It’s not often that we see the topic of sports mysteries on this blog, and this time we’ve got one from a former professional athlete. Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he tells us, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop. His first novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and will be published by Soho Press in 2022. Eli also writes a nationally syndicated sports column. Who better to explain why sports provide such good material for mystery fiction? —Janet Hutchings
I’ve devoted the greater part of my life to two wildly disparate obsessions: American football and books.
I scored my first touchdown at nine. Played quarterback in high school, college, and even one season overseas. Then I came home and coached for five years. Throughout that time, my appetite for reading never waned. I also somehow managed to write in what little downtime I had between practices, games, and offseason workouts. As a college quarterback, I penned short stories on the bus to games in Georgia and Mississippi. As a coach, I made a daily ritual of writing in my journal, scrawling away at the pain and the pressure, trying to figure out how I could help all the young men who’d been entrusted to me.
And then, at the ripe age of twenty-nine—exactly twenty years after I scored that first touchdown on a rainy afternoon in Perryville, Arkansas, exactly twenty seasons later, seasons that had taken me to Boca Raton, Florida, and Karlstad, Sweden—I got out.
I quit. I retired. I’m not sure what the right word is, but I hung up my whistle, walked away from the field, and never looked back.
Okay. Wait. That’s not completely true.
I’ve never gone back to coaching, but I have, almost obsessively, tried to write about my time spent on the gridiron. I’ve written short stories, essays, even a few failed novels, but for whatever reason, I never could boil all the pain, violence, bravado and pageantry into the proper readerly stew. That is, until I stumbled upon the “mystery” genre.
I cut my teeth on gritty Southern literature. Think Larry Brown, Flannery O’Conner, Harry Crews. For years, I tried writing my football stories in the same vein, but something didn’t click. Something was missing. And that something was the mystery.
All sports, if you really think about it, are mysterious. Drop a football and there’s no telling which way it’ll bounce. That’s what draws us to the game, the promise of winners and losers. That’s why the games are played. We don’t know how they’re going to end. There’s an inherent mystery to every contest.
There are other reasons athletics are a good backdrop for mystery novels, one of which is the setting. The stadium or the arena. The locker room. The team. These tightly woven subcultures are perfect for mysteries. All the suspects are there already, trapped inside an enclosed space, all eyes on the scoreboard while blood is shed beneath the bleachers.
I am by no means the first one to come to this conclusion. Peter Lovesey hit on this same idea by setting Wobble To Death, the first novel in his Sergeant Cribb series, at a sporting event. A six-day, 500-mile, speed-walking race, to be exact. It’s an amazingly apt setting because the suspects are all trapped at the event. They’re literally sleeping (barely) in tents around the track! Sports venues open all sorts of opportunities for locked-room mysteries. The wide world of sports isn’t short on motives, either.
Teams are like families but without the blood to bind them. Teams work together. They live and eat together, and of course, they fight. Jealousies abound! Teammates vying for the same position, ready and willing to do whatever they can to win the top spot. With all this competition, there’s always some bad blood.
Megan Abbott is the queen of bad blood. Time and again she expertly weaves athletics into a cohesive, suspenseful narrative. She’s tackled competitive cheerleading, gymnastics, and ballet, in her latest novel, The Turnout. I had a chance to sit down with Megan a few months back and ask her why she continued to return to the world of athletics in her prose. Here’s what she had to say:
“My brother was a really good athlete. I grew up in a household where I would get dragged along to the Little League games and everything. But I never had any capacity to control my body, so I find it all really exotic. I like subcultures of any kind. I think physical ones are more suited to writing because you get to paint a whole world.”
There’s one part that stands out to me in there, and that’s “paint a whole world.” If I were a better interviewer, I would’ve asked Megan to expound upon this, but instead I moved onto the mannequin hand she had sitting on her desk (which was, of course, rather hard to ignore). But what did she mean? Why does an author get to “paint a whole world” when sports/athletics/physicality are involved?
The best answer I can come up with is because sports involve fanaticism. Think “Cheeseheads” and tailgates and bookies with big bucks on the line. In the South, where I’m from, college football is bigger than Jesus.
Now, nobody will admit this, of course, but it’s true. There are far more people in those gargantuan stadiums on Saturdays than in the pews on Sunday mornings. More money is spent at the concession stands than is left in the collection plates. And the only difference between preachers and coaches is that college coaches are multi-millionaires.
The proof, as we like to say down here, is in the pudding. Sports are the biggest thing going in the South. And it’s not just football. Parents of tee-ballers get into fistfights after games. Moms empty their savings account just to pay for their daughters’ gymnastics lessons. It’s all so desperate. That’s what it is. People clinging to something and trying to make it something it’s not. Trying to make it bigger. A father pushing his son to be better than he was, pushing him so hard the kid snaps.
Sport breeds an appetite like none other, and then displays it on courts and fields all across the world. But what happens when that red-hot desire bleeds over? Well, my friends, that’s where the story—the mystery—begins.
R. T. Raichev is one of EQMM’s regular contributors of short-story length classical mysteries—though they always have a modern edge! His story “To Slay a Stranger” appeared in our September/October 2021 issue and we have more of his stories coming up in 2022. A scholar of the mystery as well, he also contributes regularly to this site. This time, he compares the handling of a common plot element in two stories published many years apart in EQMM. —Janet Hutchings
Consider the fate of the corpus delicti in detective fiction.
In Agatha Christie’s play The Spider’s Web*, Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, after stumbling on Oliver Costello lying dead in her drawing room, asks her three loyal friends to take the body to the nearby Marsden Wood. Clarissa then prepares a bridge-playing alibi for all four of them. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley Under Water, the obnoxious Pritchard, intent on incriminating Tom Ripley, dumps the sack containing Murchison’s mortal remains on Ripley’s doorstep, then calls the police. Ripley quickly retaliates by dropping the sack in the pool outside Pritchard’s house. In Dorothy L. Sayers’s short story “The Man With the Copper Fingers” actress Maria Morano is killed by her jealous lover who then covers her body in copper and turns it into a statue gracing a sofa. Similar treatment lies in store for the young man suspected of having had an affair with Maria but at the eleventh hour the killer is prevented from duplicating the outrage.
These, of course, are examples of deviation from orthodoxy—the norm being for the body to be discovered where it fell, patiently awaiting forensic attention.
But what about those murder mysteries in which a person is made to disappear without a trace? This is the subject of John Dickson Carr’s short story “The House at Goblin’s Wood” and Boris Akunin’s “Table Talk, 1882.”
Carr’s story was first published in EQMM in 1947, and later in the collection The Third Bullet (UK, Hamish Hamilton, 1954). Like most of his other short stories, it is a compressed version of his particular speciality, the full-length “sealed-chamber” mystery—and as Julian Symons puts it in his study of the genre Bloody Murder—it “benefits for the compression.”**
Twenty years prior to the events described in the story, a young girl, Vicky Adams, the daughter of wealthy parents and supposedly “fey,” vanishes from her room in an isolated cottage on the edge of Goblin Wood, despite the doors being locked and bolted from the inside. When she re-appears a week later, she insists that she was spirited away, literally, that she has the power to de-materialize and that she had been living with faeries.
Back in the present Vicky’s cousin Eve persuades seasoned criminologist Sir Henry Merrivale to join a picnic party consisting of Eve, her fiancé Bill, and Vicky, and the three drive to Goblin Wood. Vicky gives every impression of being a shameless exhibitionist or at best delusional—but she contrives to disappear again—this time, it seems, for good.
