To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books May 5, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/05/mysteries The best American whats of the century? A new best-of omnibus has some terrific stories. But are they mysteries? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jacqueline Carey I became suspicious of "The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century" when I saw, second on the list of the contents, "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather. In what way is "Paul's Case" a mystery story? Maybe in the way that the New Testament is -- the latter has, after all, a betrayal, an unjust execution and a surprise ending. Come to think of it, the New Testament, if only it had been written more recently and by an American, would qualify better. "Paul's Case," an extraordinarily powerful story of self-immolating romanticism, involves a crime (petty theft) only peripherally. 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? 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. Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" was published in 1973, which may explain it: Too many drugs, perhaps? Ostensibly based on the Kitty Genovese case, in which the victim's neighbors heard her being stabbed and did nothing about it (not even call the police), the story features a final quotation from Rollo May and sentences like this one about New Yorkers: "They were worshipers at a black Mass the city had demanded be staged; not once, but a thousand times a day in this insane asylum of steel and stone." This insane-asylum metaphor is probably a Freudian slip. The story would make excellent evidence in a sanity hearing. Stanley Ellin's wonderful duel, "The Moment of Decision," is an O. Henry story for people with brains. (I, too, am a big fan of Ellin's, but I was surprised to see in Penzler's introduction that he considers the month that Ellin could work on a story to be a long time.) Stephen King? Oh, come on. Let's just drop him right here. Jerome Weidman and Joe Gores I excuse as sentimental favorites. Curiously, the Gores story, "Goodbye, Pops," was Hillerman's selection for "Master's Choice," edited by Lawrence Block, in which various detective writers picked out the stories that had had the strongest influence on them. (Wacky Ellison chose Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," which also appears in this volume.) But why dwell on my doubts about "lofty literary goals" here? Both are sweet pieces, long on the guilty love sons feel for their fathers (or father figures) and very short on cryptic qualities of any kind. Three of the strongest stories in the volume are explorations of social issues. As the just men rise in the courtroom of Melville Davisson Post's 1916 "Naboth's Vineyard," it seems to the young narrator "that the very hills and valleys were standing up." Susan Glaspell, in the 1917 "A Jury of Her Peers," creates two layers, one of male officialdom and one of female "trivialities" and "gossip," which is where the truth is revealed. Michael Malone, another of my favorites, reveals his usual cunning cross-section of social classes in the 1996 "Red Clay." Then there is a whole category of stories featuring the clever criminal. This would include the work of Elmore Leonard, who has always been careful to distance his type of writing from whodunits. I must say I was secretly happy to see he did not make the cut here. Those who did were Frederick Irving Anderson, with a 1914 story about outtricking a master trickster; Henry Slesar, who writes in 1957 about a killer, oops, I mean, a lawyer; Jack Ritchie, with the delightfully twisty "The Absence of Emily," from 1981; and Donald E. Westlake, with more tiresome whimsy about Dortmunder and his cronies. Also Ben Ray Redman, Robert L. Fish and Brendan DuBois. I include here, too, Futrelle, creator of Professor Van Dusen aka the Thinking Machine, because in "The Problem of Cell 13," the Machine pretends to be a criminal to show that he can outwit his jailers. Very pleasant reading, all of it -- even Dortmunder is a welcome guest if the party is big enough -- but not what I would call mystifying in any way. A similar category features the dumb criminal. The thinking here seems to be that if the life you describe is low enough it automatically turns the work into a mystery. In a slightly more puzzling precursor to the others called "Blue Murder," from 1925, Wilbur Daniel Steele describes the brutish killings of two brothers. Then there are three very recent entries: "Hot Springs" by James Crumley, "Poachers" by Tom Franklin and "Running Out of Dog" by Dennis Lehane. The poetry they find in their virtually mute, dispossessed characters suggests that this may be the richest vein being followed right now; Crumley is one of the most gifted crime writers around. The entanglements of scheming adulterers in the 1933 California versions written by James M. Cain ("The Baby in the Icebox," best described as "Double Indemnity" goes to the circus) and John Steinbeck ("The Murder") are also entertaining. But are any of these mysteries? No, no, no, a thousand times no. Of course, there are always the stories in which professional investigators are let loose upon a problem. Certainly these should qualify. Let's see. The Harry Kemelman and the Ellery Queen are too stupid to read, let alone call stories of any sort. The John D. Macdonald is also ridiculous; he should have found some way to publish just the title, which is "The Homesick Buick." Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Stephen Greenleaf are all better off writing novels; their talents do not suit the shorter form. The same with Ross MacDonald -- the greatest mystery in 1953's "Gone Girl" is how many generations he can cram into 30 pages. He doesn't do too badly. And Margaret Millar ("The Couple Next Door") was married to him, so she's got to go, too. (If this sequence offends, then think of your own reason to do her in first.) I'm tempted to keep Lawrence Block. The "Burglar" books had led me to believe he was a hack, but his "By the Dawn's Early Light" is ample refutation. The story perfectly captures the midtown Manhattan saloon world of hard workers and even harder drinkers. But I can't let sentiment stand in my way now. There's still Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hard, really, to question the qualifications of the two grandfathers, paternal and maternal, of modern-day American detective literature. And their respective stories, "The Gutting of Couffignal" and "Red Wind," are great. But isn't the Hammett a little ... theatrical? And the Chandler a little ... atmospheric? That leaves William Faulkner and his "An Error in Chemistry." There's a body, there are clues, there's a solution. But if you think I am going to leave this little tin star pinned only on Faulkner, of all writers, then you are crazier than Ellison. So Faulkner's out. Wonderful collection. Amazing, though, that it doesn't contain any mystery stories. salon.com | May 5, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Jacqueline Carey is the author of "The Other Family," a novel, and "Good Gossip," a collection of short stories. Her book reviews also appear in the New York Times.