As long as I could read, I've enjoyed mysteries, a.k.a. "detective novels" or "crime fiction." For just as long, I've wanted to create my own set of characters and follow them from novel to novel, murder to murder. But my experience of real life crime is nil, and I've come to despise some elements of the genre. Reading two crime novels written sixty years and an ocean apart, I have these thoughts about what's good in a good mystery.
It's the Journey, not the Destination
First, the trajectory of any crime novel is a given. Early on, a protagonist will be drawn into some criminal situation, will meet interesting suspicious characters, will encounter personal danger closing in on the culprit. That's the plot, and it hasn't been improved. (One variation: the now-forgotten novelist Charlotte Armstrong tried something a bit different. In her novels, we watch the crimes in preparation, and we watch the protagonists unaware, and the interest lies in wondering, "Will the protagonist figure out what's going on in time to prevent the awful crime?")
Knowing the road so well allows the writer and reader to take in the scenery along the way. Simenon often takes his detective Maigret to a new place (his boyhood home, a sleazy neighborhood, or, in this case, a provincial town in Holland). Agatha Christie takes us to boats on the Nile, cars on the Orient Express, or isolated estates. P.D. James claims that all of her novels begin with a thoroughly imagined location. Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries all focus on a different corner of a real place, Oxford. (When I last visited Oxford, it had turned into a sort of Inspector Morse theme park.)
For Mosley, it's not place but time that he explores: Easy Rawlins lives in LA, but each novel finds him advancing in time, from the immediate post-World War II years to the "Summer of Love" in this most recent one.
Mosley impressed me early in his career during an interview. He was asked why much of his work is set in years before he was born. He replied, "When you grow up in a family that loves you, your memories go back far beyond your own life span." He meticulously recreates the time's fashions, music, international events, and the state of race relations in LA at the time.
Other writers I admire have used the scaffolding of the crime plot to explore a theme - loss, faith, corruption, the entertainment industry. My personal acquaintance Terri Holbrook wrote a series of excellent mysteries set mostly in England with a north Georgia expatriate at the center, allowing her to dig into her own Southern roots. She tells me that her second (my favorite) novel The Grass Widow was based on an actual incident in her family's life -- and that she fears that her fiction was too close to the truth.
The Game
That being said, there is always an element of game playing, here. Novelist Raymond Chandler scorned the kind of novels in which solving "whodunnit" (and how) was uppermost -- those locked room murders of John Dickson Carr, the Agatha Christies, and of course Ellery Queen's challenge to the reader at the point where all the "clues" had been revealed: "Dear reader, can you figure out the solution?" Chandler points out, rightly, that it's never a fair game when the author gets to be God and manipulate hidden motives, luck, and coincidence.
Chandler's own novels are still a kind of game, less about logic than about something we do every day, trying to read other characters. That's something that all mysteries have in common, a worldview that says "No one can be trusted; everyone conceals something." Simenon and Agatha Christie use that insight for a plot device; with Mosley and Chandler, figuring out whom to trust is the emotional thrust of the whole story, as someone attractive is bound to be concealing something.
Death or Life Matters
In a detective novel, we take for granted that we're reading something that matters, just because death is involved. Oddly, then, the body count is something we anticipate with some glee, while we focus more on the relationships of the characters, their daily routines.
We want some death scene artfully, gleefully described. Simenon usually does not deliver on this expectation, and Mosley doesn't play that game, either. At the other extreme, P. D. James obviously takes care to display death as theatrically as possible. In one memorable opening of a James novel, there's the man's well-dressed corpse drifting at sea in a row-boat -- both hands missing, severed at the wrists. The scene that got me reading her work was set in a Church -- a bum and a Lord, bodies laid at the altar, their heads switched. A faux-English writer, Martha Grimes, lets melting snow reveal a corpse set on the sign of an inn where a mannequin used to be. Patricia Cornwell's medical examiner Kay Scarpetta is always finding remains, none more gruesome than what she discovers in a refrigerator -- the high point of Ms. Cornwell's whole series, for my money.
A Death in the Family
All of these crime writers mentioned above (except Charlotte Armstrong) build their work on a constant cast of characters. Obviously one attraction of the genre is our bonding with those characters. In this, the authors are helped along by actors who memorably played the detectives. I cannot read Sherlock Holmes without seeing Jeremy Brett and his wonderful Watsons (David Burke; later, Edward Hardwicke); actors John Thaw and Kevin Whately were in my mind's eye as I read the complete works of Colin Dexter; and Agatha Christie's work is not nearly so good on the page as it is with actor David Suchet playing Poirot -- with the help of great scenic designers, music, and supporting actors, who create all the nuance and atmosphere that she left out.
Mosley's Easy Rawlins (played once by Denzel Washington) is someone you have to like, and his buddy Mouse (Don Cheadle) is a memorable foil. In each novel, I'm always interested to follow up on a boy named Jesus that Easy rescued, a child who never spoke a word for years. (In Cinnamon Kiss he's a dependable and grateful twenty-year-old). Cornwell's Scarpetta novels took her cast of characters to a point of such exaggerated grimness that she wisely moved Scarpetta out of Richmond VA to a new location. The move hasn't helped as much as I'd hoped, however -- Scarpetta and her friends now carry so much baggage of international intrigue, secret agencies, robot attack dogs, "werewolves," and personal misery now that there's no believing in them, and no pleasure in seeing them together anymore.
There's more to say about this. I'll return to the topic again.
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