The mystery as novel of manners

National Review, Jan 20, 1992 by Linda Bridges

Not until 1969 did the New York Times Sunday Boo Review choose a mystery novel (Ross Macdonald's The Goodbye Look) as the subject of its lead review. That review - or rather the fact of its having been commissioned - was greeted by a good deal of sniffing from beneath elevated brows. Mysteries, we were informed, cannot be dignified with the name "novel." They are throwaways meant to be read once only, and not susceptible of serious criticism. Yes, of course, serious people have admitted to reading them, but they are at best a sort of exercycle for the mind, slightly inferior to crossword puzzles; more usually they are simply vehicles for escapsim....

It's true enough that not everything on the mystery shelves is a novel. Leaving aside police procedurals, thrillers, and various other sub- and related genres, many actual whodun-its are pure puzzle, designed to take people's minds off their own concerns. But the true mystery novel is intended to put the reader's mind onto something else - considerations of good and evil, human weakness and temptation, the fallenness of man. And while aficionados of the oure puzzle - early Ellery Queen, say - become impatient with mysteries in which, as they put it, the scenery and characters get in the way of the plot, there is still plenty of scope in the genre for humor and drama, social comment and exotic scenery, character studies and literary flights. The mystery is today's novel of manners, and its morality novel as well. Had Charles Dickens been born in the later days of Queen Victoria rather than of George III, his London might have resembled Margery Allingham's or John Dickson Carr's; Anthony Trollope might have filled his stately homes and country rectories with corpses and rumors of corpses, like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. And a twentieth-century Nathaniel Hawthorne might have created a detective as brooding as P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh.

In many mysteries the victim is a sympathetic character, and when the murderer is finally found out and brought to book, our only emotion, apart from intellectual relief or surprise, is a sense that justice has been done. Other novelists try us higher; they make the victim someone we are tempted to say richly deserved it, and the murder someone we like or at least pity. In the best of these novels the sorrow reaches a Virgilian level of lacrimae rerum. John Dickson Carr seldom does this; Nicholas Blake makes it almost a trademark. (More than that I mustn't say: even though it is my contention that there's much more to mystery novels than the plot, still there is, an an English professor of mine put it, a certain virginity you lose the first time you read the denouement of any novel, an the critic should not presume to lose it on behalf of his readers.)

Be that as it may, up to the point where the detective pins down his quarry, there are scenes to be set - and sometimes axes to be ground. While Patricia Moyes is delightful on subjects like one's first ski lesson, when she turns to racial prejudice or the privileged classes she can let satire fall over into caricature. Nonetheless, social comment is a fruitful field. In his days as a jockey, Dick Francis rode for, among others, the Queen Mother, and many of his characters have a view of the upper classes untinged with either envy or snobbery. In Trial Run the Prince (a cousin of the Queen) calls over his gardener:

"What do we do about all this, Bob?" he

said.

The gardener was knowledgeable

about two trucks and suitable garages,

and said he would fix it. His manner

with the Prince was comfortable and

spoke of long-term mutual respect, which

would have irritated the irritated the anti-royalists no

end.

"Don't know what I'd do without Bob,"

confirmed the Prince as we walked back

toward the house. "If I ring up shops or

garages and say who I am, they either

don't believe it and say yes, they're the

Queen of Sheba, or else they're so fussed

they don't listen properly and get everything

wrong. Bob will get those cars

shifted without any trouble, but if I tried

to arrange it myself, the first people to

arrive would be the reporters."

Lew Archer's beat, in the Ross Macdonald novels, is the social topography of Southern California. "The town," he says in The Way Some People Die,

rose from sea level in a gentle slope, divided

neatly into social tiers, like something

a sociologist had built to prove a

theory. Tourists and transients lived in

hotels and motels along the waterfront.

Behind them a belt of slums lay ten

blocks deep, where the darker half of the

population lived and died. On the other

side of the tracts - the tracks were

there - the business section wore its old

Spanish facades like icing on a stale

cake. The people who worked in the

stores and offices inhabited the grid of

fifty-foot lots that covered the next ten

blocks. On the slopes above them the

owners and managers enjoyed their patios

and barbecue pits. And long the top