On Shining Girls and Lonely Places

The psychoses fomented by rigid constructions of masculinity are the topic of many serial killer narratives. Yet novels such as Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter also make their psychotics appear intriguing, attractive, and even seductive. Casting these murderers as sympathetic or even relatable characters undermines the horror of their actions. That these fantasies are explicitly male indicates a gendering of serial killer narratives. Female authors within the genre, such as Dorothy B. Hughes and Lauren Beukes refute such characterizations by criticizing a history of violence fostered by patriarchal structures. In this sense, Beukes’s The Shining Girls both updates and expands the themes of Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), the groundbreaking psychological thriller that introduced the serial killer plot as a vehicle for addressing the misogynistic suppression of female agency.

The Shining Girls opens in 1931 Chicago, with Harper Curtis on the lam from both the mob and the police. Harper takes up residence in a decrepit house that urges him to eliminate the “shining” girls, young women full of potential, by providing a wormhole through which he can travel to different eras. The narrative alternates between Harper’s murders and his history with Kirby Mazrachi, who survives one of Harper’s attacks at age eighteen. In the present, Kirby takes an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times to gain access to information about her would-be killer. While Kirby’s research reveals the unbelievable possibility that her killer has been operating for sixty years, Harper discovers the existence of the girl who lived and returns to finish his task.

As in Hughes’s novel, Beukes highlights the effects of war on the male psyche. Combat since the Great War has traditionally been portrayed as a defining masculine experience, and both Hughes and Beukes use it as a catalyst for their antagonists’ actions. Harper is a soldier who returns from WWI to a social displacement that leads to gambling, financial trouble, and, in turn, aggressions with the law. Beukes illustrates how the hostilities of wartime engagement cultivate the idea that masculinity is constructed through dominance, brutality, and conquest, which are qualities Harper enacts in extinguishing the potential of women whose ambition and intelligence threaten traditional gender roles.

The two books diverge, of course, in that In a Lonely Place is anchored to the specific time of post-World War II, while The Shining Girls uses time travel to explore the repercussions of Harper’s violence from 1929 to 1993. Science fiction fans may object to the logistics of Harper’s time travel, which is never adequately explained, but Beukes’s indeterminate ending speaks to an ongoing cycle of gendered violence. It is unclear whether the house fostered Harper’s murderous desires or whether Harper’s innate hatred and violence was powerful enough to create the wormhole, but this distinction is unnecessary. Although Harper’s time-traveling methods are inexplicable, his motivations are a clear and constant attempt to silence and destroy women’s agency. Rather than ending the novel with the inevitable showdown between Kirby and Harper, Beukes presents the POV of a peripheral character drawn to the 1929 house, implying the cycle will begin anew.

To highlight the indiscriminate nature of such violence, Beukes intersperses her victim’s stories with Harper’s narrative. Such victims include a nude dancer, a factory worker, a transsexual passing in a girlie show, a pharmaceutical researcher, and a drug-addicted artist. There is little commonality between these women, other than each one’s attempt to assert her own individuality and independence. The diversity of Harper’s victims speaks to a violence that affects women of all classes, races, and sexualities. Thus, in our current political milieu, in which ongoing legislation attempts to regulate women’s bodies or restrict LGBT identities, Beukes’s criticism of the denial of female autonomy is particularly resonant.

The Singer from Memphis covers ancient espionage

Whether in classics, such as Homer’s The Iliad, or contemporary novels, like Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, the dominant literary tone toward ancient Athens is one of gravitas and reverence for the deeds of warriors, gods, and monsters. Rather than extending this mythology, Gary Corby treats antiquity with wit and whimsy in The Singer from Memphis. Disguised as a humorous caper plot, Corby’s novel combines the cynical tone of hardboiled detective fiction and the intrigue of espionage to make the classical world feel current.

When Athenian private investigator Nicolaos is contracted to guide aspiring historian Herodotus on a research trip through Egypt, various political interests complicate Nico’s straightforward protective detail. As his travels coincide with the Egyptian rebellion against the Persian Empire, Nico is charged by his statesman, Pericles, with a more difficult assignment: to represent Inaros, the Prince of Libya, in the delicate matter of overthrowing the Persian king Artaxerxes and establishing Inaros as the new Egyptian Pharaoh. Threatened by assassins, mercenaries, and crocodiles, Nico enlists the help of Djanet, the titular singer, to find the tomb of Psamtik and steal the late pharaoh’s crook and flail, the regalia that will symbolize the rightful ruler of Egypt.

