it's a mystery
Aug. 6th, 2009 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacA 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-07 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-08 04:22 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-08 12:28 pm (UTC)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.