UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (1868)

            Collins’s epistolary novel was serialized in All the Year Round before being published in book form. It effectively blends the conventions of the new and popular sensational novel of the 1860s in England, the varied points of view of the epistolary novel, and the features of the detective story. The moonstone is an Indian diamond stolen from the forehead of a statue, probably by Rachel Verinder’s evil uncle Herncastle ; this we discover from an extract from Herncastle family papers. She inherits it and wears it on her eighteenth birthday at a house party attended by all the main characters. Suspicious Indian jugglers are on the grounds. Franklin Blake, whom Rachel was assumed to love, is one of the guests, but when the stone is stolen during the night, Rachel wants nothing more to do with him.

            The famous Sergeant Cuff is called in but can discover nothing. The maid Rosanna Spearman drowns herself. The Verinder family steward, Gabriel Betteredge, much enamored of using Robinson Crusoe for sortilege, narrates thus far.

            During the next year, Rachel first accepts and then rejects the proposal of her cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, who was also present at the house party. She learns that he is after her money, as the evangelist and family relative Drusilla Clack tells us in the second narrative. These accounts, by the way, are requested by Franklin Blake, who after a year of traveling comes back and decides to solve the mystery. His first move is to ask Rachel, who shocks him by telling him she saw him take the diamond. Franklin enlists the aid of Ezra Jennings, the family physician’s assistant, who suggests that they reconstruct the evening of the theft, with Franklin taking the laudanum dose that the doctor, miffed at something Blake said, had secretly given him. The reconstruction merely deepens the mystery.

            Mr. Bruff, the Verinder family solicitor, has the next narrative, and Ezra Jennings the last. Collins shows how the telling of a story from several points of view, explored in eighteenth and nineteenth century epistolary novels to deepen psychological insights, can be used in the detective novel to gradually reveal a mystery. And he uses to enrich the narrative the conventions that the detective story had already developed, such as the thorough but not inspired police operative versus the eccentric and socially liminal private investigator, and the solution brought together in a scene where all the principals are gathered.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny (2009)

             Armand Gamache is Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, the province’s criminal investigation division. He is a patient man for the most part, solidly grounded in his circle of family and friends, secure in many years of police experience and knowledgeable about the English and French-speaking people of his province.

            In the little town of Three Pines, a body is found in the bistro of Olivier Brulé. Gamache discovers that the murdered man was a hermit who lived in a log cabin in the woods. The murder was clearly committed in the cabin, but the body, it turns out, was first carried to a newly-renovated house outside the village and dumped there before it showed up in Olivier’s bistro. This bizarre game of shifting the body around points to a festering rivalry among the village hoteliers.

            Examining the cabin, Gamache is astonished to find that the hermit used priceless glass and china for his meals, and his bookshelves are packed with first editions of famous authors. Moreover, the hermit was a woodcarver, and his elaborate and unsettling carvings, Gamache knows, hold much of the secret of his death.

            But before he can discover the truth, Gamache has to employ an art expert and a code expert, and he has to journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where Canada’s premier artist Emily Carr painted the Haida Indians and their totem poles.

            Louise Penny tells the story slowly and allusively, invoking the poetry of Margaret Atwood and Mike Freeman. She can be quite funny, and I believe she invented a character whose first name is Havoc just so Gamache can ask his mother to call him and we can have this line: “’Havoc!,’ his mother cried, letting the dogs slip out as she called into the woods.”

            The meals are described with loving care, and you don’t want to be hungry when you’re reading this book: eggs Benedict, escargot in garlic butter, pear with prosciutto, minted sweetpea soup, cauliflower and Stilton soup, a fruit-stuffed Rock Cornish game hen cooked on a spit, a lamb and prune tagine, shrimp and fennel salad, boeuf bourguignon. You get the idea.

            Louise Penny, a Toronto native who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before becoming a successful, prize-winning crime novelist, now lives in a small village south of Montreal, which is the way Three Pines is described in the book. Still Life was the first of the Armand Gamache series, published in 2007. Penny uses art and artists frequently in the books of the Gamache series, in which The Brutal Telling is the fifth. If you like beautiful settings, art, food, and murder, you’ll like this one.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Pale As the Dead, by Fiona Mountain (2002)

             Fiona Mountain’s 2002 book, Pale as the Dead, is about Natasha Blake, an uncommon sort of detective whose trade is genealogy. She researches family trees for a living. The author is tapping into a huge interest group here: In England, genealogy is now the most popular hobby, and more websites treat genealogy than any other subject except pornography.

