Even more French books, mostly appropriate for children

Since I could read, I read.  I studied French in the winter and spring mostly by reading French, lots of it, in many forms, constrained only by the sense that I should stay near my collège reading level, which was barely a constraint.  Don’t get stupid and jump to Rabelais or Proust.  Plenty to read right here.

I could assemble, for example, a little Theater of the Absurd unit: Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, Jean Tardieu, and Eugène Ionesco, ending with a trip back to Alfred Jarry.  Ubu Roi is strictly speaking assigned at the lycée, the secondary school, level, but once in a while I would push the boundary.

Or in preparation for the Quais du Polar, I could read crime novels, mysteries – books that were on the collège reading lists since, as part of what ought to be a basic literary education, the French teach literary history, including the histories of specific genres.  Thus my annotated edition of Thierry Jonquet’s La Vie de ma mère! (The life of my mother!, 1994) included essays on the history of the mystery from Poe onwards, with an emphasis on the French contribution, which is heavy on the anti-hero, like  the gentleman burglar who stars in Arsène Lupin gentleman cambrioleur (1907).  There is a student edition of this collection of crime stories, as well as one for Gaston Leroux’s locked room mystery La mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907).  The editions exist, but how often are these books actually assigned?  A mystery of its own, how the potential curriculum relates to the actual one.

I was on a guided tour of the chateau of the Duke de Uzès, the tourists being the middle-aged French people one might expect.  The guide at one point said (I translate) “I now propose to you a visit to” (arches eyebrows) “the Yellow Room,” and everyone laughed.  Everyone got and enjoyed, more than I did, the reference to the century-old Leroux mystery, or perhaps one of it film adaptations.

A curious feature of both the Leroux novel and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories is that they are both explicitly competing with Sherlock Holmes.  The thief or detective cannot just be ingenious, but has to defeat his English competition.  They both have explicit Holmes characters.  Leblanc’s is named Herlock Sholmès, which is a great gag, but Leroux’s use of Holmes is even more outrageous.

Speaking of outrageous, it is outrageous that that Thierry Jonquet novel is not available in English.  It is of high ethical interest.  A Parisian schoolkid, a Serbian immigrant, is torn between his criminal friends and a more normal French life.  But he does not know that he is torn.  How would he know, he is twelve.  It is a battle between innocence and experience.  Experience, at the end of this bleak novel, is destructive, at least for someone that young.

This book was a productive mistake for me, and not the only one I made.  The language was extremely difficult, with a lot of slang including the subset where the protagonist takes the “tromé” to the mall and then listens to some “zicmu.”  It’s like a word game.  Between the language, the violence, and the sexual content (things the character observes), I thought, this is for junior high kids?  But collège extends to 9th or 10th grade, which is a long ways from 6th or 7th.  I made this mistake several times, trying a book that was not too hard for me but was very hard.  The mistake was so valuable that now I do it deliberately.

I could keep going.  I have not written about J. M. G. Le Clézio, or Marguerite Yourcenar, or Joseph Kessel, all collège level, or Annie Ernaux or Raymond Queneau, successful lycée-level experiments.  At some point, I do want to read Proust and Montaigne in French, that seems achievable, but I am patient.

Today at the Quais du Polar: French class and translation class - maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great

A better view of the Quais du Polar bookstore on Sunday morning.  I figured out that I could go upstairs for a picture.  While we were waiting in line for the building to open, employees were hauling in more books.

Today was like a school day for me.  Aural comprehension day.  I went to a discussion of the social noir by my new anti-hero Jean-Bernard Pouy and several other writers, all in French, too fast, too difficult.  Pouy has written, I learned today, a crime novel featuring and partly narrated by a telepathic cow.  Larchmütz 6532 (1999) is the title.  I am learning a lot.

The next panel was about food in mysteries, this time in French and Italian but fortunately much easier to understand, but still exhausting, eventually, and the writer who was hardest to understand – who spoke most rapidly – seemed honestly way more interested in food as a vehicle for the delivery of poison than as an expression of culture.  I know, a mystery writer  who can’t stop talking about poison – a comic figure I have now encountered in so-called real life.

I ended the festival at a Translation Joust, a friendly but rigorous public translation seminar.  Two young French translators independently worked up the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith, not really a mystery or detective writer at all, but a testament to the expansiveness of the French term polar.  The two translations and the original were projected, side by side, for all to see.

I first thought that this process would be painful for the translators, but at least as much wincing came from the author.  More than once, after the translators went over a difficult phrase, Smith would say a bit about what he had been thinking and finish with “But I think I’m going to cut that.”  Once, we, the audience, or at least some of us, had to overrule him.  “Noooo, noooo!”

Smith is, in this book, this chapter, at least, a blatant Faulknerian.  Light stream of consciousness, long sentences with biblical cadences and surprising intrusions, followed by strings of fragments.  If these translators were expecting a mystery, boy were they surprised.  This text was hard.

There was one relatively simple sentence where the translators made different choices for every possible word.  As one translator noted, they had just three words in common, and those were the equivalents of “he,” “the,” and “of.”  Different nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  For “street lamps,” one “réverbères” and one “lampadaires.”  And – here is the great lesson – both sentences were good translations!