Although serialized as an Athenian mystery, The Singer from Memphis is essentially a spy novel in its portrayal of treachery, bureaucratic corruption, and geopolitical jockeying. Corby frames his story in espionage terms, describing a Greek military advisor’s defection to Persia and characterizing Athenian-Persian relations after the Spartan’s last stand at Thermopylae as an ancient cold war. Indeed, Corby incorporates modern Cold War narrative conventions, such as cover stories and institutional agendas. Academic and entertainment professions, respectively, position Herodotus and Djanet to collect and circulate crucial information to their handlers, while Nico, the moral-driven protagonist, finds himself the pawn of the Tjaty, the Prime Minister of Egypt and head of its Public Service. Replete with distrust and double-crosses, The Singer from Memphis includes a classic espionage ending in which the individual agent’s will proves futile against the government machine.

In the tradition of historical fiction and spy narratives, The Singer from Memphis is a meticulously researched blend of fact and fiction. Corby enhances his novel with paratext, including a chronology that recounts 69 years of invasion, rebellion, and war and a lengthy Author’s Note that documents the real events and personages that populate Corby’s fictional world. The inclusion of Herodotus may seem incidental, but his The Histories provides the rich backdrop against which Corby sets his tale, as he incorporates accounts of cultural customs and develops minor characters from Herodotus’s comprehensive record. Yet, the novel avoids feeling overly didactic by balancing its history with humor, from Nico’s ironic contempt for religious rituals and government practices to oblique Elvis references that play on both the title and espionage themes of “suspicious minds.”

Corby’s comical approach makes light of darker crime fiction themes in hardboiled and espionage novels. His historical analysis, however, grounds The Singer from Memphis in a serious, realistic context that demythologizes pop culture depictions of the ancient world by replacing vengeful gods with crooked institutions. In this sense, Corby makes foreign affairs of the ancient world feel surprisingly timely. While the Persian Empire may no longer exist, the three-cornered war portrayed in The Singer from Memphis speaks to ongoing geopolitical instability and conflicts of power in Egypt and Libya.

The Singer from Memphis; 352 pages; Soho Crime, 2016.

The Victorian ghost story matures in “The Grownup”

With its allusions to Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and Daphne du Maurier, Gillian Flynn’s short story “The Grownup” weaves a rich intertextuality of 19th-century Gothic tales. In its sharp focus on the trappings of economics, though, Flynn’s incarnation of the ghost story closely aligns with a different style of terror, that of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Combining the Victorian internalization of horror with a Kafkaesque existentialism, Flynn thus updates the haunted house trope by substituting the sinister English manor for a bleak suburban nightmare of home ownership, faltering marriages, broken families, and matrophobia.

As in all of Flynn’s novels, the psychology of “The Grownup” is driven by complicated mother-child relationships. The unnamed narrator opens the story by detailing her unstable upbringing, from her father’s abandonment to her contempt for her mother, whom she deems “the laziest bitch she ever met.” Instead of stable employment, the narrator’s mother survives by panhandling, exploiting her daughter as a tool to bring in more money. With age, the narrator’s grifting experience naturally progresses from street begging to sex work and fortune telling at the seedy Spiritual Palms. When one of her palmistry clients, Susan Burke, describes eerie occurrences at her house, the narrator, sensing an easy mark, offers her “psychic” services to cleanse the space of its negative auras. After she visits Carterhook Manor and encounters Susan’s disturbed teenage stepson, Miles, however, the narrator questions whether the madness and malignant forces portrayed in her beloved supernatural novels truly exist.

Originally published in George R. R. Martin’s Rogues anthology as “What Do You Do?,” the standalone story’s revised title more precisely indicates Flynn’s concerns about the claustrophobic anxiety that accompanies adulthood. In particular, Flynn highlights the socioeconomic factors that affect women of various classes. Acknowledging the demeaning perception of sex work, the narrator constantly colors the reality of her profession, referring to her occupation as “customer service,” “vision specialist,” or “therapeutic practices.” She finds herself deficient in comparison to higher-class, university-educated women like Susan, but the reality is that such women bear their own burdens of mortgages, aloof husbands, and antagonistic children.

