Mysteries

Still stalling on Bacon, I read two mysteries last week. One was another recommendation, this time in the Wall Street Journal, The Lodger by Hillaire Belloc's sister, Marie Belloc Lowndes. It is not a proper mystery, in that the criminal is both deranged and known to the reader from the start, and should probably be called a work of psychological suspense. The twisting of mind and morals suffered by the strict, self-reliant woman of the house as she tends to her mad lodger catches the reader and twines his hopes with hers, so that when she convinces herself for a moment that he is innocent, her relief is the reader's. It is a remarkable performance, and another confirmation that if a good writer recommends a minor novel, you should certainly give it a try.

I also read The Lighthouse, another of the books I picked up at Half Price Books a couple of weeks ago. Dalgiesh is becoming a little too superhuman in his command of himself and everyone he meets. Not only does he always know exactly what to say and, far more important to his very British author, what not to say, in order to achieve the greatest possible effect on everyone else, but he even manages to solve the case from his sickbed as he suffers through SARS. As though to compensate, James has increased the intensity of his self-criticism and the torment of his highly intellectual romance, to such a degree that a man of his intelligence would surely realize he was being ridiculous.

As a mystery, though, The Lighthouse belongs to that pleasant, old-fashioned genre, the locked-room mystery. In this case the locked room is a remote island, a variation that escapes the artificiality of a door locked from the inside. For that matter, it might not even be possible to have a locked room in any meaningful sense now. Bedrooms and studies do not have chimneys, gas fixtures, bell-pulls, keyholes, French doors, or old, thick walls that could hold a secret passage. Forensic science finishes off whatever sneaky alternatives are left, with the possible exception of killing by radio, or of course by time machine. The island is also a secret preserve for the wealthy and powerful, so it takes the place of the now-implausible manor house. The result is a comfortable mystery that, whatever its faults, is no weaker than several of Sayers' mysteries.

Update: I just found that the WSJ had P.D. James give her recommendations, so I have several more books in the queue now. The only one I know is Murder Must Advertise, which James is entirely correct to choose; of Sayers' dozen novels, it is unquestionably the purest entertainment.

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.