Mysteries Are Literature

Should only one kind of novel be regarded as “literary” or serious?  Should the mystery be scorned as lowbrow entertainment for the masses and relegated to the genre dustbin? This would be ironic, since dividing books into genres is intended simply as a sales tool directing consumers to a particular shelf. After all, the mystery is part of the same serious literary tradition, is composed of exactly the same formal elements, and in the works of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Robert B. Parker has brought realism and an authentic American voice to contemporary fiction. With all that in mind, don’t mysteries deserve further consideration as a uniquely American art form?

In 2009, Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones noted, “Literary novelists, the very people who usually scorn genre writing, have been slumming” with crime fiction for the better part of a century, including Faulkner (Sanctuary), Dreiser (An American Tragedy), and Mailer (Tough Guys Don’t Dance). Now contemporary novelists like Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) and Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice) are doing the same thing, with Pynchon “using Chandler territory as inspiration (to launch) a tale as complicated as anything he’s ever written.” Crime stories, Jones writes, “have made it into the American literary pantheon” and crime writers no longer are the “Rodney Dangerfields of literature, ignored by American critics and serious writers” (“Death becomes them,” 10 Aug.).

Historical Perspective

Why is this happening? An historical perspective may be helpful. Although often considered not serious writing, the mystery is rooted in the same serious literary tradition as so-called literary fiction. Mystery editor Barbara Norville notes that crime fiction developed from medieval morality plays, where sin like crime was exposed and punished. Then in the 18th century, fiction itself was invented by writers like Fielding, Cervantes, and Defoe. Without Defoe, who emphasized authenticity and used a first-person narrator, the contemporary crime story wouldn’t be possible.  

In 1841, the first mystery story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, was published in Graham’s, the first mass-circulation magazine. Thus, the mystery form itself, as well as the first fictional detective, were both invented by an American. Amazingly, when Poe wrote the story, there wasn’t even a word for detective. Yet in creating the hero and his sidekick who tells the story, Poe single-handedly laid out the form for the mystery that endures today.

Poe’s hero inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes, another pivotal figure in the mystery’s development. The first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was serialized in 1887. Holmes last appeared in “The Adventure of Shoscome Old Place” in March 1927. As the ultimate reader of clues and deductive genius in all of literature, Holmes might seem too superhuman to be real. Nevertheless, Doyle’s tireless attention to detail and application of the scientific method gives Holmes’ adventures verisimilitude.

In fact, it is widely known that Holmes was based on one of Doyle’s medical mentors, Dr. Joseph Bell, a consulting surgeon with an amazing talent for diagnosis. Dr. Watson also was based on someone real—an amusing, less than brilliant version of Doyle himself. By borrowing from real life and endowing his hero with such an unmistakably original voice, Doyle created characters so believable that to this day the public remains confused about whether they existed or not.

But no writer is immune to literary criticism, and despite this awe-inspiring tribute to the power of his imagination, Doyle himself felt the Holmes stories were not serious like his now long-forgotten historical novels, drama, science fiction, and nonfiction. The growing demand for more Holmes from public and publisher nauseated Doyle, who tried to kill Holmes off in “The Final Problem” (1893) as Saul Schwartz notes in The Detective Story, his introduction to the whodunit:

Readers reacted by wearing black armbands and weeping in the streets as if mourning an actual national hero. While Doyle was preoccupied with more serious literary undertakings, people around the world sent abusive letters demanding Holmes’ return. Doyle ignored them for ten years before finally, in 1903, resurrecting Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

Reader fascination with Holmes did not end with the Victorian era, of course. By the time the writer of this paper was ten years old, for example, he’d devoured every one of the four novels and 56 stories featuring Sherlock. Imagine his disappointment when his English professors ignored Holmes. Not serious, they said. Perhaps they did not take the stories seriously because even a child could appreciate them.

Although Doyle did not write hardboiled private eye mysteries, his contribution to their development as a form can hardly be overstated. Even if Holmes’ abilities are uncanny, he never arrives at a solution without forming a hypothesis, which he tests empirically through careful observation. Thus, Doyle’s reliance on science in crime-solving provides a realistic foundation for all future mystery heroes.

