I Love A Mystery

Guest post deux from Jeffrey Ford:

When I was a kid, my mother had a policy about school.  You didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to.  One year, either 4th or 5th grade, I was absent 45 days.  The principal of the school wasn’t going to pass me, but that was all before my mother went to see him.  After her visit, there wasn’t a problem.  The principal knew better than to say no to my mother.  During those days off, I did a lot of reading, I remember that.  But the real attraction was at lunch time, she’d make a big pot of spaghetti with butter and salt and pepper and we’d watch whatever Mystery movie they were showing on the television that day.  This was back in the late fifties, early sixties, when all of television was in black and white, perhaps the best way to fully appreciate the shadows of those dark tales of revenge and crime and treachery.  The ones that come readily to mind are the Mr. Moto films with Peter Lore as a sauerkraut eating Japanese detective.  Not exactly PC by today’s standards, but still cool as hell back then.  There was also The Whistler, Sherlock Holmes, The Thin Man, as well as the great gangster flicks like I Was a Prisoner On A Chain Gang with Paul Muni (I see him still, falling back into the shadows, hissing, “I steal.”) or anything with Edward G. Robinson.  All of these existed as Mysteries to us although I’m aware today that there are different sub-genres.  Of one thing I am absolutely certain, as cracked as this might seem to some, I know for sure that my mother thought that a diet of these Mysteries, in educational value, far exceeded anything they’d have been teaching me in school.  Whatever concept they would have been grinding out in Mr. Karp’s Math Class, could it have even approached the existential wonder of watching that certain film, the title escapes me, that was shot entirely from the main character’s point of view?  You only saw the character when the camera came across a mirror, otherwise that camera was eyeing gams and duking it out with the bad guys.  Or how was Social Studies ever going to give me as clear a view into the depths of human depravity as when Richard Widmark pushes that old lady down a long flight of stairs in her wheelchair and then laughs his ass off?  If I wanted to learn critical thinking, who could have been a better teacher than Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes?  And always Muni, falling back into the shadows. 

Perhaps when I’d grown up I’d have come to think about my mother’s attendance policies as daft, but I learned in college that she was absolutely correct.  When I attended the State University of Binghamton for my Masters degree, I had a teacher by the name of William Spanos.  He was a deconstructionist or de-constructionist, a post modernist, literary critic, and a good guy in spite of it.  Yeah, he had the Derrida and Foucault, etc. but he was also a well respected writer of essays in his own right.  He’d written this essay “The Detective and the Boundary” which had some interesting things to say about Mysteries.  He wrote about the fact that pretty much all of Western Literature (novel-wise) borrows the form of the Detective Story in that the reader begins not knowing what will come and then embarks on a journey of enlightenment, discovering clues, so to speak, as he/she travels toward a point at the end that is a moment of revelation for both character and reader.  The reason why these works are like Mysteries is because the writer knows what is going to happen but does not reveal it all at once at the beginning to the reader.  The importance of the story is the process of detection, the process of revelation, and the final solution or denouement is not nearly as important.  The fact that there is a beginning and end to the mystery story makes certain objects or events seem fraught with significance, though they may or may not be.  But think how this is very much like life.  We can not really know the importance of some things until our lives are finished, and it is only readers of our lives, those who live past our days and knew us who will be able to interpret the significance of events we lived through.  We have a feeling certain people and places and events have significance as clues to the meaning of our lives, they seem imbued with an intensity of significance, but we can never be sure they are at all important until the end.  They could be red herrings. So at the very axis mundi of existence is the Mystery. Of course, Spanos’s whole point was that the sense that we are living a mystery is all false, a prison in many ways.  Yeah, OK, but it doesn’t make the experience feel any less true or dissuade us from envisioning our days as the chapters of a book. 

All of this my mother knew, although she held no PhD.  Instead of Dick and Jane and geometry my grade school education was car chases and shoot outs, snappy banter, shadows, great legs, a shiv in the kidneys, the long odds, the low down, and a bowl of spaghetti.  It prepared me well for high school, at which I failed miserably both academically and socially, setting me up for success later in life. I knew how to read the clues, and I knew who to avoid, looking for that Richard Widmark gleam in stranger’s eyes.  And then eventually my mother got old and got cancer as old people are wont to do.  I’d say that was a significant clue.  But in her last days of cognizance I saw in her expression a look that told me that after having lived an entire life, she still had not solved the Mystery of her own existence.  Like Muni, she fell back into the shadows, and I realized that it was up to the living, the readers of her life to apply significance and meaning to her days.  After all, we had the entire story – beginning, middle and end.  Those days in front of the black and white television, during my grade school years, I have decided are an important clue to my mother’s life and perhaps my own.  They are fraught with significance, especially now that I have written this.      

Comments

[BrianO]

I thought this link is appropriate:
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=WithBorges
It's Alberto Manguel on Borges views of the detective novel and its relation to fiction in general. I just saw it posted over at Maud Newton's blog, it's like one of those karmic moments you were talking about below.

By the way Jeff, these are both fascinating posts. I love the idea of all fiction being related to mystery fiction. This is great stuff.

[Gwenda]

Karen Joy Fowler asked me to post this comment on her behalf:

I find myself mesmerized by 1893, but even more mesmerized by Jeff's mother. I try to picture the conversation with the principal, but "he knew better than to say no to my mother," doesn't give me enough information to guess how the conversation would go. So it's a personal question and I won't press, but if Jeff would like to say more about his mother, I wouldn't mind.

