“In Good Company” (by Carolyn Hart)

Posted on May 23, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
It’s only rarely that bestselling author Carolyn Hart writes a short story. She’s a prolific novelist, with more than four dozen titles in print, most of them mysteries. EQMM is fortunate to have been able to present two of those rare Hart short stories to its readers over the years. This week the Oklahoma author has some thoughts about the nature of the mystery/suspense field that should be of interest to all fans of the genre. (Discussion is welcome!)—Janet Hutchings

Mysteries fascinate millions of readers. What attracts readers to mysteries and why do I write mysteries?

Do you remember reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew? Why did we love those books?  What did  we find in those books?

We found independence, a battle for justice, and a puzzle. Girls reading Nancy Drew found a heroine who delighted and inspired them. Nancy Drew was—and  is—brave, honorable, fun, and gloriously  independent. Boys and girls found the same qualities in Frank and Joe Hardy. I know you remember them well, serious, thoughtful Frank, fun-loving, eager Joe. They too exemplified independence, a status children are thrilled to envision for themselves.  We weren’t as brave and independent as they  but we wanted to follow their lead. What an example they  set  as  they  battled injustice, dishonesty, cruelty, and corruption. They faced bewildering challenges but persevered until the mystery was solved, the criminal captured.

Independence,  a battle for justice, and a puzzle.

These are still prime attributes of  the mystery. But the mystery offers more. The moral worth of the mystery should be evident in that it has drawn to it writers devoted to the religious life. Dorothy L. Sayers was a foremost theologian of her time. Philosopher Ralph McInerny wrote the Father Dowling mysteries. Agatha Christie was a staunch member of the Church of England. Among other books where the mystery’s link to the religious life is made explicit are the charming books by Sister Carol Anne O’Marie.

I have always said and not really in jest that if I were to be marooned on a desert island, I would choose mystery readers and writers as my fellow castaways. They would follow the rules and one of them would be smart enough to get us off the island.

So what are these books that offer so much to readers?

There are two sharply different kinds of mysteries, the crime novel and the traditional mystery. The crime novel features heroes such as private eyes Sam Spade or V. I. Warshawski and police officers such as Barbara D’Amato’s Suze Figueroa or Ed McBain’s officers of the 87th Precinct. The traditional mystery features the amateur sleuth, such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Joan Hess’s Claire Malloy, or my own Annie Darling.

The crime novel is the story of an honorable woman—or man—who tries to remain uncorrupted in a corrupt world. The crime novel is the story of the protagonist, not the story of the murder that is solved within those pages. The private eye – whether we are talking about Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade – is the white knight who will never betray her or his code of honor. These books explore society’s ills and attempt to right  society’s  wrongs. These books are about the quest for honor. Although crime novels are often described as books about the mean streets and indeed they often look at the underbelly of society, these books are very romantic in intent. They celebrate heroes and heroines who are willing to fight corruption, dishonesty, and fraud.

My own particular love is the traditional mystery. These books were once pejoratively described as “cozies” by those who admire books about the mean streets.  The inference was that mean street  books are “real” and “cozies” are about drawing room crimes in little villages that could never happen.

But as Agatha Christie brilliantly demonstrated, the traditional mystery is at the heart of our lives. In her Miss Marple Books, Christie made the very point that life in a village is a microcosm of life everywhere. One does not have to live in a huge city and wander the alleyways to be acquainted with anger, jealousy, greed, and despair.

Christie once compared the mystery to the medieval morality play. It is a fascinating analogy. In the medieval morality play, the tradesfair audiences saw a graphic presentation of what happens to lives dominated by lust, gluttony, sloth, and all the deadly sins. This is precisely what readers of today’s mysteries are offered in a more sophisticated guise.

The opening segments of the Agatha Christie television mysteries capture the essence of the traditional mystery.

If you recall, the TV presentation opens with a figure peering out of a window into the street and two women with sly faces in close conversation. There is an air of secrecy, covertness, and, most of all, intimacy. Neighbors watch.  Friends—and enemies—gossip. There are lies and deceptions, misunderstandings and misapprehensions, passion and pain, fear and fury.