Both women are, in effect, hindered by a Kafkaesque immobility, unable to reposition themselves socially or financially. That the narrator describes Miles scuttling around “as if he bore an insect’s shell, shiny and hard” is a direct reference to Kafka’s traveling salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a creature resembling a cockroach. Gregor Samsa’s alteration has been interpreted as a physical manifestation of the stress induced by supporting his family through a tiring and dismal job. Flynn’s childless narrator suffers through a similar drudgery, but her transformation is an emotional one, inspired by her growing understanding of the Burke family dynamic.

In such commentary on alienation and loneliness, “The Grownup” echoes themes of the Victorian works referenced throughout the story, but the strongest influence drawn from these novels is the unreliability of the narrator. True to the nature of the con artist, the narrator leads the reader to believe “The Grownup” is a classic supernatural tale when it is actually a psychological thriller about feminine fears about the loss of one’s independence upon starting a family. Indeed, Flynn never reveals her narrator’s name because she doesn’t have one single identity. Rather, she is the embodiment of every woman’s worry that she will eventually metamorphose into her mother.

“The Grownup”; 64 pages; Crown Publishing, 2015.

The devil of Pig Island is in the details

Do not be fooled by Pig Island’s unappealing title. The very banality of the name is an act of deceit, an inverse glamour that conceals a novel fixated on illusion, both in physical ugliness and false pretenses. Yet, with its allusions to both Pygmalion and The Island of Dr. Moreau, the title is also a conceit, an elaborate metaphor in which Mo Hayder marks Pig Island as an extension of these transformation narratives.

**The remaining review contains potential spoilers.**

A tourist video showing a blurry image of a grotesque half-human/half-beast on the shores of Pig Island arouses suspicions of devil worship performed by the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, the religious group that inhabits the secluded Scottish atoll. Seeking to dispel these accusations of Satanism, the PHM invites journalist Joe Oakes to investigate the “devil of Pig Island.” Oakes eagerly accepts the offer, as his reputation for debunking paranormal hoaxes originated eighteen years prior when he discredited the fraudulent faith healing ministries of the PHM’s founder, Pastor Malachi Dove. Because Dove’s increasingly erratic behavior has exiled him from the community, the PHM persuades Oakesy to disgrace the pastor a second time by writing an exposé that will have Dove declared legally insane and ousted from the island. As Oakes’s investigation reignites hostilities between the two men, he becomes a target for Dove’s delusions of godlike grandeur.

Like the purported devil of Pig Island, Hayder’s novel conveys a sense of dread and uncertainty through its amalgamated form and disquieting imagery. Dividing the action between three locations allows Hayder to mutate each strain of her story into different genres based on geography. Hayder creates a distinct atmosphere in each environment that correlates to the transformation of Dove’s daughter Angeline, whom Oakes discovers hidden on the island.

With its Lovecraftian blend of the supernatural and the scientific, the Pig Island setting evokes the tone of weird fiction. Because of a birth defect that spawned a vestigial limb, Angeline has been quarantined in the remote wilderness of the island. This is a space of trauma and madness, where Malachi has imposed both a paternal and pastoral authority over Angeline. Because he believes her deformity is unclean, a curse from the devil, Malachi subjects Angeline to repeated exorcisms in a misguided attempt to purify and purge the demons within her.

Following a tragic crime on the island, the novel shifts into a tale of domestic suspense as Joe, his wife Lexie, and Angeline relocate to a police safe house on the Scottish mainland. That this space is nicknamed the “rape suite” due to the violation of some female residents by the authorities forebodes both a physical and psychological probing into the women’s psyches. As Hayder confronts a less insidious form of masculine dominance in Joe’s attempts to protect both women from murderous threats made by Malachi, she also articulates the Oakes’ marital struggles by dividing the narrative between Oakesy and Lexie and revealing each partner’s self-motivated interest in allowing Angeline to remain the stranger in the house.