Only she doesn’t. Sir Henry deduces that Vicky is dead, she’s been killed by Bill—at Eve’s instigation. The motive is money—as her closest living relative Eve will inherit Vicky’s fortune.
Bill—a surgeon—killed Vicky while she was showing him round the cottage, he then dismembered her body in the bathroom, packaging each part in squares of oilskin, which he then sewed up. The grisly parcels he fitted inside the “three good-sized wickerwork hampers with lids”—having taken out the picnic crockery first. The hampers were carried to Bill’s car and Sir Henry was one of the carriers—which gives us the story’s memorable last line: “I’ll always wonder if I was carrying the head.”
Most readers—and critics—rightly consider the story to be Carr’s best. (I also like the intricate simplicity of “The Incautious Burglar.”) It is certainly the one that stays in the imagination the longest. The plot is cleverly constructed according to the strictures of “fair play,” with ambiguities and misdirections set up from the very start. On page one, for example, Bill and Eve—both of whom are presented as nice and likable—are boldly referred to as “conspirators.” The reader takes that to mean that they conspire to persuade Sir Henry to expose Vicky as a “faker”—indeed, that is the explanation Eve gives. Their true intention, however, is to make Sir Henry their patsy, to use him as a reliable witness to Vicky’s “vanishing.” As Sir Henry puts it:
“I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties . . . were deliberately conspirin’ to murder her.”
On page two we see Sir Henry emerging from his club, stepping on a banana skin, slipping and falling, looking rather foolish—a delightful instance of a metaphor presented literally. It foreshadows the picnic invitation which Sir Henry receives moments later—it is in the course of the picnic that Sir Henry is to be made a fool of.
A lot of attention is given not only to Vicky Adams’s self-proclaimed power to “de-materialize” and her past disappearance which lasted a week—but also to her “inordinate sex-appeal” and the flagrant way in which she flirts with Bill. The result is that we are persuaded to focus on Vicky—to watch her carefully and try to work out what exactly she is up to—and our attention is diverted from the two killers and their murderous scheme.
The story’s title—“The House in Goblin Wood”—evokes a sinister, fairy-tale-like atmosphere, with more than a hint of the supernatural. Carr’s quality of “queer suggestiveness” (phrase coined by Dorothy L. Sayers in relation to Carr’s novel The Eight of Swords) is very much in evidence here. Goblin Wood is described as a “ten-acre gloom,” which around the time of the murder becomes “blurred with twilight.” Carr liked to play with the uncanny, though there is a rational explanation for every strangeness in the story, including Vicky’s previous disappearance. Early in the proceedings Sir Henry discovers the “trick window” through which, as a little girl, she managed to get out of the house. The house, we learn, used to be the hideout of a notorious gangster, the “swellest of the swell mob.” It was he who had the trick window put in. Sir Henry also rightly divines that Vicky’s disembodied voice that haunts and taunts him in the wake of her disappearance is in fact the voice of Eve: The two girls are cousins and their voices are similar.
It goes without saying that the story should be read as an intellectual conundrum and not as a credible blueprint for real murder. Carr’s trickery is rivetingly ingenious rather than plausible and some serious suspension of disbelief is needed when it comes to the denouement.
The reader is meant to accept that forty-five minutes are enough—we are given the exact time frame—for Bill, no matter how skillful a surgeon and with a bag full of sharp instruments at his disposal, to stab Vicky, undress her, dismember her body, wrap the parts in oilskin, sew up each piece with coarse thread to prevent blood from dripping and then store the parcels away in the picnic hampers—while Sir Henry and Eve lounge in deck chairs on the lawn outside. (We are told that Vicky is small of stature—which clearly will facilitate her disposal—still!)
What if Sir Henry had needed to pop into the bathroom? Would Eve have managed to deter the seasoned criminologist without causing him to become suspicious? What if Sir Henry had happened to notice something amiss about the hamper he was carrying and decided to glance inside? As this is a carefully premeditated murder and not a spur-of-the-moment one, some readers may be tempted to argue that killers who depend so much on chance are in the wrong profession.
When Sir Henry examines the bathroom the only detail that strikes him as odd is the bath tap “dripping in a house that hadn’t been occupied for months.” The bath tap is one of three physical clues—the other two being an unused piece of waterproof oilskin he stumbles across in the corridor and the discarded crockery that used to be in the picnic hampers—which allow him to reconstruct the killer’s actions. In addition to the psychological clue of Bill and Eve at various points looking scared—Sir Henry does wonder about it—but would that have been enough for him to solve the mystery?
Credibility is further strained by the fact that Bill should have been able to butcher Vicky and clear up the mess—and a lot of mess there was bound to be—without leaving a single incriminating drop of blood or a profusion of wetness in his wake. What about his clothes? No change of clothing is ever mentioned. Surely, it would have been impossible for him to avoid Vicky’s blood staining his clothes, yet we are only informed that Bill’s hair, his sports coat and flannels were “more than a little dirty”—which is attributed to the fact that he went picking, at Vicky’s request, wild strawberries in the forest. The wild strawberries are Bill’s alibi. Perhaps he stripped off his clothes while disposing of Vicky’s body, but if so, Sir Henry doesn’t think the possibility worth mentioning.
We find a very similar situation in Boris Akunin’s “Table Talk, 1882,” a short story originally written in Russian, its English translation first published in EQMM in 2003. It was later included in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (UK, Robinson, 2009).
Akunin is famous for his historical crime novels chronicling the detective exploits of Erast Petrovich Fandorin. In “Table Talk,” Fandorin is the guest of honor gracing a great lady’s salon. Indeed, he is described as “maddeningly attractive.” On a more mundane note we learn that he has served in the office of Moscow’s Governor-General as an “officer for special missions.”
The story reads as a Golden Age pastiche, its format bringing to mind Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems: a group of well-heeled people relating tales of unsolved mysteries as after-dinner entertainment—each propounding a theory—with Fandorin in the omniscient Miss Marple seat.
The conundrum under discussion concerns the mysterious disappearance of “poor Polinka Karakina,” daughter of the “fabulously wealthy” Prince Lev Livovich, from their isolated wooded estate outside Moscow. Polinka is one of a set of twins—she and her sister Anyuta look identical—but for a birthmark on Anyuta’s face. The two young women—both princesses in their own right—are “far from being horrors” but their main attraction is their “dowry of millions.” Even though there are enough willing suitors, the old prince is irrationally strict, keeping his daughters virtual prisoners in their country house.
The prince makes the fatal mistake of commissioning a young French architect, a M. Renar, to build a belvedere in his park. Predictably, the daughters—now at the dangerous age of 28—fall in love with Renar. It is the blemish-free Polinka he sets his cap at—she is also the one “far less settled into old-maidish ways.” An “idyll” follows, but that is terminated soon enough when jealous Anyuta discovers her sister and Renar in flagrante delicto and informs their father. The prince orders the Frenchman out while Polinka is sent to her room with her sister acting as jailer.
It is on the following morning, after Renar is hauled off to the railway station in a farm cart, that “marvels began to occur.” Anyuta—she of the unseemly birth mark—is found alone in the bedroom, in a catatonic-like state, as if in the deepest sleep. There is no trace of Polinka. Anyuta eventually recovers and claims to know nothing about her sister’s disappearance.