As Poe inspired Doyle, so Doyle inspired Christie. In her autobiography, Dame Agatha acknowledges that in creating her Belgian detective hero, Hercule Poirot, she “was well-steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition.” Besides being similarly gifted with “little gray cells of the mind,” the brilliant, emotionally detached Poirot also has a dull-witted sidekick/chronicler in Captain Hastings. His first case is The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920). His last, the appropriately titled Poirot’s Last Case (1975). Thus, between them, Christie and Doyle extended the genteel, aristocratic private eye tradition for over a century.

While Christie was replacing Doyle in the 1920s, a new form, the hardboiled private eye mystery, was being born. These stories appeared in Black Mask and other pulp magazines as realistic portrayals of corruption, violence, and sex. They also had a new plebian kind of hero: the smart, tough private eye, an everyman whose personal sense of right and justice overshadowed all else. As is widely known, the early creators of such stories included Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner (of Perry Mason fame).

Out of this group Hammett, an American, emerged. By almost unanimous agreement, the first great hardboiled private eye mystery novel was Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930). The novel introduced the form’s first great hero, San Francisco private eye Sam Spade. From where did this realistic new hero come? The answer is real life in the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. Unlike Doyle or Christie, Hammett had first-hand, real-life experience with crime. He drew upon his own personal knowledge as a former Pinkerton detective to revolutionize crime fiction.

In Spade, Hammett created the epitome of the incorruptible private eye. While Hammett denied using a real-life model for his hero, it’s obvious that Spade was modeled after Hammett himself. He exhibits the same professional investigative characteristics of any ex “op” like Hammett, being disinterested, fact-oriented, and perseverant. Spade, like Hammett, is a loner and an outsider. He’s also like his creator in being a hard drinking man who works in a three-room office on Sutter Street in San Francisco. Spade even has Hammett’s first name—Samuel, which the writer himself had dropped.  

Although a brilliant interpreter of clues, Spade is no Sherlock Holmes. But he makes up for it by being believable and by doggedly pursuing the evidence, wherever it leads. Spade also is nimble-witted and an astute judge of character. When villainous Kasper Gutman asks what the others know about the Maltese falcon, Spade replies: “There’s not much to go by. Cairo didn’t say he did and he didn’t say he didn’t. She said she didn’t, but I took it for granted that she was lying.”

Though frequently misread by the bad guys, Spade is not only fearless but incorruptible. Even though he is in love with her, the detective will not let his treacherous client buy him off with love or money:

That is good, he said, coming from you. What have you given me besides money? Have you given me any of your confidence? Any of the truth? Any help in helping you? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? Well, if I’m peddling it, why shouldn’t I let it go to the highest bidder.

It’s hard to believe anyone could invent such an immortal character, who would’ve been perfect for a series, and instead drop him after only one novel. Yet that’s what Hammett did in his 1934 novel, The Thin Man, featuring Nick Charles, a retired investigator-turned-celebrity whose cases are more lightweight and comic.

Why drop Spade? Perhaps real life influenced the writer, as Robert Baker and Michael T. Nietzel point out in Private Eyes (1985). Perhaps Hammett, who resembled Spade, was changed after leaving an unhappy marriage for a long affair with Lillian Hellman, the playwright. Hellman could have been the model for Nick Charles’ wealthy, witty wife Nora. While Hammett was not a wealthy celebrity in the beginning, he became one after Hollywood made a series of Thin Man movies.

Meanwhile, another mystery writer, Raymond Chandler, was about to surpass Hammett. In the opening paragraph of Chandler’s classic debut novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the book’s first-person narrator says: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

The narrator is none other than Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe, destined to become the greatest hardboiled private eye mystery hero of all time. Two acclaimed mystery writers, Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, note (in 1001 Midnights) that Chandler “cannibalized” The Big Sleep from two of his early Black Mask novelettes, “Killer In The Rain” (1935) and “The Curtain” (1936). Marlowe does not appear in either by name. We first meet him in the The Big Sleep, a complex, violent whodunit concerned with the corrupting influence of money and power. The earlier stories doubtless became immeasurably more powerful in novel form because of Marlowe.

In The Big Sleep, Marlowe is hired by an aged, ailing oil baron, General Sternwood, whose youngest daughter, Carmen, is in trouble over an IOU held by a rare book dealer named Geiger. During his investigation, Marlowe becomes involved with the general’s other daughter, Vivian, whose husband is missing. Marlowe is captured by thugs whose boss, Eddie Mars, has some hold over Vivian. In a passage that is representative of Marlowe’s voice and attitude, our hero tries to convince Vivian to face facts about Mars:

You think he’s just a gambler. I think he’s a pornographer, a blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control, and a suborner of crooked cops. He’s whatever looks good to him, whatever has the cabbage pinned to it. Don’t try to sell me on any high-souled racketeers. They don’t come in that pattern.