In the bleak urban wasteland of London, the novel concludes as pure noir. Haunted by fears of retribution from Malachi, Joe spirals into depression and a self-destructive madness that mirrors his antagonist’s own insanity. Meanwhile, Angeline becomes more socialized, seeking the normality denied first by her father’s obsessive control and then by Joe’s desire to shield her from a society that could potentially be repulsed by her disfigurement. As Angeline struggles to assert her own identity, the conflict between Joe’s regression and her maturation culminates in disastrous consequences.

Continuing the tradition of transformation narratives, Hayder illustrates how metamorphosis leads to revelation. In this instance, though, Hayder overthrows the patriarchal authority implicit in the god-creator figures of Shaw and Wells. Through its porcine connotations of chauvinism, which often enforces the possession of female figures through isolation, Pig Island exposes a sexism that is much more sinister in its delusions than any demon, devil, or demigod.

Pig Island; 352 pages; Grove Press, 2015 reissue.

The Ironic Neo-Noir of Niceville’s Resident Evil

Niceville is to Carsten Stroud what rural Maine is to Stephen King. Both places are fertile imaginative landscapes against which their authors explore the sociology and superstitions of insular communities. Much like King’s Needful Things or It, in which the supernatural acts as an agent of the environment, Niceville is a chilling depiction of the trauma, iniquity, and injurious memories suppressed under the pretense of small-town values.

After ten-year-old Rainey Teague is reported missing, Detective Nick Kavanaugh’s investigation determines that the disappearance is no mere kidnapping. Rather, security cameras of the child’s last known location show him to simply vanish. When Teague inexplicably reappears days later, inside a locked tomb in the town’s graveyard, Kavanaugh delves into the mystery of the 179 random stranger abductions that have occurred in Niceville since 1928. Assisted by his wife, his partner, and a police CI, Kavanaugh finally determines that something inhuman, something from the outside, is targeting the bloodlines of the Founding Four families.

Because Stroud draws from several disparate genres, Niceville’s many plotlines and populous cast may initially feel incongruous. As evidenced by the town’s ironic name, however, the novel is as much a satiric deconstruction of literary traditions as it is a demystification of the Old South. Therefore, to appreciate the novel requires an understanding of the influences that inform Stroud’s work and how they tie together to build the bizarre world of Niceville.

For fans of hardboiled crime fiction, Stroud’s canvass of the town exposes its gritty underside. Intertwining subplots include a bank robbery that leaves four cops dead, a slighted citizen intent on exposing the sexual deviances of others, and the blackmail of a security firm founder as part of a corporate takeover. As in that most famous of hardboiled novels, The Maltese Falcon, though, these story lines merely serve as MacGuffins for the true terror lurking beneath the town’s surface.

Indeed, such cultural decay of crime and violence moves Stroud’s novel into the Southern Gothic, addressing the grievances and blood feuds masked by the South’s quaint, idyllic image. As the abductions relate to a century-old slight between two families, regarding a rakish cad’s indiscretion that leaves a young girl in trouble, the many now face expiation for the sins of a few. With an entity that travels through mirrors and glass to exact its vengeance, these reflective surfaces become a metaphor for the masquerade of small town idealism, exposing the wickedness otherwise concealed by Niceville’s citizens. In this sense, the land itself is the novel’s most important character, exhibiting a consciousness that absorbs and feeds upon the malicious energies of its inhabitants.

Although it deploys conventions of crime fiction, magical realism, and the horrific, fantastic, and Gothic, Niceville is, above all, a neo-noir fiction dictated by the characters’ own fatalistic propensity for self-destruction. With two successive installments in the trilogy, the novel’s cliff-hanging end proves to be the real beginning of the Niceville saga. As Stroud leaves the reader with nothing but unsettling questions, one feels that the only conclusive answer is that the residents of Niceville are simultaneously plagued by a past on which they had no bearing and prevented from a future in which they will have any agency.

Niceville; 464 pages; Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2013 reprint.

Speakers of the Dead resurrects Walt Whitman’s humanist spirit

Set against a backdrop of murder, grave robbing, and civic corruption in 1843 New York, J. Aaron Sanders’s debut novel, Speakers of the Dead, creates an alternate history in which death is the catalyst that transforms Walt Whitman from a struggling journalist and mediocre writer into the preeminent poet of American life.

