The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  AND NOW TO Irving Place, which runs six blocks between Fourteenth and Gramercy Park and is changed much less from when I was a kid. This street, too, was created by Samuel Ruggles when he created Gramercy Park. He gave it its name because he liked Washington Irving. He also named Lexington Avenue, to the north of the park, after the Battle of Lexington, which, I suppose, he also liked.

  Different stores here now, but located in the same old buildings. A cheese shop where the Sleepy Hollow Book Shop once was, and where my mother bought me children’s books. A Japanese restaurant. The Washington Irving High School is here still, a massive place nearly filling the square block between Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Irving Place and Third. At the northeast corner of the building, a big bronze bust of Washington Irving looking wan. The school was all girls when I was a kid, and had a rough reputation. Walking home from school one spring day, I passed a crowd in front of the building, pointing and murmuring. Police kept them back. A teacher, a young man, had jumped or been pushed from the roof, nine stories up. He lay like a slain deer on the pikes of the iron gate around the school, streaks of blood on his brown tweed sports jacket. I had no urge to solve that case.

  MURDER. NOTHING LIKE it. All other crimes step aside when the word is spoken. Murder. In Green for Danger (1946), a nifty mystery movie, a parish nurse interrupts a dance party of doctors and nurses by stopping the phonograph music and announcing from a little balcony above the crowd that a patient’s recent death was not due to natural causes, as had been assumed. “It was murder,” she says, giving the word all the weight it can bear. Muurrderr. She holds the u and rolls the r’s.

  Alfred Hitchcock used it as the title of an early film. Agatha Christie used it all the time—Murder on the Orient Express, Murder at a Gallop, Murder Most Foul. I have no idea how it became the collective noun for crows, but think of the image, that cloud of blackness. No word in English has its heart-freezing effect. Speak it, and one does not merely see death, but also the act of killing, and the killer, the weapon, the body, the blood. The better detective writers use it sparingly because of its dreaded power, because murder is the center of human evil, the worst someone can do to someone else.

  In Green for Danger, Alstair Sim plays the crafty and methodical police inspector, called in on the case after the nurse who pronounced the word at the dance party is murdered herself. Knowing who the murderer is, she runs from the party to the operating theater, to collect the evidence. She hears a noise. The doors to the operating room are flapping on their hinges. She looks up and sees in the limpid light a figure in a white operating gown and mask and cap, covering the face. The figure holds a gleaming knife.

  BLOOD. BLOOD IN SYRIA, South Africa, in shopping malls. Blood on college greens. Green blood. Bang bang bang bang bang. When I stand at the epicenter of the century’s madness (this century or the last), I try not to be deceived by my own sanity. After all, what profiteth a man to be sane in a madhouse? On the other hand, why go crazy with the rest? I can always make it through by speaking of money, because money’s where the action is, here at the epicenter. Instead I’d rather listen to you tell me a tale of heroic peoples who did not underestimate their enemies, but understood that shame is real and can stink up a refrigerator, even a Sub-Zero, for a lifetime. On my walk, on anybody’s walk, lies the epicenter of the century’s madness. Epicenters are quiet places, though they represent the tumultuous.

  Thirty years ago, when I was writing for Time magazine, I flew over Hiroshima’s epicenter in a helicopter I had hired because I wanted to go where the Enola Gay had gone after it dropped the Bomb, at the same cruising altitude. A reckless notion. It taught me nothing. And the wind that morning was crazy, the chopper shaking up me and the pilot like a bird in a dog’s jaws. This was all in the interests of a cover I was writing on the forty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, which Time called “My God, What Have We Done.” The conventional question, or exclamation, or whatever. They might have called it “The Case of the Disappeared City,” though there wasn’t much mystery as to who done it.

  The difference between that epicenter and the one I tread right now? I’m not sure. Hiroshima’s was real, this one’s theoretical. But both are both. If you want to get ahead in this world, said my dad, first you have to know what it is you want. We wanted to bomb the shit out of the Japanese and we want to be rich. I ask you, pal: What’s so complicated about that?