In ten years of reading book blogs, I rarely saw anyone reading William Faulkner, and much of what I did see was in a spirit of fear and loathing.  I don’t, as usual, get it.  But today I saw a real Faulknerian get the same response.

A few older members of the audience seemed genuinely freaked out by the end of the phrase “he walked in the satisfaction of night,” which both translators had as “la satisfaction de la nuit,” just word for word.  An “anglicism,” the protestors said.  A translation error.  But the translators pushed back – “satisfaction” is an ordinary French word; it is the English that is unusual, poeticized.  Over-written, maybe, but truly Smith’s, an example of his style, which has a strong flavor.  It is the common problem, that a reader dislikes an author’s style but blames the translator.

It was to a different example, but this response of Smith's was good: “maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great.”  I like authors who think like that.

This was an instructive session, an instructive book festival.  Nerve-wracking for the author, in this case, but they usually seemed to be having a good time.  Get your mystery novel written and get invited, that is my advice to you.

noir, metaphysical and hopeless - having fun at the Quais du Polar

The core of the Quais du Polar is a giant bookstore.  The big hall of the Bourse, the 19th century stock exchange, is occupied by ten local booksellers, all medium to small independents, with huge heaps of books, the piles sometimes concealing the authors.  How the authors are assigned to particular bookstores I do not know.  C. J. Tudor, signing away, took better photos than I did.

The last time I was in this hall, it was for an organic wine expo.  That was also nice, and much less crowded.  The French are more serious about crime novels than about organic wine!

The other surprise has been how muted the publishers have been.  Aside from sponsoring the hamburger truck, they are concealed.  I cannot help but contrast to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was about publishers, agents, and book rights, not books.  The Quais du Polar is about books and writers.  And readers.  I see people reading more here, reading one of their new, newly-signed books.

I had the public library’s copy of Jean-Bernard Pouy’s A Brief History of the Noir Novel with me, and I wanted to get him to sign it, but ma femme seemed to be against that.  I asked Pouy and he seemed fine with it, but he would be, since one chapter of his book is devoted to pessimists and nihilists and two chapters contain nothing but weird stuff, the craziest books.  Has anyone wandering by read Peter Loughram’s The Train Ride (1966), for example?  “[T]his descent into hell is one of the most noir, metaphysical and hopeless novels that the history of the genre warms in its moist and malodorous folds” (p. 80, translation mine, be suspicious).

So anyway I bought my own copy; he signed that; the library book is pristine.

I went to an event featuring Patricia MacDonald, Camilla Grebe, C. J. Tudor, and two debut novelists, all of whom have recently written novels about old crimes that have returned, so that the novels have multiple time frames.  The moderator said that his Belgian teen students hated flashbacks because flashbacks are for adults, who look into the past, while young people look to the future – I congratulate whichever Belgian kid came up with that bit of sophistry.  The mystery writers were dismayed, visibly dismayed, every one of them.  Otherwise, this panel of professionals gave predictably professional answers.  Patricia MacDonald only spoke in French, which impressed me.

More doomy and interesting was a panel of Deon Meyer (South African) and Yana Vagner (Russian), both mystery writers who have written disease-apocalypse novels.  Meyer’s book was openly a kind of Year Zero Utopia, but Vagner’s seemed truly grim.  Her direct quote about her characters, transcribed into my notebook: “They all know that they are doomed.”

The happy part of the story is that Vagner, not a professional writer, not a fiction writer, wrote the novel directly to her blog, a chapter at a time, picking up an audience, and a publisher, and a movie deal along the way.  It’s the blogger dream!  Meyer was stunned, and kept interrupting her with questions.  Stunned and impressed.  Me, too.

One more crime day.

The Quai du Polars, Lyon's big detective novel festival, begins tomorrow - everything is in everything

The Quais du Polar, Lyon’s author-centered celebration of the polar, the crime novel, begins tomorrow.  Readers of Book around the Corner are well aware of the pleasures of this book festival.  My impression, not just from her but from other things I have read, is that it is a favorite of authors, which is why it attracts such a substantial group of international mystery authors.  Camilla Läckberg, Harlan Coben, and Ian Rankin are the biggest names this year.  I think.  See below.

Of course the festival is attractive to authors.  It is in Lyon.  Just think of what they will be given to eat and drink.  I am thinking of it now.  I plan to eat and drink more or less whatever they are having.  Lyon is so pleasant, and so well-fed.

The second* real problem, for me, is that I do not particularly care about crime novels, not as such, not as a fan, and thus the third problem is that I do not feel like I know that much about them.

The latter problem I know how to fix, by reading.  Over the last several months, with the help of the surprising English-language collection of the Lyon municipal library, I read many crime writers I had never read before, one book apiece: Agatha Christie, John Buchan, Erle Stanley Gardner, B. Traven, Anthony Berkeley, Francis Iles (the last two are the same person, I know), Geoffrey Household, Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Stanley Ellin, Craig Johnson (he’ll be at the festival – maybe he is also one of the biggest names).  I relied heavily on the “Top 100” lists of the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Mystery Writers of America, alongside the odder and more interesting 100 Best Crime & Mystery Books by H. R. F. Keating.

I also read, in French, books by Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Fred Vargas, Thierry Jonquet (plus another Georges Simenon).

