The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  THERE IS A moment on a walk when you look away from something or someone you have been looking at, and then look back. The object appears farther away than when you first saw it. The act of looking away, of deliberately ignoring the object—or perhaps you were distracted, it makes no difference—the act of looking away seems to have distanced the object from you. The object has receded from your point of view. That bench over there in Union Square, for instance. I was walking straight toward it, when I averted my gaze for no more than a few seconds, and then returned it. Though the bench was actually closer to me, it appeared to have moved back a few yards. Nothing had happened to the bench, but something had happened to me. In the instant I looked away, I drifted and forgot where I was. I occupied a different place from Union Square, though I cannot say what. Perhaps I was dwelling in the past, or in the stars, so when I returned to the world in which I walk, everything seemed new and strange to me, almost alienated. We appear to be near things and to one another. Yet we are just as close to being far away.

  LET ME SPEAK to you of three walkers—Rousseau, Hesse, and Bashō, especially of Bashō. All three made good use of walking, according to their different temperaments. Rousseau, the most analytical of the three, called his walk-thoughts “reveries,” but they are more like sorrowful rants than to dreams. He took his long walks at the end of his life, and while he has a number of philosophical bulletins for the world that has rejected him, he thinks principally about himself, his self-imposed exile, smarting from every real and imagined persecution. Even as he searches for rest and calm, he seems incapable of avoiding the methodical. There is one nice moment. He calls himself a solitary wanderer but acknowledges that no one is truly solitary but God, to whom he ascribes complete solitude, thus complete happiness.

  Less deliberate, Hesse called his account Wandering. His tone is far more serene: “The world has become lovelier,” he says. “I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than it is.” Unlike Rousseau’s forced march, there is nothing irritating about Hesse’s sojourn, which is kept quiet by interspersed drawings and poems. Still, one gets the picture of his walking against the tide, an awareness that the calm he has achieved runs counter to his former self. And we can hear the din of that rejected world in the background.

  But Bashō. Wonderful Bashō. The wanderer’s wanderer. The pure observer, as he takes to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in the Japanese provinces during the seventeenth century. Where Hesse insists on his enlightenment, Bashō is imbued with it. He perfected the haiku, which seems the ideal form for recording discrete moments of a walk. How lovely is this: “Breaking the silence / Of an ancient pond / A frog jumped into water / A deep resonance.” Bashō said, “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine.” A first-rate private eye, that Bashō.

  AS WAS BLIND Hector Chevigny. When he came storming around the park, you’d better not leave your bike or skates in his way. He could wield that white stick like a scythe, and he seemed angry enough as it was without anyone doing anything to irritate him further. Neither his blindness nor his temper impressed me as much as his being a writer, and a mystery writer, to boot. He wrote scripts for the Mr. and Mrs. North series. We had actors aplenty in Gramercy Park. John Barrymore was said to have lived in number 36. Humphrey Bogart married Helen Menken in the Gramercy Park Hotel. John Garfield died in the sack in number 4. In my lifetime, there were John Carradine, and Royal Dano who played Lincoln, and Margaret Hamilton, whom younger kids approached with caution whenever she was sitting in the park, lest she let out the witch’s cackle that made her famous in The Wizard of Oz. James Cagney lived in number 34 for a few years. I saw Charles Coburn once, stepping out of the Players Club, yet another Stanford White building. I waved. He waved.

  But Mr. Chevigny, the mystery writer, was in a class by himself. He quick-stepped everywhere, as if on a furious mission, his own “Wizard,” his German shepherd, at his side. Often he walked too fast for the dog, which was why we kids had to be alert not to leave anything he could trip over in his path. His autobiography was an homage to Wizard. He called it My Eyes Have a Cold Nose.

  One day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, he invited me to his apartment in number 34, where he lived with his wife, a kind and gracious woman, and his two gifted children, one of whom, Paul, became a writer, too. I do not know why he summoned me. Perhaps someone had told him I was a detective. I had no idea he knew I existed. We sat together in his study. It was my first time talking with a blind person, and I wasn’t sure where to look. His ferocity had vanished, as he spoke of the special difficulty of writing for radio. “It’s tricky,” he told me, “especially hard to impart information, like exposition.”

  “How do you let an audience know something that one of the characters can’t know?” I asked him.

  He said, “Have one of them whisper to another.”

  One night I was listening to The Shadow. There was a moment when Lamont Cranston needed to inform the audience that some time had passed between scenes. Cranston said, “Well, Margot, here it is the next day.”

  23 PACES TO Baker Street. Have you seen it? Another movie about a blind detective, or rather about a blind playwright in London, who overhears a kidnapping plot and takes on the role of detective. Van Johnson as the writer, embittered because his blinding was sudden and recent, caught in the old predicament of knowing that a crime is to be committed with no one believing him, especially Scotland Yard. A murder is involved, and a couple of attempted murders. The movie appeared in 1956, when I was fifteen, past the years of my boy detective in the streets, and I had no creative outlet for my solitude. My family remained remote, my school a waste of time. I kept returning to 23 Paces to Baker Street. There was much to glom onto in the story. Baker Street. The foggy atmosphere of London. The writer-detective from whom everything was taken, and what was not taken he cast away. Eventually he is proved right about the crime, of course. But until he abjures his bitterness, he is alone.