The traditional mystery offers readers a primer in relationships. The distant mother creates a child who cannot love. A tyrannical boss engenders hatred and frustration. Slyness evokes distrust. A man who cheats on his wife or a woman who cheats on her husband cannot be trusted in any relationship. If this, dear reader, is how you live . . .

Readers who do not understand the dynamic of the traditional mystery will inquire, “Why do you want to write about murder?”

The answer is simple.

Murder is not the focus of either the crime novel or the traditional mystery.

In the crime novel, V. I. Warshawski explores how society has been warped and strained by those who flout laws and conventions.

In the traditional mystery, Miss Marple is discovering what went wrong in the lives of those living in the village. The focus of the traditional mystery is fractured relationships. In trying to solve the crime, the detective searches out the reasons for murder by exploring the relationships between the victim and those around the victim.  The detective is trying to find out what caused the turmoil in these lives. What fractured the relationships among these people?

Readers, being the intelligent creatures that they are, extrapolate the lessons observed in fiction for their own use, their own lives.

When readers observe the lives around them, they can see the torment of an abused wife or husband (and abuse can quite often be mental and verbal rather than physical), the despair of an unloved child, the anger of a betrayed spouse, the jealousy of a less-favored child, the hatred of a spurned lover.

Usually these emotional dramas do not end in murder. In fact, they do not end.  The violent emotions created by fractured relationships corrode the lives of every person involved. Often forever. This is what the traditional mystery is all about. The traditional mystery focuses on the intimate, destructive, frightening secrets hidden beneath what seems to be a placid surface.  And often, the traditional mystery affords humor as well as insights.

Once again, Agatha Christie comes to mind.  No one ever captured the destructive power of greed any better than she did in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  But equally, in book after book, she punctures pretension and wryly observes the human drama.  In The Body in the Library, Christie notes with humor the stuffiness and class consciousness of Col. Bantry, but she also observes with compassion how a suspicion of wrongdoing, if not resolved, could destroy his life.

It is no accident that Christie has outsold every writer, living or dead. It is because her people are real. Readers recognize them at once. Oh yes, that’s just like that fellow in my office. Or yes, that’s just like Aunt Alice. Or the woman across the street. Or me.

Truth to tell (and fortunately), most readers do not spend every waking moment trying to escape from a serial killer. Yes, serial killer books have enjoyed enormous popularity. They are a very visible example of the randomness of violence today and of the ultimate separation of a human being from society. These books respond to a definitive reality of our times. Readers want to try and contain this kind of evil. One way to contain its horror is to read about the vanquishment of a serial killer.

But readers are also deeply concerned about the expressions of dissension and violence far short of murder that occur in their own lives. Readers spend much of their lives in moments of stress and confrontation with those around them. They know the jealous mother, the miserly uncle, the impossible boss, the woman who confuses sex with love, the selfish sister. These are the realities of life with which they must cope.

This is why Christie’s mysteries and all traditional mysteries are so popular.
What could be more everyday, more humdrum than life in a remote English village?

Miss Marple can tell you.

I’ve always been amused by those who dismiss traditional mysteries by saying, “Oh, how absurd.  All those bodies in a little village.  Isn’t that silly?”

No.

It is reality.

There may not be a body in the library, but there will always be heartbreak and passion, fear and denial, jealousy and revenge in every society everywhere.
It is how these emotions destroy lives that fascinates the writer and reader of traditional mysteries.

Mysteries mirror the realities of our lives, personal and social.  But perhaps the greatest gift we take from the mystery is a continuing reassurance that goodness matters.

Readers read mysteries because we live in an unjust world.

That’s why I write mysteries.

In life, evil can triumph as Americans were reminded most painfully on 9/11. We still want the world to be good, we want the world to be just, we want the world to be fair so we can go together, you and I, to a magic place where goodness will always triumph, where justice is served, where wrongs are righted.  We can read a mystery. —Carolyn Hart

Among many other honors, Carolyn Hart has won three Agatha Awards for best novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Letter from Home. Recently, a complete, uncut version of her WWII suspense novel Escape From Paris was published to rave reviews; the latest book in her popular Death on Demand series, Death Comes Silently, was released last month. http://www.carolynhart.com/

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“The Moment of Decision” — Perched on the Edge of What Happens Next (by Art Taylor)

