I’ve been industriously rounding up samples of the various writers on my list of possibilities for the Women and Detective Fiction seminar (see here for the current reading list and parameters for my current search). What strikes me most at this point is that there’s a difference between a book you might want to read and a book you’d want to teach. There just has to be enough to talk about if you’re going to teach something. In a class focusing on genre fiction, innovation is one potentially important factor; hence my interest in Grafton and Paretsky, for instance, who took the well-established conventions of hard-boiled private eye fiction and did something different with them. But exemplarity also matters; we will read Agatha Christie, for instance, because she establishes and perfects so many conventions of a certain kind of ‘puzzle fiction’ or ‘cozy,’ and because Miss Marple is a crucial prototype for many women detectives who follow. Complexity of form or theme gives us more to think and talk about; for this particular course, novels that explicitly explore the relationship of women to crime and detection, or to power and justice more broadly, or that raise questions about the effect of gender on (mystery) writing can provoke particularly good conversations. Good writing matters, though it’s not an easy thing to define, and what we might typically think of as literary qualities are not always appropriate to genre fiction–or their absence may be outweighed by the other factors I’ve mentioned. This is all by way of saying, yes, there are dozens, even hundreds (maybe thousands!) of mystery novels that might fit the broad course description, but it’s difficult to find a half-dozen or so that can support the weight of our attention in the classroom. (I realize that this result reflects as much on the peculiarities of teaching literature as it does on the particularities of detective fiction; many historical accounts of English studies as a discipline have pointed out that, for instance, “close reading” as a critical practice arises coincidentally with modernist texts that need pretty painstaking analysis to yield their meaning. But that’s a subject for another post.)
To get on with it, since my previous post I’ve managed to get my hands on samples by a number of the authors we came up with as likely suspects. Here are the ones I’ve looked at so far. I don’t pretend to have read them all through; by a few chapters in, I could usually tell (or I thought I could, anyway) where things were going. If you think I missed a bet and should go take another look at one, just let me know: I’ve got them all for another couple of weeks.
Karin Alvtegen, Betrayal and Shame. These both look kind of interesting, but they just didn’t seem to be the right kind of novels–they aren’t detective novels. for instance, but are closer, I think, to thrillers.
Karin Fossum, Broken. Basically, ditto. This one looked literarily quite interesting, though, and others on her backlist look like they might suit better. I’ll keep looking.
Laurie R. King, A Grave Matter, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and The Art of Detection. I thought A Grave Talent was pretty good but not, ultimately, that interesting (in that teaching kind of way). If I could find another in the Kate Martinelli series that had a more thematically relevant case at its center, that might be a reasonable option to displace ‘A’ is for Alibi, as the series combines two of my desiderata (police procedural, lesbian). The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was more entertaining than I expected (I often find historical mysteries unbearably tedious), at least for the first half, but I got a bit tired of Holmes (as usual) and having a female version of him didn’t really help after all. I would have liked it better if he had to face off against somebody who rejected his methods (and, for that matter, his annoyingly superior personality). The Art of Detection, which brings the two series together, lost me too.
Sandra Scoppetone, Everything You Have Is Mine. I read about half of this one and it seemed fine, very much in the Grafton / Paretsky / Muller line of female private eye novels. That’s the thing, though: it didn’t break out of that form and do something really different. Paretsky has said that when she began her V. I. Warshawski novels she meant to do a simple role reversal, with a woman in the private eye’s place–but she found that changing the sex of the detective affected too many other aspects of the story and she had to develop a more complicated model. Scoppetone seems to have found it quite easy to fit her lesbian investigator into an existing model; nothing in the novel (as far as I read) suggested that she was going to shape her book around a related inquiry into other challenges to or critiques of heteronormativity, for instance. That she doesn’t have to (or want to) do something more overtly political is fine, even good. But then if it’s just a book like ones we’re already reading but happens to have a gay detective, what would we talk about? We could talk about how times have changed…but then we are doing armchair sociology, not literary analysis.
