The Sealed Room: A Literal Stronghold

"The lofty ceiling is not high enough,

The walls contain no consummated breath;

And hanging there, the orison of time.

Ticks and ticks and ticks its way to death."

- Hospital Waiting Room (Sister Mary Vista, R.S.M.)

The marginalizing of the detective story has been a recurring subject of discussion and banter on the GADetection Group, which probably began (again) when a gritty, "ultra-modern" private-eye novel, Where the Dead Men Go (2013) by Liam Mcllvanney, with a jaded protagonist won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel.

We could literarily feel the foundation of the genre tremble and transcend beneath our feet as we read about the winner's prose-powered, page turning storytelling powers and the books uncanny ability to linger in the mind beyond the final page. It sounded exactly like the kind of bleak, dime-a-dozen, Serious Grime (sic) novels that have come and gone for decades, but critics and scholars have always been favorably disposed to them for "Transcending the Genre" with character-driven narratives – while ignoring such tripe as sound plots and props (i.e. locked rooms and dying messages).

The mystery-sphere's correspondent in France, Xavier Lechard, noted in this ongoing, scattered discussion that as far as the really important "mystery" awards are concerned, "not only traditional mysteries need no apply, but standard crime fiction don't either," favoring novels only marginally affiliated to the genre. 'Cause genre fiction, any type of genre fiction, can be fun-inducing and having fun is dangerously irresponsible – even if it's just from an armchair. Personally, I find it hilarious how the "Respectable Wing" of the genre are distancing themselves from the label "genre fiction" and enclosing themselves in their padded hugbox. I wouldn't have dragged the discussion on to the blog, but I happened to stumble across an old essay from decades ago, more or less, addressing this issue from the perspective of the much maligned locked room sub-genre. The author had written down, what I thought, better than I ever could. I'm a hack reviewer, you see.

"The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, but Not Dead Yet" by Donald A. Yates, Professor of Spanish-American Literature and book collector, was published in the 1956 autumn issue of The Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review and begins with outlining the critique leveled at literature in general at the time – which boiled down to the "classical concept of structure" and "form-for-the-sake-of-form." Obviously, the detective story (and the locked room prop) is guilty as judged, but, as Yates points out, it's a form of literature that actually thrives on those limitations. It has thrived and proven to be fertile grounds for creative writing for over a century, but has often, unsuccessfully, been declared dead and buried.

Yates' response to the critics, scholars and contemporary crime novelists eagerly signing their name on the death certificate of the detective story should be committed to memory, "I should like to show that even when its death papers are signed and delivered, a genre is capable of lively revolt" and "that it may throw these papers up in server's face and suddenly reveal that it has acquired a new life and new direction—merely through the stimulation of imagination lent to it by a new individual who has dedicated himself to a fresh treatment of its themes and traditions," because it has happened since this piece was written. Many times!

Herbert Resnicow brought four decades of experience in engineering and construction to the game in the 1980s, which is reflected in the unique way Resnicow approached the problem of the sealed room (e.g. The Gold Deadline, 1984 and The Dead Room, 1987). The neo-orthodox movement in Japan has pioneered, what could be called, "Corpse Puzzles," in which writers fool around with dismembered body parts to create identity problems, alibis and seemingly impossible crimes (e.g. Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Just two examples.

It continues with a (spoiler laden!) historical overview of the locked room device, from Edgar Allan Poe, Melville Davisson Post and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Gaston Leroux, Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, which covers the middle portion of the essay, before, prophetically, speculating on its future. Yates states that "the limitations of the locked-room puzzle offer to such writers a challenge which is really rather difficult to resist" and "it seems that in hand of every new advance in the field of human knowledge there comes a new way to polish off someone inside that wonderfully appealing locked room." After all, "Poe had no vacuum cleaner, and we have no penetrating death-ray gun, but it might be next." Last year, M.P.O. Books published Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), in which crime-scene hermitically locked, fortress-like villa guarded with cameras and motion-sensory detectors, but Books found a way for his murderer to by pass those security measures. And the penetrating death-ray gun... I remember a relatively obscure story (from the 2000s) that had the murderer ignite an incendiary device inside a locked apartment with the assistance of a simple laser pen.