  DOES A BLIND mystery writer feel his way into his work? Writing isn’t science. Neither is most detective work. Explaining why he picked teams at random in a football pool, Chief Superintendent Foyle told his sergeant, “Science is not my strong suit,” which is generally true of the trade. Exceptions are Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, the TV show Bones, and the TV series Quincy, M.E., about a forensic expert played by Jack Klugman. But most private ops operate by intuition and by knowing how people tick. Vance made a fetish of his understanding of character and personality. Others don’t speak of it directly, yet it is clear to the reader that however many hard clues may lead to the guilty, it is character that does them in. To kill for envy, one must be capable of envy. To kill for passion, one must not necessarily be outwardly passionate, but rather have passion smoldering within. See Clifton Webb in Laura. Or Laird Cregar in I Wake Up Screaming.

  And this capability to delve into the human psyche, however corrupt that psyche may be, accounts, I think, for the deep vicarious pleasure we take in a mystery story. Mysteries are like sports. Someone wins, someone loses. And that clean conclusion is always satisfying in anything. But the mystery story is better than a baseball game or a tennis match, or a football game, European or American, because there is always a tinge of ambiguity to be detected and relished—some trace of mixed feelings, or sympathy for the culprit, along with a deeper understanding of human nature as a result of the crime. The story told to us is more organized and more complete than our own lives. And it has an ending. A case is closed, unlike anything in reality. But before that door clicks shut, before justice prevails, we may dwell in the house of a mind other than our own and see into a human capability that we may, and must, deny ourselves.

  Would you kill for money if you were assured of money, a great deal of money? Would you kill for revenge if you were assured of revenge—just, satisfying, delicious revenge? Advancement in business? Triumph in love? Would you kill for such things if the mere act of kill
ing would hand them to you on a platter? Probably not. I do not know you that well, but probably not. Still, is it not intensely pleasurable to watch someone else act in your worst self’s behalf, commit the crime for you, as your surrogate, and then take the rap for you, too? Better than that, as a reader, it was you who tracked yourself down. It was you who made the fatal error, that slip of the tongue, and it was you who caught it, and you who brought yourself to justice. So now you may breathe two sighs of relief. No football pool will give you all that.

  YET WHY DID he do it? If that question is asked in a mystery story, it usually comes after the crime has been solved and the criminal is caught or dead. An innocent asks why he did it. And the detective often says something vague and poetic. After the Maltese falcon brings about a couple of murders, the cops ask Sam Spade what the bird was. He could have said “money,” but his answer is Shakespearean—“the stuff that dreams are made of.”

  That answer could apply to more stories than The Maltese Falcon. Only in the simplest mystery stories are motives clear-cut. In Double Indemnity, why does an insurance agent who has followed the straight and narrow all his life turn on a dime and conspire with a beautiful woman to murder her husband and get his money? Is his motive the money? The woman? Or is it something unseen, unspoken of in the story itself—attached to the straight and narrow of the salesman’s life, or to something buried way in his past? Or to nothing articulate? A motive may be untraceable yet still be a motive.

  Ask the why-did-he-do-it question of the grease monkey in The Postman Always Rings Twice or of the hapless attorney in Body Heat. In both cases the men seem duped. They never murdered anyone until love and money combined to prompt them. The women, too, may serve as evil temptresses, but until the right wrong guy came along, no blood was on their hands either, as far as we know. If you think that sex and a fortune are enough to drive people to do the worst things in the world, you don’t know much about the world. The lovers in all these stories could have walked away after second thoughts, but they didn’t. Why did they do it?

  For the detective, motive is no more or less important than any item of information leading to the crime’s solution. Unless, as in The Maltese Falcon, he gets involved with the murderer herself, he couldn’t care less about motive. And even in that story Spade had decided long ago that dreams, of love or money, make no killing excusable. I’m not even sure how much motive matters for the reader, since he too gets drawn toward the solution of the crime rather than the inner workings of the criminal. But in life outside detective stories, why does anyone do anything? Murder. Mass murder. I used to think that boredom, ennui, was the reason for most of the world’s crimes, like wars. But boredom is merely the fallow field for that awful still silence in which our minds show themselves capable of anything. Hitler, for instance. Why did he do it?

  ALL RIGHT, I’LL TALK. But you’ll never take me alive. I’ve seen to that. My side of the story? You really want my side of the story? About my military skills? My ambitions to conquer Europe? About the Russia fuck-up? About my youth as a painter? I’m just yanking your chain. I know what you’re after. Why? You really want to know? You won’t like it. Oh, what am I thinking? You don’t like anything about me. I bet you suppose it has something to do with their money, don’t you? Well, for one thing, most of the ones I dealt with didn’t have ten deutschmarks to their name, and those who did I admired. Having money means you stepped on someone to get it. I’m all for stepping on someone.

