by Peter Turchi
To consider how fiction can operate along a scale of puzzle to mystery—or, more accurately, along a scale of almost pure puzzle to an effective combination of puzzle and mystery—we’ll start with a detective story.
A JOLLY KIND OF DETECTIVE GAME
Long before he created a strangely charismatic bear, a chronically depressed donkey, and an eternally tiny piglet, A. A. Milne wrote The Red House Mystery. Published in 1922, it has, remarkably, never gone out of print. Milne quite consciously worked within the conventions of a particular subset of detective stories: when a man is killed on the estate of wealthy Mark Ablett, pipe-smoking Anthony Gillingham suggests to his friend Bill Beverly that they assume the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Anthony Gillingham is perfectly observant and clever, and faithful Bill Beverly is always a step behind. Over the course of a few days they determine who is responsible for the murder and how and why he did it. At the end of the book, Gillingham and Beverly head back to their lives, whatever those may be—we know almost nothing about their educations and occupations, their marital status, or their families. The pleasure the book offers is in the banter between Gillingham and Beverly, the small bits of suspense, and the variations on such familiar elements as a secret passageway, a mysterious stranger, a disappearing gun, and a man rowing into the middle of a pond late at night to drop a weighted canvas bag into its depths.
In an introduction to the book, Douglas G. Greene writes that, in this subgenre of detective story, “The author provided all the clues to the reader and the detective at the same time, and the game for the reader was to avoid surprise at the identity of the murderer. The corpse was provided to supply the puzzle. That the victim was once a living, breathing human being with hopes and fears was irrelevant.” Milne seems to have been well aware of the frivolity of the enterprise; at one point his narrator tells us, “How could [Bill] help feeling that this was . . . merely a jolly kind of detective game?”
If we enjoy books like The Red House Mystery, we enjoy them as entertainments, diversions; something to be consumed. Unless we’re studying the genre or attempting to create a similar book ourselves, they are not likely to repay contemplation. The novel is a closed system. It does not open out into the world, informing us or provoking introspection, and does not intend to. It doesn’t mean to disturb us, or to confide in us, or to express an understanding of our lives. It means to amuse us for a little while. It is, in essence, a prose puzzle.
One of The Red House Mystery’s famous detractors was Raymond Chandler, who believed the detective novel could and should be something more. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s attack on James Fenimore Cooper’s “literary offenses,” Chandler poked holes in several essential aspects of Milne’s plot. “However light in texture the story may be,” he wrote in “The Simple Art of Murder,” “it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. . . . If the problem does not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is no problem; [but] if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce . . . the whole thing is a fraud.” After offering similar criticism of other “classic” detective stories, he adds, “These stories . . . do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. . . . if the writers of this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.”
Chandler is arguing two points at once. One is about the need for a piece of fiction to have internal logic, intellectual integrity. The other is about substance, and his clear preference for fiction that captures “the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.” Even if the logic posed by Milne’s book was sound, Chandler wanted the detective novel to be something more than a puzzle. Reasonable as that might seem, sales of The Red House Mystery for nearly a century serve as evidence that consistent logic, plausibility, and realism don’t matter to a large number of readers so long as something persuasive, entertaining, or compelling is offered in their place.9 Still, Chandler’s argument is important. While he may not have said it in quite these terms, he was trying to explain why he believed some detective stories not only aspired to be but should be considered literature, while others were laborious trifles.
IT’S ALL PRETTY UNSATISFACTORY: MURDER BY MATHEMATICS
The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge. . . . It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it.
— RAYMOND CHANDLER
Literature has that name because it shows life as it really is. Literature’s objective is the truth, unconditional and honest. . . . no matter how awful he may find it, [the writer] is obliged to overcome his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the filth of life.
— Anton Chekhov
Raymond Chandler suggests that an overreliance on plot emphasizes the artificiality of a story, reducing it to a “problem of logic.” Within the world of detective fiction, Chandler singled out Dashiell Hammett as a writer who worked to recognize complex reality. Hammett is perhaps most famous for The Maltese Falcon—and for the fact that, before becoming a writer, he worked as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Chandler says,
Hammett . . . was one of a group . . . who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. . . . A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been going on for some time. . . . Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse. . . . He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. . . . He did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.
