How to explain the appeal of a good mystery story?
To Dean of the Faculty Christie Sorum, “They're for the most part morality tales, with a nice closed system: Somebody does something bad and they're caught, which is reassuring, since most literature and the world around us are not so simple, and good and bad are not so clear. You know the program, so you can relax.”
Mysteries are amazingly popular on college campuses. Sorum, in fact, says she's never been on a campus where this kind of book wasn't big. Even at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where she studied and visited when she's led terms abroad, “there's a whole wall filled with mysteries.”
It's no different at Union. One of the popular browsing spots on campus is in the
Science and Engineering Center, near the office of Kimmo Rosenthal, dean for undergraduate education. A small bookcase has become a “lending library,” where faculty, students and staff bring in mysteries and borrow others.
Sorum, who “learned French reading Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret books,” also learned German through translations of Agatha Christie novels that she'd already read in English.
“My favorite genre is the nonviolent, proper, British society mystery. I don't like Erle Stanley Gardner, or any of those American male detectives who drink and womanize and use bad language.”
Asked about her reading habits, Sorum confesses to beginning her reading with the first chapter and then the last three or four pages. “My husband, my daughter, and her significant other-an author-are aghast-I'm defeating the author's purpose, they tell me. But I find it more interesting how you get to that ending-something to think about when I'm reading-a different kind of suspense.”
Of her long list of recommended mystery novels (see “Christie Sorum recommends”), a great percentage are by women authors. “Interesting,” she says, “especially since that's not true of most of the world's literature.”
An entire course of mysteries
The earliest mystery stories?
“You could actually start with Cain and Abel, or with Oedipus Rex,” says Judith Lewin of the English Department faculty. But in her course about “Victorian Detective Fiction,” she begins with Edgar Allen Poe, who's considered the pioneer of the form.
“Poe created the first private detective in literary fiction-C. Auguste Dupin,” she notes. “You can trace the lineage of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple back to Dupin.”
In fact, adds Alina Samuels '03, a student in Lewin's class, “in one of Conan Doyle's stories, Sherlock Holmes actually compares himself to Dupin.”
Students in the class are also reading prominent Victorian writers Charles Dickens (Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone). The course “investigates detective fiction's emergence and popularity in late nineteenth-century English literature and places the birth of the genre in its social and cultural context…as it intersects with historical conditions of Empire, gender relations, and social policy,” as the course description reads.
Books like these can launch readers on their own detective hunt, unearthing cultural
attitudes, assumptions, and practices of the time. Lewin's students searched for clues in Schaffer Library's Special Collections, examining Dickens's
Bleak House as it originally appeared in monthly “magazine” parts. They looked at the advertisements for clothing, medicine, and literature that appeared alongside each installment along with the story illustrations to see which scenes were highlighted. Samuels and her group studied ads “because we thought they'd say something about the average reader back then and about society.
I looked at medicine and hygiene ads crammed on the pages. Unlike today, when we tend to have at least one product for each ailment, I found ads for a pill that supposedly cured everything from the common cough to cholera.”
Lewin is delighted that the library owns this complete, serial, first edition of
Bleak House from Household Words, as well as both the British and American serial editions of Collins's The Moonstone. “This is a wonderfully rare opportunity. Students are excited about putting on white gloves and sleuthing in the archives. And they're experiencing firsthand how the cliffhanger works.”
In the opening and closing scenes of Conan Doyle's Sign of Four, Holmes reaches for a syringe of cocaine. Says Samuels, “To me, this was pretty surprising-this character, this detective-hero I associated with young boys' reading-finding out he was a drug addict! Watson expressed his disapproval, but Holmes just saw it as a personal foible of his, something to fill his brilliant mind when he wasn't hot on the trail of solving a mystery.”
Puns and allusions
On her December vacation, Judith Lewin of the English Department took with her a contemporary literary mystery called
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez Réverte-“he uses puns and allusions that are rewarding if you know French literature. I also found
The Seville Communion, where the sleuthing involves the Vatican. Perez-Réverte is someone I stumbled across not in the detective fiction section but among the trade paperbacks.”