The initial theory is that Polinka has run away, that she has followed her lover—having given her meddlesome sister “something nasty” to drink which caused her to suffer a “nervous disorder.” However, it is established beyond doubt that she couldn’t have left the estate. There was no trunk among the Frenchman’s luggage, in which she could have stowed herself away—all he carried were “some small suitcases, some bundles, a couple of hat boxes.” The park is surrounded by a high stone wall, there was a guard at the gate and the police find no evidence to suggest the guard had been bribed.
The old prince has an apoplectic stroke and dies. Anyuta, now sole heir to the Karakin fortune, abandons the estate and goes “to the very ends of the earth”—in fact, to Brazil. She settles down in Rio de Janeiro, having arranged for regular sums of money to be sent to her by the estate manager . . .
It doesn’t take Fandorin too long to work out what happened. (Nor should the perspicacious reader be baffled for long.) He calls it “one of the most monstrous crimes of passion about which I have ever had occasion to hear . . . it is a murder of the very worst, Cain-like sort.” He puts it rather picturesquely thus:
“There is no beast in this world more dangerous than a woman deprived of her beloved!”
It is in fact pretty Polinka who killed tarnished Anyuta, not the other way round. Polinka dragged her sister’s body into the bathroom, stripped off her own clothing as well as her sister’s, then cut Anyuta “into bits”—with a bread knife—and washed the blood away down the drain. The “dismembered flesh” left the estate in the various small cases and hat boxes belonging to M. Renar, who of course was Polinka’s collaborator. During the night there was an “evil ferrying” of the victim’s remains—she passed them over to him through the window—in “some kind of vessel.” Using black makeup Polinka then drew a birth mark on her face and passed herself off as her twin sister. Fandorin also suspects that Polinka poisoned her father, that she committed sororicide as well as patricide. Fandorin is positive that Polinka and the Renar are now living in Brazil . . .
According to the tenth commandment of Father Ronald Knox’s 1939 Detective-Story Decalogue, “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Well, readers are prepared for the twins, that is not the problem here. The problem—as I see it—is that the evil-twin trope is employed a little too bluntly, without much variation.***
The story is entertaining, but it’s guessable. The very first mention of twins sets alarm bells ringing—we expect some kind of twin-related hocus-pocus—and we get it. We think, no, can’t be, there must be a ruse of some sort—but we are proven wrong. Add to this the detail of the naked princess with the bread knife in the bathroom—as one would say in Cluedo—and eyebrows may be further raised. (At least Bill in the Carr was a qualified surgeon and had his instruments with him.)
The story is translated into the kind of flowery, often rarefied kind of English which smacks of a literal translation from the Russian. (Unless that was the translator’s intention?) Consequently we are treated to phrases like “nabob of Hindi” instead of Indian nabob—“besotted by love” (besotted would have been enough)—“gentle-lady” instead of gentlewoman, and so on. We are also told that “a good story is never hurt by adding a little pepper, as the English say,” when the expression the English use is “to add a little salt.”
*Make sure you read the Agatha Christie play, not Charles Osborne’s over-faithful, over-reverent novelization which suffers from that curiously stilted kind of writing that suggests a detailed synopsis.
**The story is 11 pages long. At the conclusion of Carr’s novel The Hollow Man the elucidation of the mystery alone takes 20 pages. It is often referred to as “Gideon Fell’s celebrated locked-room lecture” — but some readers do find such technical pontificating tedious.
***Think of Michael Innes who defied the no-twins rule by introducing triplets into Nightof Errors, his 1947 novel. That may be over-doing it a bit.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a reporter covering criminal-justice issues for The Associated Press in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of seven mystery novels featuring P.I. Andy Hayes. It’s a series Publishers Weekly has called “Intriguing,” but writing any series creates challenges, and Andrew discusses one of them here. —Janet Hutchings
Early in my new novel, An Empty Grave, my lead character—Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes—is having a beer with a friend as he debates the logistics of letting his younger son live with him on a more permanent basis. It would be a big change from Andy’s current custodial arrangement with his ex-wife—ex-wife No. 2, if we’re counting, which for the purpose of this essay we must—and he’s worried whether it will work. “It’s the whole girlfriend problem,” Andy laments. “Late-night stakeouts are just as bad for child-raising as they are for romance.” He should know—or at least thinks he does.
After all, when my series opened, in Fourth Down and Out, Andy had two divorces and a broken engagement under his belt, along with a string of other, semi-disastrous relationships. By this point, his love life was reduced to a strictly-on-Sundays-only triste with a local judge in her condo, the unorthodox conditions dictated by her and not subject to negotiation. “Bodyguard with benefits,” Andy dubs it, referring to the job that initially brought them together. By the end of that first book, he’s met someone new, a college professor named Anne Cooper. They stay together for three more volumes, until Andy’s chaotic life drives them apart. Some readers still think they should be together.
And why not? Because if there’s one question I receive more than almost any other (after, of course, the perennial “Where do you get your ideas?”), it’s, “Will Andy ever have a steady girlfriend?” It’s a query I think about a lot, since these days the lone wolf private eye trope is both common and, frankly, a bit overdone. Why shouldn’t Andy hook up for good? Or as I like to put it: “To Girlfriend, or Not To Girlfriend, That Is The Question.” But as mystery fiction shows us, there’s not always an easy answer when it comes to detectives and significant others.
Starting near the beginning, Sherlock Holmes isn’t much help. He admires his rival, Irene Adler, an American and a former opera singer, acknowledging that she’s one of the few people to ever best him—and the only woman. But Arthur Conan Doyle makes it clear there’s nothing else there to see there. “It was not that [Holmes] felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler,” Doyle’s Watson writes in A Scandal in Bohemia. “All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”
For a long time, private eyes with steady partners were rare enough that it was considered remarkable when Brock “The Rock” Callahan, the Los Angeles private eye created by author William Campbell Gault, not only had a regular girlfriend in Jan, an interior designer, but married her in 1982’s The Bad Samaritan. (My character might take a lesson from Callahan, who, fictionally at least, was also a former pro football player, in this case with the Los Angeles Rams). More typical of the genre was John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, the self-proclaimed “salvage consultant” (and yet another former pro football player—for the Detroit Lions—turned investigator), who jumps from bed to bed throughout the twenty-one McGee books. “I had sure cut myself a wide swath through a wall of female flesh,” McGee notes in Free Fall In Crimson.
For his part, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe took an appropriately tough-guy attitude toward women. “I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin,” he says in Farewell, My Lovely. The only time he sleeps with a woman in print is at the end of The Long Goodbye, when he goes to bed with heiress Linda Loring. Ultimately, Chandler chose to marry the couple off, with Loring proposing to Marlowe in Playback, Chandler’s last finished novel. Poodle Springs, an unfinished Chandler manuscript completed by novelist Robert B. Parker, opens with the two of them married. For all that, it’s clear that Marlowe conducts most of his career as a loner.
Speaking of Parker, his iconic Boston private eye Spenser bucks the single guy trend by spending the series romantically attached to psychologist Susan Silverman. Fictionally, the relationship works because both are solitary sorts who live on their own and don’t have children, although Spenser takes on an unofficial foster son named Paul Giacomin. Spenser and Susan also share custody, so to speak, of a succession of German Shorthaired Pointers named Pearl. Parker deserves credit for keeping Spenser, the quintessential tough nut, in a more or less monogamous relationship. But he also holds the pair at arm’s length compared to a traditional coupling, since it’s not as if you see them haggling over bill paying and whose turn it is to take out the garbage.
