Never Mind Story, Get The Formula Right

My search for good mystery fiction continues in cycles, my success about the same as that of Diogenes. Diogenes, as you’ll perhaps recall, used to carry a lit lamp around in sunshine; and in those days that lamp lacked batteries. Asked what he was doing, he used to say: “I’m looking for an honest man.” Here a recent disappointment. On the cover an almost naked geisha with a marvelous dragon tattooed on her back. Assassin’s Touch. By Laura Joh Rowland. That Joh in the name suggested an Asian author, possibly good. Warning me off was a quote from The Denver Post’s review. It said: “Sano may carry a sword and wear a kimono, but you’ll immediately recognize him as an ancestor of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.” Still, I succumbed. Had to check something out. Well, The Denver Post’s reviewer had evidently failed to read the book. Deadlines, you know. No sign of Sam Spade anywhere. But neither did the book even remotely capture at least my imagined life of the Tokugawa Shogunate. But the formula, mind you, is good. Samurai detective placed so highly he virtually runs Japan; and better yet, Mrs. Samurai Detective is also a detective, don’t you know. And there is a kind of veneer of historical fact… Sigh.

Relighting my lamp a few days later I chanced across Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May off the Rails. Fowler is more skillful than Mrs. Rowland, but formula dominates here too. Two aging detectives run the Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) in London. It’s a special agency with freedom to sidestep the usual rules. Where have I seen that before if not everywhere. Do you want a stunningly drawn portrait of London at its most decadent—transcending even Theodore Dalrymple’s shuddering descriptions—not least encyclopedic as well as microscopic knowledge of the London Underground? If yes, this is the book for you. Their eccentricities rival the characters’ emptiness. But the story isn’t getting anywhere as corpses pile up, each victim vividly described. But why don’t I feel anything? Because I’m seeing surfaces and nobody is home… Witty chit-chat on and on, but then I close the book. I’ll have to get some new batteries and try again.

The Mystery?

Over the last several months I’ve picked what looked like promising mystery novels from the wall-sized shelf of our local library. In this I’m trying to discover a genuine story-teller. One test is to look at the first page of the novel. If it begins by plunging me into a scene—action, dialogue—I slip it right back into the gap I created removing it. I’m looking for a story, not a third rate movie executed as print on paper. Once it looks like that a story might be told, I look for other indications that give me hope: set in old times, for example, set in China. How though it is to find something good is illustrated by the last three I chose, admittedly rather rapidly.

The first of these begins in 1204 AD or thereabouts, in Swabia. It concerns a community of circus performers hiding in the Black Forest from a evil persecution of some Pope. (Had I gleaned that much from my examination of the book, it wouldn’t have made it to the house, but, alas.) The first person story teller is a member of this community but sounds, in speech, surprisingly like an American from the Midwest. At around page four or thereabouts I come across a “guild hall” built amidst the dense pines of that very mountainous region; it features four “class rooms” in which the circus-arts are taught. Really? Class rooms don’t really come into their own until Napoleon or thereabouts. And guild halls, well, don’t really fit the notion of a fugitive community hiding in the Black Forest at the tail of a path camouflaged by a “movable bush.” Soon the story-teller’s wife (she is great with bow and arrow by the way!!) mentions a “live audience” — as if that era had had any other kind. And then my story-teller talks of “Europe,” a geographical conceptions not in the day-to-day lexicon of some itinerant juggler of the thirteenth century.

The second book, set in modern times, starts smartly with nice, quick portraits of three Brits; amusing, nicely done. But settling down I rapidly find myself bogged down in a ten page description of a little section of The City in London the purpose of which, I’m guessing, is to show that our American author really was in England with notebook and digital camera. By now, leafing, ahead, I discover that description is the bulk, the tedium relieved only here and there by encountering the occasional charismatic ghost.

The last is a “Templar Mystery.” It kicks off with a low, turreted wall collapsing and killing a knight in armor. The description of this collapse, the listing of the materials present in the rubble, persuades me that the author knew naught about how walls like that were made. In the second segment we meet a young, vile sort of friar; he is just a brother, mind, but already the diplomatic go-between the king of England and the Pope. The third short segment already has us enjoying an obligatory sex scene between a female peasant I can’t actually believe in and a peasant hunk I fear might play a leading role in all that follows. Sigh. It’s a very hot and humid summer. I’m losing my touch even in sampling mystery novels in this age of the image. The mystery of all this? The mystery is that any of these books would actually have been published.

The Mystery Genre...

…attracts me because life is a mystery too, but the good authors make it accessible, respect my sense for good and evil, and reward me with a satisfying resolution now. From the genuinely gifted I learn things without awareness of learning. The realization comes at a distance later on.

Jane Austen, Detective

I must have read the novels of Stephanie Barron not long before I began this blog. Had Ghulf Genes been running at that time, I’m sure I would have noted her name and her delightful novels already. Stephanie Barron is the pseudonym of Francine Matthews, a woman with a fascinating career. She is a scholar (history), a one-time CIA analyst—but above all a very fine novelist. Her Jane Austen books generally follow Jane Austen’s life chronologically; the mysteries take place in the places where Austen lived or vacationed, and its characters include members of her family, people she knew, and, of course, characters invented by Stephanie.

I came across her work in my on-and-off life’s hobby of discovering mystery writers I really like. I approached this series with a great deal of apprehension. I discovered these detective novels while looking deeper into Jane Austen’s life after another period (which also repeats at roughly nine-year intervals) of rereading Austen. “Well,” I thought, “it’s probably a waste, but what the hell. Read one.” I was immediately captured, charmed, indeed surprised—and never regretted setting off on the venture. The list of Stephanie Barron's mysteries, a serious body of work, follows:

1. Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996)
2. Jane and the Man of the Cloth (1997)
3. Jane and the Wandering Eye (1998)
4. Jane and the Genius of the Place (1999)
5. Jane and the Stillroom Maid (2000)
6. Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House (2001)
7. Jane and the Ghosts of Netley (2003)
8. Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (2005)
9. Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006)
10. Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (2010)

Why now? I’ve become weary of reading so-called serious books, needed a change of atmospherics, and therefore began another search for yet another mystery author. I think I’ve also succeeded, but I'll write about the new author I stumbled across at some other time. The current search reminded me of the last one.

Francine Matthews, under that, her real, name also writes modern thrillers. I’ve looked at these as well but had the same curious response I’d had to reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. That novel is the strangest amalgam of magic and brutality I’ve ever encountered. Two thirds of it takes place in the past and is illuminated by a mysterious spirit. In the last third we are suddenly in modern times, and everything changes with such a gritty brutality that I found it difficult to finish the book. Now, of course, this may have been intended… Years later I chanced across Allende’s The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir. This book has essentially the same content as The House of the Spirits, but, written as a memoir, it is understated and oddly much better structured than the fictional version. A round-about way of saying that the spiritual element is much stronger in Matthews’—as in Allende’s—work when reality is seen at a greater distance and the raw texture of the everyday has been transformed by distance and reflection into meaning.