It’s obvious what kind of man Marlowe is: one following in Sam Spade’s gritty footsteps. In all seven Marlowe novels, the characters and crimes are as realistic, if not more so, than Hammett’s. They’re set in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco, but the real difference is that Chandler adds something new: a voice combining Hammett’s idiom with poetry and humor.

In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler contends that Hammett had style, “but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.” But Marlowe’s storytelling style is so infectious that readers—and writers—keep returning to his books long after plot details have ceased to matter.

In Marlowe’s oft-imitated voice, the English-educated Chandler married American parlance with a scuffed-up version of British refinement. The result is electrifying—worldly wise, full of clever wisecracks, capable of sustaining snappy dialogue, and able to express a unique interiority. This voice and style are the real joy of all hardboiled private eye mysteries since, and what brings readers back.

Virtually everyone agrees that not only was Chandler a better mystery stylist than Hammett, but he was also the best ever.

In a 1939 letter (Kathrine Sorley Walker, Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1977), Chandler tells his publisher about the new, wholly original style of writing that will be reflected in Marlowe’s vivid voice. Chandler’s mature style is a lean prose consisting mostly of simple declarative sentences with active verbs that unobtrusively describe action, and nouns and adjectives that are not overblown. He mixes formal and informal diction, but (as Norville puts it) steers clear of clichés, while having fun “twisting new meanings out of old.” Chandler’s humor, perhaps more even than his complicated plotting, is what readers remember most. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), for example, Chandler writes:

Okay, Marlowe, I said between my teeth. You’re a tough guy…. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all this amount to?  Routine. Now let’s see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.

Chandler, again like Hammett, made Marlowe seem more believable by using himself as a real-life model, claiming Marlowe was a creature of fantasy combining his own sense of reality with idealized wishful thinking. But in at least one significant way, Chandler is quite different than Hammett. In Raymond Chandler Speaking Chandler, who had never been a private eye or policeman, said Marlowe would never be a private eye in real life, either. Such men were always “turtle-brained” ex-cops or “shabby little hacks” or they were “sleazy little drudges … strong-arm guys with no more personality than a blackjack.” In a tongue-in-cheek moment, Chandler claimed he didn’t know Marlowe’s reading habits or musical tastes, and didn’t want to improvise for fear of confusing them with his own.

Chandler’s novels, like Hammett’s, are never out of print and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. But Chandler was hardly an overnight success. The first three Marlowe novels sold only a few copies, but eventually all seven Marlowe novels became bestsellers and motion pictures.

A host of Hammett-Chandler disciples soon followed, including Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Dick Francis, Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, Peter Corris, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, James W. Hall, Tony Hillerman, Michael Z. Lewin, John Lutz, Ian Rankin, Jonathan Valin, and Randy Wayne White, to name but a few.

All those listed (and their heroes) are men, but the hardboiled private eye mystery is not exclusively a male province. In her alphabet-titled mysteries featuring female P.I. Kinsey Milhone, for example, Sue Grafton has done distinguished work. So has Sarah Peretsky in her VI Warshawski series, but they are by no means the only ones. Literary novelist Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, has been publishing many fine crime stories in recent years. But male or female, virtually every hardboiled private eye mystery writer has been influenced by Chandler.

Of them all, Chandler’s most conspicuous literary heir probably was the prolific Robert B. Parker, whose 37 best-selling novels feature Boston shamus Spenser. Parker’s hero was also portrayed on television in 66 episodes of “Spenser For Hire” and four TV movies. Further evidence of Parker’s standing as Chandler’s literary heir is shown by the fact that the Chandler estate chose him to complete the only unfinished Marlowe mystery, Poodle Springs (1989). Here’s Parker imitating the master’s voice: “I sipped some of the gimlet. It was clean and cold and slid down through the desert parch like a fresh rain…. The office was as blank as a waiter's stare.” 

Upon publication, the critical consensus was Parker had achieved the feat with style and grace. In his review of Poodle Springs, for example, mystery novelist Ed McBain said in The New York Times that he couldn’t think of anybody better qualified to finish the novel than Parker, who was the “closest living writer to Mr. Chandler” and had created the “literate, witty and tremendously readable” Spenser novels.