  IN ANY CASE, epicenters are uncomfortable. If I had to choose one place to make my stand, it would not be an epicenter of anything. It would not be a place at all, but rather the midway point between poetry and prose. That is where the best moments of our minds occur, between poetry and prose, our truest selves. Isn’t that so? The sweet, solid territory between the two main forms of writing allows for thoughts and feelings not available to each alone. A man may travel to the moon, and at the same time lie curled in his lover’s bed. So, at the midway point, we tell a tale of high adventure, and we sing it, too.

  By the world we are appalled, and we also sympathize with it. With the world we sympathize, and we also are appalled by it. When we are appalled, we write prose. When we sympathize, we write poetry. But when we wish to get at the truth of the matter, when we want to be honest with ourselves, and with others, we write both.

  Archimedes bragged that he could move the world if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand on, with one foot in poetry and the other in prose. Or something like that. Perhaps it’s best to write in the ellipses, when there are no words. I should like to live on those three islands, the Ellipses. Ulysses sailed to the Ellipses, I believe.

  Do I have that right? In the heart of winter, the old men’s season, I listen to Ulysses speaking calmly and judiciously about Scylla and Charybdis, and the Sirens, and the Cyclops, as if they were people of business who simply provided a moment of difficulty for him, a temporary impediment, rather than raising anything life-threatening. To understand him, it may help to remember that it was he who had the brainstorm of a wooden horse, so that the Achaeans could capture Troy. Anyone who can dream up an idea like that needs no help being creative. He might have made it all up—the rocks, the girls, the one-eyed Jack. Of course, there is always the distinct possibility that I may not know my ass from my elbow about any of this. About Ulysses, New York, my work, or you. Or even if I can tell my ass and my elbow apart, I tend toward creative drift myself. Just like Penelope, I lose my thread.

  BONG. BONG. BONG. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Atop Met Life is a bell tower, inspired by the freestanding St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice, with clock faces on each of the tower’s four sides. The Westminster chimes sound over Gramercy Park. I learned what fifteen minutes meant when I heard the chimes as a child. Also a sense of completeness and incompleteness, as one would wait for all four sets of chimes before hearing the ringing of the new hour. So slow the bells for the new hour. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.

  AND IN CASE you were wondering—because I certainly was wondering—this may be as good a place as any to talk about Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Not that you ever mentioned the poem. And not that I am at all sure I have the meaning down cold myself. But in spite of all the ellipses in that poem (four-dotters, if there were such a thing), it seems clear that the poem is about the created self. And a boy detective knows something about the created self.

  So the idea, I think, is that we live with real people and real events, yet we feel like fictions traveling among them. This is because, while the externalities of our lives remain stable, even adamant, we function in a continual state of self-creation, malleable, fluent. When the Hoon poem states at the end, “I was the world in which I walked,” it means that the poet influences the conscious life about him by making an imaginative construction of himself. And that this self, the detective or the writer, though he moves about in “the loneliest air,” is hardly lonely. Indeed, he celebrates (privately), because he finds himself, as a result of his illimitable walks, “more truly and more
strange.”

  Yet this is where the detective’s and the writer’s view of things becomes a bit tricky, because the world the detective observes, while not imagined, has all the thrills of an imagined construct. Holmes means it in “A Case of Identity,” when he tells Watson that “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” And just when we find ourselves agreeing with Holmes, and rooting for nonfiction over fiction, it comes to us that Holmes is himself a fictional creation. So Conan Doyle is playing us here, but also making a point. Holmes, not real, instructs Watson, not real, in the wonders of reality. The wonder is Holmes himself, the fictional detective in pursuit of a fictional crime that he creates the fiction of solving. Truth is, nothing ever is solved in a Sherlock Holmes story because it never happened. If life is “infinitely stranger” than fiction, how could one ever solve its mysteries?

