New Perspectives on Detective Fiction

Mystery Magnified

Casey Cothran, Mercy Cannon, Casey Cothran, Mercy Cannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138910980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317435235
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

Part I
Disturbing Expectations

1 Troubling Bodies of Evidence

Gender, Detection, and the Problems of Self-Reinvention in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods

Andrew M. Hakim

The pulpy, bloated body of a veteran’s missing wife rises from a lake, weeks after she disappeared. Or perhaps the body is that of a different woman altogether, who was murdered so the missing wife could escape into a new identity …

In a fit of madness, a senator boils his wife alive, and then discards her body into a lake. Or she may have simply had a boating accident, or drowned, or slipped across the Canadian border to a new life …

Ladies in lakes. Missing or unrecognizable bodies. Mistaken identities. These are the common themes permeating Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1943) and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994). In both texts, a female body represents a key piece of evidence necessary to the reestablishment of moral certainty and the restoration of order in an America seemingly adrift and lacking authority. Set against the backdrop of war—World War II in The Lady in the Lake and the still resonant echoes of Vietnam in In the Lake of the Woods—both novels draw on Arthurian legends of ladies in lakes as they float multiple and often conflicting solutions to their mysteries before readers. Yet despite the texts’ plot similarities and shared thematic concerns, critics have not remarked upon the ways O’Brien’s novel responds to and extends Chandler’s exploration of gender, detection, and American myths of individualism and self-making nearly half a century later. I’m interested here, then, not merely in the thematic currents of ladies in lakes that ripple outward from Chandler to O’Brien, but in particular the ways dubiously identified drowned corpses, like the one Marlowe finds in Chandler’s novel, and women who have simply vanished, like Kathy Wade in O’Brien’s text, enact a paradoxical reading experience that dislocates and destabilizes readers’ expectations. Instead of offering answers, Chandler and O’Brien plunge readers into mysteries centered on female bodies that disturb the very tropes we have come to expect from detective fiction,¹ and in so doing force us to reconsider how we read both texts and other people.

In this essay I examine the ways The Lady in the Lake and In the Lake of the Woods challenge a generic tradition where women become “readable” bodies, the reading of which often leads to overly simplistic solutions to textual mysteries and a return to national wholeness. Placing Chandler’s and O’Brien’s novels in conversation illustrates that, in a nation where detectives can be murderers and successful politicians can be war criminals, finding and correctly identifying the bodies of ladies in lakes offers anything but the possibility of closure, moral certainty, and the restoration of order so often associated with detective fiction. In fact, the evidence in these texts appears to preclude it: the drowned woman in The Lady in the Lake is not who Marlowe thinks she is; the body of the missing senator’s wife is never dredged up from the lakes of In the Lake of the Woods. In place of tidy resolutions, Chandler’s and O’Brien’s novels bring to the surface an undercurrent of uncertainty that troubles our understanding of the ways detective fiction operates, and thereby raise questions about genre and form, gender and detection, and the tension between American ideals of freedom and independence and postwar U.S. national narratives of restored order, harmony, and unity. Considered in relationship to one another, The Lady in the Lake and In the Lake of the Woods present a complex investigation of both the genre and the nation that highlights a fundamental conflict between a cultural privileging of individualism and a country seeking order and unity in times of both war and peace.

Chandler and O’Brien emphasize this tension by introducing ladies in lakes into their detective fictions and drawing on the complicated, multifarious visions of gender and femininity presented in Arthurian legends—tales that are themselves deeply concerned with the restoration of order in fifth and sixth century Britain. In the Arthurian tradition, the lady in the lake is a slippery, ambiguous figure who appears in multiple tales and personas. In fact, there seem to be several different ladies in lakes in the mythology. In some versions she is a positive character who presents King Arthur with his sword, Excalibur, or raises Sir Lancelot after the death of his father and cures him when he temporarily goes mad. In others, she is the enchantress who seduces Merlin and either encases him in a tree or seals him in a cave. Later poets such as Lord Tennyson and Edwin Arlington Robinson have further contributed to her complexity, Tennyson by casting her as an explicitly evil character, Robinson by depicting her as Merlin’s true love. Given these varied depictions, Arthurian scholar Sue Ellen Holbrook judges that in the lady in the lake, “To be sure, we have a character who is not cut from whole cloth, and the seams are visible,” even if there is a “acceptable logic” in her development from helpless damsel in distress to sorcerer’s apprentice and finally to a powerful sorceress in her own right.² Often considered of fairy origin, she is fey, elusive, and at times dangerous in a manner that anticipates the femme fatale of detective fiction.

The shifting, elusive and somewhat threatening nature of the Arthurian lady in the lake flows through both Chandler’s and O’Brien’s novels, as their central female figures endeavor to negotiate a space within the dominant norms of twentieth-century American culture. Writing about Chandler’s novel, Carl Malmgren notes that its very title “indicates the Arthurian origin of the story,” which will revolve around Philip Marlowe’s quest to track down his client’s missing wife, only to discover a stream of bodies and a perilous woman about whom everyone seems to have the wrong idea.³ Describing the novel’s “signature motif” as “the woman who is at once there and not there,” Malmgren asserts that through her varied appearances in the novel, Muriel Chess comes to signify “the woman as marker or vanishing trace.”⁴ Sliding between identities and manipulating and murdering both men and women for her own gain, she threatens the status quo of a 1940s U.S. already unsettled by World War II. Kathy Wade too might be described as a vanishing trace in O’Brien’s novel. In fact, even more so than Muriel Chess in The Lady in the Lake, she is at once there and not there, simply disappearing one day after she and her husband have retreated to a cabin in Minnesota’s lake country following the scandalous revelations of John Wade’s participation in war atrocities and his subsequent political defeat. As John Wade thinks at one point late in O’Brien’s novel, the only thing anyone can pin down in the text is that “Kathy was gone, everything else was guesswork. Probably an accident. Or lost out there. Something simple. For sure—almost for sure.”⁵ Kathy is gone, “for sure.” But, as Wade then qualifies, any suppositions—including the possibility that he murdered her—can only ever be “almost for sure” in this narrative. In fact, the other characters’ inability to dredge Kathy Wade’s corpse from the lakes of In the Lake of the Woods highlights and accentuates fears of a post-Vietnam, late twentieth century epistemological breakdown on national, local, and individual levels.

