UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. A. Jance, Desert Heat (1993)

             Joanna Brady is Judy Jance’s Arizona detective, forced into that role in this first book of the series when her husband, a Cochise County sheriff’s deputy, is murdered and his death made to look like a suicide.  Worse, there is evidence that Andy Brady was also involved in drug smuggling.

            Jance was not new to mystery writing when she published Desert Heat in 1993; she already had ten books in a series about a Seattle detective named J. P. Beaumont.  But the setting of this book returns to the area where she grew up, in southeastern Arizona, in the copper-mining town of Bisbee and the surrounding Cochise County. 

    Part of the book is set in Tucson as well, and since I grew up in southern Arizona, I keep trying to read mysteries set there, just because it’s pleasant to come across familiar places when I’m allowing my imagination to inhabit the scene of a book.  Unfortunately, not every Southwestern author writes like Tony Hillerman, and I have put down quite a few of these local mysteries after ten or twenty pages of mediocre writing.  Jance is a good writer, though, and a good deal of the interest I found in this book is in the way she has constructed it.  The book has a structure I would call comic.  I don’t mean that it’s funny, but rather that it has a plot arrangement that shows up in Shakespearean as well as classical Greek and Roman comedy.  Before the reputation of the good guy even begins to be threatened by the bad things he seems to have done, we have already been shown that someone other than the villain knows the truth and can eventually reveal it.  This is reassuring for the audience or the reader.  So it may be a test for Joanna Brady to continue to believe in her husband with each new revelation that seems to incriminate him, but we readers never doubt him and know the truth will out.  In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, we know that the accusation against the beautiful young heroine will come to nothing because the police have already captured the drunken bunglers who helped to manufacture the evidence against her.

            In Desert Heat, Jance concentrates on two characters, Joanna Brady and the woman who has unwittingly become mixed up with Andy Brady’s killer.  In different ways, each finds more strength of character than she thought herself capable of.  And if you want to know how the series will continue, let me give you this hint: Joanna Brady’s father was sheriff of Cochise County, and her husband Andy was running for sheriff when he was killed.  As one of the characters says, “sometimes the best man for the job is a woman.”

Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017) and The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (2022)

            In The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards, who writes mystery stories set in Liverpool and the Lake District, takes as his scope the first half of the twentieth century in primarily British crime fiction. “I see it as a tale of the unexpected,” he writes—what breaks the previous mold in “achievements and sometimes limitations.” I like this take on writers hoping to fashion an uncommon mystery and a novelty each time they begin.

            The 100 books are neither the absolute best nor necessarily his favorites, but each helps him tell a story. This may be disingenuous, but his choices certainly don’t match up with the lists of the best compiled by Haycraft, the Crime Writers Association (of which Edwards was chair at the time of writing), or the Mystery Writers of America. I had read only a third of the hundred books he chooses to write about in detail—that is, about 500 to 600 words each. I was inspired to read many of his choices through Edwards’s convincing arguments for their contribution to the genre, but more by his recommendation of their good writing: Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig, Philip MacDonald’s The Rasp, and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man being several examples. With Edwards I have confidence that he’ll tell me if something has historical importance, but is dull, and he does so with Freeman Wills Crofts’ The Cask, for instance. This candor counts for much.

            The organization of the book is muddled. He starts with several chronological chapters and then switches to thematic ones—mysteries set in the countryside, locked-room mysteries, mysteries about law courts, politics, or professors, and so on. Then near the end he treats American mysteries in one brief chapter, then the rest of the world in another, and he ends with another historical round-up and a look at new developments.

            These chapters each mention briefly many more than the 100 books treated in detail, so that Edwards talks about more than three hundred titles in all, another positive for a book that gets mixed marks. On the one hand Edwards seems trustworthy in his assessments of the readability of mystery books and in measuring their importance. On the other hand, he hasn’t written a very coherent book. But if you are a mystery fan you will find much in Edwards to like, and you will not mind that it’s a book to dip into and read a chapter or two rather than a cohesive narrative.

            Seven years after writing The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Edwards published a more comprehensive history of the genre, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (2022). Until I read this book, I did not know that Erskine Childers, the author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which exposed an actual threat posed by German war preparations in the Friesian Islands, had been executed as a spy by the Irish Free State and at the time of his death was considered a traitor by them as well as the British. Edwards’s method is to intersperse stories about authors’ lives within his history of the books they wrote, and it is an interesting approach, though it extends his book to over seven hundred pages. Edwards tells the story of Poe’s mysterious death, informs us that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was involved in a scandal that echoes some of her bigamy plots, and gives us a good deal of gossip about the love lives of Golden Age authors of the thirties.

            Edwards frequently quotes Julian Symons’s history, Bloody Murder, which he considers the best of its kind, though in need of updating after its third revision in 1992. He tries to be comprehensive, and the result is a somewhat fragmented narrative of short chapters and what often seems merely a list of authors and titles. He tells us about radio mysteries, Borges and the postmodern mystery, parodies of mysteries and comic mysteries, writing on criticism and history of crime fiction, and he devotes the beginnings of chapters to Ellery Queen, P. D. James, Raymond Chandler, and others, then going on to look at authors who worked similar territory. It’s rather a slog to read very much of The Life of Crime at a stretch, but as a source for information and for Edwards’s always perceptive take on a given author or a strain of mystery fiction, the book is at its most useful.