When Lena Stowe, the co-founder of the Women’s Medical College of Manhattan, is found holding the eviscerated body of her husband, Abraham, authorities believe she murdered him as vindication for his alleged affair with and killing of a cigar girl. In a futile attempt to avert her sentenced execution, Walt Whitman uses his position as a reporter for the Aurora to investigate and publicize events that led to the Stowes’ misfortunes. To honor his friends’ deaths and uphold their legacy of promoting medical progress, Walt embarks on a quest to exonerate both parties — clearing Abraham of the botched abortion that killed the cigar girl Mary Rogers and absolving Lena of Abraham’s murder. Intending to find those responsible while aiding the Stowes’ students to keep the Women’s Medical College open, Walt delves into the New York underworld of the Resurrection Men, grave robbers who traffic in the procurement and trade of dead bodies, only to discover the length of their political reach.

In reconstructing the conditions that created this racket, Sanders cites both the legal and theological discourses regarding human dissection. Whitman suspects that Abraham’s murder resulted in part from his participation in drafting the controversial Bone Bill legislation, which pushed for legalizing the dissection of the dead. Although experimentation on cadavers would advance anatomical knowledge, the Bone Bill would not protect the legal acquisition of cadavers for the medical profession until 1854. This delay was largely due to the religious opposition to dissection, which Sanders portrays in the riotous attacks on the Women’s Medical College from mobs in protest of dissection practices, who claim the desecration of the body prevents the soul’s resurrection, thereby denying one life after death. Whether informed by legality or doctrine, Sanders stresses the repressive influence of conviction in such rigid laws or unwavering faith.

A historical mystery concerning the phenomenon of body snatching could have been equally effective without Walt Whitman as a protagonist, yet Whitman’s philosophy, most famously proclaimed in “Song of Myself,” is the perfect response to the arguments posed about the sanctity of the human form. Instead of privileging the body in death, Whitman views it as a natural, cyclical regeneration of the earth, in which “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses / And to die is different than what anyone supposed, and luckier.” Indeed, the crusade to clear the Stowes’ names epitomizes the democratic nature of Whitman’s poetic oeuvre. In striving for truth and justice, Sanders’s Whitman becomes a mouthpiece for the marginalized, from wrongfully convicted criminals to prostitutes of ill repute to the women transgressing into a male profession. Sanders also gives representation to homosexuality, an element that is commonly either absent or aberrant in crime fiction. By featuring a relationship between the fictional Whitman and his Aurora editor, Henry Saunders, as crucial to both character and plot development, Sanders voices the same inclusionary, egalitarian principles as Whitman himself.

Beyond Whitman’s characterization, Speakers of the Dead is rife with allusions to the literary milieu of the time and thus will certainly appeal to American literature enthusiasts. Sanders includes references to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental, transparent eyeball, a belief that influenced much of Whitman’s work, and even a cameo from Edgar Allan Poe, whose short story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” attempted to solve the real-life murder of Mary Rogers. Sanders does an admirable job of glossing these personages within the text and partially addresses this intertextuality in a concluding Author’s Note. Yet the novel could benefit from a critical introduction that places Whitman within this historical context in order to attract a more general readership that may be unacquainted with Whitman’s work or otherwise deterred by esoteric poetry and philosophy.

With its convergence of realism, romanticism, and transcendentalism, Speakers of the Dead mimics the aesthetics and movements that Whitman’s poetics so seamlessly intersect. J. Aaron Sanders crafts a compelling mystery that thus contains multitudes, as it cleverly frames a disreputable moment in American history through the appeal of the nation’s most beloved poet.

Speakers of the Dead; 320 pages; Plume Books, 2016.

Gold of Our Fathers illuminates illegal mining in Ghana

My knowledge of the precious minerals trade extends only as far as the American commonplace Cash 4 Gold merchants. While these buyers mislead unwitting consumers by devaluing gold prices in a fluctuating market, Kwei Quartey’s Gold of Our Fathers (Soho Crime, 2016) addresses a much more insidious aspect of the gold trade by illustrating the devastation caused by the influx of illegal Chinese mining operations to Ghana, Africa’s largest gold exporter.

