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.”

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Colin Harrison, Risk (2009)

             George Young investigates insurance claims for a law office whose founder, now long dead, invited him into the firm when he was not long out of law school. So when the founder’s widow asks him to investigate the circumstances of her son’s death, George feels he owes it to her husband’s memory to agree. There’s nothing suspicious about the death itself: Roger Corbett can be clearly seen in a security videotape, coming out of a bar at one-thirty in the morning and, while staring at a piece of paper in his hand, stepping into the path of an oncoming truck and being run down. What his mother wants to know is what her son was doing and thinking before he died, why he sat in that bar until the wee hours. She’d already hired a private investigator, but after a very little digging, he has quit the job, and when George interviews him, he is advised not to get involved, that this matter is not what it looks like.

            George interviews the superintendent of Corbett’s apartment building and gets the name of Corbett’s girl friend, a mysterious Czech woman. George talks to the bartender where Corbett was drinking the night he died, and the bartender tells him he and the private investigator are not the only ones asking questions about Corbett. Once again George is warned off. But he goes deeper, finds that he is being followed, and begins to discover where the danger will come from.

            The process George follows is not that different from the methods of hard-boiled private eyes in books from The Maltese Falcon on. But George is not a tough guy. Looking at his reasons for pursuing Corbett’s story, he has a moment of realization: he’s been telling himself that he’s just paying back a debt he owes to Corbett’s father for giving him a good job, but in fact, he finds that he is reacting to the boredom of his life. The question then becomes, just how much risk is he willing to take? He finds out when he has to deal with Russian mobsters and ultimately, with the fact that he himself was unwittingly involved in Roger Corbett’s life and death.

            Colin Harrison lives in Brooklyn and critics note the way he is able to recreate the look and feel of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the other boroughs, as well as the way he populates his novels with characters New Yorkers recognize as their own neighbors. Harrison, who has been an editor at Harper’s and is now chief editor at Scribner’s, trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a careful stylist and constructor of plots. He has no series character and each of the eight novels he has written so far involves a different cast, though all are set in New York.