Mystery writer and scholar Ross MacDonald discovered The Maltese Falcon in a tobacco shop when he was young:
It wasn’t escape reading. As I stood there absorbing Hammett’s novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me like a second city. For the first time that I can remember I was consciously experiencing in my own sensibility the direct meeting of art and contemporary actuality—an experience that popular art at its best exists to provide—and beginning to find a language and a shape for that experience.
It isn’t that narrative puzzles are bad and narrative mysteries are good; rather, every well-constructed piece of fiction has elements of a puzzle, and every piece of fiction that means to provoke readers to a state of wonder or contemplation has at least some element of mystery. The meeting of art and actuality, or artifice and reality, can be seen as the combination of the strategic arrangement of information and the acknowledgment of tr
ue, unsolvable, mysteries. The composition of the work, and the elements that give it shape, satisfy our desire for order; mystery, Chandler’s “life as it is lived,” MacDonald’s “actuality,” and Chekhov’s “filth of life” challenge that sense of order, and connect the work to the world as we experience it in potentially more meaningful and moving ways.
In Hammett’s novel The Thin Man, Nick Charles is a former detective who refuses to take on the case of an eccentric inventor’s murdered secretary but who serves as the novel’s detective nonetheless. His wife, Nora (modeled after Hammett’s lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman), offers quips and advice. She also asks the questions that allow Nick to explain the work of a real detective, as opposed to the detectives in lesser fiction, and allow Hammett to encourage his readers to look beyond plot. Late in the novel, in their hotel suite in New York, Nora is working on a jigsaw puzzle:
“You used to be a detective. Find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck.” [Nora] put a finger on her puzzle. “The piece I want goes in there.”
I found the piece she wanted and told her, almost word for word, what had been done and said at Mimi’s.
Nora wants a piece to the jigsaw puzzle; she also wants to know what happened at Mimi’s. That quickly, puzzles are equated with plot. But toward the end of the novel, as we reach “the solution,” Nora is disturbed that the pieces don’t fit together with absolute certainty. “‘When murders are committed by mathematics,’ [Nick says], ‘you can solve them by mathematics. Most of them aren’t and this one wasn’t.’” And later,
“Now are you satisfied with what we’ve got on him?”
“Yes, in a way. There seems to be enough of it, but it’s not very neat.”
“It’s neat enough to send him to the chair,” I said, “and that’s all that counts. It takes care of all the angles and I can’t think of any other theory that would . . .”
“Have it your own way,” she said, “but I always thought detectives waited until they had every little detail fixed in—. . . . What do you think will happen to Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert now?”
“Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”
“That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”
The novel ends on that line—and so echoes the ending of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” (“I can’t stand to think about him. . . . It’s too damned awful.” “Well, you better not think about it.”). Hammett recognizes the need to bring a story to satisfying closure yet insists on acknowledging what can’t be known, the ways in which the world resists our complete comprehension. Our wariness of neat solutions, our desire to grapple with deeper mysteries, is what draws us to serious fiction.
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In a work of art there is a kind of merging between . . . the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science . . . and the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The stories and novels classified as “mysteries” in bookstores did not begin as the sort of parlor game that so frustrated Raymond Chandler. Edgar Allan Poe is widely recognized as the father of the modern detective story. He published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, eighty-one years before The Red House Mystery and forty-six years before the first Sherlock Holmes story. Soon after, he published “The Gold-bug,” which includes a coded message, or substitution cipher. Poe’s particular puzzling interest was in what he called “Secret Languages”; for six months he ran an ad in a Philadelphia newspaper inviting readers to submit ciphers for him to solve. He is credited with popularizing cryptograms, a type of puzzle that still appears in some daily newspapers.10 Some of the more complicated and intriguing examples of encryption are the work of the Navajo code talkers in World War II and the writing on Kryptos, Jim Sanborn’s sculpture standing in front of the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which was installed in 1990 and, over twenty years later, remains unsolved.
