Cultures & Their Disconnects

I read a book this past week that my sister gave me, A Killer in King’s Cove, the first of a mystery series by Iona Whishaw, a Canadian writer new to me but maybe not to the rest of you – the first book came out in 2015, her most recent in 2024, eleven of them so far.  King’s Cove is set in 1946.  The heroine, Lane Winslow, an SOE courier and clandestine op in Occupied France during the war, and troubled with PTSD, has exfiltrated herself to the woods of British Columbia, wanting to leave her past behind.  Not, of course, to be.  Lane, much like her cousin in spirit  Maisie Dobbs, is fated by temperament, a sense of duty, and her fatal curiosity, to be drawn toward the flame.

I’m making it sound more melodramatic than it is.  The story-telling is relaxed and even a little shaggy-dog, not my usual preference for hard-boiled blunt force trauma.  It leans on charm - by which I don’t mean fey, or whimsical, or labored hillbilly slapstick.  Characters who present as genuine, not tics or tropes.  Round, in other words, in the use of the word E.M. Forster gives us, not flat.  There’s something, I may say, Canadian about this, as distinct from British, a very different kettle of fish. 

This is actually where I’m going, here.  Another book I read, recently – again, a gift, so not something I might necessarily have stumbled on, all by my lonesome – is The Lost Man, by the Aussie writer Jane Harper, known on these shores for The Dry.  And then there’s the thoroughly subversive In the Woods, an Irish procedural, Tana French’s debut novel, which I also picked up this year.

The mystery story is essentially conservative.  This isn’t an original observation, on my part.  It’s generally agreed to.  The social compact is broken, murder being the most grievous breach of the common good, and the cop, or the private dick, or the avenging angel, knits up the raveled sleeve, and repairs the damage.  This is the classic set-up of an Agatha Christie, or S.S. Van Dine; not that it isn’t corny, and readily parodied, but Christie, for all that she may be dated, still puts the bar pretty high.  And moving forward, to somebody like Ross Macdonald, even at his most anarchic, in The Chill, say, the larger purpose of a social good is served.

Having said that, I’ve noticed some things mysteries and police procedurals don’t have in common, when set in exotic locales: not Christie, in Death on the Nile, or Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko books, the visiting fireman, but homegrown.  We’re used to the attitudes and accents of an Inspector Morse, or an Inspector Lewis, because we’ve seen a lot of PBS Mystery, and we’ve accustomed ourselves to how the Brits present these kinds of stories.  Cable broadens the overview.  I’ve mentioned Dr. Blake (Australian), Brokenwood or My Life Is Murder (New Zealand), and Blue Lights (Irish).  I’ve also picked up on Candice Renoir, in French, and the German police series Tatort – in its many different local iterations, the Dresden version my personal favorite, the Berlin storyline disturbing and too deeply creepy, even for me.  Speaking of, I also happened on the Hindi cop show Dahaad, which I wrote about on this blog, in September of last year.  Creepy, yes, but compelling.

Here’s my point.  Watching this stuff, which can come from very different cultural biases, you can be thrown off.  The case of Tatort, for example.  The series will do half a dozen episodes per season in a particular German city, so each season you get a few in Berlin, a few in Hamburg, a few in Frankfurt, and so on.  I followed, specifically, the Dresden episodes, over three seasons.  One of the things I found fascinating about it was the hangover from the not so distant past, of East Germany.  This attitude – shame, in fact, with some of the older characters – is of course not even present when the setting is Hamburg or Frankfurt.  For a German audience, it’s a crucial subtext. 

Same thing with Dahaad, this dissimilarity, or cognitive dissonance.  If you’re used to the rhythms of Bosch, or The Wire, or Barney Miller, for that matter, watching the beleaguered but furiously obstinate Bhaati and Singh fight their corner against religious politics, misogyny, caste prejudice, and plain willful ignorance is really something to behold.  Any lesser person would cave.  And although you might harbor the suspicion that Bollywood is going to simply paper over these intransigent differences in favor of a happy ending, by the actual end, you’re pleased not to be drowned in cynicism, although the happy is ambiguous.

We find, maybe, that something’s gained in translation, rather than lost.  I know there are other examples of this phenomenon that don’t in fact work, because I’ve tried to watch them and given up, but that doesn’t signify.  What’s fascinating to me is how these shows manage as best as they do, to tell stories that only work in their own context.  It seems obvious, but it’s not, that the conventions of a narrative depend on the inner tension between discipline and chaos, and arbitrary social structures aren’t just good manners, but a survival mechanism.  In this particular narrative construct, the Western hero is often an avatar of indiscipline; that’s not the only model for a story. 

