"The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Penzler Otto)

VI

From the moment that I began writing Every Dead Thing, there were supernatural elements in the novel. The supernatural touches to my books are frequently criticized by the more conservative elements in the genre, those who would like to see mystery fiction set in aspic somewhere between the birth of Sherlock Holmes and the last appearance of Hercule Poirot. It is, I suppose, the side of the mystery community that I find most depressing, this reluctance to countenance experimentation, particularly when it comes to the intermingling of genres. Yet, in so many aspects of art and culture, it is through precisely this kind of experimentation that new and interesting forms emerge.

Anthony Cox, in a dedication to his fellow writer Milward Kennedy, stated that he himself wished to produce a novel that “breaks every rule of the austere club to which we both belong.” Cox was writing in 1930. Almost seventy years later, I had something of the same urge, but in my case there were specific rules I wished to break, if only because I did not accept their validity. One was a rule of structure, which explains the peculiar “hourglass” form of Every Dead Thing, in which a crime that is committed, and solved, in the first half of the novel feeds into the larger mystery tackled in the second half. Another was to do with the supernatural and the metaphysical.

I wanted Charlie Parker to be haunted, but not haunted in the manner most commonly found in mystery fiction, where “haunted” tends to be a euphemism for “brooding,” “drinks a bit,” or “stares into space a lot.” I wondered what might happen if a man believed himself literally to be haunted, if his guilt and grief were tormenting him to such a degree that he was unable to determine if the visions of the dead he encountered were real or merely manifestations of his troubled psyche.

There were some literary influences at work here, particularly the early-twentieth-century ghost stories of English writers like M. R. James. It’s possible, too, that something of that Irish antirationalist tradition had also crept in. Then, of course, there are my own Catholic origins, which seemed to find an echo in the themes of reparation and redemption that are so much a part of the mystery fiction I love.

For me, the supernatural serves a number of functions in my novels. To begin with, it suggests a deeper understanding of the word mystery and its religious origins-a mystery as the Greeks would have understood it, or as the writers of the medieval mystery plays, which were versions of Bible stories, would have interpreted it. The curious thing about mystery novels is that generally they are not very mysterious at all. What seems beyond understanding at the start is usually explicable in quite simple terms by the end: the butler did it. I hoped to restore something of that older sense of mystery in my work, and the supernatural touches suggested a means of doing so. They also function as indicators of a larger moral universe, and in that sense they are as much metaphysical as supernatural. (Even here, though, there are antecedents. Chesterton, in the Father Brown stories, introduced a strong metaphysical element to the genre. What gave Father Brown his insights into crime was an “understanding of sin,” of the nature of the human soul.)

Perhaps at the heart of my difficulties with the structures and rules of the classical crime story is the simple fact that I don’t share the beliefs on which they are based. The world is not rational and intelligible. Order is fragile, a thin crust upon the underlying chaos. Any answers we get will be partial at best and at worst will simply give rise to further, deeper doubts. It is interesting that the classical detective story exerted such a strong influence on the postmodern novel. In the latter, writers found a means of antiliterary expression, a way to react against the weight and expectations of an older, restrictive literary tradition, but the classical story also provided them with something to disprove: the rationalist belief that the mind can solve everything. When just one or two details of the mystery novel are twisted, the opposite becomes the case, and the world that is revealed is both more frightening and more real as a consequence.

Thus, we have Nabokov writing Despair, or the genre experiments of Borges. Thomas Pynchon can produce The Crying of Lot 49, a Californian anti-detective novel that leaves us awaiting a moment of revelation that does not come. There is no explanation at the end, because there cannot be.

Sometimes I envy literary writers that freedom: the freedom not to explain. Ultimately, crime readers expect a solution, however partial, to the mystery with which they have been presented in the course of the book, and writers in the genre have a certain obligation to fulfill that expectation. Literary writers have no such obligation.

Yet there are ways of subverting those expectations, even within the genre, so that some questions can remain unanswered or are, in fact, rendered more interesting by the fact that they are unanswerable. Thus, for me, the supernatural represents my small effort at genre subversion.