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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
June 17, 2002
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Mysteries and Carmel
Edgar Allan Poe began it with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" -- the murder that
seems inexplicable until a very smart detective looks at the clues and figures out what must have
happened.
Others played the game, of course, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
who became the quintessential detective -- eccentric, brilliant, impatient with fools. Agatha
Christie's Hercule Poirot, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, and many others followed this model -- and
delighted generations of readers.
You could do a lot worse than to spend a summer -- or an autumn, or a winter -- starting
at the beginning of the Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes series and reading your
way through.
Or you could check out A&E's "Nero Wolfe" series on Sundays at 8 pm. With Maury
Chaykin as Wolfe (thinner than I expected -- since Nero Wolfe is famously one-seventh of a
ton) and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, his intrepid sidekick who does all the legwork, the
shows are much better acted than written or directed. But the charm is still there, and it's good
fun.
Some writers and readers focused on the puzzle aspect of mystery stories, giving rise to
the whole "locked-room" tradition.
Others delighted more in the charm of the offbeat detective, especially after Agatha
Christie created Miss Marple, who was in many ways the opposite of Hercule Poirot. Far from
being a famously eccentric detective, Miss Marple was an elderly woman who simply happened
to be insatiably curious and utterly without fear of getting in over her head.
The whole tradition of "cozy" mysteries began with her, and my impression is that it
remains the largest single category of mystery stories. Any mystery novel with a cat or a food
name in the title is probably going to be a cozy.
The best old mystery writers did so well that new writers coming along felt it was
impossible to follow their pattern and accomplish anything more than an echo. So back before
World War II, several new streams of mystery writing began.
Dashiell Hammett popularized the "hard-boiled" detective genre, in which a tough private
eye isn't always brilliant and isn't always lucky, but through grit and stubbornness and misguided
love still plugs away at the mystery until it's solved.
Hammett's most famous detective, Sam Spade, usually hit the floor after getting sapped
and spent the rest of the novel with a headache, though the dame he fell for is usually even more
of a pain. If you've seen "The Maltese Falcon," you know the drill.
The successor to Hammett and to Raymond Chandler was Ross Macdonald, who, with
his Lew Archer mysteries, did the best work in hard-boiled private-eye tradition. While
Hammett and Chandler get the credit, I think it was Ross MacDonald who first created mysteries
that worked, not just as adventures or puzzles, but as character-driven novels. Nobody's ever
done it better.
Through all these older mysteries, however, the hero remained essentially unchanged.
Sam Spade and Lew Archer remained sad-but-determined; Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe
remained eccentric; Miss Marple remained cozy. From one book to the next, the previous events
remained essentially unremembered.
Today, though, the best of the mystery writers create detective characters who change
over time. They aren't lone wolves at all -- they connect with the world around them, they have
parents and siblings, sometimes even spouses and former spouses, children and longtime friends.
Each series thus becomes one long continuous work that explores the life of a character
who is changed -- wounded, embittered, redeemed perhaps -- by the crimes he solves or fails to
solve in time.
This trend is so recent that there are some living writers whose careers show the
transformation.
James Lee Burke and Marcia Muller are two of the best. Burke's Dave Robicheaux
began as a tough cop in New Orleans, and while the early novels show promise, it isn't till
Robicheaux leaves the police force and becomes a deputy sheriff in New Iberia, Louisiana, that
the character -- and the series -- becomes the deep, rich, mystical literary work that it is today.
In recent Robicheaux novels, Burke has been skirting the edges of fantasy, never quite
requiring readers to believe that the folk beliefs of the bayou country are real, but hinting that
they might be.
The most recent entry in the series, Jolie Blon's Bounce, is one of the best. Robicheaux
finds himself caught up in new crimes that tie in with old ones, linked to the ancient pattern of
white exploitation of blacks from plantation life to the present day. As he finds the roots of evil
in characters both white and black, he also finds sparks of goodness in surprising places.
James Lee Burke is one of the best there's ever been -- I compare him with Walter
Mosley and Sharyn McCrumb as writers who are able to create worlds with roots so deep that
you keep expecting to find yourself in some corner of the story.
Marcia Muller was one of the first to create a hard-boiled female detective, Sharon
McCone, who started out as a private eye working for a legal co-op serving the poor and
downtrodden in San Francisco.
As with Burke's Robicheaux, Muller's McCone did not come fully formed as the well-rounded, interesting character she would become. There's not much point in going back to the
beginning of the series. But the most recent six or seven books are very good, as McCone
connects with family and wrestles with her own demons.
Indeed, one might say that while Muller influenced many women who write mysteries,
she has been influenced in turn. It would be hard to believe Sue Grafton had not read Muller
before she began writing her Kinsey Milhone series; but it would be just as hard to believe that
Muller had not read Grafton before writing some of the most recent numbers in her series.
But why not? A living literary genre consists of writers who are in a constant literary
conversation with each other and their readers.
Dead Midnight, the most recent Sharon McCone mystery, begins with the devastating
news that one of McCone's brothers has killed himself. Soon afterward, she is hired to
investigate the suicide of another young man, and in the process finds ways to live with what her
brother went through and what she could and could not have done to save him.
Always interesting, often exciting, and sometimes moving, this is another book well
worth reading.
*
I just got back from Carmel, California. When I was a kid, we lived in Santa Clara -- the
old Santa Clara, a place of pear orchards and quiet streets, an hour from San Francisco up the
peninsula to the north and the same distance from the beach and boardwalk of Santa Cruz over
the mountains to the south.
Going to the beach in California is a day trip, and you can't actually use the ocean. The
beach slopes too steeply, and the Alaska current keeps the water icy cold most of the year. So as
a kid, you run into the water and run back out again, screaming, and when you get tired of that
you climb into the car, covered in sand, and ride home to get hosed off in the yard so you don't
track sand into the house.
But after our hours of fun on the beach and the boardwalk, my mother would often say to
my father, "Can't we go on to Carmel?"
Santa Cruz is at the north end of Monterey Bay; Carmel is beyond the bay to the south,
fronting on craggy rocks where the swells cast up plumes of spray, sea otters frolic, and seals
waddle ashore to sun themselves.
What we loved most, though, were the shops of Carmel. They sold stuff we never saw in
Santa Clara, most of which we couldn't afford -- but we were content to walk along the
charming streets and look in the windows, leaving the actual shopping to people with money.
Best of all: The art galleries. And guess what? They're still there, with better art than
ever.
In the old days, most of them were selling seascapes, some good, some awful. Today,
though, the best of the galleries have a wide selection of artists doing interesting and often
beautiful things.
In a world where "fine art" usually means unpleasant, didactic, ugly, or meaningless
showoffery, and where the best representational art tends to be illustration with the intrusive hand
of the art director inserted between artist and audience, it's nice to go to a place where you can
find art that is meant to be intriguing, original, beautiful, and about something.
If vacation or business take you anywhere near the Monterey Bay, I urge you to visit
Carmel. On the way, you'll drive through the artichoke fields of Castroville or Watsonville;
you'll probably pass Fort Ord; and if you're smart, you'll stay away from Highway 101 and use
Highway 17 to cross from Santa Clara Valley over the mountains to Santa Cruz.
And when you're hungry, stop in at the Rio Grill in the Crossroads Shopping Center.
With an ambitious menu of California cuisine, everything from soup to dessert is a delight.
(Yeah, I know -- I couldn't get through the column without talking about food.)
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