Danger in Paradise

Back in the days when radio was the cutting edge medium, I remember rushing in from school to catch the latest episode of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and my dad's banning a safari themed series during our dinner hour. But the radio play that made the deepest impression (and perhaps foreshadowed my later literary career) was an overheard adult offering about a young couple who are menaced by a vicious escaped convict on a deserted tropical beach. 

I don't remember the name of the play or the denoument, just the set up: The couple are enjoying the beach when the husband is somehow trapped below the tide line under a heavy timber, probably the relic of a pier. The wife is frantic to release him and as she struggles, the convict appears. Ever after, that template of a threat of death in paradise has seemed to me the perfect recipe for suspense.

Maybe that is why I enjoyed Tana French's The Searcher. Granted, rural Ireland's weather is not exactly tropical, but the Republic's scenery is superb. Cal Hooper, unhappily divorced and recently retired from the Chicago police force, sees Ardnakelty as a tranquil rural haven after too many years on mean urban streets. The fishing is good, there will be rabbit shooting (and eating) after his gun permit comes through, the locals are friendly, if eccentric, and he enjoys putting his much-neglected cottage into good repair.

Life in Ardnakelty is pleasant and undemanding until a scruffy, half-feral youngster seeks his help in finding a missing sibling. Cal has all kinds of good reasons, legal, personal, and intellectual for rejecting this plea, but gradually Trey Reddy secures his help in finding out just where nineteen year old Brendan Reddy might be.

Not too tough an assignment for an ex-cop who did a stint in the missing persons division, but there are complications. French, who lives in Dublin and who has written a much-praised series featuring various members of a Garda force, is very good on cultural misunderstandings and on the ways that isolated rural communities both spread and conceal information.

As Cal gets acclimatized, he meets his neighbors and discovers the linchpins and undercurrents of the quaint and individualistic village. The rural area is not crime free, either; the young men being, as Mart, his bachelor farmer neighbor points out, uncertain about what they should do and how they should live now that traditional ways and occupations are obsolete. The results are too frequently recklessness and sometimes violence.

Although Cal starts out thinking that Chicago was complicated and Ardnakelty, simple, he eventually has to recalibrate his thinking, since few of his new friends and neighbors are exactly what they seem. Even after Cal solves his mystery, he still faces the bigger question about his own life. 

Tana French

Given that the same old problems and cruelties afflict Ardnakelty as afflict Chicago, is he committed to this new community, to the Reddy child, and to Lena, who offers him a pup and maybe companionship, and to Mart, the farmer, and to folk like the indispensable shopkeeper, Noreen?

It is not just that rural Irish ways are not mid-western USA ways or that their common language is not without mysterious subtleties and pitfalls. Cal also has to decide to stay with full knowledge that human frailty resides everywhere or else sell up and make another attempt at paradise, a paradise that he surely knows will come with its own snake.

---

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

By Art Taylor

Yesterday was my birthday—March 16, for anyone reading this later—and having a birthday so close to St. Patrick's Day always made it one of my favorite holidays as a child. I was and still am insistent about wearing green on March 17—my favorite color generally—and I remember wearing a shamrock pin to school one year as well. When my dad filled out the 1980 U.S. Census, he put down Irish for the question on ancestry (at my urging), though I don't think either of my parents have actually traced that back. (The likelihood is that it's true, given the predominance of Scotch-Irish settlements in my native North Carolina.) In another little quirk: At one point, much younger of course, I thought I might actually be a leprechaun—wishful thinking for those of us of smaller stature.

More recently, when my wife Tara and I got married, we went to Ireland on our honeymoon—including being in Dublin for Bloomsday!—and a few years later, I led a student group to Ireland again for a creative writing Winter Study Abroad. And I'll admit that I have a fondness for Irish writers and for stories set in Ireland. I was reading just recently some of Edna O'Brien's short fiction, and William Trevor's stories are (as anyone who's read him knows) among the best ever, and then another Irish writer, John McGahern, wrote an odd little story that still stands as one of my favorites: "The Beginning of an Idea." As with so many crime fiction fans, Tana French is at the top of my list of great mystery writers today, and just this week, I was excited to see that another friend in the mystery community, Sheila Connolly, has a new book out in her County Cork series: Cruel Winter—which was timely in several ways, since the big winter storm helped to welcome it into the world! There's dozens more writers I could likely point to here, but these are the ones that jumped to mind first.

