Tying Up the Loose Ends

            I once read a mystery novel by a conventionally published author of multiple titles in which four bodies were discovered in a storage locker early on. By the time the book reached its conclusion, there still had been no explanation of who killed the four people and why.

            Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Leaving one murder unaccounted for might charitably be excused as simple carelessness. Leaving the reader in the dark about four corpses borders on gross negligence.

            When something like that happens, the reader is left wondering not only about the lack of editing services at the publishing house, but also dissatisfied in a spiritual and existential way. To put it another way, unexplained puzzles are a violation of the author’s compact with the reader and the reader’s expectations.

Better Than Life

            Life is random, absurd and chaotic, which is why we expect mystery novels not to be. One of the great pleasures of a mystery novel comes from being confronted by a baffling situation (the crime) and seeing smart, competent people (the detectives) work through the confusion and get everything sorted into place. The comfort of seeing chaos turned to order is one of the reasons for reading these books.

            In the classic mysteries of the Golden Age (between the First and Second World Wars), authors took great pains to be sure and dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s at the end of the book. They assumed the reader wanted that, and probably no publisher of the time would have accepted a novel that didn’t explain everything (or almost everything) in the final pages.

            In the hands of masters like Carr, Christie, and Ellery Queen, the explanations made for gripping reading. They were so tight and plausible that, after reading them, you could find yourself wondering why you hadn’t seen what the detective ultimately saw so clearly.

Sometimes Not So Plausible

            Of course, not everyone brought it off as well as the masters. I recall reading one book of that era in which the criminal got into a rowboat during a tide so high it took the water nearly to the top of a 60-foot cliff, enabling the killer to fire a shot from the wave-tossed boat through the windows of the house and plug the unfortunate victim. It was a case of better shooting than plotting.

            As a writer of mystery novels in the classical tradition, I do my best to see that a reader gets a good explanation of the crime or crimes by the end of the book. Loose ends belong in bad hair, not mystery novels. You can no longer call all the suspects into the study, as the detectives of the 1920s and 30s routinely did, but you can show the investigation as it develops and leave the reader in no doubt as to how and by whom the crime was committed.

            Tying the story up neatly by the end is important in a mystery novel, but so are character development, atmosphere and detail. It’s a challenging time to be practicing in the genre, but some of the old ways are still good ways. If nothing else, the reader should finish the book knowing what happened and why.

Giving Books a Second Chance

            A couple of months ago, rummaging through one of those recommendation lists Amazon sends out, I spotted a book called Crossover by Judith Eubank. I had never heard of either the book or the author, but I read the description of it and checked out the first page. It was well written, and the price was right, so I bought the e-book version.

            On Labor Day, looking for a short book to read, I came across it on my iPad and went with it. At only 172 pages, it was just right for the day, and I flew through it. It was a highly enjoyable read, better written than most of the bestsellers I see today, and I thought I’d discovered a promising new author who had self-published on Amazon, like me. In the Kindle store, the publication date showed as April 2014.

            Then, at the end of the book, I came to the copyright page, which showed that it had originally been published in 1991 by the now defunct publishing house Carroll & Graf. What I had been reading was not a new book, but rather an electronic reissue of an older one.

Not Dead, Just Resting

            I’m guessing, since it appears Ms. Eubank has written only one other work of fiction, that her book didn’t do terribly well from a commercial standpoint, and that she eventually moved on to other things. That happens. There are good books that sell poorly and bad ones that sell quite well. But like many other authors, Ms. Eubank has gotten a second chance from Amazon and the e-book.

            Not all the authors who have done so are living. I’m noticing a lot of reissues of mysteries from the 1920s and 30s on Amazon. In fact, one of those, The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude, is on my schedule for this month. The first e-book I ever read, Murder at Bridge, was a 1920s American mystery novel that someone put up on Kindle for 99 cents, apparently after discovering the copyright had expired.

            And my own first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, got a second chance on Kindle. Passed over by agents and publishers in the 1990s, it has sold modestly but steadily since I put it up on Kindle in July 2012. In fact, this August, more than two years after publication, it had its best month ever in paid sales on Amazon, and this Monday it had its best-ever free promotion, with nearly 600 downloads worldwide.