O’Brien underscores this lack of certainty and potential for epistemological breakdown through his formal organization of the novel. Where Chandler’s text is structured as a series of episodes wherein information accretes until Marlowe arrives at the answers at the center of the mystery—convoluted and unsettling as these answers might be—In the Lake of the Woods is composed of a sequence of three different chapter types: narratives of John and Kathy Wade’s life together; lists of real and imagined “evidence” from interviews, war tribunals, historical texts, and other sources; and “hypothesis” chapters wherein the narrator attempts to reconstruct what really happened to Kathy. The hypothesis chapters in particular are crucial to O’Brien’s narrative, as they highlight everyone’s—the characters’, narrator’s, and even readers’—endeavors to dredge up not only some sort of answer, some form of truth, but also Kathy herself, the woman. This is, as O’Brien’s narrator tells us, our “human desire for certainty,” which detective fiction caters to (266). “Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn?” O’Brien’s narrator asks late in the novel, before answering, “Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known” (266). Without certainty, there is only “eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma” (266). What O’Brien points to here is the central desire in reading detective fiction: namely, to be tantalized, caught in the pleasurable space between “our love of enigma” and “the human desire for certainty.” It is a desire to be teased with answers to the unknown, to be deceived into believing we can solve what might be unsolvable, know what is unknowable, even though we realize this is impossible.

But still, we want to know.

Tzvetan Todorov has famously written that mystery stories—which he terms “whodunits”—are dualistic at their core, that they contain “not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation.”⁶ Drawing on the Russian Formalists’ distinction between fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot), Todorov further characterizes the distinction between these two-stories-in-one by labeling the story of the crime “what really happened” and the story of the investigation “how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it.”⁷ Yet Todorov’s divisions, while useful, aren’t always adequate because not all detective fictions are simple (or even complex) “whodunits” where readers eventually learn “what really happened.” A more useful way of thinking about detective fiction might be found in one of In the Lake of the Woods’ early “evidence” chapters, where O’Brien cites Robert Parrish’s The Magician’s Handbook: “In every trick there are two carefully thought out lines—the way it looks and the way it is” (97). Here, O’Brien’s novel presents us with “evidence” describing how a “trick” works, and in so doing links detection to stage magic and points out the connection between performance and deception in the creation of a detective novel, the way such texts mislead readers by offering an illusion (“the way it looks”) in place of the way something actually “is.” From very early on, then, O’Brien confronts us with the fact that we are, on a basic level, being tricked. Yet it is a pleasurable deception to experience. Given our “human desire for certainty,” we might say that, as readers, we not only want to be deceived on some level, but also need to be. Despite our “love of enigma,” we want to believe in the “trick” provided by closure at the end of so many detective fictions, where moral certainty and order are restored following the successful solving of a crime. But, as both O’Brien and Chandler demonstrate, this readerly desire to solve a mystery is in the end just the result of a trick, an attempt to hide the way something is behind the way it looks. Instead of catering to such desires, these writers plunge readers into mysteries where “what really happened” is not something readers will come to know easily, if at all. By rigorously investigating the differences between the way something looks—what we believe happened in a crime story—and the way it really is—the larger social, cultural, and political undercurrents at work—Chandler and O’Brien break down the conventions of detective fiction and demonstrate that, as O’Brien’s nameless narrator tells us, “Among the missing, as among the dead, there is only the flux of possibility” (23). And the possibilities raised by the missing and the dead in The Lady in the Lake and In the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Table and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Embarking on a New Investigation
• Part I Disturbing Expectations
• 1 Troubling Bodies of Evidence Gender, Detection, and the Problems of Self-Reinvention in Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods
• 2 The Revelations of the Corpse Interpreting the Body in the Golden Age Detective Novel
• 3 Mapping the Mark Tattoos, Crime Fiction, and Gendered Cartographies
• Part II Implicating Readers
• 4 The Transtextuality of James M. Cain's Snyder–Gray Novels The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Cocktail Waitress
• 5 P. D. James's Discontinuous Narrative A Suitable Job for a Reader
• 6 Franz Kafka Before the Fictional Process
• Part III Indicting Cultures
• 7 J. D. Robb's Police Procedurals and the Critique of Modernity
• 8 Cooking the Books Metafictional Myth and Ecocritical Magic in “Cozy” Mysteries from Agatha Christie to Contemporary Cooking Sleuths
• 9 Romance Narratives, Blackmail, and the Price of Knowledge in the Novels of Raymond Chandler
• Part IV Adapting Forms
• 10 Agatha Christie's Mousetrap and Tom Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound Playing Cat and Mouse with Farce, Mystery, and Meta-Theatricality
• 11 Beyond the Fog Inherent Vice and Thomas Pynchon's Noir Adjustment
• 12 The Mystery of the Missing Formula Adapting the World's Most Popular Girl Detective to Multimedia Platforms
• List of Contributors
• Index