UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Domecq, H. Bustos [Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares], Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, (1942), trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1980).

 

            Not only a parody of the detective mystery genre but also a satire aimed at Argentinian societal types, these six stories give Argentina its first fictional detective. Don Isidro, wrongly convicted for a murder, is the ultimate armchair detective; even Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes occasionally venture out from their lodgings, but Parodi can’t stir from Cell 273. Prison has turned him from an ordinary barber to an extraordinary crime-solver. A series of flamboyant characters approach him there, including Achilles Molinari, a self-important journalist, a poet manqué named Carlos Anglado, another would-be literary figure who also fancies himself a detective, Gervasio Montenegro, and several Chinese who are much more voluble than inscrutable. Montenegro also writes the preface, in which he reveals himself to be a chauvinist, an anti-Semite, and a fool.

            Parodi listens to his clients deliver these long-winded tales that Borges himself described later as “baroque” and “painful…for the reader.” Then, after fifteen prolix pages, Parodi solves each problem succinctly, usually puncturing his clients’ pretensions to cleverness as well as implicitly condemning their prolixity by his brevity.

            The tales themselves allude to famous detective fictions: “The Twelves Figures of the World” to Chesterton’s intricate conspiracy story The Man Who Was Thursday, “The Nights of Goliadkin” to Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and “Tai An’s Long Search” to “The Purloined Letter.” Allusions to Father Brown and other famous detectives may be found throughout, and it might be useful if a student of Argentine history of the first half of the twentieth century would annotate the references to contemporary figures and events.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End (2008)

            I went to a concert in the late sixties to see a Canadian singing duo called Ian and Sylvia. One of their original songs, “Four Strong Winds,” had been high on the charts a few years before. When they started this song, the audience began to sing it, and when Ian and Sylvia Tyson tried to change the words in the third verse, they were drowned out by the crowd’s singing of the lyrics that had been on the record. Just whose song was it, I wondered at the time.

            This question of who really owns a creative project like a song or in this case a book’s characters, is taken up by Karen Joy Fowler in her 2008 mystery, Wit’s End. In this book, Rima Lansill, saddened and confused by the deaths of her mother, father, and younger brother, arrives at Wit’s End, the Santa Cruz shoreline house of her godmother, the mystery writer Addison Early. She comes for a kind of rest cure and stays to solve a mystery.

            The mystery is partly what the relationship was between Rima’s father and Addison, a relationship that would prompt Addison to put Rima’s father in one of her mysteries as a serial killer, complete with his real name. But there’s also a stalker who haunts the coast house and who may or may not be the same woman who writes fan letters to Addison’s fictional detective and who may or may not have grown up in a cult called the Holy City with the person who inspired the character of the detective.

            At the house called Wit’s End, Rima encounters a cast of eccentrics that includes Tilda the tattooed cook, her unpleasant son Martin, the dog walkers Scorch and Cody, and various strangers who have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. The detective in Addison’s books becomes a regular visitor in Rima’s dreams, and she finds herself drawn into an investigation that puts her in danger from those who have been deranged by their bizarre and violent past.

            Karen Joy Fowler has had several bestselling books, the most recent being The Jane Austen Book Club. She’s not really a mystery writer. What I mean by that is that her attention is always less with pacing Rima’s discoveries and clearly elucidating the mystery, always more with the developing new social order at Wit’s End, as well as whether and how Rima will fit into it. As she has shown from previous books, some of which combine historical and science fiction, she’s a little bit of a genre bender. But she kept me reading with a really ingratiating style that is often funny and never mistakes sarcasm for wit.