Juniper Song, Steph Cha’s Los Angeles-based amateur sleuth turned private investigator, frequently channels Marlowe as her inspiration. And even though Song appears to be headed for a semi-stable relationship at the end of Dead Soon Enough, her reflections on the impact that her professional life has on the ability to form relationships captures the tension so many fictional private eyes face.
It turned out that the events in my life that formed me into a good detective had also hardened the softer parts of my person, the parts that could start to trust and adore in a way that overwhelmed suspicion. I felt like one of those TV cliches, the lonely hero who finds truths and changes fortunes and ends the day in a quiet home with a drinking problem for company. Of course, those heroes were men almost by definition.
Another Los Angeles investigator, Easy Rawlins, the off-the-books hard-luck investigator created by Walter Mosley, experiences more than his share of romantic encounters even as he yearns for a long-time relationship. He marries and has a daughter, but his wife leaves him and takes their child to the South. For a while he focuses on raising his adopted son, Jesus, and daughter, Feather—“my beautiful patchwork family,” as he calls them—along with live-in girlfriend Bonnie Shay, an Air France flight attendant. Nevertheless, Easy’s demons run deep, and Bonnie’s liaison with an African prince weighs heavily on him. Whether Bonnie actually cheated is an open question, but the dilemma is too much for Easy even as Bonnie flies to Europe in Cinnamon Kiss to find medical treatment with the prince’s help for the terminally ill Feather. Easy himself strays twice while they’re away, but in the end decides to move on. “‘It’s not either me or him,’ I told the love of my life,” Rawlins says at the novel’s painful conclusion. “‘It’s either me or not me.’” (Later in the series, however, Easy has a change of heart and even proposes to Bonnie.)
Matt Scudder, Lawrence Block’s unlicensed New York private investigator, has a semi-permanent attachment with former call girl Elaine Mardell and eventually moves in with her. But he also takes up with another, considerably younger woman named Lisa Holtzmann. “I suppose it wasn’t much of a stretch to say she was like a drug or a drink to me,” Scudder says in A Long Line of Dead Men. “I’d thought fleetingly of calling the liquor store, reached for the phone, and called her instead.” Sara Paretsky’s Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski divorced after two years of marriage, and while she has a number of romantic relationships through the series, never settles down. As a Chicago Public Library blog post noted, Warshawski is “a complex woman with a law degree from the University of Chicago, a pile of dishes in her sink and the occasional man in her bed.” At least that’s better than Amos Walker, Loren Estleman’s tough-as-rivets Detroit private eye, a divorced Vietnam vet who apparently left romance behind for good after his split, the settlement of which looms large mainly because it ruined his collection of early rock and jazz records. “I could do without the depression playing one would bring on,” Walker says in Motor City Blue, which opens the series.
If Andy has a counterpart in complicated relationships, it might be Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s private eye working in and around fictional Santa Teresa, California. In comparison to Andy’s two ex-wives and periodic girlfriends, Millhone had two ex-husbands and plenty of relationships throughout the long series, including with fellow private eye Robert Dietz. But nothing ever seems to take for good. In R is for Ricochet, Millhone confesses that she understands men less and less the older she gets, and for that reason tends to shy away from them: “I’ve learned the hard way that love and work are a questionable mix.”
So, what’s the issue here? Why can’t fictional private eyes—or literary police detectives for that matter—have long-term relationships like the rest of us? Is stability within the pages of a book too much to ask? Are the ties that bind really so boring? Turns out they may well be, at least when it comes to storytelling. Because let’s face it: one reason for keeping investigators solitary—or at least constantly looking—is that solitude provides both entertainment and plot points. Personal baggage can get tiresome in real life but portrayed well it can enliven a fictional narrative at just the right points, from an ill-timed liaison to an angry confrontation that shakes loose a clue. Which, it goes without saying, is the difference between novels and real life. Most actual private eyes are unlikely to be beaten up, shot at, or chased down mean streets with anything close to the frequency of their fictional counterparts. They’re similarly likely to have regular girlfriends, longtime partners, or beloved spouses they go home to at the end of a hard day conducting online background checks or occasional surveillance jobs. Novelist and former police officer Colin Conway pointed out this discrepancy in a recent blog post in which he noted that despite the myth of widespread failed marriages among law enforcement personnel, police officers actually have lower divorce rates when compared to other occupations. Or as writer Eve Fisher has suggested, the profusion of modern characters so damaged that they’re unable to love—on the page or on-screen—reflects what she calls “jalapeno culture” or the contemporary tendency to wipe out subtlety in our fiction with sex and violence in the same way we drown perfectly good food with a smothering of jalapenos and melted cheese.
To be fair, some fictional detectives do settle down. Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey had his share of flings as a bachelor—in Busman’s Honeymoon, he declares, “that it is a gentleman’s first duty to remember in the morning who it was he took to bed with him.” But eventually he marries mystery writer Harriet Vane, a woman he considers his intellectual equal, and they have a family together. Louise Penny’s Quebec Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, have a long and happy marriage, as do French detective Jules Maigret and “Madame Maigret,” his wife Louise. Characters in four different series by Louisiana mystery writer O’Neil De Noux, himself both a former homicide detective and private investigator, have long-term relationships, including his 1940s-era private eye Lucien Caye, who started as a loner but becomes a family man. “It’s a lot of fun to write, mixing a sharp private eye with an equally sharp girlfriend and a precocious daughter,” De Noux told me of his Caye series. And, naturally, where would The Thin Man and its cinematic sequels have been without both Nick and Nora Charles?
In the end, from story to story and book to book, I haven’t ruled anything out when it comes to Andy Hayes and romance. He’s going to continue to carry a torch for Anne Cooper, his girlfriend over the course of the first three books—and the first woman he had a functional relationship with after a lifetime of bad boy behavior. He’ll still have a complicated, and occasionally romantic relationship, with Judge Laura Cooper. He’ll likely indulge in a fling or two, for better or worse—usually for worse. But most significantly, he’s going to place his relationship with his two sons and the demands of his job—hopefully in that order—above a monogamous coupling. Perhaps that certain someone is still out there for Andy. Or not. Only time, and maybe a few more chases down mean streets, will tell.
Short story writer Kevin Mims is a frequent contributor to this blog site, his essays for us often insightful reviews of the body of work of one great writer in the field or another. This time, he discusses a branch of publishing that has nearly died out—subscription-only book publishing. One of the most illustrious of those publishing services was The Franklin Library Series; it ceased publication in 2000, unfortunately, but as Kevin points out in this post, many of the books can still be found, and some of them are mysteries. —Janet Hutchings
I began visiting various northern California rare book fairs back in the 1980s. Usually I would come away from these having purchased nothing more than a few inexpensive vintage paperbacks. Although I enjoyed looking at signed first editions of works by Hemingway and Chandler, I was never tempted to buy any, because the prices were simply way beyond my means. More tempting were the various collections of fine leather-bound books that had been released in special limited editions, usually via some subscription service such as the Easton Press or TheGreat Books of Western Civilization series. I liked the look and feel of these books but the serious book collectors I knew tended to sneer at them as objects of bourgeois affectation. This attitude shows up in the 2004 film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, wherein the title character (whose surname sounds a lot like “bourgeoisie”) tries to impress a woman by telling her, “I’m very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of mahogany.” Thus, for decades, I allowed a handful of snooty rare-book dealers to convince me that these were not serious artifacts of the book publishing trade.