My tastes in the genre run to weird stuff, anti-mysteries, but I enjoyed all of these writers on their own terms.  They all had their surprises.

Maybe I like crime fiction more than I realize.  Jean-Bernard Pouy’s Une brève histoire du roman noir (A Brief History of the Crime Novel, 2009) invokes, in the first chapter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Émile Zola, and Thomas de Quincey along with many other examples that I have mostly read.  He argues for, well:

For example.  Oedipus Rex ( - 430), by Sophocles, is a crime novel.  The proof is that it has been published in the “Série noire” in 1994, and that was at the time more than a cultural provocation, but the confession, late, that in literature also, and maybe mostly, everything is in everything.  (p. 13, translation mine)

The “Série noire” has been the French prestige series for mysteries, home of Chandler and Hammett, for example, since 1945.  I had a tiny suspicion that Pouy was joking (and he is, with the word “proof,”) but the bookstore at the mall had three copies of this specific Oedipe roi on the shelf.  In the mystery section.  Three copies of a translation of Sophocles.  In the bookstore at the mall**.

This Pouy book is great fun.  He’ll be at the Quais du Polar, too.  The festival should also be great fun.  My hope is that I will come across things worth writing about here.

*  The first problem is that the language of the Quais du Polar is French.  How good is Ian Rankin’s French?  I guess I will find out.

**  The mall is adjacent, almost attached, to the big public library, where I am writing this piece.

Bookish travel notes from an unbookish vacation

New in Krimis:  Or new to me.  Animal mysteries.  Zoo mysteries.  These categories might overlap.  After the success of Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi (2005), in which a flock of sheep solve a murder, a wave of animal detectives was inevitable, but I was not expecting a novel in which the sleuths are a pair of meerkats, a book I held in my hands in a Viennese bookstore.  If you had an idea for a mystery starring a raccoon or a flock of crows but thought, no, the whole thing is much too stupid, I say squelch your doubts and write the dang thing before someone beats you to it.  Cash in.

Similarly, we came across a Krimi in which the detective was Theodor Storm, who in fact did help solve crimes in his role as a judge in Husum, although the novel is set long before that, and before he wrote his great uncanny novellas, when Storm was a young Romantic poet.  Who investigated murders.  What a bad idea.  But now my own notion of a series of mysteries starring Marcel Proust only looks half as dumb.  The enigmatic stranger with the prosthetic leg, who may be the killer but turns out to be an ally, is Arthur Rimbaud.  Faked his death.  I’m giving that away for free.  I’m  not gonna write any Proust mysteries.  See above – the time is right for your series of Detective Whitman / Inspector Eliot / Special Agent Tzara mysteries.  Do not hesitate.  Either Eliot; both would make terrific detectives.  Tristan Tzara is the Dada Detective – good, right?  Better than Theodor Storm or a pair of meerkats.

Meine Frau read a zoo mystery, Das Schweigen des Lemming (The Silence of the Lemming, 2006) by Stefan Slupetzky, in which Lemming, a security guard at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna investigates the death of a penguin, which maybe sounds a little thin, but it turns out the novel is full of detail about Vienna’s art world, including, for example, the 2003 theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar, which I finally got to see with my own eyes.

At one point – this is all secondhand, since I could not read the book myself – an informant needs to meet with Lemming.  Knowing the detective is a fan of Thomas Bernhard, he suggests they meet in the Kunsthistoriches Museum – “You know where.”  He means in the Titian room, in front of the painting “Man with a White Beard,” the setting of Old Masters (1985).  It had been so long since Lemming read Bernhard’s novel that he has to run to the bookstore to look up which painting is meant, but still, do you see what I am getting at here?

In Vienna, the stature of Thomas Bernhard is so high that in a mystery about the death of a penguin it is assumed that readers are comfortable with casual references to specific elements of Bernhard novels.  We stumbled upon Bernhard frequently, even in the Jewish Museum (Bernhard was not Jewish), where a clip from one of his plays was deployed ironically.  The Vienna-Bernhard phenomenon is unusual.

That Titian room is magnificent.  Like the room with the Cellini, it was closed the last time I was in Vienna.

Well, that’s something.  My post-vacation resolution is to make Wuthering Expectations more breezy and shallow.  Off to a good start.  Tomorrow, I will continue with a book I have read rather than books I have seen but cannot read.

They ate in religious silence - enjoying a Camilleri detective novel

I’m trying to take it easy, so I read a mystery, The Potter’s Field (2008) by Andrea Camilleri, the thirteenth novel featuring Inspector Montalbano.  This puts me two novels behind in English, seven (!) in Italian, although my understanding is that Camilleri is planning to wrap up the series.

The last thing I want to do is review book #13 of 21.  The first thing I want to do is share the following passage.  Montalbano has been accused by his superior of committing a juvenile prank on a journalist; Montalbano is of course guilty, so he blusters: 

“Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation?  Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated!  You’re accusing me of an act – no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant severe punishment!  As if I were a common idiot or gambler!  That journalist must be possessed to think such a thing!”

