Salon.com > Jacqueline Carey

The best American whats of the century?

Fri, 05 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

I became suspicious of "The Best
American Mystery Stories of the Century"
when I saw, second on the list of the
contents, "Paul's Case" by Willa
Cather. In what way is "Paul's Case" a
mystery story? Maybe in the way that the
New Testament is -- the latter has,
after all, a betrayal, an unjust
execution and a surprise ending. Come to
think of it, the New Testament, if only
it had been written more recently and by
an American, would qualify better.
"Paul's Case," an extraordinarily
powerful story of self-immolating
romanticism, involves a crime (petty
theft) only peripherally.

Someone has definitely been salting the
mine. Otto Penzler, the series editor,
has said that he considers a mystery
"any fictional work in which a crime, or
the threat of a crime, is central to the
plot or theme of the story." This
conveniently capacious definition
allowed him to include href="/08/features/updike.html">John Updike's "Bech's Noir" in his "Best
American Mystery Stories" volume for
1999. Why doesn't Penzler just put that
notorious puzzler href="/mwt/feature/1998/07/31feature.html">"Lolita" on the shelves of his target="new"
href="http://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/">Mysterious Bookshop and be done
with it?

Getting there

Fri, 24 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Mystery writers can be divided into two
types: those you read for the journey --
the classic example is Raymond Chandler
-- and those you read for the
destination, like href="/books/feature/1999/12/23/mysterie
s/">Agatha Christie. The atmosphere
of a Chandler is its raison d'jtre, just
as the solution is a Christie's. This is
not to say that Chandlers have
unsatisfying endings or that reading a
Christie is a slog. Both writers are
among the best in the genre, and so
every part of their work is adequate to
its purpose. But in lesser novels, when
these two aspects are out of whack, you
can get some truly bizarre results.

Brigitte Aubert's Death From the
Woods, which was recently translated
from the French, is a good example of a
book to read for the journey. Winner of
the 1997 Grand Prix de Litterature
Policiere, it has the perfect heroine.
Elise Andrioli is beautiful, funny and
brave. And blind, mute and quadriplegic.
The book reads like romantic suspense
from 30 years ago, with the finely tuned
hysteria of an Ursula Curtiss mystery.
Odd threats are suggested. Everyday
events hint at unspecified horrors.
Paranoia has seeped into the prose until
it is inseparable from it.

Call the next witness

Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It is easy to see why legal thrillers have been so popular in the past decade. The trial attorney is a quintessential '90s hero -- a lone cowboy who gets to wear a white hat with his pinstriped suit. He gets to live up to youthful fantasies of righteous yet cunning iconoclasm while fitting neatly into a highly structured environment, the court, where there is a clear winner and loser. No matter what little quirks are thrown in at the end -- what Pyrrhic victories, what uncollectible judgments, what regretted intentions -- our hero always gets his verdict. He gets to fight authority, and then he gets to triumph in the most obvious, explicit, here-and-now, authoritarian sense. (By "he" I mean the masculine sort of person, not the human sort. The writers I am talking about are men, and their main characters are men. A novel by a Lia Matera or Lisa Scottoline is, in the end, a whole other kettle of counterclaims.)

The court -- like that quintessential '90s vehicle, the SUV -- is where vague notions of adventure can intersect with making it big time. If the lawyer's cause is just and its success depends on his success, there is bound to be some confusion between doing good and doing well -- a confusion that is readily embraced in these stock-enhanced times.

Footloose in Florida

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Florida is a restless state. You'd think that with all that heat everyone would just sit down and relax for a while, but no, the spot is teeming with transients. It is one of America's principal foyers. It is home to those who have no home. The recent controversy over the residential status of poor Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy whose mother died trying to reach the United States, is a natural symbol.

It is fitting, then, that the plot of Thomas Perry's latest Jane Whitefield novel, Blood Money, begins in the Keys. I can think of no more successfully restless writer than Thomas Perry. His heroine, a sort of walking, talking witness-protection program, moves people in peril into new lives. To elude the various killers who are always on her and her charges' tails, she flies and drives many different planes and cars all over the country, constantly adopting and discarding clothes, credit cards, hair styles and habits. Identity itself is in flux, as she takes apart the personae of those in danger and formulates new ones. She establishes safe houses, transfers funds, then plays the innocent until she can smash a trunk lid down hard on a limousine driver/criminal's head. She tricks someone on every other page, never repeating herself. In Whitefield's world, there are far more than 50 ways to leave your pursuer -- in the dust.

Christie for Christmas

Thu, 23 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I hate clues. Too many people -- including crime writers -- think mystery novels are supposed to be built around clues, as if the ideal were some Encyclopedia Brown exercise inflated to grown-up size. (Encyclopedia Brown, the hero of the children's detective series, solves non-gory crimes by pointing out the inconsistencies in the guilty person's statement -- e.g., "With the sun in his face, Ringo Charlie's shadow would have fallen behind him!")

I do not like trying to figure out whether an author's mistakes are deliberate or not. I do not like timetables or floor plans. I do not want to have to pay attention to who calls whom what, where who was when or who knew what too soon. That is the author's job, and I do not feel like doing it for the author. I do not want my mysteries to feel like work.

Besides, you have to suspend so much disbelief to read a mystery novel that picking apart minor breaks in logic threatens to topple the whole edifice. (See Raymond Chandler's much-quoted, perfectly just yet irrelevant objection to one of Agatha Christie's solutions: so ingenious that "only a half-wit could guess it.")

Ripped from the headlines

Fri, 03 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Fictional works based on real-life causes cilhbres are nothing new, but fiction-nonfiction cross-pollination is particularly abundant these days. The much admired television show "Law and Order" has created years' worth of plots "ripped from the headlines" -- some are so transparent I wonder how the producers can use the fictional disclaimer at the end with a straight face. At first I found the show's swerving in and out of real-life elements disconcerting, and I was annoyed at what I took to be the writers' laziness in not thinking up their own stories. But soon, I too felt the tug that the anchor of reality provides. Now I plan my Wednesday evenings around the show. (Not that there still aren't some bafflers. Remember the one based on Hugh Grant's being caught with his pants down, only he's given a wife who then kills the prostitute? As if there weren't any other prostitutes in the world?)

R.D. Zimmerman's new mystery novel, "Innuendo," deals with the possible homosexuality of a very big, very married movie star. Even I, as sketchily informed as I am about such matters, had no trouble figuring out which Hollywood actor inspired the portrait. The murder of a gay runaway is thrown in to provide the narrative.

The female dick

Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In the early '80s, when women began to refashion the hard-boiled detective novel using female private eyes, anticipated difficulties such as gender differences in strength and aggressiveness proved to be chimeras. To make their brawls more believable, these heroines were given workout schedules more appropriate to Olympic athletes (as if Philip Marlowe would have been caught dead in a gym); nowadays people seem to believe that given enough training, anyone can do anything.

It was harder to deal with the femme fatale of the tradition -- you know, the blond with the diamonds in her eyes and the pearl-handled revolver in the top of her stocking. Chandler and Hammett believed in her absolutely. She usually turns out to be the murderer. Even if she doesn't, she is corrupt, vile and enthralling. It is in her persona that the form's ambivalence toward evil is lodged, and this ambivalence still gives the form its unshakable power. Without it, the detective novel is just a lot of empty suits holding guns.