The Library Vanishes With a Click

            There are quite a few good authors whose work has long been out of print. In the mystery genre along, I can think of Father Knox, John Dickson Carr, Richard and Frances Lockridge, and so on. Sometimes a long out-of-print author gets a revival, as Earl Derr Biggers did when the University of Chicago reissued his Charlie Chan novels. But that’s the exception. E-books offer a way for good writers whose audiences would be limited today to stay in circulation, if not exactly in print.

            Still, I can’t help remembering the Library at Alexandria, which burned in ancient times, leaving us without many of the great works of antiquity. With everything on a computer somewhere, fire won’t be an issue, but some day a rogue computer virus could wipe out much of the literary canon, and a lot of secondary good stuff, too. I try not to think about it.

Ghosts and Witches, Oh My!

            When I started writing mysteries, I certainly had no intention of getting into the realm of the paranormal. I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, rather than H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, and Jack Mann. But once you start writing, stuff happens.

            The first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, was entirely rational and grounded in the everyday. The second, Wash Her Guilt Away, which will be out in a couple of weeks, started out that way, but at the beginning I threw in, almost as an aside, one brief supernatural reference — to a rumored witch placing a curse on the place where the action occurs.

            It turned out to be like taking one piece of candy from a box of chocolates, and the next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole damn box. By the time the book was written, it had an entire coven of witches, a headless boatman, and a suspicious death with possibly supernatural overtones. How did it get out of hand like that?

Was it Carr’s Influence?

            The easy way out would be to blame John Dickson Carr. He was one of the great practitioners of the locked-room mystery (the murder is committed in a locked room, which the killer shouldn’t have been able to enter or leave), and a couple of his books, notably Below Suspicion and The Burning Court also had a strong witchcraft angle. Wash Her Guilt Away is dedicated in his spirit — which, come to think of it, is a loaded word.

            My second book is something of an English country-house mystery, in which a group of people are brought together for a short time, tension develops, and a crime is committed. But it also has a locked-room mystery in it, hence the dedication to Carr. That mystery has a natural explanation, as they all do, but I started to see how other supernatural elements might come into play.

            Because the setting of the book is a lodge in the remote forests of Northern California, it lent itself to an air of the supernatural. After all, there’s a reason that Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were set in the woods. I stole from both of those, by the way. If you’re going to steal from an author, do it to a dead one whose copyright has expired.

Two Feet Firmly on Ground

            At the moment I’m trying to figure out how much to make of the paranormal angle in marketing Wash Her Guilt Away. A lot of people eat that stuff up, but the fact is that I’m a pretty rational man when it comes to such issues. My favorite ghost stories are the ones written by authors such as J.S. LeFanu and M.R. James, in which the supernatural elements are reflections of the emotional states and consciences of the characters. For a really good example of this, see LeFanu’s story, “The Familiar,” about a man driven mad by mysterious footsteps that follow him through the city at night.

            I’ll probably compromise by teasing to at least the witch element in the dust-jacket blurb, but otherwise not making too much of a deal about it. Any future books I write will appear in the mystery section of Amazon, not the paranormal, and that’s the way I prefer it. The third mystery, which I am now outlining in detail, should again be perfectly rational, and the general ideas I have for books beyond that are also paranormal-free. After all, the real world is scary enough.

           

           

           

The Lost Virtue of Brevity

            In his excellent mystery My Late Wives (1946), John Dickson Carr, writing as Carter Dickson, tells the story of serial killer Roger Bewlay. With a wittily observant eye, Carr shows how Bewlay targets vulnerable virgins of a certain age (early thirties, considered past marriage in those days) and woos each according to her ruling passions. One he takes to the symphony; another for long walks along the beach promenade at Brighton, and so forth.

            The result, in each instance, is the same. The lady in question falls head over heels in love, marries him quickly, signs over all her property to him, and they go off on an idyllic honeymoon, from which only Bewlay and the lady’s property emerge. A chance occurrence leads police to become suspicious and another allows them to close the net on Bewlay. But at the end, he slips away and vanishes into the vastness of metropolitan London.

            And that’s just the first 12 pages. The rest of the book takes place 15 years later, when it appears that Bewlay has returned to his old ways, and the detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, attempts to catch him once and for all.

Telling the Story Succinctly

            Carr, a master storyteller if ever there was one, was able to cram enough material for an entire book into a fairly short chapter. In today’s world of mysteries and thrillers, the opposite seems to be happening. More and more books seem to be taking 250 pages of story and stretching it into 350-400 pages.

