects are cleared while other suspects are unearthed, and their secrets unearthed with them, but none of these individuals is usually the culprit. Sometimes the secrets are nasty and sometimes rather thrilling: you know, the vicar has three wives in three different villages—and on a vicar’s salary, no less. Slowly, our detective or seeker, no matter how initially unwilling, unravels the tangled mystery.

  Here’s the rub. Discovery of the truth doesn’t mean that the perpetrator always faces the justice of the state but, in finding the truth, balance, or a form of balance, is restored. Existence can again be orderly. That’s conservative. You are never left hanging at the end of a mystery.

  Real life, on the other hand, tends to be the reverse. No wonder the mystery is such a popular form of fiction.

  Back to Dickens. Every “hosanna” shouted at him for his fabulous characters really is deserved, but he also deserves credit for taking a two-thousand-year-old convention and standing it on its head, the convention that truth, identity, and some form of justice is always revealed.

  Dickens wrote just the reverse.

  That’s why A Tale of Two Cities is my favorite mystery.

  An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of Rubyfruit Jungle, her memoir Animal Magnetism, the Mrs. Murphy series, the Sister Jane foxhunting series, her canine mystery series featuring Mags Rogers, and her novels Bingo, Six of One, and Loose Lips. Brown lives in Afton, Virginia, with her cats, hounds, horses, and big red foxes. Visit her online at www.ritamaebrown.com.

  The Dead Letter

  by Metta Fuller Victor (1867)

  KARIN SLAUGHTER

  * * *

  Metta Fuller Victor (1831–85) was a pioneer not just in the field of “dime novel” fiction, the precursor to the modern mass-market paperback, but also in the development of the mystery novel in the United States. She began contributing stories to newspapers at the age of thirteen, and published Poems of Sentiment and Imagination, with Dramatic and Descriptive Pieces, written with her sister, Frances, in 1851, quickly followed the same year by her first novel, The Senator’s Son. Hugely popular in her day, she was also the editor, at various times, of Home magazine and the Cosmopolitan Art Journal.

  * * *

  Many great women writers have been forgotten to history, from Anna Katharine Green, who is credited with creating the first series detective (Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force) to E.D.E.N.
Southworth, whose serialized thrillers were widely translated in their day, but none languish in obscurity more than Metta Fuller Victor. With The Dead Letter (1867), Victor was the first American writer—male or female—to publish a full-length detective novel in the United States. She was, in fact, at the cusp of a wave of detective fiction that is oft ignored by literary historians, who mostly concentrate on Edgar Allan Poe, credited as the writer of the earliest detective short stories, then skip straight to Dashiell Hammett, as if fifty years of American crime writing had never existed.

  Writing as Seeley Regester, Victor built on the two-tiered narrative structure pioneered by Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She opens Letter in the middle of the investigation to better concentrate not on the fact of murder but on the horrors left in its wake. In the first pages, we find Richard Redfield, gentleman lawyer and amateur detective, reeling with shock over the clue that he’s just uncovered in the murder of Henry Moreland. This shows a marked departure from the Poe formula: our detective is not a socially isolated, coldly rational outsider, but a morally invested insider. The crimes that occur in Letter resonate throughout the community. The story explores the home and family lives of both victim and perpetrator. The reader feels a connection with the morally driven detective figure and follows his emotional journey as he seeks to understand the complexities of good and evil.

  With the massive success of The Dead Letter, and that of her next mystery, The Figure Eight (1869), Victor helped the firm of Beadle & Adams, the creator of the dime novel, to become one of the most successful publishers of the antebellum period. A Mormon mother of nine, Victor wrote more than a hundred novels in almost every genre, from fantasy to adventure and Westerns. Like her contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe, she was a staunch abolitionist who wrote about the scourge of slavery. Unlike Stowe, she explored other issues of the day, from domestic strife to polygamy. The Dead Letter is, in fact, an amalgamation of all the genres Victor loved, providing the reader with social commentary as well as murder, intrigue, and a thrilling side trip through the lawless territories of the American West.