End of climax.  The inspector inwardly congratulated himself.  He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoevsky.  Had the commissioner noticed?  Of course not!  The man was ignorant as a goat.  (66)

An astute reader may see a clue as to why I have read so many books in this series.  This stunt is not exactly typical, but the Montalbano novels are always at least lightly salted with literature.  The detective is even named after a Spanish mystery writer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.  Montalbano sometimes reads Montalbán’s books, but not in The Potter’s Field, where he turns to “a book by Andrea Camilleri from a few years back,” not an Inspector Montalbano novel but one that “[takes] off from a passage in a novel by Leonardo Sciascia” (95).

I wonder if it is relevant that Italian literature has an unusual figure, a canonical writer who specialized in mysteries.  How else to deal with his great topic, the Sicilian Mafia?  Camilleri works the same ground, updating Sciascia, so it is no surprise that he frequently acknowledges his predecessor.

Then there is the food, the Sicilian cuisine, eaten with discrimination and gusto (this is another clue - nay, sufficient proof):

Having finished the first cannolo, he took another.

“I see you’ve helped yourself,” said Pasquano, coming in and grabbing one himself.

They ate in religious silence, the corners of their mouths smeared with ricotta cream.  Which, by the rules, must be removed with a slow, circular movement of the tongue.  (44-5)

Meine Frau began reading the Montalbano books in German, several years before they were published in English.  The German editions included recipes!  Which is admittedly a little silly.  Few readers would have access to the proper ingredients.

The mystery in The Potter’s Field is an unusually good one, which is a bonus.

I suppose there are a number of detective series set all over the world as good as Camilleri’s.  Or, depending on my mood, I doubt there are many others as good.  But I do not know either way.

If Wuthering Expectations ever switches to an all-mystery or all-science fiction format, it will be because I have succumbed to the pleasure of being able to read three hundred books a year.

Stephen Sartarelli translated this one, not to mention all of them.  A good gig.

A Death in Vienna, a pretty good psychological historical mystery

A Death in Vienna (2005, Mortal Mischief in the UK, it seems) is a historical mystery by Frank Tallis, the first of what will soon by six books starring a Holmes-like psychiatrist who solves crimes in turn of the century Vienna alongside a Watson-like police detective.  Tallis gives himself the amusing challenge of a combination locked room \ disappearing bullet mystery.  Sigmund Freud appears as a character in some of the novel’s best scenes; he is presented primarily as a collector, of antique figurines and Yiddish jokes.  The novel is pretty good.

I could complain about the usual stuff – the arbitrariness of the central mystery, particularly of the solution; the absurdity of the climax (mystery authors, I beg you: risk anti-climax!); the thinness of all but a few characters; the cut-and-paste assemblage of much of the historical detail (a Mahler concert in this chapter, a Klimt exhibit in another); and worst of all the unnecessarily manipulative withholding of information in the name of a misguided attempt at suspense.  Within the world of mysteries, again, all of this is pretty good, but that is not the world in which I live.

Instead, I want to emphasize something interesting.  The murder mystery plot is paralleled by one of the psychiatrist’s cases, a woman who is suffering from partial paralysis due to a repressed trauma.  The psychiatrist hero works on the mystery for a chapter, then treats his patient in the next.  The medical case is entirely unrelated to the mystery, or, really, it is merely thematically related.  The most important connection is general:  the methodological similarity between solving the whodunnit and treating the patient, piecing together the clues from her behavior, her symptoms, to solve her personal mystery.

I have no doubt that there have been other psychiatrist detectives and other mysteries with this structure, but it was new to me, and more importantly the clinical sections were completely convincing and interesting for their own sake.  Tallis is himself a clinical psychiatrist.  He is enormously knowledgeable about Vienna, but he seemed more deeply invested in the practice and history of his profession.

Unfortunately, Tallis eventually follows formula and pulls the parallel lines together, although not as gruesomely as I feared – say the killer discovers the relationship kidnaps the patient ethical dilemma heroic rescue shot in the shoulder blah blah blah.  Tallis’s plot is quite a bit better than that, although it is hard to forgive this:

Amelia paused respectfully before saying, “There is an error?”

“My good woman,” said Holz, “surely you do not mean to ascribe theta with these parameter values? An elementary mistake!”

Holz tossed the paper back at Amelia, who caught it before it fluttered to the floor.  (420)

Oh no, Herr Professor Holz, she picked that value of theta on purpose, thus solving, with mathematics, the missing bullet part of the mystery.

I am following the daring reviewer strategy of only quoting the single worst part of the novel.  If you can tolerate that, I assure you that the rest of the novel is better written and much less ridiculous, and it was satisfying plane and train reading.

The same dang thing over and over again

I just started reading Alessandro Manzoni's On the Historical Novel (1850), which includes many of the arguments I and others have made this week, couched in a subtle, ironic rhetoric. I think it's ironic - maybe he means exactly what he says. So far, Manzoni has used his essay to completely demolish the historical novel: "it is the historical novel itself that is completely at fault."* Manzoni is himself the author of one of the best historical novels ever written, The Betrothed (1827), so perhaps I am misreading.

Regardless, it's full of useful ideas. I may return to it soon. A Professional Reader might have thought to look into the subject before writing so much. Ah well.