Quartey’s fourth Darko Dawson novel finds the protagonist promoted to detective chief inspector, but as a pawn of departmental politics Dawson receives a subsequent transfer from Ghana’s capital to the rural Ashanti region. On his second day in Obuasi, Dawson is assigned to investigate the murder of Bao Liu, a Chinese mine owner buried alive in his gold pits. Dawson initially suspects one of the disgruntled galamsey boys, the small-scale miners employed by Liu, until he learns of grievances against Liu from both a local farming family and a larger American-run mining operation. While pursuing these leads, Dawson progresses from solving a simple murder case to exposing government corruption that profits from illegal mining practices.

Because the scope of the novel contracts and expands as Dawson shifts between the single murder and a complex conspiracy, Gold of Our Fathers struggles, at times, with an imbalanced narrative and erratic pacing. With both the identity of Bao’s killer and the bureaucratic malfeasance evident from the start, reader interest hinges on Quartey’s vivid depiction of Ghanaian life rather than intrigue. Further inhibiting the construction of the novel is the attempt to include the Dawson family’s relocation and adjustment to Obuasi, as their undeveloped story line intrudes on the more engaging discourse of Ghanaian politics. The minimal inclusion of these peripheral characters is reflective of serialized literature, though, since dedicated readers will expect an appearance, and therefore excuse a certain level of neglect, of figures that have been introduced through the three previous installments.

What Gold of Our Fathers lacks in suspense, however, it makes up for in setting. Quartey, a physician by trade, takes a diagnostic approach to the poor economic conditions that have produced the Ashanti region’s dependence on gold mining. In comparison to Accra, Dawson’s new appointment is in an office made inefficient by lack of financial resources and careless personnel. In conjunction, these two factors permeate the political structures of Obuasi to create varying degrees of government complicity in illegal mining activities. Whether in the form of police officers who receive kickbacks for alerting miners to imminent raids or in tribal chiefs who negotiate land holdings with the miners, often by seizing land from cocoa farmers, Quartey details the sanctions, both implicit and explicit, that allow these practices to continue. To offset the severity of these issues, Quartey appraises them through Dawson’s ironic reflections, which add levity to an otherwise dark subject.

While Gold of Our Fathers is best read in succession with the first three Darko Dawson books instead of as a standalone novel, its particular merit lies in the compelling representation of the relationship, at turns symbiotic and antagonistic, between two non-Western countries. By exposing U.S. readers to hitherto marginalized geopolitics, Gold of Our Fathers highlights the complexities of the commodities market and educates the reader through an insightful perspective on both African and Chinese foreign affairs.

The Passion of the Christie: The Mysterious Mr. Quin’s Theatre of Crime

Contemporary readers will almost certainly equate the harlequin with either the lurid covers of the ubiquitous romance series or the mischievous comic book counterpart to the Joker. The character, however, has a storied history rooted in the theatrical traditions of medieval passion plays and the Italian commedia dell’arte. Though disparate in their venerational and irreverent tones, respectively, both traditions use stock characters and standard plots to stage highly ritualized, stylized productions. As a literary British Harlequinade, a derivative of commedia dell’arte, Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin blends these forms to create a drama of crimes of the heart, recasting the buffoonish harlequin as an enigmatic figure who rectifies the plights of aggrieved lovers.

This compilation of twelve short stories chronicles the transition of Mr. Satterthwaite, an elderly gentleman, from mere observer to major player in the various dramas of human life, as Mr. Quin guides him to examine the facts and determine his own conclusions regarding the various crimes committed in the stories. Beginning with his New Year’s Eve arrival at a party attended by Mr. Satterthwaite, the strange Mr. Quin fulfills the superstition that a dark man crossing the threshold will bring luck. For Mr. Satterthwaite, this luck is his increasing involvement in solving the many investigations and mysteries he encounters. Whether these situations involve a woman’s reputation tainted by scandal, an innocent man framed for murder, or a woman impoverished by a greedy relative, Mr. Satterthwaite progresses from an extra, waiting in the wings, to playing the principal role of “arbiter of other people’s destinies.”

Christie’s cryptic Harley Quin is far from the clown portrayed in commedia dell’arte, but she extends the commedia’s social critique by caricaturing the popular literary tropes of her time. Her stock of characters, which includes British expatriates, American tourists, haughty countesses, jealous husbands, big game hunters, psychic mediums, and cast-off lovers, populate such varied settings as country houses and inns, Spanish villas, the French Riviera, and the Royal Opera House. In debasing these bourgeois attitudes and upscale locales with murder, theft, and suicide, Christie criticizes a corrupt human nature concealed by a British class system of titles, inheritances, and land holdings.