Parker, whose many decades of celebrity status helped him change the way the mystery genre is viewed, told interviewer Eric Berlin in her “Dumpster Bust Interviews” that Chandler “was clearly the supreme master” of the form. In fact, Parker wrote his doctoral dissertation, “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald,” in 1963. A recovering academic, Parker left full-time college teaching eight years later. But in the thesis, he connects 20th century hardboiled sleuths with earlier American heroes such as Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo as being what he calls “men of armed innocence” who oppose corruption.

According to Parker, mystery fiction is a continuation of mainstream American literary fiction. He sees his own work as being in the tradition of Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Parker told interviewer Charles Silet in “Five Pages a Day”  that he finds little difference between mainstream literary fiction and crime fiction at its best. High quality work, Parker argues, is high quality work.

There is nothing inherent in the mystery genre to prevent him from writing something as good as Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Parker said. The only thing preventing him from doing so was Faulkner’s superior talent. Noting that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is sometimes regarded as the quintessential Great American Novel, Parker asks what would be the difference between Gatsby and a mystery novel if Nick Caraway were a detective?

In the first of the Spenser novels, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), the private eye is hired in what at first appears to be a simple theft of a priceless manuscript. As he investigates a radical campus group, Spenser discovers their murdered leader’s body and realizes that the victim’s girlfriend, Terry Orchard, has been set up by the real murderer. Spenser helps the devastated college girl, eventually rescuing her from a local cult. When the missing manuscript turns up, Spenser refuses to drop the investigation because Orchard would be wrongly convicted for murder. He shoots it out with gangsters before eventually cracking the case.

The plot of that first novel may seem a bit dated today, but it reflects the time when it was written. In a 2007 interview, Parker told Doug Most that he was “trying to be Raymond Chandler and make another Philip Marlowe” but then moved away from Marlowe and Chandler. Perhaps this is inevitable in such a long series.

Like Hammett and Chandler, Parker resembles his hero in many ways. Both Spenser and Parker served in Korea, lifted weights, cooked, and lived in Boston. But Parker told Most this was just the “superficial stuff,” using what the writer knows. In another interview, Parker told Belin that he is “not quite Spenser … unarmed, never fought Joe Walcott, and doesn’t have a close friend named Hawk.”

But according to Bamber Gascoigne (Time Search for Books and Writers, 2008), what matters most to readers is that Spenser’s voice remains as interesting, vivid, and entertaining as any other private eye’s working in the mystery novel. Style was just as important to Parker as Chandler. In Parker’s early novels, in fact, Spenser sounds a lot like Marlowe. But with each succeeding book, his voice becomes unique with sharp dialogue and witty notes on contemporary life.  

Parker told Berlin that as a writer, he was mostly concerned with how his prose sounded. Like a musician with perfect pitch, he could tell when it was off-key. If Parker had a rule of thumb, it would be “the most meaning with the fewest words. When in doubt, use a simple declarative sentence.” Humor matters, too, as in the opening paragraph of A Catskill Eagle: “It was nearly midnight and I was just getting home from detecting. I had followed an embezzler around on a warm day in early summer trying to observe him spending his ill-gotten gain. The best I’d been able to do was catch him eating a veal cutlet sandwich.”

Critical Assessment

Until late in the 20th century, critical assessment was reserved for high art like classical music, Shakespeare’s plays, and literary novels. Everything else was dismissed by academics as folk, popular, or non-art. In a standard college English text (Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, 1970), Professor Laurence Perrine offered the customary distinction between what he called literature of interpretation and literature of escape. Interpretive literature, he said, is imaginative and offers great insight into human life, whereas escape literature is formula writing with nothing more to offer than the name itself suggests. 

One might argue that there is a formula for all literature based in part on excellence in characterization and style, and that every form of writing, including Elizabethan poetry, is convention riddled. In Renaissance sonnets, for instance, the poet-lover almost always praises his lady’s golden hair, ivory breast, or ruby lips. He usually uses oxymoronic phrases and images like freezing and burning, and he often claims his poetry only has value because she inspired it.

Furthermore, opinion about everything is subject to historical revision. Henry Nash Smith was a noted Mark Twain scholar and literary editor of Twain's papers. In his introduction to the Riverside edition of Huckleberry Finn, Professor Smith points out that when Twain’s classic was first published, the press widely echoed the Concord Library Committee’s denunciation of it as “the veriest trash.”