Posted on May 16, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen
This week, as promised, we have a post by Art Taylor, a writer whose reviews and critical essays are regularly featured in magazines and newspapers. The authors whose work he discusses here are some of my favorites (and I hope yours too), including the late, great Stanley Ellin. — Janet Hutchings

My wife and I have recently been working our way through the bulk of Stanley Ellin’s contributions to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, courtesy of The Specialty of the House & Other Stories: The Complete Mystery Tales 1948-78. I read the stories aloud, giving us the chance to savor the sound of Ellin’s style, but as much as we admire that finely honed prose, what has given Ellin such lasting renown in the pantheon of short story writers is surely the precision of his plotting: the clockwork accuracy by which each element of a given tale contributes subtly, effortlessly, inexorably toward some crushing plot turn or crisp final image. Reflecting in the collection’s introduction on the short story writers who influenced him, Ellin himself praised how De Maupassant “reduced stories to their absolute essence” and how his endings, “however unpredictable,” ultimately seemed “as inevitable as doom”—qualities which Ellin emulated and perfected in his own work.

For many reasons, Ellin’s short fiction also calls to mind John Updike’s often-quoted criteria for judging a short story’s success: “I want stories to startle and engage me within the first few sentences,” Updike said, “and in their middle to widen or deepen or sharpen my knowledge of human activity, and to end by giving me a sensation of completed statement.” Ellin’s finest stories seem to succeed on these terms as well: drawing readers in quickly, turning a clear eye on some aspect of human nature (often the darker recesses of it, admittedly), and regularly bringing a perfect sense of closure to his tales—often with cruel little twists, as in “The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby,” “The Best of Everything,” or “The Betrayers,” for example.

But as I think more about Updike’s criteria and about Ellin’s stories, I find myself stumbling a little over that “completed statement” phrase. While I too feel the sense of rightness about a ultra-tidy, ultra-unified resolution, I can’t help but notice that several of Ellin’s best-known and best-loved works end somewhere shy of telling the full story, instead leaving the reader him- or herself to fill in some of the blanks. “The Specialty of the House,” for example, lays out all the clues behind the culinary masterpieces at Sbirro’s but we readers have to figure out exactly what’s going on back in that kitchen. At the end of “The House Party,” Ellin provides glimpses of the true nature of the festivities but then leaves us uneasily sorting through the larger ramifications. And in that much-reprinted masterpiece “The Moment of Decision,” Ellin brilliantly tightens, tightens, tightens the suspense until an ending where we…. Well, I won’t spoil that ending here, but suffice it to say (to draw on the title of our new blog here) that “Something Is Going To Happen” is both a good definition of how the mystery and suspense story works and perhaps also a good place to end such a story, just on the edge of the something else, something new that might happen next. As EQMM editor Janet Hutchings herself wrote in the inaugural post for this blog, “Usually that important ‘something’ will occur within the pages of the story, though in some cases the story may build toward it and stop before the critical moment, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination.”

Open-ended stories like “The Moment of Decision” can be found across various genres: Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” is a frequently taught example from the annals of science fiction; Raymond Carver’s “The Bath” fits the bill (though not the alternate (original) version of that same storyline, “A Small, Good Thing”); and each time I’ve taught Joyce Carol Oates’ tautly suspenseful “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” my students have left their reading with more questions than answers—but profitably so, I should stress. The unresolved ending isn’t necessarily restricted to short fiction either; one of my favorite novels of recent years, Tana French’s In The Woods, continues to provoke controversy for what’s not explained by the book’s close. (And when I put out a call on Facebook for suggestions of more such stories, I discovered some new ones I haven’t yet read: Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and Italo Calvino’s interlinked story collection If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Perhaps readers here could suggest others as well?)

As the few examples above might suggest, darker stories (whatever the genre) perhaps lend themselves more readily to such endings — the pervasive sense of unease in noir, for example, setting the stage for a persistent lack of resolution. And as if in confirmation of that idea, a story I read just a few nights ago, Ed Gorman’s “Out There in the Darkness” from The Best American Noir of the Century, ended with a brilliant and brooding sense of anticipation about what still lies ahead for the narrator:

I look at the empty chairs and think back to summer.
I look at the empty chairs and wait for the phone to ring.
I wait for the phone to ring.