Denise Mina, Still Midnight. I was looking for the Patty Meehan series but this was one the one that was in (in an e-copy, just by the way, so I downloaded it, oh-so-conveniently, right to my Sony Reader). This one I did read all the way through, because I simply found it more interesting than the other ones. It features a female cop, quite an interesting character, troubled and abrasive, struggling with authority at work and a tragic personal loss and disintegrating marriage at home. If more of the novel had been about her, this might have been the one. But about half of it is spent with a “gang” (they deserve the scare-quotes) of low-lifes who fumble their way through a kidnapping. I thought the account of the victim, haunted by childhood trauma, was very well done, perhaps the best part of the book, but there were too many pieces in the novel overall with no strong unifying connection between them. I couldn’t see what my teaching idea would be for the novel. Mina’s a good writer, though; I’m going to go ahead and order Field of Blood.
Still looking: Next up I hope to find some of Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield series, Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series, a sample of the Sharyn McCrumb series Karen recommended, something by Asa Larsson, and Helen Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss. Thanks for the suggestions!
George Eliot considered the writing of historical fiction “a task which can only be justified by the rarest concurrence of acquirement with genius,” requiring “a form of imaginative power [which] must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigour.” Novels of “the modern antique school have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity,” she complained, “under which we groan.” The extraordinary difficulty of the genre is testified to by her own attempt “to reanimate the past” in Romola, the only one of her novels set back more than a couple of generations. She began writing Romola as a young woman and ended it an old one, she said herself, and having worked through the novel recently in my graduate seminar, I know that the effort it demands can make it feel as if it is having the same effect on its readers. To be sure, Romola does have its thrilling moments, and it certainly demonstrates both “accurate and minute knowledge” and “creative vigour”–just not always at the same time, or always in harmony with each other. And there’s the whole “cheese to the macaroni” moment…but I digress from my main point, which is that really good historical fiction is really hard to write, and thus really rare to read.
Many of the same qualities and techniques are evident in Mantel’s earlier novel A Place of Greater Safety, particularly the lack of sentimentality and the sharpness of the writing, which is at once prolix and poignant, even uncomfortable–if, as I recently suggested, reading Ian McEwan’s prose is like getting acupuncture to your brain, I found reading A Place of Greater Safety akin to walking barefoot across a stretch of gravel towards a graveyard: you aren’t particularly enjoying the experience, but it has its own vividness and particularity, and there’s a morbid fascination in the direction you know you’re headed. (I seem to be finding my reading especially, if only metaphorically, tactile lately.) A Place of Greater Safety also, like Wolf Hall, builds momentum gradually by developing our relationship, with not just one complicated protagonist this time, but with three, the revolutionary triumverate of Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. Again, there are neither heroes nor villains in this crowd, though each has his heroic, as well as his villainous, moments. (Desmoulins, beautiful, erratic, alternately effervescent and enervated, and writing, always writing, seemed to me a particularly brilliant characterization.) And just as Wolf Hall only incidentally informs its readers about the causes and contexts of the Reformation, A Place of Greater Safety eschews the potential pedagogical role of the historical novel. At the end of its 750 pages I really didn’t feel much better informed about the events or even the political and philosophical stakes of the French Revolution than I was already. Here again, Mantel adopts a slantwise approach: not altogether personal, not just the ‘human story’ of the men and women who lived it, but not abstract, theoretical, or fully contextualized either. Here’s a rare but characteristic ‘explanatory’ passage, terse and ominously proleptic:
It’s tribute to Mantel’s peculiar gifts and strategies as a storyteller that she assembles an even less attractive crew here than in Wolf Hall and yet what matters is not how appealing they are but how compelling they are, and how intensely themselves, so that by the final chapter, as the Revolution devours its children, I didn’t care who they were, really, only that they were going to die, after my having known them for so long. Mantel manages their end (known from the novel’s beginning because, after all, it is history) without any of the tumbril sentimentality the inevitable Dickens comparisons on the jacket blurb might lead us to anticipate. None of the characters comes across as heroic or noble, but they have such great vitality (even Robespierre, with his tedious incorruptibility), that their deaths felt like great losses–losses, quite simply, of life, of the energy and lust for life, for words, and for action, that characterized them all. Again, a sample of her terse, epigrammatic style:
Novel Readings 