 

           

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), translated by Robert Martin Adams (U of Illinois P, 1982

            Thomas Edison, in his laboratory in Menlo Park, is developing an Android—de l’Isle-Adam always capitalizes the word—that he thinks will eventually be manufactured in the thousands, which will replace in the affections of besotted men the unworthy women they have fallen in love with. The Androids can be made to have the exact features and forms of those women. To him in his laboratory comes his old friend Lord Celian Ewald, who once saved Edison’s life. Ewald tells his friend that he has fallen for a woman whom he believed must have a soul to match her stunning beauty—she looks uncannily like the armless Venus Anadyomene in the Louvre. Instead, she turned out to be venal and small-minded, without honor or imagination. Edison sees his friend as the perfect candidate for the first Android. He talks Ewald out of committing suicide for the time being—at least the three weeks it will take him to make his prototype, called Hadaly, into the identical image of Ewald’s Alicia Clary.

            Edison tells Ewald the story of his friend, Edward Anderson, who falls for a predatory, and not even very attractive without elaborate makeup, theatre dancer. He gets into money troubles, drinks too much, and ends up leaving a wife and two children when he commits suicide. Edison hopes to stop such waste through “thousands and thousands of marvelous and perfectly innocent facsimiles, who will render wholly superfluous all those beautiful but deceptive mistresses.” The radical nature of Edison’s scientific experiment seems to require a moral purpose. We find out later that Edison helps Anderson’s widow, and in fact she turns out to be his assistant in the creation of Hadaly. Edison takes Ewald down into his underground laboratory and shows him in great detail how he creates the Android to be so like its original as to be indistinguishable. He argues against Ewald’s contention that Hadaly will always be the same and monotonous. Pictures, statues, and books are always the same, he says, but “one discovers every day new beauties in them.” He argues against the wisdom and even the possibility of improvisation in words of love, and for the power of the first moment of realized desire: “perfect repetition is no flaw in love.”

            Ewald summons Alicia Clary to Edison’s Menlo Park estate, and Edison poses as an impresario to her, telling her she will be the star of his new production, thereby getting her to rehearse it while he records her voice for hours. Meanwhile, a supposed sculptress, who is really Mrs. Anderson, who has become reborn as “Sowana,” takes minute measurements and photographs of her in order to reproduce them in Hadaly, but telling her they are creating a nude sculpture of her as Eve. On the last day of the three weeks, Edison springs Hadaly on Ewald, pretending it’s Alicia. Ewald is at first horrified and then once again suicidal. Hadaly speaks to him, saying she has come to rescue him, that Edison was only her servant: “I called myself into existence in the thought of him who created me, so that while he thought he was acting of his own accord, he was also deeply, darkly obedient to me.” Most of this, it turns out, is actually Sowana speaking through Hadaly, as we learn later; Sowana has been partly responsible for enlivening Hadaly and giving her a soul. Ewald’s reason, Hadaly argues, is the enemy of his happiness, and eventually he agrees. Edison, however, says he will make no more Androids.

            Mrs. Anderson/Sowana dies the night her and Edison’s work is complete. And on the voyage back to England, the chest containing Hadaly is burned up in a fire that destroys the ship, while Alicia clary is lost when her lifeboat capsizes. Ewald, however, survives.  

 

P. D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction (Knopf 2009)

            James's survey of detective fiction is quirky. She begins with a definition more or less limited to the Golden Age, as she admits: the crime is usually murder, there is a closed circle of suspects, a detective, and a solution that the readers could reach themselves.

            She thinks the first detective novel is The Moonstone, which she praises from a writer’s viewpoint as “a complex and brilliantly structured story…. The varied styles, voices and viewpoints not only add variety and interest…but are a powerful revelation of character.”        

            Somehow in her treatment detective fiction becomes the detective novel, and there is no mention of Poe’s short stories at this point, but she goes back to mention Poe in the chapter Sherlock Holmes shares with Father Brown, saying that “many critics” would argue that credit for “inventing the detective story and influencing its development should be shared by Conan Doyle and Poe.” But Poe and Doyle are more than half a century apart, and either Poe invented it or he didn’t. She doesn’t seem to remember the Poe stories very well, and makes the very odd statement that “The Purloined Letter” is “an example of the perpetrator being the most unlikely suspect,” when in fact we know that Minister D__ is the perpetrator from the beginning in that story, and he is the only one who could have purloined the letter.

            The advantage to James’s book, as opposed to the many scholarly treatments of the subject, is that it is written by an author working in the genre. When she explains why the mystery novel is preferable to the mystery short story, she does so from a writer’s standpoint: “Novelists,” she says, “if visited by a powerful idea for an original method of murder, detective or plotline, were unwilling—and indeed still are—to dissipate it on a short story when it could both inspire and form the main interest of a successful novel.” This is in response to G. K Chesterton’s remark about long versus short, where he takes a more aesthetic view.

            Another instance where we see James in conversation with a previous writer about the genre is her answer to Dorothy Sayers’ depreciation of the mystery novel because it “rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion” and “does not show us the inner workings of the murderer’s mind” because the murderer’s identity has to be hidden until the end of the book. James’s reply is that “the writer who can solve the problem of enabling the reader at some point to share the murderer’s compulsions and inner life . . . will have a chance of writing a novel which is more than a lifeless if entertaining conundrum.”  I imagine James adding to herself, “and I, my dears, have done precisely that.”