Each of his books deals with a different topic, she says, having dug up The Nautical Chart, “about Jesuits and sailing and mapping in Spain, dealing with archives and the relationship between present and historical times.” And there are more: “The Flanders Panel , an art history thriller, connects two of my interests
-historical fictions and detective thrillers-in a book about a painting called 'The Game of Chess.'”
The longer, the better
Kimmo Rosenthal, dean for undergraduate education and professor of mathematics, is another big mystery fan.
“I highly recommend Elizabeth George's latest, A Traitor to Memory, the eleventh book in the series, all with the same two protagonists. These are British mysteries, although the writer is American. I think she's as good as P.D. James. The new book is 1,000 pages long-very intricately plotted, well written, literary, in-depth character development, a half-dozen intertwining stories. I find it harder to get into a 250-page mystery
-they aren't complicated or interesting enough.”
Rosenthal enjoys historical mysteries too, such as The Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears. This is another 1,000-page book “relating the same crime from the perspective of four different protagonists
-two fictional, two real historic figures, including a real-life mathematician and one of the first cryptographers. There's even an account of the first blood transfusion. Great ending that I would never have figured out. Not a quick or easy read, but a lot of fun.”
Otherwise, he reads about the mysteries of music, “since I picked up the saxophone at the age of forty-two. In fact, playing the sax interferes with my reading!” Rosenthal cites
Lush Life, by David Hajdu, a biography of Billy Strayhorn, “the greatest American composer no one has ever heard of. He spent most of his life watching someone else garner praise for his work.”
You can't run out
Peter Blankman, director of communications and publications, is a great source of information on mystery and detective fiction for the uninitiated and the well-read alike.
“For someone not yet immersed in mysteries, digging in can be daunting,” he says. “Happily, there's lots of help. One of my favorites is a 100-best list compiled by the British author and critic H.R.F. Keating. It's a few years old but still serves as a good introduction. Keating discusses books that essentially span the history of modern mystery writing and that represent different genres. A more recent list was compiled by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. And just a click away is a mass of information on the web.”
If you like to collect, lists like these are perfect. Blankman has been tracking down books from Keating's list for years, and loves the elation and excitement of finding a missing title in a used bookstore.
A plus to the joy of mystery reading, says Blankman: “It's a rare mystery writer who hasn't created a series. So when you find authors and characters that you like, odds are that there are more. So you'll never run out.”
A mini lending library
Judy Manchester, senior director of financial services, points to her own unofficial “lending library,” a small
space atop a filing cabinet opposite her desk, where
colleagues drop off and pick up the latest selections.
Manchester tends to like books with a continuing character, “like Alex Cross, the forensic psychologist in James Patterson's mystery novels. One of his books, Kiss the Girls, was made into a movie, with Morgan Freeman playing Alex Cross-the best casting job I've ever seen!”
She also recommends David Baldacci's Wish You Well
(“I picked it up because I've enjoyed his books. This one turned out not to be a mystery but was based on his childhood in the West Virginia mountains. I loved it.”) and Philip Margolin: “He's good at shocking you at the end, and you're hooked from page one.”
Her all-time favorite mystery writer is Robert Ludlum, who “has the ability to do intricate plots, multiple characters, and leave no loose ends. Great spy novels. Such an intricate web he weaves. Can't put it down. The kind of book you're up at 3 a.m., turning pages.”
A heavy alternative
If mystery novels are not quite your cup of tea, here's an alternative recommendation from Bill Thomas, professor of French and director of international programs: “There's always Proust! Everybody should read
Remembrance of Things Past.”
Why, beyond the fact that it's a great piece of literature?
“Well, it has several advantages, the first being that it's 3,000 pages long,” Thomas says. “So you'll only have to answer once the question of what to bring on your summer vacation. And you never
finish Proust. Once you start, you can go cocktail parties or dinners or whatever, and drop into the conversation that your goal is to finish Proust. This puts you into the intellectual elite/snob category. What they never have to know is where you are in the book. You may still be on page 54, but they're not going to know that!”
Proust is actually a profound mystery, since you don't know until the very end of the 3,000 pages how things will work out. “And,” says Thomas, “any work of fiction, when you think about it, is a mystery.”