In the meantime -- Michelle de Kretser in The Hamilton Case says that the real juice in the detective story doesn't take place between detective and murderer, but between writer and reader. What do you think, Jeff? Is that bullshit?

Karen

[jeff ford]

Brian: I haven't done Spanos any favors here in my description. You really have to read his essay. It's fascinating. I remember reading a lot of stuff by Robbe Grillet (he did a lot of playful things with the Mystery genre) at the time and it all seemed to make perfect sense what they were getting at. Now, I've forgotten much. Thanks for the Borges/Manguel post.

[jeff ford]

Karen: LOL! Not bullshit at all. The real juice always seems to take place between writer and reader. Just as there are so many more interesting things beside the solving of the mystery that go on in a Mystery (or a good Mystery). Like you want to know more about my mother, I wanted to know more about Nick and Nora Charles (of The Thin Man). I think their relationship as presented is one of the most interesting in fiction. When readers dismiss Mystery or Fantasy as being a genre, it's because they're not seeing all those other cooler things than the energeic drive to the finish line. As for my mother, she was crazy and cool -- kind of a Mystery herself.

[Meghan]

Hey Jeff -- just wanted to let you know that the thru-the-eyes-of-the-hero movie is called The Lady in the Lake, adapted the Chandler story. (the tagline: M*G*M presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together!) Here it is on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039545/

We watched parts of it in film class as a lesson on why true subjectivity sucked in movies, or something to that effect (film style does not lend itself to pure first person narrative, etc etc). Now I kinda want to watch the whole thing (who doesn't want to solve a murder mystery w/ Robert Montgomery?)(oh PS that user comment on IMDB about hitchcock is TOTALLY wrong, Rope is all about a roving, objective camera, if anything.)

My grandmother was a pretty mysterious lady, and when she died last year all sorts of questions were left unanswered, you know, forever. I was really sad about it, about all of it, and then my friend pointed out that now her stories had kind of passed on to us, to solve or end as we may. I've got a knee-jerk reaction against such sentiments, but her advice felt just about right.

[jeff ford]

Meghan: Thanks for the name of the movie. I knew it wqas a Chandler but for some reason I was thinking Montgomery Cliff, but that couldn't be right. It was Robert Montgomery. Yeah, that movie stayed with me. If I'm not mistaken, I think Montgomery is a Mystery writer in it. Would you happen to know the name of the one where the guy is poisoned by a slow acting poison and he has like a day or two to solve who poisoned him and get the aqntidote? That was another plot I remember vividly. I agree with you about the lack of sentimentality at the end of life. Spanos was right, life is not a book, but the drive to make it one is great. Do you have anything or a story of your grandmother's that you feel is your best clue to who she was? My mother left behind these manuscripts and paintings and they are brimming with all kinds of secret info or so it seems to one lost in the story.

[BrianO]

>Would you happen to know the name of the one where the guy is poisoned by a slow acting poison and he has like a day or two to solve who poisoned him and get the aqntidote?

That was D.O.A. It was remade in the '80s with Randy Quaid, though I haven't seen that version.

[jeff ford]

Thanks, Brian. I have a feeling the original is a little later than the other ones I was mentioning. Didn't know about the relatively recent remake.

[Matt Cheney]

Okay, if we're getting film geeky, has anybody seen the forgotten Bogart/Bacall movie Dark Passage, where the first third is completely subjective from Bogart's POV? It's been probably ten or fifteen years since I last saw it, so I won't venture a guess of what I'd make of it now, but it seemed interesting to me back then.

Here's the IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039302/

[Meghan]

Hey, Jeff, it's very funny, but my company is actually releasing another "slow acting poison" movie this summer, except in this one the man must keep his adrenaline up AT ALL TIMES!!! I haven't seen it. But I think it's less on the mystery, more on the running very fast and killing people.

My grandmother was not outwardly mysterious, but she kept a lot of secrets you only got passing glimpses at. The story I heard right after her funeral was once my mom and her sisters were sitting around w/ their parents, and one of them asked my grandmother why she never wore her engagement ring. She looked over at my grandfather and said, "I liked the first one better." She wouldn't say any more, no whens, wheres, or whys, though eventually the kids got her to explain that they had been engaged once before, and but she gave the ring back. When he proposed again w/ a new ring, she demanded where the old one was, and my grandfather said he got rid of it. That pissed her off to no end, but she still said yes. We still have no idea why she gave it back, or why he gave it away. There's a lot of darker secrets she kept too, I think, b/c her childhood was rough, though you would never hear it from her (16 kids, alcoholic parents, working in the mills in manayunk, the whole irish story). So. Little mysteries, wrapped in a tiny old lady who scolded her husband and drank a lot of tea.

[jeff ford]

Matthew: I saw Dark Passage way back. I think, if I'm not mistaken its a plastic surgery movie, isn't it. where you don't see Bogarts face in the beginning and then he gets a face and he winds up looking just like bogart? Was Ida Lupino in that one or was she in Petrified Forest?

[jeff ford]

Meghan: That movie sounds like my kids are going to want to go see it and so I might catch it -- fast running and shooting. Yeah, what more can you want?
The stuff about your grandmother is great. I thought I could almost see her when I was reading it. I got a sense of her. Maybe it's something for you to write about?

[Jeff Ford]

Well, I just got back from work and checked the comments and it looks like I've responded to everyone. I wanted to say I had a good time doing this and was very thankful to all of you who posted for taking the time to discuss the Girl in the Glass and my other stuff and to come and chat with me. I very much appreciate it.

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