The Lure of the Mystery
by our literary editor St. Clair Carr
This article was removed from the site some time ago, but we are restoring it because a) it seems to have got better with age, and b) our own Natalie Flemme cited it on the Johnny Eleven blog.Rex Stout contended that mystery novels were a product of democratic society. The genre is certainly democratic – at times it seems as if everyone in the Western world except me has written a mystery novel. You need only take a look at the mystery section in your local public library to realize that if all the English-speaking mystery writers settled in one place they'd create a city about the size of Vancouver.
The genre is thriving despite all this competition, so a lot of people must be buying. Is it because they're all democrats?
Certainly non-democratic societies don't seem to have produced any great mystery writers. For example, Soviet writers could have written novels about staunch Marxists solving mysteries through the application of the principles of dialectical materialism, but it doesn't seem that they did.
The chief characteristic of the mystery novel which might be considered democratic is its deference to the intellectual. Mysteries are not solved by reference to authority but by untrammelled exercise of the intellect.
The problem is that in some genres of the mystery the intellect being exercised is vastly superior to that of the average citizen of a modern democracy. Knowledge is not found by a member of the demos but by someone whose intellect is so highly developed that it seems superhuman – Sherlock Holmes, for example, or Hercule Poirot, or Mr. Stout's own Nero Wolfe.
The intellects of these three detectives are so highly developed that foils are required to create mystery. Holmes, Poirot, and Wolfe are regularly depicted as solving the mystery long before Watson, Hasting, or Goodwin. It is Watson's, Hastings', and Goodwin's bafflement that creates the mystery.
Of course, there are plenty of ordinary detectives about. Miss Marple had the same creator as Hercule Poirot, and Ed McBain's 87th Precinct detectives are certainly a pretty ordinary bunch. And Conan Doyle wanted to show how ordinary thought processes could produce seemingly extraordinary results. Unfortunately, to create interest he tricked out the stories with feats such as Holmes' monograph on identification of cigar ashes, something which is beyond your ordinary democrat.
Although some detectives are ordinary, the pre-eminence of extraordinary detectives in the genre casts some doubt on the idea that mysteries are an expression of democracy. Lord Peter Wimsey survives as a literary figure, Arthur Crook survives only in old copies of Anthony Gilbert's novels at the public library.
Of course another characteristic of the mystery novel which might be adduced as the source of its appeal is the mystery plot. Mystery novels usually have a tightly knit and action-filled plot. The problem with that explanation is that mystery plots are usually preposterous. As a literary exercise I once rated the plots of 132 mystery novels (time often hangs heavy on one's hands in Freelton) and classified 90 (70%) as implausible or dependent on highly improbable occurrences. Those 90 included 10 by Elizabeth Ferrars, successor to Agatha Christie as doyenne of the cozy subgenre, and 9 by Michael Innes. They also included works by such eminently satisfying mystery writers as Robert Barnard, Edmund Crispin, Elizabeth Daly, the peerless Sheila Radley, and Margaret Yorke, And many many more.
So it's not the mythical democratic character of mysteries that makes them popular, or the often silly plots. What is it, then?
Well, what else is there to read? In the fiction field there is no competition. As another review here points out, scientific writing has become largely fiction, but is just too freaky and avant-garde for the general public. Most statistics books, for example, are works of fiction, but the ideas in them seem bizarre to a reading public whose acquaintance with scientific inference is usually close to nil. And that outstanding fictional creation of the twentieth century, nuclear physics, is unlikely to appeal to a public most of whose members don't even know how to pronounce nuclear.
So the choice boils down to mysteries, romances and Gothics, so-called science fiction (as distinct from real scientific fiction), and so-called literary fiction (the Western genre seems to be moribund, if not extinct). The odd genre out here is of course literary fiction.
As I pointed out in the review of scientific fiction, the writers of contemporary literary fiction rarely know what they want to say, if indeed they want to say anything. While their literary "craft," as it is called, is occasionally superior to mystery writers', it is usually used to create books whose purpose is hard to discern and which, as I noted in another review on this site "are [often] written in a style characterized by outlandish description, unnatural grammatical constructions (using nouns as adverbs is a favourite stunt), and a general lack of concern for the traditional considerations of literary style."
People read genre fiction because it is better than most so-called serious fiction. The authors of genre fiction know what their books are about and know what they want to say – to your contemporary "serious" writer, of course, self-knowledge of that scope is too threatening. Better to take refuge in a supposedly postmodern disdain for the foundations of that craft of which they're so proud.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, the twentieth century saw a large number of artists of all types turning to meaninglessness, often with the desire to play a joke on the always gullible public for "serious" art. Andy Warhol comes to mind. As we have seen in yet another review on this site, authors keep playing this joke to this day, and the public for serious art keeps falling for it. Of course, that people miss the point is part of the art, but for those of us who haven't missed the point the joke is getting way tired.
Mysteries are popular because they exercise the intellect as literary fiction cannot and will not. Even those 90 novels whose plots I found inadequate kept me theorizing. The only theorizing I do while reading most contemporary serious fiction consists of trying to figure out why they published such a load of the old codswallop.
The Lure of the Mystery © John FitzGerald, 2003
Click the banner or click here for ACTUAL ANALYSIS
Reviews | Home