Why are women [crime] writers ignored? Or are they?

“Natasha Cooper says the genre has a serious gender problem”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4315389.ece

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Xavier

Memorable Clues

Since I last chimed in on this subject, I have been checking up on the excellent “memorable clue” suggestions that several of you have kindly submitted at my request. I still have quite a few left to check out (I’m neither a speedy reader nor researcher), but so far they have seemed to support my original theory (well, maybe the less ambitious term “notion” is more accurate), which I will now divulge. Please forgive how poorly I explain this; I assure you that my ideas are stronger than my ability to express them.

Though people read Golden Age detective fiction for a variety of reasons, certainly one of the key appeals of the genre is a sensation which one might be call “sudden retrospective illumination.” This sensation is referred to by many other names, including “paradigm shift,” “epiphany,” “the Homer Simpson effect (D’Oh!)” or, in Aristotelian terms, the convergence of “anagnorisis” (recognition) and “peripeteiea” (reversal). By whatever name, it entails the seemingly paradoxical simultaneous experience of surprise and inevitability (or, at least, deterministic causality).

Well, as I feared, I haven’t explained it at all well, but I suspect that most of you know what I’m talking about ( I also have another theory [by Anne Elk!] that the appeal of this sensation is tied to a subconscious validation of our very existence… but I’ll bore you with that one another time). At any rate, I believe that for many of us, this sensation is largely what defines a great whodunit denouement, and Dorothy L. Sayers described the joy of it thus:

“The aim of the writer of this type of detective story is to make the reader say at the end, neither: ‘Oh well, I knew it must be that all along,’ nor yet: ‘Dash it all! I couldn’t be expected to guess that’; but: ‘Oh, of course! What a fool I was not to see it! Right under my nose all the time!’ Precious tribute! How often striven for! How rarely earned!”

Now, so far as I’ve been able to discern, the clues suggested all provide this sensation… well, perhaps I should more accurately say, the relationship between the clues and the truths they are ultimately shown to indicate provide it. As such, they allow for solutions which surprise us, and yet are entirely consistent with all data we’ve been given earlier.

Almost without exception, however, these memorable clues also have one other important common denominator: while they are consistent with the ultimately revealed solution and, more importantly, serve to bolster the sense of inevitability of that solution (“What a fool I was not to see it! Right under my nose all the time!”), almost none of them deductively prove anything. While they may indicate possible discrepancies in the earlier, apparent scenario (i.e. what seems to be the case prior to the denouement), they don’t logically demonstrate that scenario to be impossible. Rather, they work to bring cumulative strength to the probability of the true scenario, serving, as Pooh Bah from Gilbert & Sullivan’s THE MIKADO would say, as “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Not that truly deductive clues do not abound in detective fiction, but you’ll find very few of them among our “most memorable” collection. For, surprising as this may be, the consensus of “memorable clues” clearly suggests that proving a scenario true by discounting all other possibilities (no matter how unassailable the logic) does not have nearly the power on the memory as does reinforcing its truth via a multitude of “circumstantial” elements.

I know that this theory holds for me. I have read several works in which it is proven that only T could have been the killer, because U, V, W, X, Y and Z couldn’t fulfill the (usually opportunity-based) requirements to be the culprit. However, as there are few details which indicate that T was the killer (beyond the elimination of other possibilities), I am not entirely satisfied by the denouement. Though I admire it in many respects, I believe that Queen’s THE GREEK COFFIN MYSTERY holds that weakness (though not nearly as damagingly as many other works).

Conversely, there are several powerful whodunits in which nothing (or nearly nothing) is proven, and yet the denouement has a powerful, memorable effect, both surprising and “inevitable.” FIVE LITTLE PIGS and HE WHO WHISPERS are two of my favorites which come to mind, though many of the other most notable works of the genre also qualify. Everything “clicks” in the denouements of these works — it all seems ultimately inevitable — yet none of the clues provided are truly univocal; they all could be accounted for with other explanations. It is only their cumulative effect which seems overwhelmingly convincing. Moreover, a large percentage of these powerful clues are behavioral discrepancies, about which nothing can be proven (a sudden change in the behavior of a character certainly indicates something, but though it can strongly indicate what that something is, it can never be proven).

