it's a mystery

[calimac]

A couple weeks ago, Jon Carroll reported that "I have just discovered Laurie R. King, a writer of mysteries."

That's interesting, thought I, for I too had recently been reading a mystery novel by Laurie R. King. I was not so enthused as was Jon Carroll.

I was reading King's A Letter of Mary (1996) in search of its Tolkien reference, which turned out to be on page 225, so I had to plow through most of the book to get there. This was in pursuit of my Mythcon paper on "The Inklings in Fiction." Mary Russell, equally-talented partner of and, by this point in the series, wife to the nearly septuagenarian but still hale Sherlock Holmes, visits Oxford one day in 1923 in pursuit of a lead, and reports that evening to Holmes that she "met an odd man named Tolkien." There's no particular reason for her to have mentioned him, and the evidence-gathering mission she's on is so illogical and inane, it'd be a waste of space for me to explain it.

I didn't read any further. On the solution of the mystery posed earlier, I found I had not the slightest interest. Edmund Wilson once wrote a famous article dismissing the mystery genre, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Much as it pains me to find myself in agreement with Edmund Wilson, this time I am. The mystery novels I enjoy most are those that have literary value to me apart from their mystery. Dorothy L. Sayers, most notable among them, writes comedies of manners, and that's what I like about them. It may not be coincidental that my favorite of her books is the one in which it turns out that nobody dunnit; the apparent murder was a horrible accident.

The problem, I think, is that mystery solutions aren't contingent. In an effort to keep all the possibilities open as long as possible, the authors treat all the suspects as capable of the murder, and the solution is dependent on tiny questions of fact and does not grow organically out of character. As a result, it doesn't matter which one did it and I can't be brought to care.

This is most obvious when a mystery-minded writer turns to stories in which the solution is incidental. Jack Vance writes mysteries as well as SF. In his SF story "The Moon Moth", the key question for the protagonist is, which of three men is a disguised murderer? I've read this story several times and, while I can remember how he figures it out, I can never remember which of the three men it is. It doesn't matter. The story is ingeniously plotted: most of the colorful and numerous cultural facts with which it's dotted come back up to swat somebody in the face later on. But the identity of the murderer - as opposed to the fact of identifying him - is of no importance whatever.

Same thing's true of Isaac Asimov's tonally very different "I'm in Marsport Without Hilda," which is also about a detective who has to identify which of three men is his suspect. But the culprit is so good at disguising himself, it doesn't make any difference to the story which one it happens to be. Again, I can neither remember nor bring myself to care which one it is.

The presence of Inklings references in other mystery novels had me reading one by Colin Dexter and two by Edmund Crispin. Same result: I found the references and then put down the books in relief. If Laurie R. King and Colin Dexter are good recent mystery writers, then it's just not the genre for me.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes--agreed. I get so bored at the puzzle part of mysteries--the long discussions about clues, and their sifting. I want to skim and skip for people interactions.

re: It's a mystery

[a-blue-moon-cat.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts. I too prefer character-driven fiction over plot-driven, or so it would seem via a conversation that I had with the bf last night over his current manuscript. Or at least the plotting should not suck, but the characters must be interesting, or what's the point?

I love DSL and all her works. I just picked up her translation of Roland the other day in a USB, along with something else. Too tired to go check.

Mysteries depend on both plot and character. However, Agatha Christie has interesting characters, more interesting than her plotting, at least to me, and yet she is hailed as the Queen of Mystery Writers. All her red herrings tire me out in the end. :) I prefer Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, or P. J. James amongst the ladies. For men, Conan Doyle and Dick Francis. Francis isn't always about the horsie set, btw. His late wife Mary did a ton of research for him, and he moved on into the art world, other countries, wine trading, weather forecasting, and much more. At any rate, you might think of giving him a chance. :)

I've never read the King novels, and yet I am fond of Holmes "fan-fiction". But something that so obviously smacks of Mary-Suism doesn't sound like my cuppa. Holmes married? Don't think so. Mary Russell is not Irene Adler, is she? And that's the only woman in the Canon that I could ever imagine Holmes with, and even then, it's a bit difficult.

Re: It's a mystery

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

No. She's an entirely original character, who is 16 or 17 when she first meets Holmes, after he'd retired to the Sussex Downs (so he is in his 50s, possibly his 60s). The first book has him taking her on as an apprentice, since she is smarter than the average bear, and I was fairly gob-smacked in the second book when the proposal happened -- while I could see HER having a crush on HIM, I wasn't convinced he would want to have a wife thirty or so years younger than him who was a feminist, a Jewish scholar, and rich. (Yeah, Mary Sue coming out. But... I do like the character and I like her Holmes more than most pastiches.)

