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Interview
Battle without blood
Michael Ignatieff talks about the poison of nationalism, the politics of fear and the strange future of war.
By Max Garrone
[05/04/00]

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Misha Glenny's "The Balkans" and Michael Ignatieff's "Virtual War"
Behind the bombings in Kosovo, two journalists find Western self-interest and self-deception about the physical sacrifice war requires.
By Max Garrone
[05/04/00]

Reviews
"Hunts in Dreams" by Tom Drury
A gorgeous, inexplicably sad and funny novel about screwups trying to do better.
By Craig Seligman
[05/03/00]

Not big in Japan
Arthur Golden's American bestseller, "Memoirs of a Geisha," gets a thumbs down from the country where it's set.
By Jennifer Hanawald
[05/03/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Just friends
After the romance fizzled, we became closer than ever, but I miss the sex and he doesn't seem to. Is there any hope for generating sparks betweeen us?
By Garrison Keillor
[05/02/00]

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Someone has definitely been salting the mine. Otto Penzler, the series editor, has said that he considers a mystery "any fictional work in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the plot or theme of the story." This conveniently capacious definition allowed him to include John Updike's "Bech's Noir" in his "Best American Mystery Stories" volume for 1999. Why doesn't Penzler just put that notorious puzzler "Lolita" on the shelves of his Mysterious Bookshop and be done with it?

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century Edited by Tony Hillerman; Otto Penzler, series editor Houghton Mifflin, 813 pages Fiction

Some other fictional works in which a crime is "central": the Eugene O'Neill play "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (drug use), the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil" (serial killing) and the nursery rhyme "The Queen of Hearts" (theft).

A clue to the motive for this overinclusiveness can be found in the curiously petulant introduction by Tony Hillerman, the new volume's editor. Despite his obvious accomplishments and acclaim, Hillerman speaks of being "driven out of the so-called mainstream of American writing by the academic critics and the academic trends." He describes the history of the crime novel as a struggle between the "classic" form (English, upper class, bad) and the "novel" form (those like his, with "lofty literary goals"). Hmm.

Leaving aside the whole "lofty literary goals" question, let's see how many of these mysteries are mysteries in the sense that you or I might use the term -- i.e., stories in which a crime has to be solved.

I think we can immediately throw out Flannery O'Connor's "The Comforts of Home," despite O'Connor's style, which is so sharp it draws blood. Likewise James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation," Ring Lardner's "Haircut," Damon Runyon's "Sense of Humor" and Pearl S. Buck's "Ransom."

Thurber is a humorist whether or not his typically downtrodden hero pretends -- hilariously -- to be a gangster. (A more unintentionally illuminating inclusion might have been Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," in which an avid mystery reader takes the tragedy on a vacation by mistake. It turns out that the Scottish king is not the murderer after all.) O. Henry is famous for his swinging-door stories; they push out, then at some point snap, come back and hit you in the face. But there is never anything to solve. Raffish charmers Lardner and Runyon are less well known but almost as sui generis; "dialecticians" might be a good word for them. Buck's current claim to fame seems to be the legend, "All Pulitzer Prize-winning authors were alcoholics. Or Pearl S. Buck." Her entry here is not even a story.

Psychological profiles do not count. That eliminates the Patricia Highsmith, in which a boy is driven mad by the cooking of a turtle, and the Shirley Jackson, in which the madness of an obsessive blue blood is slowly revealed. Ditto the two slices of life from the legal system by Evan Hunter and by graphomaniac Joyce Carol Oates. ( I have read better stuff by all four of these authors, but that is incidental to our investigations here.)

Ah, Cornell Woolrich, a true nut case. I love Cornell Woolrich. His exploration of paranoia is unparalleled. You need a Valium just to read his purple prose. And "Rear Window," on which the Hitchcock movie is based, is one of my favorites. The creepy combination of intimacy and distance evoked by the spying always sends me reeling. But you certainly never doubt what the Raymond Burr character is up to, so ... Sorry, out.

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