The Case of the Puzzled Mystery Writer
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Perspectives THE CASE OF THE PUZZLED MYSTERY WRITER BY HOPE HALE DAVIS Iwas pulling up bullbriers in the woods when I found our long-lost sledgehammer. Swinging it over my shoulder I started...
...The authors who concoct the most elaborate games delight in descriptions of dismembered bodies...
...Explaining the failed marriage of a disturbed adult named Tom, he has his private eye Lew Archer report: "I told her further that the child Tom had been alone in the house with his mother's body for several days...
...H. Auden's favorite detective) arrives from Scotland Yard...
...She gave a little shiver...
...Before anything happens.' "Chief Inspector Davy looked at her curiously...
...We cannot fail to sympathize with characters caught in the existential traps he always reveals...
...In Bertram's Hotel has this exohange: " 'I'm glad to be leaving here,' said Miss Marple...
...A bit rebelliously, I kept reading and hoping...
...I had planned to write my book about real live people, though, in today's world...
...And there are those off days when it seems essential to tuck up cosily before the fire with—of all things—a tale of one human beating out another's brains...
...Unfortunately, we remember her because she was unique...
...A guest will bring a Crime Club selection to the hospital as suitable accompaniment for giving birth...
...Blood began to move around in me," says Marlowe, "like a prospective tenant looking over a house...
...The one great exception was Dashiell Hammett's Nora Charles (supposedly based on Lillian Hellman), who could not only talk but drink right along with her husband, no mean accomplishment considering the gallons imbibed by most private eyes...
...But the fact is clear that many readers do feel a need of something they find—or hope to find—in murder mysteries...
...I had read detective stories before, of course...
...Agatha Christie, one of the field's all-time best sellers, with 90 million paperbacks in print, treats the word as a button to be pushed to produce a sense of foreboding not justified by the events...
...Relief...
...The girl turns out to be a cold conspirator with the murderer, and everything is sacrificed to MacDonald's pride in tying together events widely separated in space and time...
...Readers must want to hear teeth shatter, see noses smashed and ears torn off, while all the time enjoying the magical safety of a charmed life...
...And there was the explanation of the two cords: one would pass out under the door and pull the spring out, the other would be attached to the pad, so that as soon as it was released and dropped from the nozzle it would also be drawn out of the room...
...Why this choice...
...The beautiful young degenerate rich girl in The Big Sleep, for instance, hardly seems worth the inordinate effort required for her rescue—not to mention the deaths beyond the central one...
...If Fenwiok is able to solve these problems with love in her heart, I can try too, adding another push to what—who knows?—might turn out to be a trend...
...Pollifax, who is as "unexpected" and "amazing" as her titles imply...
...Or the archaeology, the ichthyology, even theology, lately...
...What do you expect to happen?' he asked...
...The punishment is detailed and brutal, the recovery quick...
...At least they always say it in the books I have been reading lately as I prepare to write a mystery of my own...
...Inspector French (W...
...I'll leave that question to Ardrey or Lorenz...
...But since World War I, when a latent blood-thirst may have been stirred up, mystery stories have provided an increasing amount of gore...
...But with a really ingenious plot you can't expect that, either...
...Evil In my notebook I scribbled rather flippantly, "Give characters keen nose for evil...
...Maigret, who might seem an amusing anomaly if she stood alone, represents the rule: No detective's wife is allowed to speak an intelligent word...
...These obligatory extra murders cause me serious problems...
...The novels are usually set a-gainst an upper-class lifestyle that was on its way out at the turn of the century...
...Authors make the peripheral murders deceptively painless for the reader by collecting an array of expendable people...
...Describing the wealthy, self-indulgent parents of a delinquent, Archer says: "Together they gave me the impression of a party that had gone on too long, till the music and the dancers were worn as thin as the husks of insects after spiders had eaten them...
...A surface plausibility, yes...
...But when it does happen, that is exactly what people say...
...Although I have shared this longing, no book in my random sampling has ever quite satisfied it...
...I wanted her to understand what murder and its consequences could be like...
...Misgivings set in at once, however...
...The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel," says Philip Marlowe, "but I didn't move...
...Evil of some kind,' said Miss Marple...
...Indeed, it has required tunneling through mountains of murders to reach a ray of light, actually two, suggesting that a mystery with an active, thinking heroine is possible...
...Comfort...
...Not sex or romance—there are plenty of versions of these...
...Wasn't believability important, then...
...All you have to do is show them with their objeotionable qualities unillu-minated by a glimmer of understanding—in other words, abdicate the novelist's normal responsibility...
...Grinsmead, who is soon murdered by gas in a bedroom locked from the inside...