            How and when this happened is a mystery to me, but I can trace some examples. One successful author began writing about 30 years ago and originally wrote brisk 250-page books. Then she started adding characters, and in subsequent books, each character had to be brought in, often to the detriment of the narrative. On the other hand, she sells way more books than I do, so either the readers don’t care, or they like her enough to put up with it.

            The bloat in book size affects even older books. I have in hand a recently published copy of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? In this version, the spacing between lines is generous to a fault, as are the margins. That makes what was probably a 225-page book originally come out at 279 pages.

            When I wrote my mystery, The McHenryInheritance, I deliberately tried to keep it to 200-225 pages so it could be read on a cross-country plane flight or on a rainy afternoon. It came in at 200, but I wonder if anyone appreciates the brevity.

Longer Movies, Too

            Movies, like books, seem to be getting longer as well. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, writing about her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, noted that a number of the films he made for Warner Brothers in the 1930s were an hour and ten minutes long. These days, it’s hard to find any movie that comes in at less than two hours. It seems as if fewer directors today know how to move a story along, the way directors like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks used to do.

            In 1935, MGM made a movie of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, starring Greta Garbo and Frederic March. The book is more than 800 pages, but after some competent scriptwriters got through with it, and it was turned over to veteran director Clarence Brown, he was able to get Anna under the train in a brisk hour and 35 minutes. If they tried to make it today, they would sink so much into stars, costumes, props and locations, it would turn into a three-hour epic and probably be less entertaining than Brown’s version. Less is often more.

Vampire Stories You May Not Know

            You get some interesting responses when you tell someone you’ve published a book. I was talking with a friend a while back, and he asked if my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, had any vampires in it.

            “Vampires?” I said.

            “Yeah, vampires,” he replied. “It seems like every book out there now has vampires. Yours would probably sell better if it had some, too.”

            He may be right, but it’s too late for a rewrite at this point. Nevertheless, he got me thinking about a couple of venerable vampire stories that are considerably older than I am.

A Victorian Lesbian Vampire Tale

            JosephSheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) is generally ranked with Wilkie Collins as one of the great writers of Victorian-era shockers. A number of his tales were ghost stories or tales of the supernatural, and though they’re not widely read today, they’re quite good. I defy anyone to read “The Familiar,” then step forth confidently on a walk through a deserted city.

            His best vampire story is “Carmilla,” which tells of a young woman by that name who takes up temporary residence with a man and his daughter in their home in a lonely forest in Germany. Pretty soon the wives and daughters of nearby peasants are dying mysteriously, and the young lady of the house, who has become Carmilla’s affectionate friend, has become inexplicably ill.

            For a story written 150 years ago, in an excessively proper society, “Carmilla is pretty steamy stuff. Here is the young lady of the house writing about waking suddenly in the middle of the night and seeing:

            “A young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was awakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment …”

            Makes you wonder how that got past the censors of the day, but then I once read that when Parliament was considering the criminalization of lesbian behavior, Queen Victoria scotched the idea on the grounds that since such a thing could not possibly happen, there was no good reason to outlaw it. Maybe that’s the explanation.

Nothing Supernatural About It

            ClaytonRawson (1906-71) was an American mystery writer, contemporary and friend of John Dickson Carr, the locked-room specialist. Rawson was an accomplished magician, and many of his stories feature outrageous situations with prosaic solutions.

            In 1940 he wrote four stories/novellas under the pen name Stuart Towne, featuring a magician named Don Diavolo. One of them, “Ghost of the Undead,” tells of a vampire who appears in New York City and commits a murder. You can find it on Kindle in the book Death Out of Thin Air.

            Rawson isn’t in LeFanu’s class as a writer, and this story has the feel of something banged out on an old Underwood, under the influence of coffee and cigarettes, by a man in need of a quick check from a magazine. But it’s interesting, nonetheless, as a historical curiosity.

            Almost all supernatural tales written in the first half of the 20^th Century, when people still believed in science and progress, ended up having rational explanations. Rawson’s vampire isn’t really a vampire, and tricks such as disappearing from a locked room on the 20^th floor of a skyscraper are merely sleight of hand, explained at the end. How odd that in today’s high-tech society, such rationality seems passé.