Similarly, critical opinion about the mystery has been revised greatly since Dashiell Hammett. For example, noted Thomas Wolfe scholar C. Hugh Holman, praised Hammett’s “distinguished” mystery novels of the 1930s for introducing “brutal realism coupled with a poetic but highly idiomatic style” (Handbook to Literature, 1972).

Mystery writers could also reasonably assert that Perrine’s dichotomy between interpretation and escape is inherently fallacious because it presents only two possible options, one of which is clearly more desirable. Perrine tries to get around this objection by using a sliding scale, at the higher end of which he places interpretive literature. But he concedes that a really good writer can turn even a stereotypical character into someone who outlives his limitations and remains in our imaginations “long after we have forgotten the details of his adventures.”

To which, one might reply, precisely—as in the works of mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Robert B. Parker.        

So how does a novel ascend to literary status, and what sets genre fiction apart?

The typical answer is that the literary novel has heavier language, lush imagery, detailed characters, and a thought-provoking storyline intended for serious readers or scholars (M.E. Wood, “What is Literary Fiction?” 2008). But notice that Wood is mainly relying on adjectives to distinguish literary from genre novels, which have the same formal elements, so her implied criticism—other than the intended audience’s pedigree—could be applied to any bad novel.

Defining literary fiction can be a tricky business, as the 2007 guidelines for the Michigan U. Literary Fiction Awards reveal: “Ultimately, it will be up to the judges to determine what is, and what is not ‘literary,’ but it’s safe to say that genre fiction, such as mystery, science fiction, romance, children's fiction, etc., won't qualify (U.M. Press 2007).

Up to the judges? Safe to say?

Sounds oddly reminiscent of the bromide, “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.” Surely a better definition of the literary novel exists than, “fiction you won’t enjoy,” as novelist John Updike told Garrison Keillor in The Louisville Courier-Journal (8 February 2009).

In fairness, one might point out that literary novels are provocative, complex, literate, multilayered, and address serious issues. On the other hand, who’s to say that a mystery novel can’t have these qualities as well? The larger question seems to be, “What is literary art?”

Influential writer and teacher Robert Olen Butler believes that only literary art “touches the deepest realms” of human experience by presenting an internal conflict. Therefore, literary art is what aspiring novelists should create (Where You Dream: The Process Of Writing Fiction, 2005). Butler dismisses genre writing as simply non-art, saying it’s typically filled with abstraction, generalization, and summary. However, Butler’s catalog of literary offenses applies to all bad novels and therefore does not necessarily prove that genre fiction is inherently inferior.

Novelist Jane Smiley offers a broader definition of a novel as hypothesis, dream, therapeutic act, ontological construct, and assertion of self (Thirteen Ways Of Looking At The Novel, 2005). All these apply to the mystery, which like any other fiction concerns itself with the question, “What if?” Like literary novels, the mystery also invites the reader to share a waking dream, offers catharsis, studies the nature of existence or reality, and represents self-expression by the author.

Writing a novel, according to the mystery novelist Lawrence Block, can serve as both a learning experience and a vehicle for self-expression (Writing the Novel From Plot to Print, 1979). This is true of any novel, literary or otherwise. In contrast to Butler’s advice to attempt only literary art, Block advises aspiring novelists to attempt the same kind of book that they would like to read. This is practical advice and sound wisdom, for in the end writers must please themselves.

Plot

The formal elements of all fiction, including the mystery, include plot, character, theme, setting, point of view, and style. How do these elements play out in the hardboiled private eye mystery? Perhaps the most common criticism of mystery novels is that they tend to over-emphasize plot at the expense of character. Granted, plotting is essential to a mystery. But from the beginning of storytelling, plot has always been crucial. In his theory of tragedy, Aristotle considered the plot as the first principle and most important feature of tragedy. A chain of cause-and-effect, he believed, would produce a superior drama to one depending primarily on the protagonist’s character, which he regarded as of secondary importance (Barbara F. McManus, Outline of Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy, 1999).

Although not a mystery writer himself, novelist Silas House acknowledges the importance of mystery elements in any novel. House believes that “every novel should be both a mystery and a love story that gets the reader’s curiosity going” (letter to the author 16 Dec. 2004).