But I was wrong about leather-bound subscription-service books, and so were those snooty book dealers. What finally brought me around was the Franklin Library of Mystery Masterpieces. This is a collection of 51 great books in the crime and mystery realm, issued between 1987 and 1990. Five or six years ago, I was visiting my elderly, ailing parents at their home in Portland, Oregon, when I noticed a copy of Mousetrap and Other Plays by Agatha Christie on one of their bookshelves. It was the first title ever released in the Franklin Library of Mystery Masterpieces. My parents had never subscribed to the Franklin Library and they owned no other volumes from it, so I was surprised to see this one. It was probably a gift to my mother from one of her friends. My mother, who died in 2020 after a decade-long struggle with dementia, was an avid reader for most of her life. She was particularly fond of gothic romances and cozy mysteries. My father, who died in 2019, had many fine qualities but he had no interest in novels or short stories. He was an accountant and read mainly The Oregonian newspaper (especially the sports section) and work-related materials. In my youth, I rarely saw my mother with a hardbound book. We were a family of eight, so money was always an issue for us. My mother devoured mainly cheap, mass-market paperbacks, which may be why I am still so fond of that format. This leather-bound copy of Agatha Christie plays seemed seriously out of place in a house filled mainly with tattered paperbacks. I asked my father where it had come from, but he had no idea. I couldn’t ask my mother, because her memory and verbal skills were gone. Thus the book was, in more ways than one, a bit of a mystery. It obviously belonged to my mother, but how she had acquired it, I have no idea. I can’t imagine her ever buying it for herself. I live in Sacramento, California, and am not exactly made of money, so I was able to visit my parents in Portland only every two or three years or so. And each time I saw them, I knew there was a good possibility it might be the last time. With that in mind, I asked my father if I could take the Agatha Christie volume with me. He assented. And just like that, I now had a sort of sentimental attachment to the Franklin Library, a commercial entity I had always in the past considered beneath my consideration.
I took that first book home with me and found myself impressed by how well made it was. I’m not talking about Christie’s skill as a playwright, although that was also impressive. No, I’m talking about the craftsmanship that went into the object itself. Regardless of the quality of the writing inside, this book was a small work of art. And this is true of all of the books published by the Franklin Library. Many of them were published in genuine leather, but even their imitation leather and quarter-bound leather editions are handsome and lovingly crafted. Many are illustrated with drawings commissioned exclusively for the Franklin Library by gifted artists. The books are printed on acid-neutral archival paper, so even forty-year-old editions look brand new when you open them. The pages are not glued to the spine but sewn into it. All sorts of touches—hubbed spine bands, embossed cover decorations, silk moiré fabric endpapers, raised lettering, sewn-in bookmarks—give each volume a satisfying textural aspect. Many well-preserved Franklin Library volumes still give off that new-car smell if you hold them up to your nose. And the leather can feel as plush and luxurious as the upholstery in a new Jaguar XKE.
Over the last few years, when I could afford it, I bought other titles in the Franklin Library of Mystery Masterpieces. My personal collection now includes Thank You, Mr. Moto and Mr. Moto Is Sorry by John P. Marquand, Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers, A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin, The D.A. Calls It Murder by Erle Stanley Gardner, Laura by Vera Caspary, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, and Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. What’s more, I began looking into other Franklin Library series and found that some of them also contain books of interest to the crime-and-mystery fan. I bought a copy of short stories by Daphne Du Maurier called Kiss Me Again, Stranger, which was published in the company’s Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers series.
My two favorite series, however, are The Franklin Library of Signed Limited Editions and the Franklin Library of Signed First Editions. From the series of Signed Limited Editions I have purchased various crime-and-mystery-adjacent novels such as The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, and Deliverance by James Dickey. But the biggest surprise, for me, has been the Franklin Library of Signed First Editions. I had seen these books at rare book fairs for years and assumed that they were using the term “first edition” rather loosely. After all, every book fanatic knows that the first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1976 novel Slapstick was published by Delacorte Press and featured memorable clown-themed cover art from legendary book designer Paul Bacon. Likewise, every fanatic collector knows that the first edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories was, like all of his other books, published in America by Farar Strauss and Giroux. I figured that the Franklin Library was referring to its own editions as first editions simply because they were the first Franklin Library editions. But, no, I was wrong about that. Back in the day, the Franklin Library negotiated with various mass-market book publishers for the right to bring out a small privately published first edition of various prominent titles and to mail these books out to subscribers a few weeks before the mass-market edition would appear in bookstores across the country. Thus, books labeled Franklin Library Signed First Edition are, despite what grumpy fine-book dealers may say, true first editions. Look at the copyright page of the Delacorte edition of Slapstick or the FS&G edition of Methuselah, and you’ll find these words in small print: A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by the Franklin Library.
Many of the books in this Signed First Edition series are crime-and-mystery-adjacent, and some of them are more than just adjacent. Included in this series you will find Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow’s novel about Depression-era gangsters. You will find Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a straight out murder mystery by Norman Mailer. You will find Alice Hoffman’s Turtle Moon, which involves murder and mystery. You will find John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, and Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, both of which are spy novels. You will find thrillers such as Morris West’s Proteus and Michael Crichton’s Congo. You will find Ray Bradbury’s Death Is a Lonely Business.
Most of these books have more to recommend them than just the fact that they are signed by the author. The Franklin Library generally commissioned a special introduction by the author, a short essay which appeared only in that edition. Most of these editions feature illustrations. They also contained ancillary material in a small paper pamphlet that accompanied the book (although these are sometimes gone by the time a Franklin Library book hits the secondary market).
Sadly, my about face arrived too late to do the Franklin Library any good. Although its parent company the Franklin Mint still exists and still turns out collectible birdbaths, door-knockers and, ironically, bookends, The Franklin Library went out of business in 2000.
Special limited editions of highly esteemed books have been a hallmark of the book trade for centuries, but they really flourished in the twentieth century, when various improvements in manufacturing and marketing made them more commercially viable. The Great Books of the Western World Series, Colliers Encyclopedia, The Limited Editions Club, Heritage Press, the Easton Press, the Folio Society, The Harvard Classics, The Loeb Classical Library – the list of such series goes on and on. In America these have long been associated with middle-class people aspiring to improve their lot in life. Often immigrant parents with limited English skills bought these books in the hope that they would help their children move up into a higher, more elite social and economic class. According to Wikipedia: “For many families owning a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia became a status symbol.” This was true of many other series of books that were sold by door-to-door salesmen or offered in monthly subscriptions. And, of course, there have also been plenty of series targeted at lovers of particular literary genres. Mystery fans of a certain age can probably recall the Detective Book Club 3-in-1 editions, wherein three complete novels were bound in one volume and sold via subscription. I still see these volumes at used-book stores, garage sales, and flea markets. The Louis L’Amour Collection includes 90 of his western novels and a few dozen of his story collections all bound in (fake) cowhide. Numerous quality book clubs offering a selection of finely bound science-fiction and fantasy works have popped up through the years.
Although these semi-private, subscription-only services still exist, their heyday is long past. Nowadays, many younger people prefer to do their reading on electronic devices, often while commuting to work on a subway or eating lunch at a Subway. The idea of shelling out $30 or $40 for a leather-bound, gilt-edged book that can’t be conveniently tucked into a purse or a pocket probably strikes many of them as absurd, especially when an electronic edition is probably available online at a tenth of the price. And I can’t blame them for that. Those fusty old leather books were made for a slower, less hectic era, when Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and Spotify and Facebook and Twitter weren’t all competing for your free time. Leather-bound subscription-service books hark back to a time when there wasn’t much to do after the dinner dishes had been washed and dried other than to settle down in the living room with a good book. The Franklin Library, like so many other subscription-book services is gone now. But its books are still with us, brightening up homes and used-book store shelves and rare book fairs and libraries and other venues. Decades after Netflix or Twitter or Facebook have run their course and gone out of business, what beautiful relics will they leave behind to remind us of their existence?