...At the beginning of Ross Mac-Donald's The Sleeping Beauty (dedicated to Eudora Welty), we meet the lovely young daughter of a rich oil family as she tries to save a sea bird from a tanker spill...
...The first one I turned to was a biophysicist engaged in tracing the course of a disease endemic in undeveloped countries...
...Miss Mar-pie, after all her triumphs, continues to keep her eyes modestly on her knitting in Christie's last book, The Sleeping Murder...
...And here I meet what may be my most difficult obstacle?the way women seem required to act, or not to act, in murder mysteries...
...You can grind any axe, as long as you kill someone with it...
...Either way she is the he-man's dream of some ultimate in femaleness...
...His detective, Maigret, similarly has only human insights to guide him as he slogs through the rainy streets of a provincial town or a sleazy quartier of Paris until, after many a damp and weary mile, he reaches the cheap boite or milliner's shop where he corners his sad, shoddy killer...
...Can't we now treat it as a compulsion that must be understood, as Elizabeth Fenwick's heroine tries to understand the killing of a prostitute by a talented window-display designer in The Make-Believe Man...
...I was troubled by the idea of playing games with death...
...Auden says it is axiomatic that one person's caring for another can only be permitted in the detective story for form's sake, when the plot requires it...
...The plague is transmitted by a liver fluke with three stages of life, the entire dangerous phase being spent copulating in the human intestine...
...It's all just a game...
...Must I really have them in my book...
...Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey cavorts among redolent long-dead corpses...
...Some writers clearly give their readers a whiff of fresh blood to wake them up after the long dull chapters of repetitive questioning that frequently seems like padding, and probably is...
...This is not difficult...
...And his detective sometimes took death seriously...
...Who had Hope Hale Davis, a frequent contributor and author of The Dark Way to the Plaza, reports considerable progress on her mystery novel...
...Reading the books of the semi-realists like Ross and John MacDonald and Ross' wife, Margaret Millar, I also felt the party had gone on too long, with the wrong kind of people...
...This hardly mattered, because he abandons them all...
...Fenwick's and Gilman's books bear later reflection—a hard test for any genre...
...Perhaps, because death is everyone's dread, the game-playing meets a need by turning it into fantasy, making it unreal...
...This may be no accident...
...The ideal detective, above all, should not care personally about the welfare of any other character...
...Then, at last: "A bit of clock spring, French thought, and suddenly his heart leaped...
...Nothing like that would ever happen in a neighborhood like ours...
...she said almost indignantly...
...Nearly all the English game-players and their American imitators give readers the added bonus of snobbery...
...This is a shame, I thought...
...Mme...
...You can get too much of murderers, potential murderers and those who come within blackmailing distance of them...
...I hoped this would be possible within the rules of the genre...
...I mean a natural openness to others that permits regard and respect for what they are, and—much rarer—a willingness to accept their kindness...
...She drops her pearls of wisdom inadvertently, like stitches...
...Only Edith, the governess, is thought so unmotivated, so unendowed, as to make ludicrous any idea that she could have either the mechanical know-how for the gas murder or the psychological cunning for the second murder, which completely baffles Scotland Yard...
...Anne felt that she was looking into a suddenly uncovered abyss of evil...
...Although Simenon has himself never been able to manage a viable marriage, in his most nearly successful one his wife was his full-time manager...
...It may be part of the mysterious formula of fantasy that people expect and demand...
...The first is Dorothy Gilman's Mrs...
...When she is kidnapped we expect a stirring confrontation between money power and humane values...
...I planned to write about people I knew, acting as they might if confronted with a life-and-death crisis...
...Well, Sayers may be the intellectuals' pet, but she is not for me...
...Not being bulletproof is an idea I had had to get used to.' Yet he, like every other private eye, inevitably walks alone into a trap where he knows desperate enemies are waiting to rub him out...
...Read Simenon," a young friend advises...
...Moreover, I wanted them to change and develop as men and women do when put to tests that demand more than they thought they had of unselfishness, brains and courage...
...But this is lost in a labyrinthine plot that contorts the characters into unrecognizable shapes...
...Yet women writers are more male-chauvinist, if that is possible, than men...
...The situation I am working' on—an investigation that turns up widespread public corruption—might well touch off violence...
...Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, distanced death as a far-off menace and often did not let it happen at all...
...Apparently millons take pleasure in feeling nostalgia for something they never have had...
...He may be fulfilling one of the supposed functions of detective stories—neatening up life's hodgepodge—yet in creating this bit of order he compounds larger confusions...
...For with the first gleam of comprehension a life takes on value...
...Wouldn't I be debasing the language to use this word without respect for its real and terrible meaning...
...When I turned to Simenon I found this gleam...
