In Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, he eloquently provided the artistic and intellectual foundation of hardboiled crime fiction. As one of his committed devotees, I lapped it up, and eagerly followed his direction (unwittingly, not having yet read the essay) with my own hardboiled series, trilogies and standalones.
That notwithstanding, I’ve never believed that embracing one form, or sub-genre, requires rejecting all the others. I lean more toward the omnivorous, having begun my reading life with my mother’s handoffs of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout and Earl Stanley Gardener. And all on my own, Arthur Conan Doyle. Lately I’ve been back at it, with a deeper appreciation for everything that Chandler condemned, realizing that these presumed shortcomings are actually the point.
You might have noticed there’s no surfeit
of cynicism, treachery and immorality on display in our daily newsfeed. This was equally true in the first half of
the 20th century, probably more so, since they experienced two world
wars and economic upheaval we can only imagine.
What most people wanted to do was escape, and these master hands
understood just how to provide the ideal transport. But as I read now, having lived the
intervening years in the back alleys and mean streets of Noir fiction, is that
there was much more to it than that.
Looked at objectively, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe
and Sherlock Holmes are exceedingly bizarre individuals. Even with their loyal sidekicks and benighted
enablers, they exist entirely apart from general society. Introverted to the
edge of misanthropy, riddled with obsessive compulsions and hints at dark
caverns of the subconscious, any would fit nicely into one of Marlowe’s
sidetracks. It isn’t just that they easily
read the criminal mind, they empathized, familiar with the moral ambiguities
that entangle even the most callow and supercilious. All three are honorable men, yet none could
be called trusting or emotionally available.
All would afford an interesting date, but you wouldn’t want to move in
together.
Anyone tempted to belittle Agatha Christie should give it a try themselves. In particular, her prose has a distinct clarity, efficiency and immediacy, required for packing a lot of setting, character development and extravagant plotting into fairly compact spaces. She never wastes a sentence, much less a full passage, on anything unessential to her story. I relish Marlowe’s circuitous diversions and introspections, but it would be fair for Christie to say, ”For pity’s sake, young man, get to the point.”
In order to have the description “mystery” appended to any work, it needs to have a puzzle. It’s no accident that ”Ludwig”, a new show from Brit Box, features an actual puzzle creator thrust into a career of solving mysteries. You may seek out Agatha Christie as an unthreatening pastime, but you better be on your mental toes, the plots so thick with clues, both portentous and incidental, that I’m tempted to open a spreadsheet. Even then, you may not be able to crack the code, since she had only a passing loyalty to the principle of fair play. Modern mystery critics would find this irredeemable, but I like to point out that no such problem ever occurred to Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock isn’t only a deductive genius, he spends a lot of time offstage performing capers we only learn about in the final pages when the mystery is triumphantly solved for us.
Speaking
of Brit Box, a first-rate mystery needn’t unfold at an English country estate, though
for me, the form achieves its most sublime in the presence of Jeff caps, sheep,
ancient pubs and a whole population of flinty, emotionally repressed tea
drinkers. I find refreshing the absence
of histrionics (who needs grief counselors when you can put on the kettle or
have a barman pull a draft), abundance of deadpan humor and rich colors muted under
permanently overcast skies. Along with
the nobility of simply carrying on despite it all.
