We Don't Read Mysteries For the Plot

We don't read mysteries for the plot. We read them for the characters and the genre. That's why there have been so many series with the same detective in them. We want to see the development of the character. But we also want that character to ultimately be safe. And that is the promise of genre. Doyle famously could not kill off Sherlock Holmes. This was a violation of the genre: it promises a return to order with all the central characters intact. It may be dark, but it is not tragic.

In some ways, mysteries are an optimistic art form, rather than, say tragedy. Even hard-boiled mysteries revere justice. To not do so would be to violate the genre. The detective needs to be a hero who sacrifices much to create some justice in what seems, on the surface, a world ripe for cynics. But the cynicism is so often stylized, so often sentimentalized. What is not sentimentalized is the demand of the reader for a genre. This is what is most "real" about a mystery.

Another way of looking at mysteries is as a genre that lets all hell break loose only to clear things up nicely and neatly. I think this is generally not the case, although mysteries as a whole have been multitudinous. This much I am sure of: to break the dictates of the genre, which states that justice must be served in the end, is to write an anti-mystery. Paul Auster has written some anti-mysteries.

Mysteries are fun. Unlike horror stories, which are exciting. Mysteries promise a sort of mind game. Horror stories cause us to be sucked in by extravagance and excess, thereby losing ourselves into the fearful spectacle. Mysteries do not ask us to lose or leave ourselves.They ask us to wonder and ponder over a manageable and discreet set of possibilities. Neat, clean, efficient. Kinda bourgeois?

the assault of the mice

1.
in the time of computers
and talking robots
traps could never end
the assault of the mice:

we are less than we hope
which hangs out before
us in clear, sharp relief

while here the talk is of
mice in orifices of
wall coating the heat
with strange squeaks

they can't hurt us it's true

but the aura is the thing

flitters, flakes of sound
in the walls your blue
eyes tell me news
of a distant death brought
close by technology

history now, here makes
everywhere creepy, with possible
dread always available
in a screen the size of a hand

hope is beside the point
it is merely an orientation point
here we have walls
where electrical wires and
mice find their way
work their way

we talk at angles and curves
hope as orientation
angles and curves

and that's fine, enough,
only too much hope says
'it's not enough'

getting down to angles and curves:

2.
a meteor last night
chipped its way across
the sky in a stutter like your
sudden departure from whim and
the cost of desire lost and pena-
lized but no solid sentence
available let the nailing
down off the hook
where are you going in this last issue of instance
what could give you such pluck in the face of
merriment the size of Crazy Horse's statue
oh no the living isn't worth the aggravation which
is in its way constant and not constant complications the merriment issued from
a scratch in the throat the size of a small seed or nut roughing up the deliv-
ery for a good long time but not forever compare pulses to trajectories
waves to thrusts to tangents and the way becomes provisional per-
haps lit by a small tangent of hope going all the way to the base
of the thing and letting you see some sort of wavering trail
but missing everything outside the light which matters
too of course but not at that moment unless it
suddenly throws itself into the scene
surprising or menacing or perp-
lexing will give no necessary
show the light itself a
condition of lithium
of nature of even
hope for them
lasting

outsizing

your bounded silence

and tertiary code

sometimes mere

gravel ways

sometimes 

black hearted loam

sometimes brick

by brick

displeasure
or inept
secondary pain
your wicked insistence?
the genuine attempt?
an aspect spun sharp?

danger follows

like any breeze

and ricochets 

inside the layers

seemingly genuine
structures

strictures

beyond the size
of sense

Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

In the mid 80's Paul Auster wrote three novels that have come to be known as The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Each book is a destruction of the detective genre, one where a mystery and a detective are proposed, but the mystery only thickens and mutates rather than unravels. In a way, they are anti-mysteries.

In his great introduction (I usually hate intros), Luc Sante points to how the books are about a part of New York City that has always been there but that we rarely notice; the passed over graffiti, the symmetry, the doubleness, the "surface flimsiness."

This is a novel of neutrinos, those strange, sub-subatomic particles that move through matter as if it's nothing, that are right now moving through our bodies, that move through these books in the most haunting of ways. They carry no electric charge. They do not gather or orbit. They just stream.

What they touch, how they touch, if they touch is all unknown.

As with these books. Does Peter Stillman walk the streets of Manhattan so that his wanderings will spell out "Tower of Babel"? Or does the character of Quinn just project this belief of his? What is the role, if any, of coincidence? of the higher order notion of "randomness"?

Again and again we are faced with the flatness of facts. Are the facts all there is? Or is there a story that unites them? If so, is it a discovered story or an invented one? If an invented one, then it is just one of many ways of dealing with the facts: there is no solution, not even close, to the mystery and, as we move through each book, mysteries, plural, as they multiply.

This is a New York riddled with possibility, haunted by the random, more than able to carry within itself contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. It is, paradoxically, a wilderness.