What really draws in readers and keeps them turning the pages is “the intense anxiety” of suspense (Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction,1991). Suspense is intricately related to plot, or what happens in a story, and that’s what most readers want to know—what happens next? Disdain toward plotting implies that creating the plot is somehow easy to do. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In a mystery, suspense is created by focusing the reader’s attention on facts and impressions dealing directly with the crime and its solution. While there are many variations of the classic mystery plot, the age-old rule that every story must have a beginning, middle, and end applies. And suspense starts on page one.

Because the reader begins with legitimate expectations based on the form’s many conventions, plotting a mystery novel is especially challenging. This begins with the very first sentence. Every novelist enters a contract with the reader with the opening line. The beginning of a novel is an instructional manual that teaches the reader how to read it. Although much of what matters in the story may remain implicit, it must be there. “If the story doesn’t go where the writer told the reader it would, the reader is sure to be disappointed” (Julie Brickman, lecture at Spalding University, 4 Nov. 2004).

House strongly agrees. “The first line is incredibly important. Remember that your first line, your first paragraph, your first page is making a promise to the reader.” House believes all novelists must give the reader a sense of what the novel is going to be overall and points out that “many readers (including agents and editors) have to really be compelled by the first line to be drawn in.”

While both House and Brickman are saying this is true for all fiction, this writer contends that it’s especially true for the first line of a mystery. Relying on her experience as a former mystery editor, Norville advises aspiring novelists that the opening lines of a mystery must hook the reader, whether by describing the scene of the crime, getting the action going, or introducing a strong interesting vital character. Here are several that I consider superlative:

“We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.” (John D. MacDonald, Darker Than Amber)

“The evening was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.” (James Lee       Burke, The Neon Rain)

“I could think of three good reasons for not going to Moscow, one of which was twenty-six, blond, and upstairs unpacking her suitcase.” (Dick Francis, Trial Run)

“I don’t mean to bitch, but in the future I intend to hesitate before I do a favor for a friend of a friend.” (Sue Grafton, “L” Is For Lawless)

“Around five-thirty, I put down the book I’d been reading and  started shooing customers out of the store. The book was by Robert B. Parker and its hero was a private detective named Spenser who compensated for his lack of a first name by being terribly physical. Every couple of chapters would find him jogging around Boston or lifting weights or finding some other way to court a heart attack or a hernia. I was getting exhausted just reading about him.” (Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza)

After the opening sentences of a mystery, the first chapters traditionally are concerned with laying out the facts of the case, including who wants to solve the puzzle and why. Although a strong build-up and a satisfying finish are crucial, the middle is where the story really takes place (Writer’s Digest, 17 Sep. 2006). To avoid a “dreaded sagging middle,” the writer must start “throwing problems” at the sleuth, as Parker does to complicate matters for Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript.

After the first victim’s body is discovered, he tries to help Terry Orchard, the girl who is being set up. But Spenser is stymied at every turn, either by her parents, the university which hired him, various crime bosses and gangsters, or the authorities.

The pace of such problem-solving in a mystery may vary wildly, depending on the writer’s purposes beyond unraveling the essential puzzle and restoring justice in the endgame, usually by uncovering some well-hidden motive. This also happens in The Godwulf Manuscript, as Spenser rushes from one crisis to another before finally confronting a multiple murderer who had no apparent reason to kill anyone.

While a mystery is always entertainment, in the right hands it can become much more. Although usually avoiding overt political statements, for example, many contemporary mystery writers devise plots implying social commentary. Mystery novels set in South Florida, for example, frequently are concerned with environmental issues.

Thorn, hero of James W. Hall’s multilayered Hell’s Bay, is a reclusive fishing guide. He must unravel the tangled plot, which involves his own family secrets, to solve the murder of a wealthy mine owner. In the process, Thorn helps prevent further destruction of the Everglades.

All mystery writers explore age-old problems like alcoholism and infidelity, which along with greed are the usual motives behind murder, always the preferred crime. In his poetically written Dave Robicheaux novels, for instance, James Lee Burke frequently explores the link between alcohol and violence. His hero, a former New Orleans homicide dick, is a recovering alcoholic who often experiences uncontrollable rages. Robicheaux’s bloodlust is usually triggered by some savage crime committed in Burke’s richly rendered Louisiana bayou country. In The Neon Rain (1987), low-life criminals capture Robicheaux and force a spout into his mouth:

Then they held my nose and poured the mixture of beer, castor oil, whiskey, and Quaaludes down my throat. The sudden raw taste of alcohol after four years of abstinence was like a black peal of thunder in my   system. My stomach was empty and it licked through me like canned heat, settled heavily into my testicles and phallus, roared darkly into my brain, filled my heart with the rancid, primordial juices of a Viking reveling in his own mortal wound.