I’ll be citing the last lines of the essay in full for prosperity sakes and to close this rambling post: "No, indeed, the last nail has not yet been driven into the restless coffin of the locked-room tale. On the contrary, its critics probably have had their obituaries interpreted more often as a challenge than as a public notice. So with this toast, I would like to hail the mystery authors of years yet to come who will be rallying to the call—Here's to the second hundred years!"

Hear, hear! And many thanks to Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, William DeAndrea, Paul Halter, Louise Penny, M.P.O. Books, P.J. Bergman, Paul Doherty, Richard Forrest, Edward D. Hoch, Martin Méroy, Fredric Neuman, John Sladek, Japan and any other writer who picked up the challenge in the post-GAD era. I'll catch up to you sooner or later!

 

P.S.: I think the actual truth behind the locked room mystery's refusal to die lies in the soft, muffled thumping coming from the tell-tale heart hidden beneath its floorboards. What else did you expect Edgar Allan Poe put in there when he gave life to the detective story? We got a spare heart from the horror genre and now we're immortal! You can bury us. You can wall us up. You can declare us dead, but, like "The Black Cat," we'll always come back. Always!

A Character Assessment of Characterization

"I have to create an entire solar system which is astronomically feasible, provide climates and geologies in keeping with the mass and position of a dozen planets and a star, populate one or more planets with hundreds of species which are biologically possible, chart their interactions, build a civilization with a history, a technology, a social structure and an engaging plot - all this and you want CHARACTERS too?!"

- Or words to that effect reputedly spoken (or written) by Isaac Asimov.

The Golden Age-Model of the Grand Detective Story is often (and unjustly) disparaged by its detractors for being overpopulated with cardboard characters that can be cut in the shape needed to fit the twists, turns and blind spots of outrageously contrived plots – which always struck me as the pot calling the kettle black. 

Looks pretty three-dimensional to me...

After all, contemporary crime novelists (if that is still the literary correct term to use) tend to over characterize their books so much that the mundane biographies of their characters have largely replaced clever plotting and digging through the pages of a fictionalized psychology textbook is not exactly the idea I have of a fun book. I know it's lowbrow to admit, but when I pick up a mystery I don't want to dog the footsteps of a policeman who constantly complains about his drunken wife, lousy kids and bitterness over dreams that never amounted to anything. Just shut up about your blather problem and DVD-collection and tell me what you think of that colored shard of glass underneath the body! This is why I gave up on writers like Elizabeth George, Ian Rankin and Henning Mankell.

It's not merely a matter of taste that keep the Literary Pearls, which adorn the bestseller lists of today, starved for my attention; I think I can put forward two fresh arguments against over characterization in mysteries. I know the first argument may impress some of you as a trifle weak, but the second one supports it – or at least, I hope so.

1) Extensive and detailed biographies of characters in modern crime novels are as unrealistic as the reputed characters with the personality of a piece of plywood that populate the classic whodunit. Be honest, when was the last time you met a complete stranger who began to tell you about his life, from the first time his uncle touched him as a kid to the moment his wife left him and took the kids with her three hours ago, except for that one time you sat next to a drunk mess in the bar who felt sorry for himself...

Usually, you will learn this gradually, over a period of time, as you get to know someone and strike up a friendship, which makes it, IMHO, unnecessary to waste as much as a single page on a detailed expose that explains one of the female characters fear for blood as emotional baggage when she was an unprepared and uninformed teenage girl who panicked after her first menstruation. Ah, I hear you say, but fiction is a vehicle to explore these nooks of the human psyche, which may be true, but for an answer I refer you to my second argument.

2) People have the ability to surprise one another, filled with either delight or reverberating with shock, when you unexpectedly trip over a new aspect in the personality of a person you thought you knew – which offers possibilities for this genre but are usually nullified when an author decides to write down every gnawing memory and half-assed musings that might pass through the head of his characters.

Yes, I know, this has been a short and generalizing piece, which was not was written as a putdown of every single detective story that rolled off the presses after 1959, of course not, but simply as an attempt at constructing an originally sounding sneer to fling at the realist movement.

I share Sherlock Holmes' opinion, expressed in the opening of "The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans," that "this great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy" than the petty problems of an unhappy and dull housewife seeking happiness in the bed of a bum of a neighbor, however, as I have often noted here, plot and characterization are not always mutually exclusive.