Natasha is approached by a young woman named Bethany, who claims to have ancestors connected with the nineteenth-century painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Bethany gives Natasha a diary given her by her grandmother. Then she disappears.

            Bethany’s boyfriend, a photographer who works in Oxford, hires Natasha to find Bethany. Natasha doesn’t trust the boyfriend, especially when he makes a pass at her, but she’s fascinated by the missing girl, who resembles Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife and model, Lizzie Siddal. Bethany seems to cultivate the resemblance, and Natasha worries that she may carry the imitation all the way to suicide, which was Lizzie’s end.

            Complicating her identification with the missing girl is the fact that Natasha doesn’t know her own background; she was adopted after being abandoned by her mother in a Sheffield hospital a few hours after Natasha’s birth on the day before Christmas Eve. So, Natasha is a genealogist ignorant of her own past--that ignorance, Natasha believes, a good part of the reason why she became a genealogist. Bethany is also ignorant of her past, though she thinks she knows her parents very well. What she doesn’t know about her own background may very well kill her.

            The book is set in Oxford and in the picturesque village of Snowshill in the Cotswolds, but some of it takes place in the London haunts of the Pre-Raphaelites and at Kelmscott, where William Morris lived. Mountain does a good job of tying together the past and the present throughout the book, as Natasha’s day takes her past carolers singing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a carol written by Christina Rossetti, and into public records offices and genealogical archives next to museums exhibiting Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Meanwhile she is reading the diary Bethany gave her, written by the daughter of the Rossettis’ doctor. The diary takes her right into the past.         

            In Bethany’s past Natasha discovers a stunner—to use a word the Pre-Raphaelites liked. This book takes a unique approach to the mystery genre.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine (1987)

            Women have been writing mystery fiction almost from its very beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, but until the 1970s, hard-boiled American detective fiction was the province of men. But authors such as Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich changed all that. These writers invented tough private investigators who were different from their male counterparts in more than just gender. The stereotypical male private eye is a loner and lonely, a wise-cracking street-talker with a questionable background. The female detectives of Paretsky, Grafton, and others tend to be more connected with friends and family, better educated—for example Paretsky’s detective has a law degree—but also able to take care of themselves.

            Sara Paretsky’s detective, V. I. Warshawski, takes on corrupt institutions and corporations in her books, which often involve a murder committed to cover up a white-collar crime.  It’s a variation of the stance of the traditional hard-boiled American detective, who set himself—when it was a male-only club—against a corrupt society. In Bitter Medicine, Warshawski goes after a crooked medical establishment.

            Warshawski takes sixteen-year-old Consuelo Alvarado Hernandez and her no-good husband Fabiano to a job interview as a favor to Warshawski’s old friend Mrs. Alvarado. Consuelo goes into labor, and at the private Friendship 5 hospital in the Chicago suburb of Schaumberg where Warshawski takes her, first the baby and then Consuelo die, despite the efforts of the Friendship doctor and the perinatal specialist Malcolm Tregiere, an associate of Warshawski’s friend Dr. Charlotte (Lotty) Herschel. Then Tregiere is murdered, and Lotty asks Warshawski to look into the case.

            Seemingly unrelated incidents in the book signal a widespread misogyny: Warshawski’s face is slashed by a gangster who is a former client; Lotty’s abortion clinic is attacked and vandalized; Consuelo’s death, a result of negligence, is covered up by doctors and entrepreneurs in the private medical establishment.