Anyway, my final complaint or concern or prejudice is more about books that come in series than about historical novels as such. The mystery series is the mode of our age, what people read. On trips to Germany, I have marvelled at the richness of the literary culture, about the attention received by serious books. But what do Germans really read, really, more than anything else? Mysteries that come in series. I'm using "mystery" generically, including thrillers and such - the Owen Parry novel I read claimed to be a "novel of historical suspense."

I know that people still write and read romances and sea stories and knights-in-armor stories. But I do not believe that those genres have the equivalent of the amazing rack of books I recently found in a library, a collection of knitting mysteries, and candle making mysteries, and gardening mysteries. Used book store mysteries. Antiquing mysteries. Pie mysteries. I am for some reason currently using a bookmark that advertises a series of handbag mysteries.**

Everything gets shoveled into mysteries now, including stories about the birth of Italian Futurism and stories about New York City midwives. When I described my pile of six mysteries, I didn't say anything about the plots, not because of concern about spoiling the surprise, but because the plots don't matter, not in any of them. The settings matter, a lot, and the choice of detail, and the voice. But the plot, the actual mystery in the mystery, is always just something pulled off the shelf of time-tested devices.

Because the clever author (and every author I tried was clever enough) knows that we cannot just march from the beginning of the mystery to the end, the story has to be well-larded with incidental material that slows us down, with each episode of the novel giving us 1) one piece of genuine information, 2) several interesting but in the end deceptive pieces of information, and 3) directions to the next episode. There must be writers who can break free of this formula. But if they do so, are they still writing mysteries?

So if I find myself wearied with the repetition found among six different authors, I can guess how I'd feel reading more books by the same author. Steve Hockensmith's cowboy Watson and Holmes are in four novels now. Besides the train, one's on a ranch in Montana, one's in San Francisco, one's in Texas. That's something. But they're really just the same dang thing over and over again, aren't they?

I suspect that's true of more authors than Hockensmith. It's not what I'm looking for in fiction. With some time - a year, years - I'm likely to try one of these authors again, probably Parry or Hockensmith. The memory of the original pleasure will have dimmed, and I will be ready to enjoy the same dang thing. That formula works in one way - I turned every page of every book, faster and faster until I got to the end.

* P. 72 of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, tr. by Sandra Bermann. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

** Now if someone were to write or has written a pie sea story, I might just read it. 'Cause the idea is so stupid.

Purpose

On Tuesday, Margaret D, host of the remarkable HistoricalNovels.info site, asked a pertinent question: why even bother with a historical novel? Meaning, the historical aspect should have some sort of point. My pile of five novels do pretty well by that standard. It's the contemporary mystery that turned out to be pointless.

Here's where I say nice things about Victoria Thompson and Murder on St. Mark's Place. I didn't like it that much, but I understood why she chose the story she did. In this novel, so-called "charity girls" are being beaten and killed. "Charity girls" are immigrant girls, factory workers, mostly, who pick up men at dance halls. They're not prostitutes, they insist, because they don't take money, just gifts.

The detective is a New York midwife, now living in a working class area, but actually from an old, wealthy Dutch family. She is independent, tough, a typical literary "strong female character." The world of young women who go dancing every night and go to hotels, or worse, with strange men is completely unknown to her. She's an outsider who can fill the reader in on all of the shocking details. This is how we get out to Coney Island, by the way, to see that Elephant Hotel - that's a place where men take their dates.

I thought this was all pretty interesting. The novel is not merely about violence against women, but also about the social changes of the past one hundred years. Some things have improved enormously for women in this situation - their incomes are dramatically different, for example. But the fear of violence, if not the risk, from men, strangers or otherwise, remains.

So Thompson's then/now comparison has some power, a resonance that the mystery itself, standard genre business, lacked. The novel has plenty of problems, but it has a meaningful purpose.

I'm pretty sure that Michael Pearce's A Dead Man in Trieste has a serious purpose as well. I just didn't understand the argument he was making. Something about the role of the individual in larger events, or the role of the artist in guiding history, or something like that. Avant garde art is a necessary but futile protest against the march toward war? So disappointing, because Trieste is such an interesting city, and it was fun to see the author play with Marinetti and Futurism. But I'm not sure that it amounted to anything more than play.

The Carlo Lucarelli and Owen Parry novel both investigate the compromises necessary for justice. Few ideas are more common in mysteries now, but the question is a big one, and worth pursuing from different perspectives - the unjust world of fascist Italy, the righteous cause of the fight against slavery.

Neither of those novels has an especially original purpose. Steve Hockensmith's On the Wrong Track has no purpose at all, besides good clean fun. Mostly clean - there are a few descriptions of gunshot wounds that are bizarrely gory, well out of character. Some misguided attempt at realism? A trivial book, I'm afraid, but not a disappointment. It is what it is.

And what book isn't, but that won't keep me from complaining about John Banville's The Lemur. I learned one thing from this book, namely that Banville can simplify his style when he wants to. Stylistically, The Lemur is Banville-lite, but still elegant, finely polished. No clichés in the prose. Why then, are the characters and plot nothing but clichés? Gee, that character is just like John Huston in Chinatown, I was thinking, just before John Huston strolls onto the page in a cameo! So Banville knows. Everything is borrowed. Calling it a pastiche or homage (to whom?) would be a kindness. It's a completely hollow novel. Why did he bother?$?$?$

Voice

Of the five historical mysteries I read over my summer vacation, I liked three of them enough to consider reading more in the series.* The little Banville novel is something of an exception, since I've already read all but a few of Banville's books. I'll really lay into Banville tomorrow, so let's set that one aside.