...Then, however, he comes in out of the cold to Mme...
...What if some deliveryman should see me and remember later, after the bludgeoned body was found...
...he has them exhumed as the fancy strikes him, meanwhile chatting pretentiously about abstruse subjects with other quaint and elegant characters...
...And, rather puzzlingly, both authors—Fenwick writing seriously, Gilman unseriously and exacting huge suspension of disbelief —leave the same sense of what is it...
...Swinging it over my shoulder I started back, then stopped, glancing around nervously...
...I read these books for the bell-ringing...
...Dick Francis, the ex-jockey who focuses on crime in the racing world, writes with such humanity about believable people that when he kills them off I am offended...
...They are all around you...
...bought some yards of this heavy silk cord...
...Murder exists, increasingly, in real life, and is a human problem to be solved...
...I therefore began systematically reading mysteries, based on the recommendations of aficionados among my friends...
...What body...
...True, I could believe that Chandler's people were capable of torture and killing...
...Since women are a rather important segment of humanity, I think it fair to judge an author's sense of reality by how they are presented...
...French spends the bulk of the book on technical guesswork, complete with diagrams I could not follow...
...Those who have had tea there will find it hard to see that chintzy firelit lounge as a crime syndicate headquarters, where all the wealthy Americans have suitcases full of heroin and the elderly muffin eaters are impersonating bishops and retired admirals the better to rob the night express to Edinburgh...
...With this fascinating menace occupying his days, my friend turns at night to the perils invented during the '20s by Freeman Wills Crofts...
...But in most crime stories the second murder is quite gratuitous...
...I wanted to write one that would...
...The puzzle would be no less absorbing, the chase no less exciting...
...Go back to Raymond Chandler.'' I reread The Big Sleep...
...This, and the queasy sense of a soft underbelly of sentimentality beneath the hard-boiled manner, rather turned me off...
...I tried to laugh...
...But just as the noose tightens around Mr...
...Worse, it seems like a slick kind of pandering, giving readers (and maybe writers) a way of avoiding facing themselves...
...My tastes aren't really sick," they can say...
...She spent her day phoning overseas from Switzerland to agents and lawyers, publishers and film people, matching her wits with high-powered money men and multiplying the millions...
...Their female characters are obsolete stereotypes, and even their lady sleuths act more suspicious of ideas than of criminals...
...Grins-mead—correctly, two thirds of the way along—he is shot in the head, in the library...
...What do the two have in common...
...Maigret, that paradigm of all detectives' wives...
...The husband, "a tall, well-built, well-dressed man with strong features," becomes the prime suspect...
...French could scarcely contain his delight...
...Nonetheless, Simenon gives Maigret a wife who is utterly content to keep food warm for her husband, appear with hot coffee at his bedside when he wakes up, go on darning his socks, and never ask a question...
...Suspicion is cast on the rest of the characters, including Anne...
...Yet better craftsmen whose stories don't need it still follow the formula...
...Clock springs...
...Crofts' classic, Sudden Death, begins with Anne Day, an orphan, going to her new job as companion to Mrs...
...Of course not...
...I find this mingling of blood and whimsy obscene...
...A hostess will leave a whodunit on the bedside table to induce sleep...
...Once you have swallowed her devotion to the CIA, which with alarming frequency sends her to deal with international crises too hot for the male pros to handle, her spirited leaps into Albanian or Bulgarian politics give all the remembered joys of children's books, with the invention raised to adult level...
...The ingredient missing in virtually all types of murder mysteries has been, to put it too simply, love...
...Could it not be that we have had enough of killing, enough purposeless gore...
...For MacDonald uses his talent to show where crime breeds, and what it does to people...
...Tracking down this purchase (to my surprise) is easy...
...I hope this view is as old-fashioned as Auden's beloved stories'by Freeman Wills Crofts...
...I raised this question with a sophisticated fan...
...It comes to me at last...
...There sat a fiend, a devil in human form...
...Or the MacDonalds...
...Without her warning no one would detect anything sinister about the scene, a facsimile of Brown's Hotel in Mayfair...
...Then there is Elizabeth Fenwick, who, without this playfulness and with an astonishing ability to fathom truly dangerous minds, shows thoughtful women struggling against real evil with the help of other decent people, occasionally including perceptive policemen...
...How strange that a trait so attractive and indeed so necessary in real life should be so unusual in stories where help is always desperately necessary...
...But Anne happens to hear a telltale word: "And then she looked across at Edith and suddenly, in a ghastly flash of enlightenment, she knew...
...Usually, a woman in crime fiction is either the idealized, self-effacing homebody or the sexpot tempting a private eye to desert the trail for momentary release...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 24