After making his debut as a writer in several literary magazines and Mike Shayne’sMystery Magazine, there was a many-years-long hiatus before Victor Kreuiter finally turned again to fiction writing. He makes his return in EQMM’s current issue (November/December 2021), with “We’re in This Together, Aren’t We?”—a metafictional tale you won’t want to miss. During the long interval between his own fiction publications, he remained an avid reader, though, as is evident from this post. —Janet Hutchings
I once saw a man get attacked by a coyote. He was a young, husky guy; the attack occurred on one of those rails-to-trails bicycle trails. He was cycling.
A coyote darted out of the treeline on his left, ran him down, lunged at him, knocked him off his bicycle and then – it was something to see, I promise you – that guy grabbed the coyote by the neck, held it down with one hand, kneeled over it, and punched it in the head over and over and over. To this day I can’t say whether the sounds that thing emitted were barks or groans or cries. It eventually managed to escape – it had had enough – and bolted off, lickety-split.
At home, later that same day, I checked out stats for the average coyote in Illinois, where I live and where the incident occurred. Male adult coyotes average twenty-five to forty pounds, are anywhere from three feet to four-and-a-half feet long, and are about two feet tall. Was this particular coyote an adult? I honestly don’t know, but adolescent or adult, that coyote learned a valuable lesson that day.
After the fight, I approached the victor to see if he was okay … he was huffing and puffing and obviously coming down from an intense adrenaline high … and he basically waved me off, saying he was okay. I asked if he wanted me to call police, he uttered a profanity, climbed back on his bicycle and pedaled off. I remember watching him ride away, thinking ‘What kind of guy decides – in a split second – to go ahead and fight a coyote … aggressively, vigorously … ferociously?’ What kind of person does that?
Well, I’ll tell you.
A fictional person does that … fictional, at least, in this instance. It was a fictional coyote. It was a fictional bike trail, too, as well as a fictional bike and multiple vigorous, ferocious fictional punches. The muttered profanity? Fictional. I made it all up. That’s the beauty of fiction … it’s all made up. Almost anything can happen in fiction, and what makes fiction so appealing – at least to me – is that things that are unlikely or impossible in the real world become more likely and absolutely possible in the world of fiction. When I read fiction, I’m going somewhere else, doing something else, being around someone else, and somehow, wonderful and fascinating things will happen. If not, if for some reason I find myself in a fictional world that is not wonderful, not fascinating … uninteresting or annoying or, for whatever reason, not to my liking … I can leave, no problem. I can leave and go looking for somewhere else … or for that matter … anywhere else.
Now … concerning mystery fiction … does mystery fiction differ from the other genres? Eh … I guess so. At least I think it’s supposed to. But mystery fiction must produce the exact same response from the reader as every other genre, and that response is this: the reader must continue to turn pages. That’s it. Pages must turn. Writing that (and, I suppose, reading it as well), it seems as if it’s not that big of a deal, but it is. It’s a Really Big Deal. Pages must turn.
While all genres use character, plot, and setting to entice the reader, mystery fiction has, baked in, a tool by which to hook the reader’s attention, and that tool is showcased in the genre’s name: mystery fiction!
A quick web search produced this definition for mystery:
something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained
I like it. It’s short and to the point. Let’s apply it to mystery fiction.
In mystery fiction people go missing, are attacked, are murdered, are targeted, duped, or victimized in some manner. Valuable things are stolen, frauds are committed, money is embezzled, money is extorted, money changes hand by blackmail, intimidation, bribery … what else am I leaving out here? … and there is collateral damage every step along the way.
Mystery fiction, then, must explain that which “cannot be explained.” Who is missing, attacked, murdered? Why? What’s been stolen? By whom? Again, why? Always, why?
Do awful things happen in other genres? Of course! That’s fiction. Anything can happen. Cowboys battle rustlers, space/time travelers encounter space/time danger, and we all know the second step, the one right after the first – after boy-meets-girl – is boy-loses girl.
It’s the puzzle at the center of every piece of mystery fiction that makes the genre what it is. At the outset, at the very beginning – first word, first paragraph – the reader knows there will be some thing, or things, unknown, and only by turning pages will the thing, or things, be known. The solution may be delivered by a single person, or a team, but it will be human inquiry and human ingenuity that solves the puzzle.
In no way am I bashing those other genres. I read them. I like them. Nor am I bashing the crème de la crème of genres, Literary Fiction. (Well … think back … back into your school days … and try to remember the title of every “important” novel you were assigned to read. Try to remember why it was important. Once you’re done remembering, determine how “important” that novel is to you … today. Write a short essay answering this question: what, exactly, did that teacher mean by using the word “important”?) I am in no way knocking what is referred to as “Literature,’ but in my experience, there are as many turkeys in that field as in any other. I read Literature, honestly, I do. I like it. But the same rule applies: pages must turn.
So when I crack open a piece of mystery fiction, it is under the exact same stress as any other fictional work I attempt to read. It has to induce me to turn pages. I’m willing – happy, even – to accept the one-off, ersatz, curious occurrence, but it must make sense in the fictional world in which it happens. To be honest, what I want more than anything is to be so caught up in the reading I don’t notice (or care about) that little plot glitch, or a character’s sudden out-of-character actions. Let me repeat why I’m reading at all … I want to be entertained.
At some point in human history, the “tale” was birthed. I doubt that boredom was involved, and I suspect entertainment was not the goal. But tales have been with us ever since … for any number of reasons … and the bottom line is we’re better for it, we’re more human and perhaps even more humanistic and that’s a bonus … at least I think so … for the real world. Reading fiction, we learn things. We travel. We deduce. We meet people we’d never meet otherwise, visit cultures we’d never get to experience firsthand, face challenges that nudge us to examine creaky beliefs and create mental pictures of things that do and do not exist.
Bonus points: it’s fun!
So praise be to fiction. All of it. It broadens our imagination, tests our sympathy and empathy, relieves a bit of stress, engages our memory and provides an escape from that other world, the world where we live most of our lives, the world that regularly challenges our sympathy, empathy, imagination, and memory.
I once saw a man get attacked by a coyote. I’m absolutely certain I’m not the only one who has witnessed something like that.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, William Boyle currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. His novels have been nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the John Creasey New Blood Dagger, and the Hammett Prize. A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself was an Amazon Best Book of 2019 and City of Margins was a Washington Post Best Thriller of 2020. Just out this week is his novel Shoot the Moonlight Out (Pegasus Crime), which has received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Booklist, with PW calling the novel “masterly literary noir.” William’s EQMM debut, “Jianjun Ling and the Sad Case of Sonny La Grassa,” appears in our current issue (November/December 2021). In a sense, that story shares a theme with this post—a childhood awakening to the power of reading and storytelling, and the mystery in particular —Janet Hutchings
Sister Agnes was my fourth grade teacher. Most of the other nuns at my school were battle-hardened women in their fifties and sixties, tough and mean. But Sister Agnes was young and sweet. She glowed incandescent with joy. One of those people who really believed in God and goodness and hadn’t been disenchanted by anything or had been and had gotten over it. She was like walking electricity. Joy in the hallways. Joy in the classroom. Joy in the schoolyard. Joy everywhere. We, her students—who, without exception, loved her unabashedly—thought she was an angel. Forget the wings. Forget whatever else people expected of angels. She was it, the real deal. We commiserated about her kindness and her grace, marveling at our luck to have her as a teacher at our small Catholic school in southern Brooklyn.