Maybe I'll set Carlo Lucarelli aside, too. The greatest interest there is thematic. Plus, it was so short, you read all three books in the series, and you're not even close to 300 pages. Easy reading.

In two other novels, the great appeal of the writing is the voice of the narrator. Steve Hockensmith is playing with the Sherlock Holmes type of mystery, so the narrator has to be Dr. Watson. But in this case, Watson is a burly cowboy named Big Red. Holmes is his older, smaller, smarter brother, Old Red. Old Red is illiterate, so Big Red has to read him the latest Sherlock Holmes stories. Also, the signs on the bathroom doors. The comedy can be a bit broad. Funny, though.

Watson \ Big Red is folksy and sees the homorous side of things, so the tone is almost always comic. I don't think I ever actually laughed while reading this book, but that's a matter of habit:**

"Someone cleared his throat, and I glance across the aisle to find a fortyish sport in a checked suit giving me the eye in a friendly, amused sort of way. He had a face as flat and pink as a slice of ham, and atop his head was a pompadour of such impressive proportions I wouldn't have been surprised had I spotted the great explore Sigerson attempting to climb it with a team of native guides." (p. 33)

That's pretty good. If its not quite characteristic, that's because of all the dialogue and plot fuss, most of which was all right. The book has many short chapters, which unfortunately often end with irritating false climaxes - this is my main stylistic complaint. They do work, though - I always wanted to keep going.

Hockensmith's narrator has a typical comic voice. Owen Parry created something more original for his Civil War mysteries. Abel Jones, our hero, is Welsh, a veteran of wars in India, a wounded veteran of Bull Run, and a Methodist teetotaler. He is earnest and self-righteous, full of prejudices (against the Irish, the rich, cavalrymen). And he's scared of horses, "great stupid things," "four-legged demons."

The comedy of the book, which in many ways is a quite serious piece of work, comes from the narrator's inability to suppress his judgmental scolding, even while telling the story of a murder investigation, or a battle. Mostly, he's a driven man on a mission, but he continually pauses to zing his superiors, scold his inferiors, and praise his own virtue. An example of the latter: he does not drink, of course, but he'll buy whiskey for other people, in order to get them to spill secrets. But then he tells us that he feels bad about it.

Maybe this isn't meant to be funny, but I think it is, because it works so well. It deepens the character - in some ways he's a very narrow man, while in other ways he's an abyss. It keeps me guessing, at least - just what will he be capable of, this strange fellow.

My only real disappointment with the book is that the answer is: whatever is necessary to fulfill certain plot and genre expectations. But let that bide, as Captain Abel Jones always says when he suspects he's gone a bit too far.

By the way, neither of these narrators, both of whom are supposedly writing their stories, sound remotely like they actually would have, telling their own stories at the time. But, fortunately, I don't care about accuracy.

* In the right situation - trans-Atlantic flight, for example - I'd read more of any of them. I just wouldn't go out of my way for more Victoria Thompson or Michael Pearce.

** The Parry and Hockensmith books are both quite funny, but my only audible laugh came from the Michael Pearce novel, the one set in Trieste. The angry, drunken Irishman, suspected of murder, turns out to be James Joyce, which is funny enough. Wait, I thought, Italo Svevo lived in Trieste, too - I wonder if Pearce can work him in. About two pages later, there he was, under his real name, smoking one of his last cigarettes (see The Confessions of Zeno, Ch. 1). That's where I laughed.

Accuracy

A couple of the historical mystery authors I just read - specifically, Victoria Thompson of gaslight New York and "Owen Parry" of Civil War Washington, D.C. - express, in afterwords, pride in the accuracy of the details in their books, despite the fact that Pride is a mortal sin. They want to be sure to tell us which few, tiny details in their novels diverge from historical fact. Coney Island's Elephant Hotel, for example, was abandoned by 1896, and burned down the same year, but Thompson thinks it's neato and keeps it in business in her book. Otherwise, though, everything is totally accurate, "t"s crossed, "i"s dotted. Uh huh.

Much of what I write this week will be a confession of prejudices, I fear, evidence, perhaps, that I have no business reading these books (although I enjoyed them all, more or less). Still, as to the accuracy of the historical mystery, of any novel: I don't care, I just don't care.

Great writers create worlds that are nearly complete in themselves, lacking nothing but the imagination of the sympathetic reader. They borrow from the actual world around them, but in the end it's most important that the fictional world is true, not that it intersects with the real world in arbitrary or trivial ways. Because, I gotta say, there's plenty about every one of these novels that is untrue, regardless of how particular dates and events mesh. And, at their best, the novels contain other truths that have little to do with their historical accuracy - let's save that for later in the week.

I liked the approach Steve Hockensmith took to his "cowboy detectives on a train" story. In his acknowledgments, he thanks seven railroad buffs and one gun expert. His research is not meticulous - he just asked someone what he needed to do to keep the sticklers happy. The topography of the train is actually incorporated into the plot, but even that doesn't really matter - different order of train cars, slightly different plot. The world he created is small, but has its own sense, and works fine.