Similarly, one of Lawrence Block’s mystery series features Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic ex-NYPD detective who unflinchingly probes crime and police corruption against the broad tapestry of New York City. In When The Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986), Scudder recalls:

There was, hell, there were a lot of joints. Mostly there was Armstrong’s. Christ, I lived there. I had my room to sleep in and I had other bars and restaurants to go to, but for a few years there, Jimmy Armstrong’s was home to me. People who were looking for me knew to check for me there, and sometimes they called Armstrong’s before they called the hotel.

Then there’s Parker, who in addition to the usual themes frequently delves into racial issues through Hawk, Spenser’s sidekick and dark side, racial pun intended. Spenser will put his life on the life for Hawk anytime, and Hawk will do the same, as this exchange in Crimson Joy (1988) suggests:

Hawk said, “And he punched you in the head and you chased him and he got away? Was he a brother?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You let a white guy run away from you?”

“What do you want from me?” I said. “I’m a white guy, too.”

“Yeah, you so funky sometimes I forget. I’ll come over in case we have to chase him again.”

Despite its importance to readers, plotting remains an anathema to many proponents of literary fiction. Butler, for instance, would even exclude outlining. Ironically, both Parker and Block agree with Butler about that, even though for Block this has meant leaving several novels unfinished. Of course, Block has published over 60 novels, Parker more than 50. Block prefers for a plot to grow naturally out of what has been written, instead of added on like a “rosebush espaliered to a trellis” (Writing the Novel From Plot to Print, 1979).

But that’s different than saying writers should not think about writing, as Butler does. Butler believes writers should forget everything they know because only then can their work connect with where art comes from, the unconscious mind. Novelists who figure out what they’re going to say before they begin, Butler argues, fall into a trap and are utterly lost. His antidote is to apply the principles of method acting invented by Stanislavski to fiction. To honestly portray a character’s deeper emotions, Butler says the writer must recall a moment in his life when he felt the same emotion desired for his character.

No doubt Butler’s approach has helped writers create more deeply realistic characters. But is his way the best, or the only, effective strategy?

Not according to Block, who believes there is no right or wrong way to write a novel, that whatever “works best for the particular writer on the particular book is demonstrably the right way.” Block agrees with Butler about the importance of characterization, however, calling it the “reason the reader cares what happens next.” Block also agrees with Butler that inspiration comes from the unconscious: “It’s my own conviction that we do not get our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment.”

Despite all this agreement with Butler, however, Block clearly recognizes the efficacy of plotting. He often begins a novel with chapter two ahead of chapter one, as in the second and third books in the Matt Scudder series (Time To Murder And Create and In The Midst Of Death) both published in 1976. “The idea is to start in the middle of the action … and then go back and explain.”

While the seminal novels of Hammett and Chandler often have complex storylines, most of Parker’s are much simpler, spontaneous, and intuitive. Parker claims to begin only with a premise, such as, “Spenser investigates a corrupt corporation.” Because of this free-wheeling approach, Parker says he often doesn’t know who did the crime until nearly the end of the novel. So, the writing and Spenser’s investigation mimic each other.   

Characterization and Theme

Inextricably linked directly to the protagonist in a mystery are two other formal elements: characterization and theme. The protagonist of any novel must possess depth and psychological development. In the mystery, part of this development grows out of the hero’s personal code of honor. Just as the theme of all mysteries is restoring justice, the key to the hero’s soul is always the code, which combines chivalry with American-style frontier justice. All great P.I. heroes—including Spade, Marlowe, and Spenser—embrace the code. They must, for it’s what makes them heroic. Chandler defined it in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder” published in 1944 in The Atlantic Monthly:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective (is) the hero, he is     everything. (He) must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

In The Maltese Falcon, Spade must protect a damsel in distress, Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe must defend not only his client, General Sternwood, but also the general’s two very different daughters. And in The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser must shield an innocent college girl from a murder charge, as well as rescue her from a cult.

The mystery hero must be principled in the pursuit of justice. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade must choose justice over love:

I won’t play the sap for you…. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t matter what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.    