A re-creation of the Turk
Kryptos, by John Sanborn
Poe also took an impassioned pleasure in debunking certain popular myths, as when he investigated and wrote at length about a much-celebrated “chess-playing machine” called the Turk. (Benjamin Franklin played chess against the Turk, in Paris.) Long before IBM created a computer to challenge the world’s greatest chess masters, the Turk appeared to be an automaton capable of playing human opponents at a very high level.11 Attempting to uncover the secrets of the Turk required careful observation, intuition, deduction, induction, analysis, and testing of hypotheses—actions and qualities displayed in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the story that introduces amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, who possesses a wide breadth of knowledge, a keen analytical mind, and imagination. Ross MacDonald said Poe was living in the age of reason but descending “into the maelstrom of the unconscious. It was with a kind of desperation—a desperation we continue to feel—that he held on to rational explanations. The murdered girl in the chimney (in “Rue Morgue”), Dupin assures us, was only the victim of an animal. But in spite of this explanation the story leaves a residue of horror. The forces of terror and reason remain in unresolved conflict.”
So while Poe predates Arthur Conan Doyle and A. A. Milne, his detective stories represent a more complicated combination of puzzle and mystery. Even more so than in Hammett’s novels, in Poe’s stories we might say that the narrative’s puzzle is its plot, and its mystery resides in the characters’ motivations and responses—their psychology. More generally, we might think of a literary work’s composition, the effective arrangement of its parts, as its puzzle, and the irreducible, inexplicable aspects of its content as its mystery. While a short story may not have a strictly pre-defined form to fill or respond to, its own individual arrangement is its form and can provide pleasure through symmetry, repetition, proportion, patterns of imagery, motifs, extended metaphors, and so on.
POSING THE QUESTION CORRECTLY
I was . . . a young doctor, and had been educated in a very severe and critical school of medical thought, especially coming under the spell of Dr. Bell of Edinburgh, who had most remarkable powers of observation. He prided himself that when he looked at a patient he could tell not only their disease, but very often their occupation and place of residence. Reading some detective stories, I was struck by the fact that their results were obtained in nearly every case by chance. (I except of course Edgar Allan Poe’s splendid stories. . . .) I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr. Bell treated disease, and where science would take the place of chance. The result was Sherlock Holmes.
— SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Several of Anton Chekhov’s most famous statements about an artist’s responsibility appear in a series of letters he wrote in 1888, when he was an unusually wise man of twenty-eight. Chekhov was writing in the shadow of the great moralist and didact Leo Tolstoy. Chekhov respected Tolstoy, especially as a young man, but ultimately parted from the older writer’s philosophy and aesthetic. Most significantly, he claimed to “lack a political, religious and philosophical worldview,” and declined to use his fiction to tell readers how they should live. Chekhov wrote,
I have always insisted that it is not up to the artist to resolve very specific questions. . . . Only the individual who has never written and never dealt with images can say that there are no questions in his sphere, just a solid mass of answers. . . . You are right to demand that an artist take a conscious attitude to his work, but you confuse two concepts: resolving a question and posing a question correctly. Only the second is required of the artist. . . . The judge must pose the questions correctly; let them be resolved by the members of the jury, each in accordance with his own tast
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In that same letter, he makes clear that the correct posing of the question is a significant responsibility: “An artist observes, selects, guesses, arranges—these actions alone must be prompted by a question. If he did not ask himself a question at the very start, there would be nothing to guess and nothing to select. . . . if an author were to boast to me that he had written a story without having thought through his intentions first, on inspiration alone, I would call him mad.”
According to Chekhov, then, the artist (a) asks himself a question, (b) thinks through his intentions, (c) observes, (d) selects, and (e) arranges. In short, he is encouraging the writer to be a kind of puzzle maker—the crucial difference being that the completed puzzle leads readers to a provocative question. Ideally, that question is of interest and consequence to the characters, to the writer, and to the reader. This might seem like common sense now, but Andrei Turkov reminds us, “The characteristic absence [in Chekhov’s work] of any overt moralizing, of the ‘pointing finger’ and clear ‘hints’ to the reader—who was left the right to judge for himself what the writer had depicted—was taken by the critics not as a particular and original literary style, but as a major conceptual and literary defect. . . . He was accused of indifference [and] . . . social insensibility.”13 Chekhov himself wrote, “I am afraid of those who look between the lines for a social stance. . . . When I write, I place my complete trust in the reader; I presume he will add the missing subjective elements himself.”