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Drawing on Dostoyevsky and Highsmith, EQMM regular Sheila Kohler returns to our blog to espouse the many benefits that the mystery genre can impart on readers and writers
The mystery story or novel has two main but opposing advantages: its rigid structure and at the same time the freedom it gives both the reader and the author to follow their darker desires. The rigid structure helps the author find the plot, the drama, and the basic conflict perhaps more easily as certain elements are almost prerequisites: an unexplained and violent death for example often lies at the center of the mystery plot and provides the necessary questions to keep the reader turning the pages with interest, eager to discover why and how such an unlikely thing could have happened and who is responsible.
But these elements paradoxically allow the author and thus the reader more freedom to follow dramatic desires: moments of violent hate and anger for example or obsessive love or jealousy, hunger for power, or simply the belief that one is above the law, desires that are not always possible or plausibly expressed in straight fiction. This freedom when fueled by a rich and fecund imagination can lead to great writing and thus great enjoyment by the reader.
Basically, the mystery story at its best provides us with a reassuringly secure structure at the same time as allowing us to follow freely our desires and fears in imagination, desires which we cannot and would not want to fulfill in a moral life. On the page we can sometimes be active, we can live in a world where revenge is possible, where reversal and redemption occur, where injustice is punished, when in life so often we are obliged by a moral code to be passive or worse to be punished or humiliated by the mistakes of others.
An excellent example of both a skillful structure and the freedom required for great writing is the novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here we have a mysterious death given to us from the first sentence juxtaposed by unusual and realistic detail that the writer provides freely and unexpectedly, anchoring us in a precise and original world. All of this of course provokes from the start the initial questions that the reader wants answered and a believable voice which makes the events credible and leads us inexorably to the last page.
The first sentence here is:
“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”
The coming and unexplained murder as well as the victim’s name is provided in the first line as well as the precise time and the action of the protagonist on this last day of his life, an action which ironically gives us the theme of religion and a hint of our whereabouts: near a river or the sea. There is a boat.
Why will Santiago Nasar be killed? Why is he getting up so early to go and wait for a boat with a bishop? Where are we? And why? A plethora of questions already team in our minds. Who could resist reading on?
This is followed immediately by the flashback to Santiago’s happy dream of gentle rain and his awakening feeling “completely spattered with bird shit.” Marquez, as in all his writing, is a fearless writer using brutal and even coarse language and juxtaposing this with gentle and lyrical description: “He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream. ”
Marquez juxtaposes the secure structure of the coming unexplained death with imaginative, precise, and original detail which create from the first page a voice with authority which leads us onwards into his world.
Another excellent example is from perhaps the greatest mystery novel of all time. We find this duality, which stirs both the reader and the writer in a dramatic plot as well as providing the necessary original, and imaginative details which give authority to the voice on the very first page of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
On the first page of his novel Dostoevsky writes: “I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,’ he thought with an odd smile.” We are immediately in the mind of this anti-hero. And just a few lines on he wonders: “It’s because I babble that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I babble because I do nothing . . . Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that seriously possible?”
Here of course we wonder immediately what it is this young man wants to attempt. Where is he going? What is he contemplating doing? Here we do not yet know his name (it is Raskolnikov, of course) but we do know from the first page his fears of meeting his landlady on the stairs. We know he needs money desperately and that “ for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition verging on hypochondria.” In other words we have already some of his motivation, his unstable state of mind. To some extent he has already gained our sympathy, too. We are rooting for him: poor, half-deranged we suspect, young and downtrodden. Dostoevsky adds to this the heat in the street, the confusion, “and that special Saint Petersburg stench.” He too like Santiago Nasar is “spattered with shit.” Dostoevsky, too, uses the place, the smells, and above all the intimate voice, the mind of the murderer which we enter so directly and freely and convincingly. We are with him all the way.
My third and last example is from The Talented Mr. Ripley where Patricia Highsmith from the first page grabs us with Tom’s predicament: “Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him.” Here too we have from the first line a hint of danger. Tom is being followed and hastens his step. If suspense can be summed up as putting a vulnerable creature in danger we sense that someone is after Tom though we do not know why at this point and we want to know of course. Then Highsmith like Dostoevsky brilliantly enters Tom’s mind and we follow his vacillations: “There was Raoul’s. Should he take a chance and go in for another drink? Tempt fate and all of that? Was this the kind of man they would send after him? They couldn’t give you more than ten years, Tom thought.” Why is Tom so fearful, we want to know? Why would someone follow him? What has he done? Why is he likely to be locked up? We are hooked.
Highsmith does here two things at once: makes us fear for Tom and also question his honesty if he himself fears being locked up for ten years. From the start she manages to interest her reader in Tom, to enter his mind, and suspect at the same time that he might be guilty of a crime. This double jeopardy is maintained all through the novel almost miraculously. She somehow makes us both root for Tom, will he or won’t he be caught? who like Raskolnikov becomes almost inevitably a murderer, someone who kills twice, getting away with his crime with the reader taking part vicariously in his nefarious deeds. All three of these authors know how to use a well-structured plot, putting the protagonist from the first page into sufficient danger (Santiago Nasar we know will be killed; Raskolnikov is plotting murder, and Tom we know has already committed at least a minor crime) At the same time the writer is able to give us sufficient original detail to make the high-stakes game believable: in Chronicle we have incongruously the boat, the bishop, the spattering of shit; in Crime we have the mundane lack of money, the inner monologue, the very realistic uncertainty: “Am I capable of that?” and in Ripley the fear and the unreliability “they couldn’t give you more than ten years” and in all three the use of both the outer and the inner world: the interior monologue and the dream of the endangered protagonists which keeps us reading, on to the bitter end.