By focusing on the trials and sufferings of wronged lovers, rather than those of Jesus Christ, Christie updates the medieval passion plays to suit a secular reading audience. Yet, as in the original pageants, the ultimate theme of Christie’s passion play is one of redemption for the injured parties. Despite the destructive emotions of fear, jealousy, greed, and lust that drive our appetites, damaged relationships are not irreparable. Indeed, Christie cautions only against detachment, which is the most detrimental response to life’s dramas, as evidenced by Mr. Satterthwaite. To observe but not act leads to regret, sorrow, and despair, and although Mr. Satterthwaite learns to see that which others cannot, he has largely resigned himself to a life devoid of love.

As the collection anthologizes stories that were originally standalone pieces, the standard plotting borrowed from both theatrical traditions can feel predictable, as the reader knows Mr. Satterthwaite will solve each crime. Its appeal, however, is the author’s embrace of the macabre, fusing the traditional intellectual approach to crime fiction with the supernatural appearance of Mr. Quin. Quin’s identity remains inconclusive, leaving the reader to question if he exists as an apparition, recalling the devilish ancestry of the demon hellequin in French passion plays, or within Mr. Satterthwaite’s imagination, a consequence of his years of self-imposed aloofness.

The Mysterious Mr. Quin, then, is much like the house that lies at the end of his “Lover’s Lane” in the book’s final chapter. In this ruined cottage, one can see either a dream house or a rubbish heap. Likewise, one reader may receive the novel as an innovative synthesis of literature and theatre while another, preferring Christie’s more traditional works, may regard it as a failed experiment that denies explanation and thereby deceives expectations. This reviewer, for one, revels in Christie’s mystery as a book that bears revisiting. Under Mr. Quin’s tutelage, Mr. Satterthwaite observes, “Time does not dispose of a question—it only presents it anew in a different guise.” The same could be said for The Mysterious Mr. Quin. Although it never answers the riddle of Quin’s presence, Christie’s novel certainly yields a new discovery with each reading.

 

The Mysterious Mr. Quin: 320 pages; William Morrow Paperbacks, reprint 2012.

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Pleasantville takes electoral politics to trial

When Dennis Lehane collaborated with HarperCollins to create an eponymous imprint, his first selection for Dennis Lehane Books was Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season (2012). As with Lehane’s Bostonian novels, Locke’s story about a Louisiana plantation manager’s extralegal investigation of a murdered woman found on the property is one in which place is as much a character as people. Although her most recent novel, Pleasantville (2015), is published under Harper Perennial, Locke once again personifies the South as Lehane does Boston, using an isolated crime to deconstruct the institutions — familial, racial, legal, social, and political — that undergird community infrastructure.

Locke’s Pleasantville, an historically black Houston neighborhood formed in the 1950s, is positioned between two decisive political events: an impending runoff election for the Houston mayor’s office and a class action lawsuit of Pleasantville v. ProFerma Labs represented by lawyer Jay Porter. Fifteen years after his introduction in Locke’s debut novel Black Water Rising (2009), Jay is struggling to resume his law practice and raise his two children while coming to terms with his wife’s death. After Alicia Nowell, a teenage campaign worker is abducted and murdered, Jay becomes even more overburdened, tasked with defending the obvious fall guy, Neal Hathorne, the campaign manager and nephew of mayoral candidate Axel Hathorne and grandson of self-appointed “mayor of Pleasantville” Sam Hathorne. For both Jay and the reader, Neal’s innocence is unquestionable, and thus Pleasantville’s real mystery is whether a candidate or a corporation aims to profit from this Machiavellian frame and the subsequent mockery of a trial.

As with Lehane’s Mystic River, Locke could have drafted the single story line of a murdered girl and produced a fine crime novel. In both novels, however, an expanded, and thus enriched, scope portrays not only the micro consequences of such a senseless tragedy, as grieving parents and shocked neighbors attempt to process the events, but also the macro deterioration of an illusory American Dream. For Locke, this fiction is of a representative, transparent body politic, which she intricately analyzes and dissects in the bureaucratic machinations that exploit a young woman’s death and unapologetically implicate an innocent man.