It's easy to drum up a list of contemporary mystery writers who proved my point, but to show that this is not something understood by only post-GAD writers or Crime Queens not named Agatha Christie I have compiled the following list of examples from writers who were topnotch in (nearly) every department but are now all but forgotten (and they were often better than the more well-known counterparts):

Pat McGerr (e.g. Pick Your Victim, 1946; The Seven Deadly Sisters, 1948), Christianna Brand (e.g. Green for Danger, 1944; London Particular, 1952) and Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Come Away, Death, 1937; St. Peter's Finger, 1938).

Note: Gladys Mitchell made somewhat of a comeback in the past decade thanks to the independent publishing industry.

 

The Skeleton in My Clock

"With sudden shock the prison-clock

Smote on the shivering air..."

- Oscar Wilde (The Balled of Reading Goal, 1898)

The Maestro!

 

I have broached this matter once before, when I posted a similar, but much briefer, message to the John Dickson Carr mailing list, in which I had set forth my reasons for suspecting that the greatest mystery writer who ever lived might have suffered from chronophobia – a suspicion that I based on his treatment of time and his depictions of clocks in his stories.

Douglas Greene professed skepticism, since Carr never exhibited any of the textbook symptoms that are listed for this condition, such as panic and terror, but I don't manifest these symptoms, either! It doesn't have to be extreme, like mine, which rarely goes beyond depressive bouts of nostalgia and a chronic intolerance for ticking clocks. Anyway, the matter wasn't definitely settled, one way or the other, but since we just entrusted another twelve-month period to the earth, I thought it was a perfect time to state my reasons for suspecting this to a broader audience – and see what you will make of it.

There was, first of all, his compelling sense of nostalgia and yearning for simpler times, which is probably why he turned to historical fiction when the 1950s rolled around – in an attempt to escape from a world that resembled his less and less with each passing year. This longing to slip through the cracks of time is reflected in the protagonists from The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957), who defied the then known laws of the universe and peddled up-stream in the river of time. I also think it's telling that he, more than once, compared events in his books with a Punch and Judy show (fond childhood memories clawing to the surface?).

Than there are the clocks and bells, often emerging as an allegory for death, the inevitable passing of time and usually closely associated with the demise of a character – and occasionally emblazoned with the face of the Grim Reaper himself!

Here's a list of examples: 

1) The murder weapon from Death Watch (1935) is a gilded clock handle and features a macabre Skull Watch.

2) Marcus Chesney uses a clock handle as part of his psychological experiment, moments before he's murdered, in The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939).

3) A clock in a store window and the sound of church bells has an important bearing on two seemingly impossible murders in The Hollow Man (1935).

4) Another representation of death as a clock/time can be found in The Skeleton in the Clock (1948).

5) "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks," collected in a volume entitled The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), brings the great detective face to face with a man who smashes every clock he sees to pieces.  

6) The victims from two stage/radio plays, "Thirteen to the Gallows" and "A Man Without a Body," were flung from the top-floor of a clock/bell tower.

7) In another radio play, "The Hangman Won't Wait," church bells are the first thing the falsely accused Helen Barton hears, when she regains her lost memory, in the condemned cell on the eve of her execution. 

8) "The Villa of the Damned," yet another radio play, has a unique victim for an impossible disappearance act: time itself!

These are just the examples that I can remember, but I am sure more of them could be added to this list and I still find them, especially combined, very telling and think it gives my suspicion some credence. But I would like to know what you think: are these the ramblings of a basket case, who tries to project his own mental short comings on his hero, or the astute observations of a brilliant armchair psychologist?

A Query for Mystery Buffs: Come Into Our Parlor

"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!" 

- Sherlock Holmes.

The morose and sulky visage of the clock has not been too liberally, as of late, with providing me with the amount of minutes needed to arrive at the final chapter of Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) and write about it with a feigned air of intelligence. So I decided to exorcise a ghost that has been haunting my thoughts for the better part of a month now and hastily scribble these lines to prevent this place from reaching a standstill, however, the enquiry below isn't just an accumulation of throwaway lines to get things moving again – since I think it's an genuinely interesting question that we can have some fun with.

Detective stories have always been one of the most popular and engaging personalities in the class room of genre fiction, alongside its buddies science-fiction and horror, which almost naturally attracted an array of individuals from outside the field – who wanted to participate in what we affectionately refer to as the Grandest Game in the World. The Queen of Burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee, indited two comical mystery novels, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942), and novelist Isreal Zangwill penned the novella "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891), which was aptly dubbed as the flagship of the modern locked room story, but the most successful visitor was perhaps science-fiction legend, Isaac Asimov. The Caves of Steel (1953) is the exempli gratia of the hybrid mystery novel done right. And let us not forget that the detective story was created by someone who qualifies as a visitor, Edgar Allan Poe, who's still primarily known for his tales of terror and hauntingly beautiful poems.

