Valentine's Day -- Love Among the Clues

    Every once in a while my schedule of alternating Tuesdays coincides with a special day on the calendar.  Such is the case today:  Valentine’s Day.  A day of romance, a day that, while falling in the midst of winter, conjures spring.

    Trying to stay on topic here I decided to offer up my best recommendation for a Valentine’s Day mystery:  a story that will tug at your mind while also tugging at your heart.  Finding a candidate that fits that description is not, however, an easy task.  The Golden Age of detective fiction (my favorite hunting ground) is not exactly riddled with romantic mysteries.  This can be illustrated best by examining some favorite classical mystery authors whose works simply do not fit the bill.

   None of the Sherlock Holmes stories are potential Valentine’s Day nominees.  The closest we get to a romantic involvement for Mr. Holmes is Irene Adler, who actually appears in only one Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia..  Irene Adler has no romantic scenes with Holmes in any Arthur Conan Doyle story, and in fact A Scandal in Bohemia ends with her marriage to someone else.  Nonetheless she is frequently linked with Holmes, but in various pastiches, not in the original Arthur Conan Doyle canon.

    The source for these romantic conjectures involving Sherlock and Irene probably stems from a passage in  A Scandal in Bohemia where Watson sets the stage as follows:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.

    This, plus the fact that Irene Adler is referred to, albeit fleetingly, in four other Holmes stories, A Case of Identity, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, the Five Orange Pips and His Last Bow, inspired other writers, notably Nicholas Meyer and J.S. Baring-Gould, to speculate as to a romantic involvement between the two.  But none of their stories, and certainly none of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, meets our Valentine’s Day requirements of a mystery that is also a romance.

    My favorite Golden Age detective, Ellery Queen, fares no better.  While Ellery engaged in some flirtations over the years, in The Finishing Stroke for example, no actual romantic involvement ever took place during the course of the Queen novels and short stories.  Two recurring female characters appear as quasi-romantic possibilities, but, again, neither suffices for our purposes.

    The first of these is Nikki Porter who for a time was Ellery’s secretary.  Nikki first appeared in the Ellery Queen radio series and movies and was later a character in two Queen novels, There Was an Old Woman and The Scarlet Letters .  Nikki also appears in several short stories, but she and Ellery were never portrayed as a couple.  (Just as Irene Adler inspired other writers to hypothesize romantic involvement with Holmes, so, too, Nikki inspired a similar hypothesis concerning her involvement with Ellery in The Book Case, a conjecture for which I am largely responsible!)

   The only other possible femme fatale in the Queen canon is Paula Paris, a reclusive Hollywood columnist who sparks Ellery’s interest in The Four of Hearts and who also appears in several Queen short stories set in Hollywood.  (Paula also makes a brief appearance in my Queen pastiche The Mad Hatter’s Riddle.)  But, again, whatever spark there might have been between Paula and Ellery ultimately fails to ignite.

David Suchet as Poirot

    What of Agatha Christie?  Well, slim pickings there too.  As far as I can determine there was never any reference to a love interest for Miss Marple, and no love story involving her ever played a part in the Miss Marple novels and short stories.  We get a little closer with Hercule Poirot.  Poirot was apparently smitten at least once --  by Vera Rossakoff , a Russian countess who appears in The Double Clue and then re-appears in The Big Four and The Labours of Hercules.  However, while there is infatuation that is evident on Poirot’s part, at least in the course of Christie’s written word any attraction between the two remains unrequited.  So no Valentine story there.

    With Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe we fare, if anything, even worse.  While there is the occasional female character who earns the grudging respect of Wolfe, by and large the detective is portrayed by Rex Stout as a misogynist.  Archie Goodwin describes Nero Wolfe’s views on women as follows in The Silent Speaker:

 The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womanly details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can’t be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I’m going to take a whole chapter for it.

    Well, interesting, all in all.  But not the stuff of which Valentines are made.

    As an aside, I should at least mention here the famous "e-o/o-e" theory propounded by John D. Clark, Nicholas Meyer, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, writing as Ellery Queen, and W.S. Baring-Gould that the combination and order of the vowels in "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe" are a clue that Nero Wolfe is in fact the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.  But, again, while there are Valentine possibilities here, the theory is derivative and appears only in homages and analytic works.

     We get much closer to the mark, however, with The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.  While it is sort of hard to believe, given all of the movie and television sequels that this book spawned, Hammett only wrote one book starring Nick and Nora Charles.  In fact, it was the last book he ever wrote.  And, even more strange is the fact that the Nick and Nora did not even appear in the original version of the 1934 novel, which was first published in a shorter version in installments in Redbook.  In any event, the romantic and flirtatious interchanges between Nick and Nora push this novel much closer to a Valentine’s Day nominee.  Indeed it was Hammett’s novel that set the stage for later spins on the “romantic couple” as detectives, notably television’s MacMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James, and even Richard Stevenson's characters Donald Strachey and his partner Timothy Callahan, who have been referred to as the gay Nick and Nora.

    Having said all of this, however, The Thin Man is no better than a near miss, as far as I am concerned, for today’s purpose.  While the detectives are a couple, the mystery itself doesn’t tie back to or otherwise derive from their romantic involvement.

    Well, as you have probably guessed, I do have a personal favorite to nominate for best Valentine's Day mystery story.   It is Random Harvest by James Hilton. 