I believe that the explanation for this perhaps surprising conclusion about deductive vs. corroborate clues is that, despite the importance of rational thought to the experience of detective fiction reading, the effect of “sudden retrospective illumination” is ultimately a primarily visceral one — it hits us at a gut, rather than intellectual, level.

That is not to suggest that deductive clueing is unimportant to the genre. Indeed, they are extremely useful, often giving the mystery’s solution intellectual credibility. However, their most important function is often as a precursor to the more memorable, non-deductive clues. For example, a process of deductive elimination may prove that Mr. Jennings, and only Mr. Jennings, had the opportunity to drink the full contents of the whisky glass. But it is the clue that Mr. Jennings, a well-known teetotaler, drank the whisky (and the ultimate explanation for this bizarre behavioral discrepancy) that will be most remembered.

One exception to my notion — and it is indeed an important one — is the famous “curious incident of the dog in the nighttime” clue from Conan Doyle’s SILVER BLAZE. It can be summed up as a simple logical syllogism:

1. The dog would bark if the visitor to the stables was a stranger.

2. The dog did not bark.

3. Therefore the visitor to the stables was not a stranger.

Though one could argue that it too doesn’t positively provide absolute logical proof (the first premise is not entirely solid; there are other possibilities which could account for the dog’s silence: the dog could be drugged, it might have be switched for another dog, etc…), I will grant that it fairly well proves its point.

Then, why is the deductive “dog in the night-time” clue memorable?

I can find two possible explanations:

In the first place, the logical syllogism of this clue is tied intimately with a behavioral discrepancy (unlike the Mr. Jennings clue above, in which the deductive process only leads us to the behavioral discrepancy). Thus I’d suggest that it is the why? aspect of the behavioral discrepancy and its explanation, rather than the deductive proof of that explanation, which is most viscerally powerful.

In the second place, this clue fits into that relatively rare category of clues which are clearly presented, long before their final explanation, as clues; we know that it is of importance, it is only the nature of its importance that is unknown to us until later. John Dickson Carr referred to this type of clue (of which the title phrase of his THE CROOKED HINGE is another non-deductive example) as the “enigmatic” clue, as it openly presents an enigma to the reader. The majority of clues in mysteries, on the other hand, consist of plot details which have their status as clues only made apparent at the time they are explained. The “enimatic” clue is undoubtedly among the most difficult type of clue to create, for, to put an indicator openly in front of the reader—in essence, to say to him “this is important; I challenge you to guess what it means” — and then to provide him with an answer that is both surprising and satisfying is quite a feat. Having been baffled by something so clearly and openly put in front of his face, the reader can only be greatly impressed. The “curious incident of the dog in the nighttime” achieves this, thus explaining its power.

Again, I apologize for my inability to articulate this all clearly—it’s a tricky subject. Hopefully, some of you got an idea of what I was trying to say. If so, please give me your thoughts on the matter.

– Scott

GK Chesterton

The current NEW YORKER has a very interesting article on G. K. > > Chesterton, including his anti-semitism. Father Brown is mentioned > > only briefly, but the article is filled with interesting insights. > > I’ll be interested in what GADers think of it.

Doug Greene

Maps in GAD mysteries

I think it’s interesting that so few Streets actually have maps, as this presence of maps in Golden Age novels is one of Julian Symons’s special digs at the genre.

So, based on people’s reading of GAD novels, how many would you say had maps?

Interestingly, two reprint editions of Miles Burton books from the seventies had maps on the jackets, though as far as I know they were never published with maps originally. Did Street make maps that were not used in his lifetime?

How many Streets had maps originally? Let’s see The Ellerby Case (house plan) and Shot at Dawn come to mind immediately. I’m sure I’m leaving some out.

How many Christies have them? I recall her They Do It With Mirrors from the 50s had a house plan, and that Marsh’s Scales of Justice from a few years later had a map. That must have been about it.

Curt