That these events occur in Pleasantville is significant, as the neighborhood has proven in real-life elections that one precinct of educated and engaged black voters can decide, or potentially disrupt, state politics. The first half of the novel is slow to develop, a consequence of foundational chapters that provide a necessary understanding of the municipal forces that formed Pleasantville, from segregation to integration to black activism against industrial encroach, thereby making it such a determinative electoral precinct. In the novel’s shocking last quarter, however, Locke probes the disconcerting possibilities of how far-reaching the corruption of a single voting district can be.

While Thoreau preached civil disobedience as the people’s empowerment against such corruption, current American political movements that protest systematic inequalities, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, seem to have gained little traction in redressing injustices. Perhaps more effective, then, is a course of civic disillusionment that questions a suspect political process. Pleasantville does so by exposing the calculated cronyism that privileges corporations at the expense of citizens and communities, and is thus an exceptionally relevant read for the current election year.

Unlocking The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

In his 1950 essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler dismisses Sherlock Holmes as “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” Chandler’s criticism stems from a larger argument about what he characterizes as the implausible and illogical nature of the classic detective story. This judgment notwithstanding, Conan Doyle’s creation has irrefutably inspired scads of continuation stories, revisionist novels, adaptations, and pastiches. As such, Holmes’s attitude is now one of the most recognizable tropes of detective fiction.

How, then, does the Sherlock figure translate when taken out of 19th-century Bohemia and resituated in 1979 Japan in Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders? Despite its overt homage to Conan Doyle, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (originally published in 1981; reissued in 2015 by Pushkin Vertigo) is no mere recasting of Holmes and Watson as Kiyoshi Mitarai and Kazumi Ishioka. Rather, by blending the intellectual puzzle of the locked-room mystery with an arcane mysticism and a self-reflexive narrative, Shimada creates a unique form of logic problem known in Japan as shin honkaku, or new orthodox, mystery.

While the subject of the novel hearkens to Golden Age detective fiction, as Kiyoshi and Kazumi attempt to piece together the events that led to the murder of artist Heikichi Umezawa and his six daughters and stepdaughters, Shimada’s form embraces Chandler’s criticism of the detective story as unrealistic by conducting an exercise in postmodernity. From the listing of the dramatis personae to the foreword in which Kazumi posits the book as a factual recounting of his own investigation with Kiyoshi, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders winks knowingly at the reader, daring one to be perceptive enough to read between the lines and unravel the mystery before the solution is revealed. As Kazumi is an avid reader of mysteries, his numerous allusions to the detective tradition create a rich intertextuality for the reader, while diagrams, charts, and maps mimic the feel of an actual investigation.

A prologue serves as the last will and testament of Umezawa, in which he claims to have been possessed by a devil that tempts him to build the perfect woman from the body parts of six virgins with different zodiac signs. Some readers may find the prologue’s 40-page length and dense alchemical language off-putting, but it is crucial for laying out the problem of both Umezawa’s death, as he is found alone in his studio, the door locked from within, and the six murders that Kiyoshi and Kazumi aim to solve.

Their subsequent investigation unfolds in a five-act format that appeals to an elementary knowledge of dramatic structure while calling attention to the artificial construction of narrative. Further collapsing the illusion of realism are two entr’acts in which Shimada himself interrupts the narrative to taunt the reader’s deductive powers, for if all necessary clues have been so clearly provided, then why do questions still remain? Even after the murderer is named in the falling action of Act IV, Shimada still tasks the reader to deduce the identity and motive for the killer’s actions before Act V’s resolution.

As an impossible solution novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is designed to stymie the reader, and some who view it in low regard may be tempted to attribute their disfavor to translation issues, either literal or cultural. The reception of the novel, though, is a problem not of translation but of preference. Dedicated readers of Golden Age detective stories will appreciate The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ take on deductive reasoning tales, delighting in its allusions to and metacommentary on the conventions of the genre, while those who favor the Chandlerian realism of hardboiled detective fiction may be frustrated by the novel’s pacing and misdirection. In its playful displacement of a realistic presentation, however, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders shows the game of intellectual puzzle literature, now reinvented and reinvigorated, is ever afoot.