In a similar vein, Daniel Woodrell’s recent short story collection, The Outlaw Album—excerpts of which I just finished teaching for a class on American Noir—offers a couple of examples of how such endings can both resist resolution (or even explanation) and yet still seem complete and satisfying. In “Floriane,” a father struggles to come to terms with his daughter’s disappearance, but while the story offers suspects aplenty, what happened to the girl is never revealed—the narrator’s lingering, inescapable state of suspicion and distrust becoming the point of the story, in fact. And in “Night Stand,” a Vietnam vet named Pelham defends himself and his wife against an intruder who appears at the foot of the couple’s bed in the middle of the night, naked and growling—a man who turns out to have been a vet as well (Gulf War) and the son of one of Pelham’s oldest friends. At story’s end, Pelham himself strips off his own clothes and stands at the back deck, growling toward the perimeter of his own yard—a perfect circle of sorts for the story’s imagery, a fresh balance it seems, except for the fact that Pelham’s actions may likely prove as inexplicable to the reader as they are to his wife, standing just inside the door, watching him. (And yet despite what my students seemed to think, that final scene shouldn’t be inexplicable for an engaged reader, and at least one of the questions the wife asks Pelham toward the story’s close should help point the way toward unraveling what’s going on.)

Coming back again to EQMM: One of my favorite authors among the magazine’s regular contributors is David Dean (a widespread assessment apparently, given his frequent appearances on EQMM’s annual readers’ polls), and a couple of Dean’s best stories also come to mind as I’m writing this—both because each of them stops short of the climax and because each echoes with some part of Woodrell’s “Night Stand.” In the very short and very chilling “Awake” (July 2009), the middle of the night becomes a time for memories and menacing sounds and perhaps more. And in “Ibrahim’s Eyes” (June 2007), as crisply structured a story as I know, an ex-Marine working the night shift at the Quik and EZ Mart reflects on his troubled stint in Beirut as he preps to defend the convenience store against a rash of late-night robberies; what happens just beyond the final lines of the story is surely inevitable—as inevitable as doom—and yet I’d argue that the ending is so provocative and so moving precisely because it stops just short of the “what happens next,” requiring us to finish out that last bit of the story ourselves, fill that blank space just beyond the final sentence with our own imagination, our own emotions. (Incidentally, each of these stories has been included as part of EQMM’s podcast series—easy access for interested readers/listeners.)

Finishing the story ourselves—that’s basically how these open endings work. These and other writers don’t just tell us what happened but instead force us to become an active part of the storytelling, at the very least puzzling out the “Why?” and “What if?” and “But suppose…” possibilities, or trying to tie up the loose ends left purposefully dangling, or supplying the emotional responses underplayed by the author, or at the further extreme, having some hefty moral quandaries laid at our doorsteps, as Ellin’s “The Moment of Decision” so expertly does.

In that tale and others mentioned here, the “sensation of completed statement” that Updike praises isn’t necessarily something that’s “given” to us readers. Instead, it’s something that we earn, both along the way and well past the time we turn the final page. — Art Taylor

Art Taylor’s short stories have appeared frequently in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and two of his EQMM stories have won Derringer Awards: “Rearview Mirror” in 2011 and “A Drowning at Snow’s Cut” in 2012. In addition to his short fiction, he is a professor of English at George Mason University, a frequent reviewer of mysteries and thrillers for the Washington Post, and a regular contributor to Mystery Scene. For more information, visit www.arttaylorwriter.com.

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Two Awards Ceremonies

Posted on May 9, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen

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On Thursday, April 26, 2012, the Mystery Writers of America held its annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards dinner in New York. It was a special night for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and our sister publication Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Two EQMM stories were nominated for the Edgar for Best Short Story: David Dean’s “Tomorrow’s Dead,” from the July 2011 EQMM and Peter Turnbull’s “The Man Who Took His Hat off to the Driver of the Train,” from the March/April 2011 EQMM. John  C. Boland also received a nomination for his June 2011 AHMM story “Marley’s Revolution.” Congratulations to all of the nominees, and to the winner of this year’s short-story Edgar, Peter Turnbull! At the Edgars banquet, the Robert L. Fish Memorial award for the best short story by a new author was also presented; it went to David Ingram for his January 2011 EQMM story “A Good Man of Business.” We congratulate him on an extraordinary debut.