  In any case—and frankly, you can get a fine old headache trying to work out “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the very title of which suggests that Stevens intended to give us a headache—the poem is happy. I was the world in which I walked. And though I moved through the loneliest air, hardly was I lonely. Not less was I myself. I was more myself. My boy detective. My self-created self. Happy. Fairly happy. In case you were wondering.

  I LIKE LIVING my life without telling anyone, as if whatever I did during the course of a day—get the car an oil change, shop for coconut ice cream, sit in Starbucks with my grande bold coffee and yellow legal pad—was between me and me and no one else. I would not say that what I do is none of your business. That’s not what I mean. Everybody’s business is everybody’s business once in a while. What I mean is that doing things like taking a walk in the city at night without telling anyone makes the thing being done a modest gift to myself. We live most of our lives this way, do we not? Unnoticed and unannounced. And who would I tell anyway? Do you really care if I buy coconut ice cream, or if one winter evening I leave my classroom and roam about New York in search of my inconsequential life? Would you love me more or less if I told you?

  TELL US ABOUT yourself, anyway.

  Not much to tell.

  Tell us anyway.

  Look, Lieutenant, I try to cooperate with the police as much as possible. But I don’t see—

  Just a few basic facts.

  Okay, a few. I play the piano by ear, jazz and pop mainly. Too lazy to learn to read music. I type with two fingers—one, really, the index finger on my right hand. The left index I use for capital letters. I swim with my head completely submerged, not turning it from side to side to breathe, as one is supposed to do. I play tennis by the seat of my pants, running around my backhand to convert it to a forehand. I bank by guessing my balance, keeping whatever I can remember about checks I’ve written in my head.

  You don’t!

  I do.

  Do you get the balance right?

  Not even close. In fact, I’ve never learned to do anything properly except drive a car, which I did by taking lessons from the AAA after failing the road test twice because I was trying to imagine what the rules of the road might be.

  What about writing?

  I write by ear, too. Oh yes. One other thing I’ve learned to do correctly is kayaking. I took lessons in kayaking. That’s about it, Lieutenant. Are we done?

  INSTEAD OF ALL those facts, how about some feeling? Feeling is first, says E. E. Cummings, after all. How I wish I could capture for you that intake of breath on a cloudy Saturday morning, when I had left the gloom of my home behind me, emerged from under the green awning into the leaden air, saluted Carroll the doorman, and started out on my day’s adventure. The gashes of sunlight. The poem of the city—every person of every shape, style of dress, and color moving through the stanzas of the streets, each dreaming, in one dream or another, of love or money. A tremendous crime story lay before me, I was certain, a mystery so tangled, monstrous, so full of misleading coincidences, cross-purposes, blind alleys, and the darkest intents, that only the greatest sleuth in the world was capable of seeing into it.

  That man there, at the perfume counter in Woolworth’s. Wasn’t he the one I had spotted two weeks earlier, coming out of the White Castle, wearing a yellow-and-blue plaid scarf and a long black cashmere coat, his hands stuffed hard in the pockets? Only two weeks ago, his hair was blond, not red, and he wore it longer, and his pants weren’t creased, and he didn’t walk with a limp. But it was the same fellow. I could tell by the ears. As every PI knows, you can change your appearance nearly completely, but never the ears.

  The shadow at the base of a brown brick warehouse. The tunnels of alleys. The clip of footsteps. A hallway lit in silver. The ruins of a church. A slash of light from a window with the shades drawn. And then the shade rises. A hand. A patch of imagined gaslight. A lost letter lifted by the wind. A startled look of recognition as a stranger hustles past, then turns around halfway down the block at the very moment you turn around, and you both know something you will never tell anyone else.

  Not in so many words did I tell myself that such mornings offered the best of life to me, but the evidence was all around me. Not in so many words did I understand that life was dark and wild, and that it insisted you look at it, pry into it, and face it with equal amounts of suspicion and affection. But who could not see this was so? I knew who I was, but I could not say it. Not in so many words. Yet, as I learned eventually, when words became the coins of my realm, how many words does it take?