Despite my long-standing love of Ireland and the Irish, however, I have to admit that I no longer count St. Patrick's Day as a favorite holiday. In fact, some aspects of the day have overwhelmed my otherwise long-standing enthusiasms for it—and the same is true of New Year's Eve (which may already give you a hint of where I'm going with this). 

Now, anyone who knows me well knows how much I appreciate a nice cocktail, but especially at my advancing age (circling back to that birthday I mentioned in the opening), going out on a raucous drinking binge is about the last thing I want to do, and in my mind both New Year's and St. Patrick's have become synonymous with those types of parties: crowded bars, overindulgence, and all the fall-out from that overindulgence—ultimately less a toast to the occasion than an excuse for excessive alcohol consumption.

Or maybe I'm just being curmudgeonly. 

For those who still do head out for public celebrations of St. Patrick's Day, are my impressions actually the case? Or have I fallen prey to some stereotypes about the festivities?

And maybe a better question: For those of you who, like me, admire Ireland and the Irish, how do you raise a toast to today? 

I'll be sipping a glass of Green Spot myself at some point—and maybe revisiting a favorite story or two. And I'll be sporting some green too—one tradition that I inevitably keep. 

However you celebrate, Happy St. Patrick's Day to all!
 

"Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery"

By Art Taylor

As you might be able to tell from this post and my previous ones here, my teaching at George Mason University is dominating my mind these days—and lately it's not only the semester I'm enmeshed in but next semester as well that's occupying a lot of my mental energy.

In the spring 2016 semester, I'll be teaching a graduate-level course for the first time: "Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery." That's not my title, I should stress, and I have some issues with the idea of what's meant by the "the literary mystery"—a phrase that could go in a number of directions: mysteries that have books or bookish folks at the core of them maybe? But as intended primarily for aspiring writers in the MFA program here at Mason, I think the goals of the course are potentially a good one: an exploration of genre fiction, a look at the places where these persistent classifications of genre fiction and literary fiction blur, and a study of what so-called "literary writers" can learn from genre writers. To put all this in context, back when I was in the MFA program at Mason myself, I had a fellow writer tell me he'd finally read a Stephen King book and was surprised that it was actually good!

Stephen King

More context: I remember at panel on genre fiction at an AWP conference several years ago, where a writer/professor in another MFA program talked about the difference between his students interested in writing genre fiction and his students interested in writing literary fiction: If a he told students writing fantasy that they might want to read Gilgamesh or The Aeneid or any of a number of "high literary" works, they'd have it read by the next week, whereas if he suggested to literary-minded students that they should read a thriller or a sci-fi novel, they'd drag their heels.

There's lots of room to learn, clearly, from lots of different writers and lots of different kinds of writing—and I've often been fascinated, often written myself about, these delineations between kinds of books, the prejudices and biases at the core of such attitudes, and the continuing evolution of writers attitudes toward genre, how those writers might be informed by formal traditions on the one hand and how they might challenge them on another.

Much more to say on all this, but I mostly wanted to share some of the books I'm considering teaching—and invite others to chime in with books I might add to the reading list, whether one for the syllabus itself or a supplemental list for students to explore on their own.

The course will start out with a selection of short stories surveying both the foundational history of the genre (Poe and Conan Doyle there, among others) and also various subgenres within the larger world of crime fiction: the traditional mystery, the hard-boiled tale, the noir story, domestic suspense, the police procedural, true crime writing, etc. etc. But once that foundation is laid in the first few weeks, here's the list of full novels—and one feature film!—that have risen to the top so far (in no particular order yet but all, purposefully, pointedly, from 2000 onward):

• A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny
• Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley
• In the Woods, Tana French
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
• The End of Everything, Megan Abbott
• Country Hardball, Steve Weddle
• Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan 
• The City & the City, China Miéville
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

Thoughts? Additions?

I have a second list of strong contenders too that will be on a growing supplemental list, so.... Thanks in advance for suggestions and additions!