Re: It's a mystery

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I like Conan Doyle, glaringly implausible as Holmes often is, because the author isn't playing the "give the reader a fair chance to guess the murderer" mystery-writer game. The purpose of a Holmes story is to dazzle the reader with Holmes' intellect, not to hold the reader in suspense over a meaningless solution.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I think that some Mary Russell novels are more interesting than others -- in particular, I really enjoyed "O Jerusalem", since it was set in Palestine and concerned a more political plot than a "mystery" one. I also rather enjoyed "The Game", but that was more because I loved the IDEA of a grown-up Kim than the execution (I would have preferred more Kim, less Holmes in that one). I have not picked up the later ones at all.


I tend NOT to read mysteries for the mystery plot -- while I care somewhat that the evildoer is caught and punished (since that is what defines a mystery for me -- is the world order upheld by good prevailing and bad losing?), I'm much more interested in what happens along the way to the characters.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Some time ago I started to read the first of the Mary Russell novels, The Beekeeper's Apprentice. I enjoyed it for about the first half of the book, which is all about the interaction between perky young Mary (Sue) and old Sherlock, up until the point where a mystery plot crops up and the two of them put heads together to try to solve it. At which point it became exceedingly boring and I put the book down.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I liked The Beekeeper's Apprentice rather better than you did; I read all of it with enjoyment, though I focused on the developing relationship and character interactions in the second part, not on the mystery. Then I read the second book in the series, with the marriage, and gave up on reading anything further. I didn't consider a romantic wish-fulfillment fantasy an adequate continuation of the original interestingly quirky relationship between the overconfident teenage hotshot and the quirky old master of the art, which I still mostly like.

On the other hand, the second time through I spotted that she had a shilling equal to 5p—which is true now, of course, but was certainly not true in the Edwardian era. Seeing that she utterly failed to grasp that basic historical detail undermined my confidence in any of the historical content of the novel. It's like the time I glanced at a comic book story about Tarzan coming to the United States, which commented on the 48 states . . . but was set in a year when Arizona and New Mexico were still territories.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"she had a shilling equal to 5p"

Oh dear. That's bad, very bad, and worse than the 48 states bit, because the shilling was 12d ("p" wasn't used as the abbreviation prior to decimalization, so if she did use it, that's another error) for time immemorial; the 120 years or so it took the U.S. to rise from 13 to 48 states is trivial by comparison. And these days you have to be a trivia buff to know that 5 new pence = 1 old shilling anyway, as the term has fallen pretty much out of use and the 5p coin is mostly just called 5p.

Tolkien at Oxford in 1923

[(Anonymous)]

I could be off base, but isn't there not much chance that someone would run into Tolkien at Oxford in 1923, since he was teaching at Leeds at the time? Did the author account for this (for example, indicating that Tolkien was visiting Oxford at that time for some reason), or did she just have her facts wrong about when Tolkien started teaching there?

Re: Tolkien at Oxford in 1923

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That Tolkien was teaching at Leeds is mentioned in the novel. The specific date of the encounter is between terms at both Oxford and Leeds, where Tolkien was indeed teaching at the time, and he is not known to have been elsewhere on that day, so it's not impossible for him to have been visiting Oxford. This speculation is, accordingly, one of the least outlandish things in the entire book.

Re: Tolkien at Oxford in 1923

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough, then. It looks like she may have consulted her Hammond and Scull! I'm sorry that it sounds like the rest of the book didn't maintain the same level of plausibility.

Ed Pierce

Re: Tolkien at Oxford in 1923

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I very much doubt she consulted anything, except perhaps Carpenter. (This book was published in 1996, after all.) I did, though.

Re: Tolkien at Oxford in 1923

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, I neglected to notice the publication date of the book. And I suppose it would have been more prudent of me to assume that YOU had checked your Hammond and Scull rather than that King had, anyhow!

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Letter of Mary is the book that made me stop reading Laurie King. The first two Mary Russell books are quite good and the one contemporary one I read was quite good as well. But Letter of Mary was ridiculously bad, so much so that I decided I didn't need to risk another one being that bad.

I enjoy the occasional mystery novel (and I still love and reread many of the ones I loved in my youth), but they're not my favorite genre.

[emerdavid.livejournal.com]

(A) Agree about mysteries. I like reading Raymond Chandler simply because he puts words together so wonderfully. A lot of times I can't even follow his mystery plot, but I don't care, as long as I can come across a line like, "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight."

(B) "I'm in Marsport Without Hilda" is still one of my favorite Asimov stories. I love the concept of a drug side-effect unhinging the language centers of the brain into free-association. To this day, I sometimes find myself spouting the line, "Bird to the wise guyed book to all places everybody."