  IN GENERAL, LESS was said when I was a child. More was implied. Perhaps because there were commonly shared assumptions about things, both good and bad, or because people knew “their place” and everyone knew everyone else’s place, which also was good and bad. But for one reason or other, less was said. Detectives never talk a lot anyway. You never met a detective who runs off at the mouth. Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of the British TV series Foyle’s War, which is set during the Second World War, for instance, never used a word that didn’t count. Such a good writer.

  I don’t know that people did more thinking simply because they did less talking. One thing, though: Speaking less allowed for fewer careless outbursts, thus creating at least a veneer of civilization. The abrupt nod of the head. In my childhood I saw so many men, in particular, give one another abrupt nods that seemed to convey a good deal more than a mere greeting or agreement. Don’t see many these days. The nod that seemed to be worth a thousand words has been replaced by them.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle had a habit of nodding just before he quietly clobbered someone with a devastating piece of information, which often revealed that person’s culpability. He would go straight to the point. He would say “Right,” meaning “Wrong.” He would say “No. You’re lying.” I miss the world where people said “No. You’re lying.” Sometimes Foyle would just raise an eyebrow.

  And all this emerged from a sense of justice, a font of justice, because the detective we most admire and honor is imbued with justice and is not simply assigned to see that justice is done. He must not only think justice is right. He must not only believe that civilization depends on its enactment. Justice must flow in his microbes and genes, so that when he goes after a bad guy or arrests him, he is satisfying something essential in his own makeup. In truth, he could no more live without justice than without air or water. I am thinking of all of them, the best of them. Holmes, Maigret, Poirot, Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, Marlowe, Spade, Archer, Wolfe. But here on this walk of mine, I am thinking especially of Foyle, who, even after he retired from the police department, could not let an injustice stand, particularly as it involved the weak. In the last episodes of Foyle’s War, the war is over, and crime is not officially Foyle’s business. Yet he pursues unfairness, cowardice, and bigotry for no other reason than that they must be pursued. Foyle was not merely a policeman. He was a man. His job, his position in the world, was that of being a man. What child would not wish to grow up to be Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle? What child wi
th a nose for crime?

  HERE’S HOW NOSY I could be: When I was six, my parents rented a small summerhouse in Westport, Connecticut, on a leafy street. It came with a collie named Lady, which was great for me because our own dog had died the previous winter. On the first day there, as my parents unpacked, I took a stroll down the new street and came to a large Tudor house with a glass-walled sunroom in the back. Peering in, I saw a gleaming concert grand. The door was open, so I walked in, just like that, and I began to play “Danny Boy” and “The Blue Danube,” the two pieces I had picked out some months earlier. As I played, a blonde in her twenties, who looked like a princess in a fairy tale, entered from the main house, stood at the far end of the piano, and gently smiled. She listened to me play, gave me cookies, took me back to my parents, and told them the story of my bold visit. She called it remarkable. My parents came up with another word.

  Has anyone seen Dr. Teucher lately—he who, during that summer in Westport, took out his .22 pistol and shot kittens in his basement? One night I heard the shots. If you crossed the street to Dr. Teucher’s home, and looked past the Bilco doors into the dark, you could see the kittens lying on their sides in blood and fur. Their eyes were closed. Four, seven, maybe twelve. “Why did Dr. Teucher do that, Dad?” My father made a grim smile. “Too many kittens, I guess,” he said.

  Our second summer in Connecticut, Peter had been born. My parents rented a house in Weston, a farm community then. No neighbors in sight. My father commuted to the city and remained for two, three weeks at a time. My mother stayed with my brother, sometimes in the garden, mostly indoors. That marked the beginning of her long retreat into caring for Peter, and away from my father, and from me. A few years later, I read about a comedian, Jack Douglas, who had written a bestseller called My Brother Was an Only Child. I got the joke.