A Certain Justice

I have let myself go completely and have read another mystery. I stopped at the neighborhood Half Price Books on Sunday and of course ended up with several books. I was delighted to find that Patrick McManus, whose North Idahoan outdoorsy humor cheered me up throughout my teens, has started writing mysteries. I got thirty or so pages into Avalanche while waiting for a prescription to be filled tonight; so far it is pleasant but a little uncertain.

I have, I think, all of P.D. James's books now, and have not been disappointed yet. Well, except that A Certain Justice, which I finished earlier tonight, proved to be one I had already read. I did not own it yet and know no one to borrow it from or lend it to, but in the first few chapters I realized I had read it somewhere. Probably it was at someone's house while I was bored. It was good enough to keep going anyway, especially since I had no other book with me yesterday.

It comes close to breaking the one absolute rule separating a proper mystery from a procedural, a thriller, or most ghastly, a true-crime work. The rule is, the suspects (or the murderer, if he is known from the start) must be sane. The murderer will likely prove unbalanced in his emotions--after all, he killed someone--but insanity is a mystery's deus ex machina. Of course a madman is even less free than we are, but the limits of madness in its many forms are so unknown to us that we have only the author's assurance that he is playing fair. Yet the greater unfairness is not, I think, in that it prevents the reader from guessing the murderer; in that sense, Doyle cheats shamelessly, Knox is far too obscure, Christie too obvious, and Sayers is sometimes hardly interested in the criminal. I rarely guess, though I watch for the hints and misdirections so that when the answer is given, I can try to see the path the author intended.

The unfairness of madness goes much deeper, for a mystery is a sort of comedy, like the classical "New Comedy," in which social disruption, mistaken identity, and cross-purposes among more or less ordinary people follow a chain of causation (even if flimsy) from chaos to greater chaos until the plot begins to resolve towards social harmony. It is characteristic of New Comedy to end with multiple weddings and a feast, and in that light it is not all that surprising that Christie, at the more obvious end, also wrote romance novels and that Sayers bent the course of several books towards that one great engagement. Even less romantic mysteries, though, follow that path of initial disruption (the body in the library) through the cross-purposes and misdirections that multiply as more disruptions, often more murders, increase the chaos, until the detective's integrating intelligence pulls society back towards wholeness and comity. Insanity breaks all that. The initial harmony is shown to be a falsehood over the bottomless chaos of madness, the plot cannot progress by a normal sense of causation, and the detective cannot by his powers of explanation formulate events into a meaningful whole. Nor can society be repaired, when the story turns on the excruciating isolation of every mind from every other.