We studied her. I followed her up to the convent on the fifth floor one day and watched her disappear into the secret lair of the nuns where no kid had ever set foot as far as anybody knew. I saw her at the Ulmer Park library on a Wednesday afternoon after dismissal. She was a big reader. She had a stack of mystery novels, the Mylar wrapping sleek and shiny under her soft hands. I read the names on the spines: Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Daphne du Maurier, G.K. Chesterton. I didn’t know nuns read books other than the Bible. I was shocked and happy.
In school the next day, I brought a mystery novel that I’d gotten at the library. I read during lunch and even during class. I liked mysteries, but my goal was simply to get Sister Agnes to notice me in a new way. I wanted her to think I was a kindred spirit, another great lover of mysteries, not just any regular boy. It was an Agatha Christie book. The print was small.
Sister Agnes finally saw that I wasn’t doing my schoolwork. She floated over and flashed her heavenly smile. “What are you reading?” she asked. The other nuns would’ve snatched my book away, made a spectacle of me, an example.
I held the book up.
“I love that one,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. My cheeks flushed. “Your name is close to her name. Agatha. Agnes.”
She nodded. She didn’t tell me to stop reading and focus on my schoolwork. An angel.
Later that week, she asked to see me after class. I was worried. Maybe she was secretly mad. Maybe she felt like I was taking advantage of her good nature. I approached her desk with my head down. “Yes, Sister Agnes?” I said.
“I have something for you,” she said. She opened her desk and took out a plastic grocery bag filled with books. “I get most of my books at the library, but Sister Ellen gave these to me years ago. I read most of them multiple times. I like to reread books. I thought you might be interested in taking them off my hands. I saw you reading, and it made me so happy. When I was a child, my aunt always gave me books. I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t done that.”
I took the bag and looked through the books. They were all paperbacks. Mystery novels. I recognized some of the names. I touched the covers. “Thank you,” I said.
“Maybe we can have a little book club?” she said. “You know, talk about the books after you read them.”
My mind was on fire. My own private book club with Sister Agnes! I wondered where we would meet. Maybe out in the schoolyard, just leaning against the brick wall of the school. Or maybe on the church steps. I imagined this book club lasting for years. I imagined myself getting older and Sister Agnes staying the same age.
I went home after school and finished my library book and then picked one from the bag at random and started reading. It was small enough to fit in my back pocket. I brought it with me to school the next day. Sister Agnes smiled when she saw me reading during class.
We met after school the following week. She took me up to the convent. As far as I knew, I was the first kid who’d ever stepped foot in the place. The other nuns—even the meanest ones—greeted me like I as welcome there. It was a big apartment, really. Nothing special. Regular furniture and regular light and a calendar on the wall. Smelled a little different—holy or something—but that was the only thing that was off. They even had a TV and VCR. Stacks of VHS tapes, too. They had Rain Man and The Color of Money! Imagine a bunch of nuns watching those movies!
We sat at a small table set up with two chairs against the wall just off the kitchen, an empty vase on a lace doily between us. I marveled at what was on the table: folded newspapers (the nuns read the Daily News!), lottery tickets, a hulking ring of keys, a magnifying glass, a scratchpad. Sister Agnes cleared most of it away and brought me a cup of tea. She said she didn’t take milk and sugar, but she asked me if I wanted some. I shook my head. I wanted her to think I wasn’t the milk-and-sugar type. She brought me tea in a fragile cup on a dainty saucer. I’d never seen such a thing. In my apartment, we had mugs and most of those mugs had busted handles repaired by my grandpa.
She asked me what I thought about the book I was reading. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to talk about books. She took the pressure off and started talking about why she loved the book. She had a great memory. It’d been years since she last read it, but she remembered everything. I was in love with listening to her, swept up by her words, but I was also looking around at the convent, taking in small details. My pals would require me to give a full report in the schoolyard the next day.
She talked about why she liked mysteries so much. She said life was a mystery. She said God was a mystery. She said she liked wondering about all the possibilities. She said she liked feeling like a detective. Mysteries could be many things. They could be like puzzles or like confessions. I watched her hands, one resting on the table, the other lifting the teacup to her mouth. I didn’t say much. I didn’t know how. I answered questions, usually in a word or two, when she asked. I nodded. She probably thought I was uncomfortable, that I was having a terrible time or that it felt like detention or punishment. It was the best day of my life.
Sister Agnes disappeared a month later. Not disappeared in any scary sense. We didn’t know much. She just wasn’t around anymore. She was there and then she was gone. She didn’t say goodbye. When we asked, the other nuns said she went home to be with her family. We didn’t know where home was. I asked if there was an address where I could write to her. I wanted to tell her that I was still reading the books she’d given me. I knew she’d write me back. They said they didn’t have an address, but they promised to get it. No one ever found out anything. Or, if they did, they didn’t tell us. We were expected to forget Sister Agnes. I still don’t know what happened to her. I wondered if she stopped being a nun. I pictured her on a train somewhere, happy, reading. I hoped she was okay. I wanted to say thank you, but I never could. I still have the books she gave me. I even still have the plastic bag they came in, a white Waldbaum’s bag with green print; it’s in a crate in the attic at my mom’s house. Sister Agnes, wherever you are, thank you for teaching me to believe in mysteries.
C.H. Hung writes primarily science fiction and fantasy, and her work has appeared in our sister publication Analog Science Fiction and Fact and other magazines. Her EQMM debut, the holiday story “The Debtor,” is featured in our current issue (November/December 2021). In this post she gives readers some insight into how she made the crossover from science fiction to mystery. —Janet Hutchings
I confess: I’m new to mystery.
That’s not to say I’ve never read stories in the genre—I grew up with Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys, the same as everyone else in my generation (although I arrived late to them, just as I’m often late to parties such as these)—but other than a rather clumsy attempt at hacking a Brown-like mystery in the third grade, I’d never tried my hand at writing in the genre. And not to come across as a bandwagoner by any means, but it was Frank Herbert’s Dune that inspired me to become a writer. So I buried myself in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and, later, Butcher’s Dresden Files and Corey’s The Expanse. So you can see where my reading interests lay, and it was not with the mystery fiction genre.
Until one dark and stormy night, I met in my inbox an assignment to write a mystery short story, centered around the Thanksgiving-to-New-Year holiday season. (There were other assignments, too, due that same week, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the ubiquitous predicament of a writer forced out of her comfort zone. But that’s another story, for another genre.)
I’d read a few Sherlock Holmes stories since grade school (because my high school English classes required it), enjoyed an Agatha Christie or two, and dabbled in Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta (because a college literature class required it). But to actually sit down and deliberately, methodically, plot, and write a mystery story? That was much beyond my small capabilities, especially for someone who doesn’t specialize in red herrings (I prefer, in fact, no herrings at all, as they are a tad overwhelming for my taste), whodunnits (to me, I didn’t care about the butler or the lead pipe, I was that annoying kid who always asked why), or brooding private detectives with checkered pasts (as if checkered pasts were limited to only that particular character trope).