    I know, I know, Random Harvest isn’t a classic Golden Age “whodunit” mystery.  But it is a classic.  And it is also, most certainly, a mystery.  Written in 1941, Random Harvest tells the story of Charles Rainier, a wealthy businessman and politician, who battles his way out of amnesia to search for his long-lost love.  The story is a wonderful and nostalgic depiction of life in England from the First World War to the brink of the second, but it is also one of the finest classic mysteries I can remember reading.

    There is a tendency to say too much when discussing Random Harvest, and this I refuse to do.  As I have said before, “no spoilers here.”  I will offer up a snippet from the New York Times review published back in 1941:  “a strange tale . . . harrowing and romantic and tender.”   The Chicago Tribune, in the same year, called the book “Mr. Hilton’s best novel to date.”  That is saying something since Random Harvest was preceded by Lost Horizon  and Goodbye Mr. Chips.  Random Harvest is, in any event, my Valentine’s Day nominee since, to my mind, it is one of the best blends of mystery and romance ever written.

    So if there are any readers out there who have somehow gotten to 2012 without reading Random Harvest, or watching the 1942 film version starring Ronald Coleman  and Greer Garson, this book is for you.  My advice, however, is that you should look no further for information concerning the book: don't watch the movie, don't search out reviews, don't read about it on Wikipedia.  Just get the book and then read it as James Hilton intended, from start to finish without the “help” of others.

    Happily, unlike many volumes from the 1940s Random Harvest is still readily available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  There is even a Nook edition for $3.99.  (Sorry, apparently it has yet to be “Kindled”!)

    Enjoy. 

    And Happy Valentine’s Day.

    

Desperately Seeking Detectives

Consider the flood of detective novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Consider that, unlike the Victorians and the Edwardians, a jewel robbery or two is not enough to elevate the reader's heartbeat. Consider that, except maybe in the hands of Karin Fossum, a single victim is currently small potatoes. And consider that with only two sexes, the permutations of she killed him, he killed her, he killed him, etc don't go very far.

What's a writer to do for variety? There are the save the world thrillers of great ambition and small plausibility, and the serial killers that have just about displaced Nazis as an all-purpose menace. But the sovereign source of originality remains The Detective.

Here the profession has shown almost unlimited ingenuity. We've had all manner of police from every age and every nation. Monks and priests likewise, to be joined by Chinese scholars and Japanese potters. Little old ladies who haunt prize gardens and country houses share the shelves with little old men (and some not so old) who pontificate from their armchairs.

There are gumshoes of every type, ditto journalists, those other licensed snoops. Railroad engineers fussed about malfeasance along the rails and titled lords who find unpleasantness at their clubs rub elbows with Greek scholars navigating the shoals of the ancient world and their Roman counterparts loose in the Empire, not to mention swaggering Renaissance gentlemen abroad in low company.

Even species is no bar, either, especially for the feline tribe with cats as assistants, cats as narrators and witnesses. The mind boggles.

Of course, every detective needs a weakness and here, again, the profession has been creative. The old broken heart (Lord Peter Wimsey) and alcohol problems (Philip Marlowe) have been greatly expanded. One of Dick Francis's protagonists had a hand crippled from a racing accident. Jeffrey Deaver went several steps better with Lincoln Rhyme, his quadriplegic detective, while Jonathan Lethem gave his Lionel Essrog Tourette's syndrome, which certainly added an original flavor to the narrative.

But to the best of my knowledge no one before Alice LaPlante has attempted a mystery narrated by an Alzheimer's patient, although Faulkner had the profoundly retarded Benjy narrate part of the mysterious The Sound and the Fury.

The main character of Turn of Mind keeps a sign in her kitchen, informing whoever maybe concerned that she is Dr. Jennifer White, 64, suffering from dementia. A former top hand surgeon and a widow with two grown children, she is initially still able to read and capable of writing down the events of the day as Magdalena, her caregiver urges her to do.

But there are gaps and nowhere are those moments in the mental abyss more noticeable than when the murder of her long time friend and neighbor, Amanda O'Toole, is at issue. Dr. White forgets that her friend is dead; Dr. White grieves and is lonely, and then Dr. White forgets again. Not uncommon with a dementia patient, but this one is different. This one is not only a grieving survivor but also a 'person of interest' in the death.

Who knocked the formidable Amanda on the head, and then removed four of the fingers of her right hand? Surgically removed, that is. Does Dr. White not know? Or does Dr. White not remember? Or does Dr. White not want to remember?

These are the chief mysteries of Turn of Mind, although other questions emerge in the course of the novel, and LaPlante's skillful plotting creates a good amount of suspense. Almost everything is filtered through Dr. White's increasingly fragmented mind, and it is fair enough to call her both suspect and detective. Despite a capable investigating officer, the case is ultimately resolved through the doctor's almost dissolved memories. By the end, although she barely registers it, the doctor presents the reader with the truth.

The portraits of both women, and also of Dr. White's two problematic children, Mark and Fiona, are sharp and complex. The doctor's memories of her husband, James, and of her children when young and of her friendship with Amanda and her husband Peter are all imaginatively handled. Though broken up by plausible gaps in Dr. White's consciousness, we eventually get a good picture of a complex woman in complicated relationships.

If the good doctor occasionally seems to have retained too much - she gets loose in her old clinic and gives perfectly good medical advice for a half hour or so - the sense the novel gives of a good mind crumbling is more genuinely scary than any number of terrorist plots or serial killers. In Turn of Mind, LaPlante has scored a rare double, finding not only a unique 'detective' but a uniquely terrifying antagonist in Alzheimer's disease. The result is an imaginative and provocative volume.