But as I ramble on here, you are probably starting to wonder where I want to go with this. It's really simple and I could've limited this to a simple, one-paragraph post: if you could send in an invite to someone outside of the field to write a detective story, who would it be and why?

If you'd ask me to whom I would dispatch a note of invitation, I would not have to think for even a second and promptly blurt out the names of the Las Vegas magicians, Penn & Teller. 

Penn & Teller

This idea began to take shape when I was listening to a very funny interview with Penn, in which he told how Teller has one of the best minds in magic today and can look at a complex stage illusion and tell how it was pulled off – which sort of became the premise of their television show, Fool Us.

Look, no strings!

I don't think it will come as a surprise to most of you when I say that I saw opportunities for at least one stunning impossible crime novel, but preferably a series, in which Teller provides a clever, multi-layered plot while Penn comes up with the lines to dress up the story – exactly like in their on-stage act and television shows. Plot-wise, these two stage magicians possess the knowledge and experience needed to possibly outdo a masterpiece such as John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), in which a member of a spiritualist circle is murdered while apparently levitating in mid-air, or even teach the master himself, John Dickson Carr, a trick or two on how to create a locked room or new ways to make stuff disappear. The only thing I am iffy about is whether they would understand the concept and necessity of fair-play clueing.

For these same reasons, I would also love to see James Randi try his hands at a locked room mystery. James Randi is a magician who dedicated his life to explaining miracles and seems therefore almost a shoo-in to pick up the plot threads that were left behind by John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot, Joseph Commings, Edward Hoch and Clayton Rawson. After all, this is the man who was confronted with someone who could apparently leaf through the pages of a phone book with the power of his mind and was not in the least impressed. Naturally, this warlock was exposed as the fraud he really was by this real-life counterpart of Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

So... let me know whom you would like to see firing up his or her computer and write a detective story. Oh, and they don't have to be necessarily alive. You could, for example, say how great it would've been if Michael Ende had written a mystery. Drop a comment here or compose a blog post of your own. I'm looking forward to hear from you!

The Spoils of Conquest

"I need more chaos to reconstruct. I read and I read, but it's never enough."

- Victorique (Gosick: The Novel, 2008)

Yesterday, I marched into a vast, open event hall that was this months stronghold for the Boekenfestijn (book fest), where mainly leftover or returned books are disposed of directly to the consumer at bargain prices, and armed with an inventory I charged the rows of tables – and was able the claim the following tomes as war booty: 

Paul Doherty's Domina (2002), The Plague Lord (2002) and The Queen of the Night (2006)

Admittedly, Paul Doherty's historical romances were the primary objective of this year's crusade to the book fest, but the result was rather disappointing – as none of the books I swooped up were listed on the scrap of paper I was carrying on me. Unsurprisingly, I was questing for his impossible crime stories, especially the ones set in ancient Egypt, but was unable to turn up even one of them. Nevertheless, the synopsis of The Plague Lord entails a lot of promise.

Jill Paton Walsh's Debts of Dishonor (2006) and The Bad Quarto (2007)

Walsh garnered fame within the GAD community when she completed Dorothy Sayers' uncompleted manuscript, Thrones, Dominations (1998), in which she perfectly captured the essence of the erudite Crime Queen – and showed that a pastiche can be good depending on who's wielding the pen. She also authored a series of her own, in which a college nurse, Imogen Quy, unravels classically conceived plots of the murkiest kinds in a scholastic setting. I picked up the last two entries in that series.

Georges Simenon's My Friend, Maigret (1949)

According to the gold standard utilized on this blog (roughly 1920-1950), this is the only novel published during that prosperous, golden era that I was able to obtain on this journey. Not that I had any hopes of excavating a copy from the catalogues of the Rue Morgue Press or Crippen & Landru, but you can't stop that flicker of hope igniting itself when you pick-up a war chariot (i.e. trolley) at the entrance and catch that glimpse of the first pile of books. In any case, the description on the book cover promises an interesting story.