So I did what any writer facing a dreaded block does—that is, if one doesn’t take up drinking or smoking or recreational drug use—I went to a bookstore. I found several anthologies and collections of mystery stories of various flavors (including a big book of Christmas mysteries, edited and compiled by Otto Penzler—score one for a research motherlode!), and I sat down and browsed through them for hours. (Not all at once, mind you. Once you start approaching a certain age, losing yourself in a story is less about sitting still in one place for hours as it is about being able to mark your place in a book without damaging it before rushing for the nearest bathroom.)
And I discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that mystery wasn’t just about the hardboiled detective trying not to fall for the distressed femme or the closed room full of clues or the stuffy butler who may or may not have done it, but is definitely in on it. In one anthology of modern mystery stories, “Mika Model” by Paolo Bacigalupi was so riveting that when I ran across it later in another, unrelated anthology, I immediately recognized the story within the first couple of sentences. It opens, as one so often does in the genre, with a woman in distress walking into a police station asking for help. There has been a crime committed, with the inevitable discovery of a body as the result. And yet, because it is also science fiction, the woman is a robot, and the crime and its implications is not as easily resolved as in a traditional whodunnit. I loved this mash-up as dearly as I once loved R. Daneel Olivaw.
And once I’d made that connection, I made another—that, unbeknownst to me, I had been consuming mystery all along, in many of its various tropes and forms. Robots of Dawn, the third in its series, is a whodunnit clothed in far-future science fiction. The Dresden Files is firmly entrenched in urban fantasy’s hardboiled detective roots, right down to the brooding private detective with a checkered past literally cloaked in magic. And the first book in The Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes, is a detective mystery that features, as one of the two main protagonists, a jaded police detective whose beat just happens to be a space station on an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt, as he tries to solve the mystery of a missing woman. Classic mystery tropes, repurposed by other genres for their own (and often nefarious) purposes.
But when you think about it, why the hell not? Mystery is one of those threads of story that winds its way through every nook and genre in storytelling, if one were only to look hard enough. So many of its common, cherished tropes have found new twists in other genres. Readers who might’ve groaned at yet another Holmesian pastiche greedily gobbled up Enola Holmes with their kids when the Netflix movie adaptation brought to light that there were already six books in the delightful YA series. Romance adapted readily to the mystery genre ages ago, with Mary Stewart pioneering the romantic mystery subgenre and inspiring the birth of Nora Roberts’ J.D. Robb pseudonym in the ’90s, and with Robb’s success playing no small part in the prolific rise of the romantic suspense genre at the turn of the century. It is that sort of paving of the way that sets the stage for other authors, like paranormal romance author Nalini Singh, to successfully cross over into mystery with contemporary psychological thrillers like Quiet in Her Bones and A Madness of Sunshine.
Because we read, and read widely, and have decided that labels—helpful or not—will not dictate what we love to consume, we lovers of good stories have all, knowingly or not, interred the bones of what makes a good mystery in our understanding of what makes for good storytelling. And when needed, like ill luck nipping at the heels of a guilty perpetrator, those bones may surface, to be ground up and sprinkled across the fertile fields of our imaginations, where we can give new life to old tropes and bring the familiar eerily close to the unfamiliar.
So while I confess I’m new to mystery, the only crime that I plead guilty to is the crime of not giving mystery its due when it comes to how much it has influenced my own reading and writing. The punishment, obviously, is to read more—a sentence I am more than happy to continue serving, no matter how much time I owe.
Here’s another insightful post by award-winning author and teacher of creative writing, Sheila Kohler. Her most recent novel is the thriller Open Secrets, published by Penguin in 2020. Publishers Weekly said of the book: “The plot moves swiftly amid luxurious settings to a closing twist . . .” One of Sheila’s recent short stories, “Miss Martin,” was selected for the 2020 volume of Best American Mystery Stories. As in last week’s post by Michael Cebula, the work of author Patricia Highsmith is examined here—a timely tribute as it is the centenary of Highsmith’s birth this year. —Janet Hutchings
As a symbol, water has many connotations. It is life giving, sustaining, and dangerous. It immediately creates suspense, and fear of death: plunged under water, bereft of air, one drowns. Water boarding is probably one of the most effective methods of torture, we are told. Yet we begin our lives in water or certainly liquid—in the amniotic fluid in the comfort and security of our mothers’ wombs.
Water, too, perhaps for this reason, is used in many religious ceremonies. John the Baptist baptized Jesus with water, and water is at the center of the Christian baptism, which is considered a new birth, a ceremony that brings the baby into the congregation, into the church, giving the child a name, an identity, as holy water is sprinkled on the head. Judaism too has a ceremony of purification with the immersion in water.
Thus water has a double symbolism, representing both renewal, life, and death.
It is not surprising then that it is used as a central image in so many books and stories, only a few of which I can mention here. One that comes to mind immediately is “Black Water,” a novella by Joyce Carol Oates. Here the young heroine, Kelly, leaves her friend’s party to accompany the famous “Senator” whom she admires, hoping for a love affair with the handsome older man. Instead of love she finds death, trapped in his car, which he carelessly drives off a bridge and into the watery marshlands in Maine. The heroine, abandoned by the Senator, who escapes the car, is flooded by memories, remembering her life, as the author’s language rushes at the reader and the water floods into the car. Eventually, bereft of the bubble of life-giving air, she drowns.
Here, too, in a literary baptismal service, the author renames the places and people involved in the Chappaquiddick incident, when Mary Jo Kopechne was abandoned by Edward Kennedy, who drove his car off the bridge and into the water.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, we know from the start that Tom Ripley fears water. His parents have drowned in Boston Harbor, leaving him—an orphan—to the tender mercies of his Aunt Dottie, who calls him a sissy and bullies him, making him run by the car to fetch water on a hot day in moving traffic. Yet it is on the water that Tom Ripley takes on a new identity. He kills Dickie Greenleaf, the boy he has been sent to bring home. In the motorboat with an oar, Tom bashes Dickie over the head and after a struggle—Tom, unable to swim, almost drowns as he tries to control the madly spinning boat—Tom acquires a new life. Eventually, dressed in his clothes and taking his place in society, Tom Ripley becomes Dickie Greenleaf.
Water here is both dangerous, bringing death and violence, but also a new birth. Tom Ripley is reborn as the wealthy and enviable Dickie whose fortune he eventually inherits in a false will. Secretly, shamefully, we root for his success.
In my own “Open Secrets” I used many of these motifs: Alice’s husband, a Swiss banker and a good sailor, is last seen when he leaves in the boat which belongs to his bank, the Circe. He goes sailing with a Russian client in Beaulieu sur Mer. A body is eventually found in the sea, wearing Michel’s clothes and his gold watch. Michel is presumed dead. Alice and her daughter attend the funeral together in deep sorrow. In her search for the reasons for her husband’s death, Alice is lured to swim out across the sea and onto her husband’s boat, the Circe, where she discovers the reasons that explain both his life and the death of his Russian client.
In Alice Munro’s wonderful story “Child’s Play,” a woman remembers a moment from her childhood during a stay in a camp at the sea. In an act of retribution she pays for this joint crime committed in the water in her youth.
Water thus combines for us all our hope for a new life, for a rebirth, and our ancient ancestral despair. It enables the writer to portray our joy in the value of each and every life, and our deepest sorrow and fear in the knowledge of the dangers which lap around us at all moments, threatening what we know must come to all of us some day.
As of today, our trivia contest has yet to be won, so we are extending the deadline until the end of the year. Brush up on your EQMM history and dive in; the first reader to respond with all the correct answers will win a choice of five EQMM anthologies from our archives. Runners-up will also receive prizes. See you in our inbox by December 31!
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 