Mystery writers can be divided into two types: those you read for the journey -- the classic example is Raymond Chandler -- and those you read for the destination, like Agatha Christie. The atmosphere of a Chandler is its raison d'jtre, just as the solution is a Christie's. This is not to say that Chandlers have unsatisfying endings or that reading a Christie is a slog. Both writers are among the best in the genre, and so every part of their work is adequate to its purpose. But in lesser novels, when these two aspects are out of whack, you can get some truly bizarre results.
Brigitte Aubert's Death From the Woods, which was recently translated from the French, is a good example of a book to read for the journey. Winner of the 1997 Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, it has the perfect heroine. Elise Andrioli is beautiful, funny and brave. And blind, mute and quadriplegic. The book reads like romantic suspense from 30 years ago, with the finely tuned hysteria of an Ursula Curtiss mystery. Odd threats are suggested. Everyday events hint at unspecified horrors. Paranoia has seeped into the prose until it is inseparable from it.
Of course, in this day and age a writer couldn't get away with such skittishness in a full-facultied woman. In real life most people are still spooked when a back door slams suddenly, but on the page women can coolly fight off assaults that would have left the old 50-Foot Woman bleating for mercy. Make the heroine a blind, mute quadriplegic, though, and every little twanging of the nerve will make perfect sense. She can be brave just sitting in the passenger seat.
Elise has been incapacitated by the terrorist bomb that killed her fianci, and, her movie theater sold, she has retreated to a Parisian suburb, where she is cared for by her longtime housekeeper, Yvette. One day Yvette leaves her sitting in her wheelchair outside a supermarket to catch the sun. There a disturbed little girl who calls herself Virginie tells Elise she saw "Death from the Woods" kill a boy who has been missing for a few days. That afternoon Elise hears her physical therapist tell Yvette that the boy has been found, strangled.
It is hard to imagine a situation that could intrinsically arouse more curiosity. Since the story is confined to Elise's point of view, what is going on is always open to at least some doubt. Elise's encounter with Virginie sends her into a whole new circle of people she must learn about in her strange, new, limited way. One man declares his love for her. Huh? We may be in love with her, but then we know her. It is perfectly in keeping with the tone that another recently acquired friend eventually turns out to be an impostor. Like Virginie, adults confide a lot in Elise (shades of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"), but the only way she can respond is to raise an index finger. Ah! That finger! It is truly eloquent. And funny. How can it be funny? Yet it is.
The uncertainty of not knowing whether everyday details of life are threats is far more frightening than a sudden, bloody-knifed attack. Aubert is free to take full advantage of this circumstance, and she does. She shamelessly chases suspense. I am always suspicious when reviewers talk of "nail-biting" and the like. (Someone should do a study of whether such descriptions have tapered off with the widespread use of Prozac-type drugs.) Still, when Elise regains consciousness toward the end of the book in an unknown place with no clue as to who or what is beside her, it is one scary moment.
A lesser (or greater) writer would let the grimness of the subject guide the book. Aubert never does. Her book is wonderfully sly, and Elise's narrative is an expert mix of wryness and tension. At one point she thinks she is trapped with Virginie in her dead fiancé's apartment by the still unknown murderer:
She comes to my side. I hear her nimble little fingers feeling around for the bolt. Okay, she's pulling it, but what's she doing now? Virginie! I don't hear her anymore. Virginie, where are you? This is no time to play hide-and-seek. There's nothing but furtive sounds. I take a breath and slowly count to twenty. I hear her moving to my right, coming toward the wheelchair. Is this a new game? The worst thing about not being able to speak is not being able to yell at people, getting in their face and barking, giving orders, insulting them. What I really miss is insulting people. Ah! There's an inrush of air to my right. Well, in any case, the door's opening and --
The climax itself seems interminable, however, and once the explanation begins, the mind boggles. Oh, the identity of the murderer -- which for obvious reasons Elise hears about rather than divines -- is reasonable enough. The reader will probably guess it, but remember, you're not supposed to pick this book for its solution.
Still, you have to go through dozens of pages of gobbledygook in the closing chapters: bogus psychiatric analyses, who thought what when, what was a coincidence and what wasn't, etc., etc. This astonishingly jury-rigged nonsense is the result of Aubert's having sacrificed everything to keep you turning the pages. The ride, I must say, is fabulous, but you may find you have to pay too high a price for it.
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Moment of Truth, by Lisa Scottoline, has the opposite problem, which is the more common one. Because mysteries by definition require a question and an answer, many writers think that by simply supplying a plausible answer they've got the whole problem licked. The problem for the reader is: Will the sometimes tedious journey through fairly indifferent prose pay off in the end? Here the committed reader of mysteries is the most hopeful specimen of humankind. Time and time again you are disappointed, but memories of the one purely satisfying solution you read -- when? your sophomore year in college? -- keep you reaching for more.
I look for certain tip-offs. "Surprising" in a blurb on the back cover is good; "twisty" or "Hitchcockian" is better. (For some reason People magazine is especially reliable in this regard. Its writers have a good eye for a fake-out.) I also have learned to trust certain authors; that's one reason series are so important to the genre. You can check out the prose to make sure it's readable, but there is no way you can check out a possible surprise ending without ruining it. So you get to know who's going to come through.
Lisa Scottoline generally does, which is what kept me going through most of her new novel. The lack of suspense here was uncharacteristically extreme, even wondrous. A man comes home and finds his loathsome wife murdered. He suspects his already victimized daughter and so decides to confess to the crime himself. About 200 pages pass as his lawyer and the justice system catch up to what we knew from the beginning. Then, at the end, firecrackers: The reader is treated to a truly nice double-twist. It is hard to imagine, in fact, how such an interesting murderer could be attached to such a dull narrative. But Scottoline may have gotten herself too far in debt to us for the payoff to be worth it.
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Deep South, by Nevada Barr, is not quite so misshapen. Like Scottolines latest, this book is much better at the end than through the body, although the disparity in this case is not as great. Barr tries to increase the journey's interest by describing the workplace tensions and accommodations of the heroine and her investigative team -- making it a sort of police procedural of the emotions.
Park Ranger Anna Pigeon, a transplanted Westerner new to Mississippi, has to deal with obstreperous underlings who don't want to be bossed by a woman, with her growing feelings for the local sheriff and with one dead and disfigured teenage girl. Barr has the confidence to let Pigeon be unlikable (she says she doesn't like children, for instance, while contemplating the corpse), and as a result we like this character all the more. But the situations and the other characters are pretty much pro forma, so I was pleasantly surprised by the solution, which is clever and perfectly fair. A lot of what looks like local color -- and feels a little too researched -- is actually key information that takes on importance in the final chapters.
Because of the relatively sensible proportion of story to ending, "Deep South" is probably the most competent of the three works I've considered here -- if competence is what you're looking for in a mystery. I'm not sure I am.