The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Method and Mysteries of the World's Greatest Detectives (2009)

A readers companion to the investigative methodology of the world's most famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. It's apparently also chock-full of Holmesian trivia and whatnot. This book could turn out to be fun as well as a disaster (or a combination of both), but at these prices it would almost be criminal not to take a gamble.

Well, there you have it, booty of war, which I will continue fondling in public as I knock them off my to-be-read list and review them for this blog in the months ahead of us. Speaking of reviews, there will be one up tomorrow.

Clipped Wings

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

-  George Bernard Shaw

Let the reader beware: extremely vague ramblings are ahead of you!  

Recently, Xavier Lechard added an addendum to a response he compiled earlier this month to the projectile vomiting an article signed by Philip Hensher, in which the savant took a fresh and much needed stance by opposing the unchallenged conventions of the rule bound mammoth that is the crime genre – and labeled its perfervid followers as the un-evolved troglodytes they really are. But as Xavier already spewed his cerebral guts all over the article, there's not much left for me to add except to seize this opportunity to make one or two general observations of my own.

In the opening of his addendum, Xavier restated one of his previous observations that the genre being "rule-bound" doesn't mean it is necessarily adverse to originality and innovation, but I think that is putting it weakly – since the genre would've never prospered as it once did had any of the practitioners in the field taken serious notice of the scribbles produced by S.S van Dine and Ronald Knox.  

Mysteries were virtually unique as a genre fiction during their golden period in the fact that they were hard to define and had a scattered fan base. For decades, a discussion raged on what constituted as a mystery as the wings of the genre seemed to encompass the entire literary globe. Within the scope of the crime-ridden genre itself there were many different denominations: the fair-play whodunit, action packed thrillers, inverted crime stories, gothic novels of suspense and maidens in distress, police procedurals, rogue adventures, spy thrillers etc.

This is not a problem found with gritty westerns, science-fiction yarns, blood curdling horror stories or sweet, diabetic inducing, romance novels. They are, for the most part, what they are and still easily identified if they crossed-over in unfamiliar territory – where as the detective story blends in almost naturally with every surrounding it is put in. The prime example of this genre bending is, of course, Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954), which places a traditionally plotted mystery in a futuristic setting peppered with social commentary, but you could just as well write a legitimate detective set in Transylvania featuring a protagonist who has to exonerate Count Dracula from a murder committed in a locked and nearly impenetrable castle tower – whose only point of entrance is a tiny, top-floor window large enough for a bird or bat to pass through. A creative writer can pull it off.

As far as rules go, I have pretty much given up on them. Until recently, I clung to the necessity of a plot and strict fair play, however, that proved to be incompatible with a lot of writers and books I absolutely love and adore (e.g. Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Rex Stout and H.R.F. Keating). I still consider cleverly plotted detective stories that play fair with their readers as a personal favorite, but that's just a preference for one of the many forms the genre can be molded into by a talented pair of hands guided by an intelligent and imaginative brain. That's how I see the genre these days... as a mass that can be molded in any shape you want and should provide a gifted writer with unlimited freedom.

Lamentably, that's a potential that is rarely tapped into these days and there's not much left of that once majestic, free-roaming bird who soared over the printed pages of nearly every genre after it was captured, clipped and put in a cage too small to even stretch it wings properly.

Enter any bookstore, and it's the same old, same old. So called literary thrillers saturated with character angst and lengthy, pointless descriptions of absolute nonsense. No imagination. No experimentation. No longevity. And there's where you find the true tragedy of this problem. The people who threw themselves up as innovators with the purpose of "transcending" the genre are effectively bleeding it to death and hopefully their publishers will take notice, before it's too late, that the new generation of readers aren't all that interested in these self-proclaimed, literary masterpieces – that make pungent comments on society and whatnot. I realize that it's very vulgar of me, Ho-Ling and Patrick to admit, openly and unapologetically, that we read mysteries mainly for our enjoyment, but perhaps our generation simply isn't literate enough to appreciate lengthy descriptions of angst-ridden childhood recollections, bladder problems and CD/DVD collections.

As my fellow aficionado concluded, we should (or rather they) make the tent bigger and be more inclusive as well as stopping with that childish, unfounded phobia for the "I" word, but then again, maybe we're better off if the genre, as it stands now, withers away so we can begin anew.

And on a side note: I'm midway through another impossible crime novel (it's not an addiction, I can stop whenever I want!) and the review will be up within the next two days or so.