In the mystery novels that introduce them, Marlowe and Spenser are instantly associated with chivalry via their names. It’s clear that Philip Marlowe is named after Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe’s first name, perhaps, comes from another famous Elizabethan poet and courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, who was also a soldier, idealist, and highly skilled at intrigue and information gathering. Spenser obviously gets his name from Sir Edmund Spenser (note the spelling). Parker begins A Savage Place (1981) with his hero reading a book about The Faerie Queene:

Susan Silverman had given it to me, claiming it was my biography. But it wasn’t. It turned out to be about the sixteenth century English poet who spelled his name like mine. The guy that wrote it had become the      president of Yale, and I thought maybe if I read it, I could become Allan Pinkerton.

Chandler and Parker’s protagonists are further linked to chivalry through artistic images they notice. The Godwulf Manuscript, for instance, begins with Spenser examining a photo of missing property showing knights and their ladies. The Big Sleep opens with Marlowe noting a stained-glass knight rescuing a lady in the Sternwood’s enormous front hall. In Rough Weather (2008), Spenser’s love thinks she can “hear the theme from Camelot” in his client’s house, which looks like “someplace you could catch a sleeper train for Chicago.” The need for such icons, rather than badges or uniforms, shows that the mystery code is an unwritten law “engraved only on the heart” (John G. Calweti, Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture, 2008).

Calweti also points out that the mystery code, above all, concerns the proper application of individual violence, which cannot be used for personal gain, only when the law cannot produce justice. In dispensing his own highly personal form of justice, the mystery hero sometimes is compelled by honor and awareness to act outside the law like Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript. But the mystery hero may only commit crimes to follow the higher law of his code.

Not only must he be willing to risk his life, when he sees his strength is needed he cannot refuse. In the opening line of Ceremony (1982), for example, a father rails about his missing daughter and doesn’t want her back, but Spenser takes the case anyway for one dollar from the girl’s worried mother.

Setting

Setting is a particularly vital element in mysteries, where a well-developed sense of place helps deepen the illusion of reality. Mystery heroes who are not thoroughly knowledgeable about their city may distract readers from willingly suspending their disbelief—or as novelist John Gardner puts it, “dream the essential dream of fiction” (The Art of Fiction, 1983).

Of course, there’s nothing in the mystery code requiring New York or Los Angeles as a setting. If writers once assumed that only the biggest population centers could harbor sufficient evil, they now know almost anywhere will do. Sue Grafton’s alphabet novels, for example, are set in Santa Teresa in homage to Ross Macdonald’s fictionalized Santa Barbara. Others dwell in Chicago (Paretsky), South Florida (Randy Wayne White, Hall, and John Lutz), St. Louis (Lutz again), Detroit (Leonard and Loren D. Estleman), Cincinnati (Jonathan Valin), Indianapolis (Michael Z. Lewin), small-town Louisiana (Burke), the mountains of Montana (Burke again), the Najavo reservations in the New Mexico desert (Tony Hillerman), and even down under in Australia (Peter Corris). Parker told interviewer Most that if he lived in Cleveland, that’s where Spenser would be set.

Point of View

The most natural and effective way of telling any story is to let the main character do it; and in the Hammett-Chandler hardboiled private eye mystery tradition, the way the story is told matters as much as what happens. The hero is almost always the point of view character and usually narrates in the first person (although Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in third person).

Lawrence Block prefers first person because the writing is more likely to have “a natural flow” and it is the voice “we all grow up using.” But either way, novelist K.L. Cook says that using the point of view character’s consciousness as a way of filtering any scene will make it “really come alive, really bubble with possibility and intrigue” (letter to the author, 20 July 2006).

Whoever tells the story, I think writer Richard Goodman is right to praise “the music” of great crime stories like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is “without flourish, without trills … not an extra note anywhere (and) just plain fine writing. Period.” Goodman notes “how taut and brief so much detective fiction is … Not a single adjective or adverb … the nouns and verbs carry the tune, and you better be very attuned to your character and your story or the whole thing will fall apart” (lecture at Spalding University, Fall 2004).

As Newsweek proclaimed, the mystery “isn’t a genre any longer. It’s claimed its place as one of the twin strands of our cultural DNA, the dark side of the American dream.”

Indeed, this uniquely American art form is part of the same serious literary tradition as so-called literary novels and composed of precisely the same formal elements. It deserves the same attention and respect.ndeed, this uniquely American art form is part of the same serious literary tradition as so-called literary novels and composed of precisely the same formal elements. It deserves the same attention and respect.