Some authors research their subject as part of their creative method. I'm thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald, novels like The Blue Flower or The Gate of Angels, which seem effortless, but are backed by intense archival work, hours digging around in old newspapers and diaries. The key here is that Fitzgerald used what she learned to inhabit her imaginary world, to make the fiction real. Almost all of the information she acquired in the process is omitted from the book.

Among these mysterical histories, only Carlo Lucarelli, writing about World War II Italy, came close to achieving this effect, carefully failing to explain the importance of every political detail or branch of the secret police. Some of the details are even obscure, or confusing. Good. He trusts his reader, or perhaps just assumes that they're Italians who know what he's talking about.

Every other writer from time to time hits the narrative brakes for an information dump. Hockensmith and Parry came off best, I think because of their first person narrators - they have to stay in character. A few passages in the Victoria Thompson and Michael Pearce novels, though, are little more than encyclopedia entries, on the history of Coney Island, or the politics of Herzogovina, or some other bit of curious lore. Thompson actually writes, about her policeman character, "He'd done some research on Coney Island and learned..." (p. 61), and then we get a page of Thompson's notes. When I said Thompson was clumsy, I meant passages like this.

The same problem plagues historical novels of any stripe, not just mysteries. Walter Scott's novels often include detailed notes about the accuracy and sources of his various characters and events. I've read six Scott novels; in saying that I am definitely not including every word in every one of those notes. I remember the notes in Ivanhoe as being especially dull. Better historical novels - The Scarlet Letter, or Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed - excise everything that is merely factual.

But, but, but, given that a novel or novelist may not be capable of creating an original world, historical or otherwise, given that the author is not Nathaniel Hawthorne or Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps accuracy isn't such a bad goal. If a novel's mystery plot is typical for its genre (in every novel I'm considering, it is), the characters brightly colored cardboard, and the themes well-worn if we're lucky, we can at least enjoy some strange and wondrous details extracted from the library by our all too fatigable mystery writer.

Because Victoria Thompson was right - it is neato that there was a hotel on Coney Island shaped like a giant elephant. I had no idea. By all means, use that in a novel. I'm happy to know about it.

All this week: I am mystified by historical mysteries

What I Read on My Summer Vacation. Mysteries, all mysteries, all new authors to me. Maybe you'll see a pattern.

In order of declining preference:

Owen Parry, Faded Coat of Blue (1999), 337 pp. A Civil War mystery by columnist and all-around military expert Ralph Peters. Series: #1 of 6, I think. Narrator: 1st person, with an original voice. Cameos: Abraham Lincoln, General George McClellan, Allan Pinkerton.

Carlo Lucarelli, Carte Blanche (1990), 94 pp. A murder investigation set in 1943 Bologna. The Gestapo lurks everywhere; the Americans are coming. My understanding is that this author is hugely popular in Italy now. Series: #1 of 3. Narrator: 3rd person, plain, all business.

Steve Hockensmith, On the Wrong Track (2007), 290 pp. A comic mystery, with two cowboys on a train between Utah and San Francisco in 1893. One of them wants to be Sherlock Holmes. The series is called Holmes on the Range! Har har. Series: #2 of 4. Narrator: 1st person - Watson narrates, of course, not Holmes. R. T. reviews the first novel in the series over here.

Michael Pearce, A Dead Man in Trieste (2004), 188 pp. A British policeman in 1906 Trieste. Series: #1 of 6, maybe. Narrator: 3rd person, understated, repetitive. Cameos: Franz Lehar, Marinetti - the climax of the novel occurs during the first Futurist Evening. James Joyce! Italo Svevo!

Victoria Thompson, Murder on St. Mark's Place (2000), 277 pp. A midwife solves murders in 1896 New York City. The second-worst novel I've read, for quite a long time.* Series: #2 of 11. Narrator: Third person, sometimes quite clumsy, although fortunately not always. Cameo: New York Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, offstage.

Most of these were recommended by the friendly owner of a mystery book store. I wanted historical mysteries, he delivered. Here's one more book that does not fit the pattern:

John Banville, The Lemur (2008), 134 pp. A typical Banville narrator becomes tangled in, and then somehow solves, a murder. This one is the worst book I've read in a long time. Series: Stand-alone, thankfully. Narrator: It's Banville, and not about the history of science, so it must be first person. Cameo: John Huston.

I included page lengths because every one of them is too long, except possibly the tiny Lucarelli novel.

This is my raw material for the week, as I try to figure out how these books function, what worked well and what didn't, and why anyone bothers writing or reading them.

I don't read too many mysteries, so I'm likely to showcase some first-rate ignorance as the week progresses. My thoughtful readers can help me out.

* Sounds sorta harsh. I'm going to say some nicer things about the book later. And, to the author (http://victoriathompson.homestead.com/), if you stop by, please look around the site. You will see that I am comparing you to Flaubert and Chekhov and the like.

The Case of the Missing Mystery - a boring Poe detective story, and a good one

I had known for a long time that Poe had written three stories starring C. Auguste Dupin. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogët" (1842-3), and "The Purloined Letter" (1843): the first three detective stories in literary history, not counting a wide range of arguable predecessors.