            Sara Paretsky has lived in Chicago for many years. She began writing the Warshawski books with Indemnity Only, published in 1982. Bitter Medicine is the fourth in the series. She is especially good in recreating Chicago neighborhoods, with their interesting ethnic mixes.  The only movie that has been made from Paretsky’s stories is V. I. Warshawski, a 1991 film starring Kathleen Turner as Warshawski. The movie was based on the second book in the series, Deadlock, and was not a commercial success, probably because the filmmakers made a decision to play the story for laughs.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered, always Outgunned (1998)

             Mosley’s main character is called Socrates Fortlow, and he is not a detective like Easy Rawlins, the hero of Devil in a Blue Dress and most of Mosley’s previous books.  Socrates, like his namesake, is a moral philosopher.  But he is also a double murderer who spent twenty-seven years in prison for his crimes.  When he tries to show people around him the moral consequences of their actions, what their duty is, or that they need to feel guilty for wrongs done, he speaks from his own profound sense of guilt, and he usually fails to convey his own sense of rightness to others.  His own life is an attempt to live in strict moral rectitude, avoiding any dishonesty or harm to others, and he doesn’t always succeed.  But the attempt means that he is poor, he spends a lot of his time turning the other cheek, and nothing is very easy for him.

            There are fourteen chapters in the book, and although each is a stand-alone story that originally appeared separately in a magazine, there are some continuing threads, like the mystery of Socrates’s past and especially what sent him to prison.  There is also the question of what will happen to a young boy Socrates is trying to rescue from the gangs of the inner city.  In a way all these stories are about attempted rescues, as Socrates tries to redeem his own life and save what he can from the ruin around him.  And Socrates’ rescues are not limited to people; he saves a dog late in the book, an episode that almost lands him back in jail but instead has a happy and romantic ending.

            The book’s setting is a grittily realized piece of Los Angeles, Slauson and Marvane and other streets of Watts at the time of the Rodney King riots.  But its scope includes Socrates’s past, stretching back to the Vietnam War, and a repeated theme is that past actions have their consequences.

            Somehow the book manages to be bleak and hopeful at the same time: bleak in setting and in its overall picture of the world of south-central Los Angeles, but hopeful in the small triumphs Socrates brings about among his friends and the other people he touches. 

            Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned was made into an HBO movie in 1998 and Mosley has written a sequel titled Walking the Dog.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929)

With The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett started an entirely new, entirely American variety of detective novel—the hard-boiled mystery. To be fair, Hammett has to share the credit with other writers for the pulp magazine Black Mask, where The Maltese Falcon first appeared in serial episodes starting in September, 1929.

One of the features of hard-boiled fiction is that everybody lies. Brigid O’Shaugnessy, who says her name is Wonderly, comes to consult Sam Spade and Miles Archer. She makes up a name, makes up a sister, makes up a story. And it is no surprise to Spade. “Oh, we didn’t believe your story,” he says to O’Shaugnessy, “we believed your two hundred dollars.” Then, almost immediately, Archer is murdered; the man, Floyd Thursby, whom Wonderly says first helped, then betrayed her is murdered; Joel Cairo, a perfumed “Levantine” with a small gun that Spade easily takes away comes to offer Spade money and then to search for the Maltese Falcon, a figurine he says is worth a huge fortune; and the police give Spade a hard time over the death of Miles Archer because they know he was having an affair with Archer’s wife, Ida. Spade lies to them. The detective lies; everybody lies. Even physical objects participate in the deception: the black bird is not what it has promised to be.

            A teenaged gunsel named Wilmer starts tailing Spade, who becomes romantically, but not emotionally involved with O’Shaugnessy, who tells him a different story of her search for the figurine. A man named Casper Gutman offers Spade a partnership in the pursuit of the falcon. A dying ship’s captain deposits the statuette at Spade’s office, and spade puts it in a bus locker and mails the key to himself. In a long final scene everything is resolved, and Spade reveals that he knew who the murderer of Miles Archer was all along. The solving of the crime takes a back seat to the butting of heads in this sort of fiction.

            The lack of sentimentality in Spade’s taking Archer’s name off the door the morning after his death, his brushing-off of Ida, his refusal to shield O’Shaugnessy despite having been her lover—these are characteristic of the hard-boiled hero, and so is the code that allows him to take money from the bad guys over what may be stolen property while he makes the killer of his partner pay for the crime. The spare dialogue and gritty settings are also a part of this sort of mystery, and the fairly small (but real) role played by the detective’s figuring things out.