Rebranding My Detective

            When my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance was first published in July of 2012, I described it in shorthand as a fly-fishing mystery. Although that may have been accurate as far as it went, it’s a marketing decision I’ve come to regret.

            The regret arises from a growing belief on my part that identifying or describing the book in that way may be putting off some readers who would enjoy it but who have no interest in fly-fishing. Nor does it seem to be pulling in large numbers of readers who have that interest; if a fly-fisherperson doesn’t read mystery novels, he or she is unlikely to wade through the other 190 pages of the book to get to the ten that have to do with fishing.

            From the beginning, I saw the book as the first in a series featuring the same protagonist, Quill Gordon. The running theme of the series would be that Gordon goes on a fishing trip, becomes enmeshed in some aspect of the small-town drama at his destination, and plays some part in solving the murder that arises out of that drama.

Lord Peter Goes to Scotland

            In many respects, that’s similar to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Five Red Herrings, in which Lord Peter Wimsey goes on a fishing trip to Scotland, becomes enmeshed in the drama surrounding a group of artists who live in the small town where he is staying, and helps the police solve the murder of one of them. No one would refer to that book as a fly-fishing mystery, and while my tome has more fishing detail than Sayers’ book did, the fishing plays the same role: it gets the protagonist into the setting and situation.

            Sayers used the fishing device only once, whereas I would be using it in every book. But what my books will really be about is an outsider (Gordon) becoming involved in a community and its issues, and in some way bringing his outsider status and perspective to bear on solving a crime that has disrupted the community.

            Several readers of the first book — all male, by the way — have picked up on the outsider aspect and have commented that Gordon reminds them in some ways of Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher. They’re both tall, both loners and they go where they want to go and do what they want to do, but the resemblance pretty much ends there.

Jack Reacher Meets Miss Marple

            Gordon is perhaps what Jack Reacher would be if he had a permanent address and substantial investment income — respectable in other words. In that regard, Gordon is something like Peter Wimsey, but he also is like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who travels about and solves crimes, mostly in small towns, based on her life experience and observations.

            The Gordon series is more in the classical mode of Christie and Sayers than the modern action-thrillers that Child writes. And it has occurred to me that the classical aspect of the series should perhaps be emphasized more, though exactly how, I’m not sure. But with a new video to make and with having to redesign the Quill Gordon website to work in the second book, I’ll have some chances to work on the rebranding.

            If, as I hope, I keep adding more books to the Gordon series, there will be plenty of additional opportunities for redefining what a Quill Gordon mystery is, and maybe I’ll eventually get it right. And there’s always the old fallback. If you tell good stories, which I’d like to believe I do, there will always be readers who appreciate that.

           

My Initiation into Mysteries

            The first adult mystery novel I read was Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. I was 12 years old at the time, and, my moral scruples not being as fully developed as they are now, I cheated and looked at the last page to see who the killer was. I still got it wrong.

            As I recall, the book was one of several on a shelf in a cabin our family was occupying in Jackson Hole, WY. The cabin was located at a beautiful cattle ranch that was one of the inspirations for the ranch in my current mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. There was no TV, the summer nights were long, and I was one of those kids who never had to be prodded to read a book.

            Murder in Mesopotamia was one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, and I went on to read most of them by the time I finished junior high school. It was the beginning of a lifelong mystery habit.

Coming to Appreciate Miss Marple

            During that period I checked out a couple of the Miss Marple mysteries and a couple of the non-Poirot stand-alone books. I didn’t much care for them, which is on me far more than on Dame Agatha. Something about Poirot and his “little grey cells” appealed to my keen adolescent mind.

            After ripping through the Christie oeuvre in my youth, I pretty much left her alone for several decades. There were plenty of other mysteries to read, and I read as many as I could. My preference is for British writers, though I am no absolutist on that score, and one preference I inherited from Christie is an appreciation for a story that wraps up all the loose ends. Few things in a mystery novel annoy me as much as a puzzle that’s dangled before the reader, then never explained at the end — especially when it’s clearly a case of carelessness rather than calculated ambiguity.

            In recent years I’ve started dipping into Agatha Christie’s books again. With the passage of a few decades, my perspective has changed. Poirot I now find pedantic and tiresome, while the virtues of Miss Marple have risen steadily in my estimation.

Echoes of Austen and Hardy

            What appeals now in the Marple books is the emphasis on human frailty and folly. Miss Marple repeatedly points out that having spent her life in a small English village, she has witnessed every form of human folly and depravity there is. The people who pine for a Mayberry society should take note. And when Christie develops a theme fully and richly, as in The Mirror Crack’d, the sense of damage done by personal obliviousness calls to mind Jane Austen, and the way in which a casual, unthinking act can unleash a chain of awful circumstances recalls Thomas Hardy.

            (We’ve even rented some of the Miss Marple films, starring Margaret Rutherford, from the early 1960s on Netflix. They’re not at all what Agatha Christie intended, but are very well-done and entertaining in their own right.)

            Something I haven’t done, and don’t intend to do, is re-read Murder in Mesopotamia. I want that book to remain forever fixed in my mind the way I first read it and experienced it, as a 12-year-old in a cabin on a ranch in Wyoming, with the summer sun setting at last. There are some things you just shouldn’t mess with.