There Won’t Be Blood

Seventy years ago, Charlotte Armstrong wrote what is probably her boldest and most radical novel, an unidentified literary object whose suspense rested not on some criminal scheme or lady in danger but on the whereabouts of a bottle of olive oil. A Dram of Poison read like nothing she or anyone else had written before and the MWA, back then always on the prowl for things unusual, bestowed the Edgar Award upon it. The book had and still has its discontents however, who dispute its qualification as a mystery novel; I expressed my feelings about the issue some years ago and they have not changed. This is not the subject of this post anyway. The topic instead is, could such a book still be written, published and win awards today?

I’ve recently had an IRL conversation with a friend who complained about the omnipresence of murder in contemporary mystery dramas – crime comes in many shapes, he said, so why does it always have to be about violent death? He definitely had a point. A mystery story doesn’t have to involve a corpse or a threat on someone’s life and the near exclusive focus on them is comparatively recent. It may come as a surprise to modern readers, considering how the times were much more unsafe and violent than ours, but early crime fiction made a relatively parcimonious use of murder, which was just one of the many kinds of puzzles (« problems ») the detective might encounter, and not always the most interesting. A large portion of the Sherlock Holmes Canon for instance deals with what would now be called « petty crimes » and some of Sherlock’s most celebrated cases involve no criminal element at all; what’s more, as Julian Symons remarked, the word « murder » never appears in the titles of the stories. Writers were parcimonious with corpses too, as one was usually enough to carry a narrative, be it a short story or a novel, and they rarely dwelt on the gory details – they were writing « respectable » fiction, not penny dreadfuls my dear sir.

So how and why did the genre and its readers become so obsessed with murder, leading to the situation bemoaned by my friend? There are many answers, both historical and sociological, but none is entirely satisfying. The massive, senseless outpourings of violence that were WW1 then its sequel WW2 certainly played a part in this evolution, as the audiences became both more jaded and more cynical and were no longer willing to pay merely to read about smashed Napoléon busts. Sherlock Holmes has now given up more or less entirely on cases of identity and red-headed leagues and most of his (apocryphal) cases deal with violent deaths, often described in a way that is not « respectable » at all. Even so-called « cosy » mysteries usually begin with some dead body on the floor. The people want excitement – they want BLOOD!

This brings us back to Charlotte Armstrong’s book and beyond to the possibility of such a book in times like ours. Assuming some publisher agreed to print it, it might not even been branded as a mystery or if it was, would be seen as cosy as its cosiest – not the kind of book that has the heirs of Anthony Boucher raving or that wins statuettes. To be taken seriously, the writer would have to kill someone, or at least try to. Some might say it’s proof that the genre is no longer the dull, sanitized fluff it once was but now deals frankly with the unpleasant realities of crime. Others might counter that it’s evidence of how standardized it has become, an argument I think has some merit. Either way it’s hard for me to imagine in the current landscape an A-lister like Armstrong challenging long-held conventions, writing a mystery without a corpse and without a criminal and more crucially getting people to read it.

My friend’s suffering is not over yet.