Two of these stories are among Poe's most famous, and will be found in any Poe collection, as well as any number of short story and mystery anthologies. Not "Marie Rogët," though. Why not?

One reason is that it's a little long, fifty pages in the Library of America, compared to thirty-five pages of "Rue Morgue" and nineteen pages of "The Purloined Letter." Another is that it's boring, among the most boring things Poe ever wrote. It's a boring murder mystery!

Poe, smarter than everyone else, about everything (which more often than not was true), decided he was going to solve an actual unsolved murder, the death of Mary Rogers in New York City. "Marie Rogët" presents his solution to the actual crime, with everything transposed to Paris, allowing his newly minted Detective Dupin to take over. How does this work?:

"Three days elapsed, and nothing was heard of her. On the fourth the corpse was found floating in the Seine,* near the shore which is the opposite the Quartier of the Rue Saint Andreé, and at a point not very far distant from the secluded neighborhood of the Barrière du Roule.†

* The Hudson.
† Weehawken." (p. 509, LOA)

The footnotes were added after initial publication, in something called Snowden's Ladies' Companion, a true crime magazine, I guess. Maybe I should have filed this under the comedies. Weehawken! Dupin solves the case by reading all available newspaper articles and reconciling the discrepancies. That's why the story is dull - much of it is nothing but actual excerpts from actual newspapers.

The other Dupin stories are by no means my favorites, since Poe indulges their narrator in some of his most lugubrious prose. But they are genuinely important stories, cultural touchstones; everyone should know who the Rue Morgue murderer was, and where the purloined letter was hidden. And all three stories develop an idea that I think was original, that the detective can restore order through pure cognitive ability, some perfect mix of intuition, logic, and psychology. "Ratiocination," Poe called it. "Marie Rogët," the mystery solved by reading newspaper articles, is conceptually pure, maybe a little too pure.

Poe wrote one other detective story that is much less famous, rarely reprinted, and at least as good as the others - better than "Marie Rogët," certainly. It's called - note the irritating extra quotation marks - "'Thou Art the Man'" (1844), and is not a Dupin story. In a relatively efficient fifteen pages, we get a brief setup, a murder, clues and more clues, a revelation and confession, and an explanation. Almost classic, except that the revelation scene is completely insane, and Poe does have to resort to one cheap trick to make it work. "'Thou Art the Man'" strikes me as at least as effective a detective story as the Dupin tales, told in a more straightforward style.

We call "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" the first detective story retrospectively. A series of other detective stories followed, not right away, but eventually, that were clearly influenced by Poe, and clearly not influenced so much by some other candidates, so Poe stands at the beginning of the genre. I'd like to say something, though, for E. T. A. Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery (1819), a story that Poe certainly knew, which perhaps looks more like a detective story to us than it did even to Poe.

The "detective", the title character, is a writer of the 17th century, no longer read much but still well-known in Hoffmann's time. The villain is a serial killer. Mlle de Scudery does not catch the killer, but proves the innocence of the prime suspect. This story is the ancestor of the current boomlet of novels featuring Detective Jane Austen and Inspector Oscar Wilde and Special Agent Walt Whitman and so on, all of which are, I assume, hackwork. Not Hoffmann, though, and not Mademoiselle de Scudery.

Poe on Barnaby Rudge, proto-murder mystery

Edgar Allan Poe wrote two reviews of Barnaby Rudge in 1841. The first review was of the first few chapters, serialized, the final review of the whole book.

The initial review is a curious thing. Poe is excited to find that Dickens has written a murder mystery. Earlier that year, Poe had published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," often considered, correctly or otherwise, to be the first detective story. So one can understand Poe's interest.

Poe uses his review to use the clues at hand to solve the mystery. Today, his magazine would receive a swarm of angry "Spoiler!" emails. I don't know if Poe's readers thought this was fair game or not. Anyway, Poe correctly identifies the murderer. He proceeds to explain exactly how the story will unfold and how the murderer will be revealed.

Here, Poe is wrong in every detail, sometimes hilariously wrong (the hilarious part is that his predictions are so confident). But he's correct in one sense - the story he describes would be a much better murder mystery. One thing Poe does in his second review, of the complete novel, is to discuss, in detail, and correctly, how the murder plot is botched. The drama of the solution of a 25 year-old murder loses a lot of its impact when inserted into the middle of the Gordon Riots, which engulfed London in flames for a week, and resulted in the deaths of at least 800 people, many by hanging. One more execution in all that bloodshed - well, it's not nothing, but it does not exactly stand out.

In fairness, although Poe regrets the loss of the murder mystery amidst the rioting, he does say that "The riots form a vivid series of pictures never surpassed." He means not just unsurpassed by Dickens, but by anyone.

Poe was a pioneering book reviewer, but I'm not convinced that he is a first-rank critic. Much of the interest in reading Poe, as is the case with the Barnaby Rudge reviews, is to learn about Poe. He reminds me of Virginia Woolf in this way. Her Common Reader essays often reveal as much or more about her ideas about the novel than about the book she is reviewing. I hope this doesn't seem negative - the ideas about ficiton of Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe are worth reading for their own sake.

Poe's reviews are both in the Library of America Essays and Reviews.