Welcome to Bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Hola, compadres. It’s been eight months since our last Bookchat; I am sorry that is so, and glad to be back with you all. I’m already working on my next Bookchat, for January 28th, on Reading News Vs. Books. Then some Wednesday in February, I’ll post a review of Sense and Sensibility. Except for those slots, every other Wednesday is free, and looking for you to host your next Bookchat. So please join me, painting this fence white. It’s even more fun than it looks.
Mystery In My Childhood
Papa had a marvelous library with myriad books. He was a widely, deeply read professor, and proud of it. Whenever he read an obscure classic, he notched points on his mental scoreboard. But for idle pleasure, he liked Science Fiction and Mystery.
As a lad, I enjoyed the SF, but didn’t care for the mysteries. They didn’t feel like fully fleshed out books; more like clever, but arid, puzzles. So the first thing Mystery meant to me was a complicated plot, where the writer manipulated their two-dimensional characters, like chess pieces, until the last clue fell.
In those days I read everything I came across, from encyclopedias to cereal boxes. So I read a few mysteries, just by accident. A collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and two of the first, from the 1840s, when Edgar Allan Poe invented the genre: ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’.
T. S. Eliot disputes Poe’s primacy. He says that The Moonstone (1868) was “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective stories in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe”. I don’t know about that. But I enjoyed The Moonstone very much in my teens (then again, later). It impressed me as both a splendid mystery and a fully developed novel.
A couple of years later, I came across a book which was all that and then some, which kept me up half the night too: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. We each have some genres that don’t grab us, like Mystery to me, in my youth. But there’s a delightful epiphany when you find a book of that ilk which was crafted into a gem, and dazzles you. You finally get the formula of, say, Mystery, and hear how it can sing; at the same time, this book is shaped with such love and wonder that it transcends its genre, to become a world unto itself, that swallows your whole imagination.
Just as Mystery can ascend into Literature, the process can work the other way. Many great novels reach into Mystery’s wheelhouse, and borrow its formulas to enrich their own tapestries. For example, most of Dickens and Dostoevsky’s classics contain mysteries, which various characters are working to solve or keep hidden.
Secret Power Of Mystery
A strong mystery plays on its reader’s heartstrings, it acts on our mind like a drug: it energizes and transfixes; it makes our heart beat faster, fearing peril, and our eyes open wider, to spot every clue.
There is a crime, usually one or more murders, often with a conspiracy behind them. We’re walking inside the detective’s shoes, scanning crime scenes through their eyes, and personalities. Stakes are high, and every clue we uncover drops us further into danger.
Mystery’s protagonist is usually flawed, sometimes even a criminal; in a gray zone between corrupt power-brokers and an elusive dream of justice, or maybe just escape. Curiosity and adrenaline keep us glued to the edge of our seat. Mystery asks us to read as closely and alertly as we possibly can, to sort true clues from red herrings, then add them up into one hidden solution: a rightness the world cannot yet see. We’ll come back to that.
In childhood, as I said, I saw mysteries as arid puzzles, peopled by “two-dimensional characters, like chess pieces”. But most mysteries are books in a series, so the writer must create at least one complex three-dimensional character, to keep readers coming back for more: their detective. Starting with Sherlock Holmes — one of the most interesting, adored, and influential characters in all of fiction.
When a writer creates an inspiring detective, who evolves further throughout their series, they add more layers to the intoxicating transport of Mystery. Besides the danger and clue-gathering, readers discover a detective’s expertise and weaknesses, their hungers and fears. Over time, we form a more intimate bond with our flawed champion.
Mystery In Troubled Times
I still read almost everything I come across. Nowadays that includes less cereal boxes, and more books from far off countries or centuries. I’ve grown fond of several mystery writers, and two have opened my mind, to see more layers and beauty in mysteries than I previously guessed at. I found P. D. James’s A Taste for Death on my Aunt Frances’s side table, in a farm near the Rio Grande. She’s not aiming to write literature, she’s solidly in the genre of Mystery; but she does it so well. P. D. James was a judge in inner city London, so she’s seen all the panoply of human nature. She’s a keen observer of people, of what makes us tick, and how we respond under pressure. Mysteries beguile more when they’re wrapped in so much humanity.
Raymond Chandler, though, is on another level: one of my four favorite writers (along with Shakespeare, George Eliot, and Ursula Le Guin). I live in Los Angeles now, so Chandler’s film noir visions of LA, back in the 1930s and ‘40s, enchant me every time. I love his wounded romanticism, blowing like Santa Ana winds through his tales. But most of all, he’s a hell of a writer, with his odd blend of grace and grit, his gimlet eye for details, and all those razor-sharp, yet poetic, phrases.
“The detective story is a tragedy with a happy ending”. — Raymond Chandler
That quote is the spark that got me thinking, and eventually writing this essay. How can it make sense? It’s obviously wrong. A tragedy, by definition, has an unhappy ending.
What would a tragedy with a happy ending even look like? Maybe, Gandalf or Aslan dies, so their companions grieve and lose heart — but then they come back from death transformed, brighter and more themselves than before. Except, that’s Fantasy. We all cherish such magic, but we stop looking for it to happen in the real world, once we’ve grown past childhood.
The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done . . . As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done — unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen. They were apt to be hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. — Raymond Chandler
In this tragic world of ours, that may be as happy an ending as we can achieve: justice may be done, if you can find a hard-boiled hero to grind it out. And we must each work to be a hero, as best we can.
As I keep growing older, I discover new layers, my experience and understanding mature inside me, like a tree through endless seasons. Well, I hope endless, approximately. Reading comprehension deepens as much as anything. I know more of humanity, I grasp a wider world. So I see more in Mystery.
A crime —murder especially, but any violence or violation— is not just a quick stab, alone in the dark. It lives, it kills, within a social context. It leaves behind witnesses, families, survivors, who keep feeling the blade’s sharp destruction. Communities are ripped apart, thrown off balance. Some crimes are so shocking and evil that they rip at the hearts of our whole nation: like January 6th, 2021, or January 7th, 2026.
In a world this broken and askew, surviving so many seasons of outrageous wrongness, I find Chandler’s wisdom terribly true, and helpful. We’re in a tragedy every damn day. Somehow, we need to grind our way through this, to reach more sane and caring times. Then, we have a lot of crimes and corruption to examine, to reckon with, to fix together, to ensure they can never happen again. Justice Will Be Done. Because all of us, and America, will be bleeding out, until we cure all our infections and cauterize our wounds.
That is the happiest ending we can hope for, in this benighted land. And it will be enough.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.