Settings

     Fiction, at its best, does more than just tell a story -- it tells a story in a setting.  Good fiction immerses the reader – we are propelled into the narrative and into its setting.  And the setting crafted by the author reflects the world around the author, or the author’s characters, at the time of the story.  The story told in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is part and parcel with the French Revolution.  A Dickens novel is often almost as much about setting as it is about story.  Oliver Twist is dependent on the injustices that were a side effect, and a very real side effect, of the industrial revolution.  And as I noted some months back, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in fact grew out of a non-fiction essay that Dickens wrote addressing the deplorable mid-nineteenth century working conditions in England and the need for child labor reform.

    No surprise, then, that setting is also a major component of great mysteries.  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes cannot be separated from Victorian England.  I add the proviso of “Doyle’s Sherlock” since, to my mind, the BBC series Sherlock does a sensational job of re-imagining Holmes in modern day London.  But even there, it is modern day London, with its Blackberries and computers, that provides the setting backbone to the stories.

The Doorbell Rang (NOT the newest Clint Eastwood sequel

!)

    In Rex Stout’s 1965 Nero Wolfe novel The Doorbell Rang, which The Nation described as “the best civil liberties mystery of all time” the story is dependent on then-current FBI abuses under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover who, famously, Wolfe leaves standing on the stoop of his brownstone at the end of the book.  Similarly, Ellery Queen’s The Glass Village, and its theme that accusation must never be a substitute for evidence, is dependent on its setting -- the McCarthy era that pervaded the mid-1950s when the novel was written.

    To read these books is to experience what it was like to live in the eras depicted. It is no surprise that all of this remains true today.  Two recent (and sensational) new mysteries by a pair of gifted writers, Tana French and Gillian Flynn, who are separated by many thousands of miles, tell stories in different  settings, but settings that are still eerily analogous and in each case reflective of our time.  More on that below, but first, some background on each author.

Tana French

Gillian Flynn

    Gillian Flynn grew up in Kansas City Missouri, a state in which her three mystery novels are set.  Before she became a novelist Flynn was was a television critic for Entertainment Weekly. She was educated at the University of Kansas, and received a masters degree from Northwestern.  Her first novel, Sharp Objects, was a 2007 Edgar nominee for best first novel.

    Tana French in fact received the Edgar for best first novel when In the Woods, was published the following year  Although she was born in the United States, Tana French spent most of her early years abroad.  She received a degree in acting from the University of Dublin, and since 1990 has resided in Dublin, where each of her four mystery novels is set. 

    So, other than leaping into the world of mystery fiction within one year of each other there is very little that either of these women share.  Yet each has crafted their most recent novel in settings that, while thousands of miles apart, nevertheless resonate with common themes.

    A teaser on Gillian Flynn’s website describes her new book, Gone Girl, as follows:

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

And here is the description of Tana French’s new book, Broken Harbor, as set forth on her website:  

On one of the half-built, half-abandoned “luxury” developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care.

    The principal setting of each novel is therefore very different.  What, after all, does a small Missouri town  have in common with the outskirts of Dublin?  But there is an undercurrent in each setting that is the same and that is reflective of the times in which we live.  Each author has taken the pulse of the present and has built a setting for her novel that rings true and, as a result, ensures that each story rings true. 

    Broken Harbor is set in a community of new homes on the coast of Ireland that failed as a result of the economic downturn that has shaped many lives in recent years.  The home that the unfortunate family lives in is surrounded by abandoned or half finished homes, and the couple at the heart of the novel has had to grapple with the horrors of losing a job in an economy where jobs are increasingly hard to find.  From that setting, which is to say from their world, the story springs.

    And that community of “McMansions” that is the setting for Gone Girl?  Well, there are remarkable similarities between Gillian Flynn’s Missouri housing development and that depicted in Tana French’s novel.  The couple at the heart of Gillian Flynn’s novel also find themselves in a development that is a casualty of world-wide economic downturn.  Like the family in Broken Harbor, the couple in Gone Girl is surrounded by homes that are abandoned and in foreclosure, and other homes that stand as half completed derelicts.  As in Broken Harbor neighboring homes are abandoned as a result of foreclosure, or sit half completed.  And in each book there are wandering homeless people living or gathering in the empty homes.  And here, too, the central characters in the mystery have lost their own jobs as a result of economic downturn. 

    I have written before that I hate spoilers.  So you will get no more of the plots of these wonderful newly-published novels from me.  But they are both great reads, and like many mysteries and other well written books over the years, they gain strength from the fact that they are set in a world that we know.  The heart of each story beats to the world’s pulse.  The setting may be a bit bleak in each case, but, after all, that never stopped Dickens.