  Or you think it was their clannishness, which, I’ll admit, did get under my skin. (I know you don’t want to hear about skin. Can’t take a joke?) But I didn’t really care if they kept to themselves. Fact is, the camps were logical extensions of their clannish behavior. Involuntary to be sure, but no one can say I didn’t keep them together in one place or in several, until, of course. . . . But no, it wasn’t the clannishness either. Or the hairdos. Or the hats. Or the language. Or any of the tools they used to shut the world out.

  You really want to know why? Because they endured. That’s why. Because, century after century, visionaries like myself have tried to wipe them from the face of the earth, and you’ve got to admit, I came close. The closest. No luck. The reason I tried at all is because Jews endure. Hate ’em, love ’em, ignore ’em, shoot ’em, they just walk on and on and on. Who could stand by and watch that happen? I ask you. Happy now?

  SO NICE NOT to be going anywhere tonight. I could be on my way to my publisher, to promote myself in my appealing self-effacing way. I could be going to the supermarket, where I would chuck my assignment to buy aluminum foil and fresh peas and bananas, and pick up a fistful of Devil Dogs instead. I could be strolling over to my friend Garry’s house, where we could figure out something to do, because long ago we concluded that life consists of something to do. I could be headed for the dermatologist so that she could tell me that the melanoma-looking stain on my left leg isn’t melanoma after all, and she’s shocked because she knows I go out in the sun without sunscreen, and she could frown. I could be going to the funeral of a former colleague at which I am to speak, rehearsing what I shall say so that it appears spontaneous. Or I might be going directly to the gravesite. But I am not going anywhere tonight.

  Some use solitude like this productively, creatively. Many of my writer friends hide away in far-off places to do their work. I do not make any such use of my solitude. In fact, I write more easily in the company of others, when my family is in the house and I can sense their warming presence in distant rooms. When I am alone, I usually just sit around watching sports or movies on TV, or take a walk, as I am doing now, feeling more like myself than I do with people. Aloneness is my place in the world. It no more pleases or displeases me than my skin.

  The solitude of city walking is different from the kind that mountains give you or the sight of violet trees in the fall. City solitude does not befall you like a blessing, does not insinuate itself. You earn it. Instead of shutting out the noise of the people around you, you embrace all the noises on your cluttered walk, remaking solitude into multitude. How to walk in the world? Surely, that question is not mine alone. Everywhere is within walking distance.

  A backcourt man at the University of Arkansas, a playmaker, was going through a cold spell. He couldn’t shoot. His passes missed their targets. He asked his coach what he thought was going wrong. The coach told him to get a friend to take a stopwatch and time exactly how many minutes and seconds the player had his hands on the basketball during a game. The player was astonished to report that in a regulation forty-minute game, he had touched the ball only slightly over two minutes, the discovery being all the more surprising since, as a point guard, he would have his hands on the ball more than his teammates would. “So what do you learn from this?” asked the coach. The kid shrugged. “You learn that most of the game is played away from the ball.” I am a very small part of these streets.

  THIS IS TWENTY-SIXTH and Madison, the site of New York Life, where a depot stood in the 1860s, until P. T. Barnum turned it into Barnum’s Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome. It was renamed Gilmore’s Garden in 1876. William Henry Vanderbilt renamed it once again as Madison Square Garden and opened it for cycling. Stanford White (he got around) designed the second Madison Square Garden, which opened at the same location in the 1890s and was torn down in the early 1920s. A new one was erected on the West Side in 1925, and there have been two more Madison Square Gardens since, neither of them near Madison Square.

  What New York kid reared on basketball did not dream of playing in Madison Square Garden? In the vast echoic place that smelled of sweat and hot dogs, my high school friends and I watched the great pro players like Bob Cousy and Paul Arizin, and the great college players like Bill Russell and Jerry West and Oscar, each of us bouncing in the cheap seats high above the court, dreaming ourselves into every pass and shot, locked in our private tales of triumph. I can recall few pleasures equal to the flick of the wrist and the lowering arm and the ball arcing toward the
basket. At its best, it was like writing at certain mystical moments. You didn’t plan it. You didn’t think about it. You jumped and let the right word fly into the hole. All net.

  And then, all of us loping downtown toward home and shouting to one another as we relived the game. This pass. That shot. The cold mist of our breath. The fires of memory. Air-passing and pantomime dribbling around and shooting over the heads of the grim grown-ups on the street and the scowling cops.

  I’D LIKE TO go back to your life statement, if I may.

  I thought we were finished, Lieutenant.

  Almost. You said you never bothered to learn how to do things the right way.

  Well, not the way they’re supposed to be done, anyway.

  Whatever. You sound . . . and I went over my notes to make sure I got it right. You sound as if you have lived impressionistically.

  Impressionistically. Yes. I think you could say that.

  But aren’t you concerned that by so doing, you’ve missed a lot? I wonder if you think the Impressionist painters missed a lot, too. Or, do you think they would say it was others who missed a lot?