Two days later, the Malice Domestic Convention held its Agatha Awards banquet in Bethesda, Maryland. Toastmaster Dana Cameron, who was also nominated for Best Short Story for her June 2011 EQMM story “Disarming,” took home the award, adding to her growing number of honors in the short-story field. Hats off to her and to everyone else who was recognized this awards season!

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SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: Not Just Another Mystery Blog (we hope!)

Posted on May 9, 2012 by somethingisgoingtohappen

The Internet already contains innumerable sites where crime and mystery fiction is discussed. As the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I should know. Our magazine hosts “Blog Bytes,” a column started by Ed Gorman and continued by Bill Crider in which, each month, more new sites that no mystery fan should miss are identified. Running for more than five years now, with (I’m estimating) over 100 sites reviewed, the column has proved one thing beyond a doubt: There’s a lot of light already shining on mysteries here in the blogosphere. So why are we trying to add EQMM’s star to this ever expanding universe?

Well, first of all, it isn’t exactly new territory for us. We’ve been blogging for a couple of years, but without an address of our own, which left us invisible to the search engines. To find our blog, readers had to go to our website and visit the readers’ forum, where I and my colleague Linda Landrigan at AHMM posted bi-weekly columns under the heading “From the Editors’ Desks.” Joining in the conversations was a loyal contingent of fans of the mystery short story, but it soon became apparent that the content of the posts reached beyond short mystery fiction.

Within the vast space the crime and mystery field occupies—through novels, plays, movies, television, and even games—our small outpost devoted exclusively to the short story may sound like a remote place to those who’ve never visited it. But I think there’s something universal at the heart of short fiction—something that connects to our need to be told stories we can take in and savor in one sitting on a front porch or around a campfire—and crime or mystery, of one sort or another, finds its way into most stories.

As pervasive as crime and mystery are in fiction, it’s only in the pages of the mystery magazines that the full range of what is generally classified as belonging to the mystery genre gets consistently represented. There are fashions in book publishing, times when it’s hard to sell a private eye novel, others in which the cozy is passé. Not so at the magazines: Our aim, stated in the early days of EQMM, is to include the best examples we can find of every type of crime and mystery story, and in this blog, you’ll find them all discussed. If your taste runs to the classical whodunit, you’ll find columns devoted to that once endangered species; if it’s noir that you’re after, we’ll be talking about your favorite authors and why that sub-genre is thriving. Even urban fantasy, involving the once forbidden importation of supernatural elements to the mystery, will have advocates to represent it here.

The field we serve has become broader over the past decade and it isn’t only because certain genre barriers, such as that between mystery and fantasy, have broken down. To say that the boundary between literary and genre fiction is disappearing is no longer very controversial. Many “literary” writers now produce stories and books that are marketed as crime fiction. There’s nothing new about that for EQMM: It’s well known that EQMM’s founding editor, Fred Dannay, hoped to prove, through the reprints he included in the early days of EQMM, that every great writer in history had produced at least one work that could be considered a crime story. And yet, if the field is really that broad, how are we to say what we’re all about? I’ve given that a lot of thought and it seems to me there is something one can expect from virtually any story or novel that gets marketed under the heading Mystery or Crime, and that is this: In it, something is going to happen. Usually that important “something” will occur within the pages of the story, though in some cases the story may build toward it and stop before the critical moment, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination.

That simple statement—Something is going to happen—touches, for me, on the nature of suspense. We’ve all heard the complaint mystery readers sometimes level at certain literary magazines: that they’re comprised of stories in which nothing happens to characters we don’t care about. I don’t think the disparaging tone of the charge is fair; after all, different types of fiction aim for different effects. But it does seem to me that the overriding aim in suspense/mystery/crime fiction is to tell a story, and in a story, things happen. On this site, we’ll celebrate that aspect of fiction.

We’ve lined up some guest bloggers you won’t want to miss for the coming weeks. Please come back and join the discussion. Next week’s post is by award-winning mystery writer, critic, and reviewer Art Taylor.

Janet Hutchings
Editor
EQMM

P.S. Also not to be missed, on May 19th,  is the debut of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’s blog (more details to come).

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