A Fine Romance

            It’s probably safe to say that most authors, by the time they finish a book, aren’t really sure about what they’ve done. When the writer finally types “The End,” he or she might think it all came together, but there’s always that nagging doubt. When you’ve been working on something for a long time and wrestling with the messy details, you can never be certain about how distorted your perspective might have become.

            In one regard, though, authors are something like actors in live theater. They have an opportunity to learn from the audience and its reaction. It takes time to get a reading — after all, the audience may roar at a line one night and chuckle just slightly the next. But after enough nights, the actors get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t.

            Last week marked the six-month anniversary of the publication of my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance, and I’m starting to get a handle on the reaction to it. One response in particular has surprised me.

Not Holmes or Brunetti

            Looking at detective stories over the years, one sees a range of attitudes with respect to the detective and the opposite (or occasionally, these days, the same) sex. There are loners, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot; happily married men like Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti or Patricia Moyes’ Henry Tibbett; and there are detectives, single and married, who get into edgy and loosely defined sexual relationships, like Benjamin Black’s Quirke or Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.

            A central element of my book is the protagonist’s romantic (as opposed to sexual, though there’s some overlap) relationship with a woman. It’s what spurs him to become involved in a murder case and to take actions independent of law enforcement that eventually lead to the solution.

            Writing the passages of the book that developed the romantic relationship was about the toughest part of the project. There was a lot of getting up from the computer and having another cup of coffee while trying to come up with the next line of dialogue in a scene. When I finally said it’s time to let go and publish, I was confident about other aspects of the book, but whether the romance worked was as much of a mystery to me as the murder in the book was to the sheriff.

The Reaction You Least Expect

            So out came the book, and as the weeks and months went by, I began to hear from people who had read it, and I tried to pay attention to those who offered specific comments, as opposed to those who said, “Loved your book, gotta go now.”

            Pretty early on, one comment, expressed in several variations but essentially the same, started to recur. It had to do with the romantic relationship at the heart of the book, and I can’t say what it was without giving away one of the book’s surprises. I can say that it wasn’t something I had expected in any way, and that at first it puzzled me. And yet I kept hearing it over and over again, particularly from female readers.

            This past weekend, my godfather Harold Stuiber, 90 years young and sharp as a tack, called to say he’d read The McHenry Inheritance, then made the comment to which I’ve been referring. Hearing it from him, the penny dropped for some reason, and I realized that people were making that comment because at some level they cared about the characters and their relationship. The puzzlement was over. The audience has been letting me know that the romance worked.

           

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.