Why CADS matters

Every new issue of CADS (Crime And Detective Stories) is an event on itself - because of both its irregularity and the invariably high quality of the content. The last issue, bearing number 58, is in a league of its own however as it marks the twenty-fifth aniversary of - let's not mince words - the best crime fiction periodical since The Armchair Detective. 

Readers of this blog know one of my recurring complaints is about the sorry state of mystery scholarship and the general lack of interest of authors, readers and critics alike in the history of the genre. That's what makes CADS so important - it is a magazine made by and for people who care for the What, Why, When and How of crime and mystery fiction. If you're looking for in-depth examination of the works of Mildred Davis, George Bellairs, Helen Simpson or Hilda Lawrence - all persons whose names would leave most in the fandom scratching their heads in bewilderment - then CADS is the place to go. While emphasis is put on the elders and betters of the genre, contemporary fare is not neglected and one of my favorite features is Bob Cornwell's Questionaire of an author - in this issue, Frances Fyfield - which refreshingly dispenses with the phony questions (and answers) of standard promotional interviews. 

That such a magazine lived long enough to celebrate its first quarter century is a miracle and a testimony to the passion of both its editors and readers. If you want the miracle to continue and CADS to turn 30, 50 and (why not?) 100, then you might consider joining the club by asking for your copy to Geoff Bradley, 9 Vicarage Hill, South Benfleet, Essex, SS7 1PA.  

Be warned, though: CADS is a dangerously, if delightfully, addictive experience. Which might be the final and best reason why it is so indispensable.

Further reading:

"25 Great Years" by Martin Edwards

"CADS" by Catherine Poulson

L&O's Law

So it's over. Law & Order won't beat Gunsmoke's record and become the longest-running drama ever. I hadn't watched it for years, still it makes me feel sad - and kinda nostalgic.

I was vacationing in Nice when I saw my first L&O. It was 1994, the show had just began airing on France 3 - and the guys there took great pains to make sure it didn't become a hit. For all its run on France 3 Law & Order was what the French call a bouche-trou: something to air when there was nothing else to air. The show moved from Saturday afternoons to Sunday nights; at one point you had to stay awake until 2.am to see it. (Universal-owned cable channel 13ème Rue then picked the show and gave it saner schedules and a greater visibility. As of this article, the show and its spin-offs are now "owned" by TF1, the greatest French network - how things change.)

And yet I was hooked. I didn't miss an episode and often found myself championing the show to people who'd never heard of it. I cheered when the show finally won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1997*. Looking in retrospect, Law & Order was the first TV show I watched seriously, not just for entertainment.

Why?

Back in 1994 and for a long time afterwards L&O looked like nothing else on French television. Homegrown dramas in particular looked antediluvian in comparison - dull, preachy, simplistic and devoid of any ambiguity. L&O on the other hand managed to pack intricate plotting, compelling drama and unflinching takes on explosive issues in 45 minutes and made you ask for more. It was both extremely formulaic and completely unpredictable - you could almost never guess where the murder-of-the-week would lead, and prosecuting the culprit was often more difficult and trickier than finding him. To a young French viewer, the spectacle of American judiciary proceedings was often even more fascinating than the who's-why's-how's of the crime. I also liked the show's willingness to disturb. Not all episodes ended with the good guys winning and all questions being solved. Sometimes the system worked, sometimes it didn't and sometimes victory was more problematic than defeat. Complex issues were dealt with in a complex way, and it was often up to the viewer to make his own opinion, come up with his own answers. Everyone - and I mean everyone - could turn to be a baddie on L&O, no matter his milieu, race, politics or religion. This I liked too. L&O was my absolute favorite show up until Carey Lowell's departure.

All good things must come to an end, however, and I began taking my distances in the Wiest years as the stories became more predictable - in terms of both story and stance. The show started looking like a French drama - there was a good side and a bad side, and writers wouldn't let you choose; the once wonderfully arcane plots became simpler and repetitive. Sure it still had great actors doing a great job, but what good is an actor without a good part to defend and a good story to serve? The spinoffs finished killing the show for me. SVU I found even preachier than the original and too focused on a particular brand of crime to be surprising on the long run; CI was good and Vincent d'Onofrio gave a wonderful performance as Robert Goren but it lacked a concept. Jury might have been great but ratings didn't give it a chance. I'll check the upcoming L.A. but I don't expect much of it - hopefully I'll be proven wrong.

*A revealing anecdote: when asked by the now-defunct magazine Generation Series how they felt about the crowning of "their" show, France 3 executives replied that they didn't know about it, some going as far as to say they didn't even know about the show itself...)

Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915)

L'histoire des hommes et celle du septième art entretiennent des rapports étranges. Ainsi, 1939 marque à la fois le début de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale et le point culminant de l'Age d'Or hollywoodien (Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Of Mice and Men, Wuthering Heights, il n'y a qu'à se baisser...) Il en va de même, à une moindre échelle, pour 1915. D'un côté, les tranchées; de l'autre, trois films extrêmement importants sortent en l'espace de quelques mois: Birth of a Nation de Griffith, Les Vampires de Feuillade et celui qui nous occupe ici, Regeneration. Que deux de ces trois films soient américains ne doit pas surprendre: c'est "grâce" à la guerre en Europe que le cinéma américain, jusque là assez mineur, va progressivement s'emparer du leadership mondial, tant sur le plan commercial qu'artistique.
Regeneration est le premier film de Walsh, qui avait fait l'acteur quelques mois auparavant dans Birth of a Nation; c'est également l'ancêtre d'un genre, le film de gangsters, qui marquera les années vingt à quarante - et dont Walsh réalisera quelques uns de plus beaux fleurons. L'argument est relativement simple, et tient dans le titre: un jeune homme, Owen (interprété avec une modernité stupéfiante par Rockliffe Fellowes) que la misère et le manque d'amour ont poussé hors du droit chemin est "régénéré" par l'amour d'une jeune fille. C'est le traitement qui fait tout l'intérêt historique et artistique du film; on comprendra mieux pourquoi en comparant l'approche du débutant Walsh à celle des plus expérimentés Griffith et Feuillade.
Ce qui frappe tout d'abord dans Regeneration, c'est son absence de romantisme et de sentimentalité, du moins selon les standards de l'époque. Walsh, contrairement à Griffith, ne donne pas dans le pathos édifiant. La misère, la violence sont filmés frontalement, sans chercher à ménager le spectateur. Les scènes de l'enfance d'Owen sont remarquables à cet égard, et encore très éprouvantes un siècle plus tard. Le Bowery vu par Walsh est un enfer à ciel ouvert peuplé de mendiants, de gouapes, de brutes ivrognes et de gamins abandonnés à leur propre sort qui vivotent entre la rue, les bouges et des logements crasseux; que Walsh ait choisi de tourner sur les lieux mêmes ajoute encore à l'aspect documentaire du film et à son impact. Cette recherche du "détail vrai" rapproche Walsh de Feuillade qui avait tourné plusieurs scènes de son Fantômas dans la zone, et fit grand usage du Paris désertifié par la guerre dans ses Vampires.
Sur le plan formel, Walsh s'inscrit clairement comme disciple de Griffith, dont il reprend et prolonge les expériences sur le cadre et la lumière, mais en les intégrant à un projet et une vision tout à fait personnelles. Il ne s'agit pas pour lui d'agrandir, de magnifier les personnages ou le décor mais d'en saisir l'essence, et d'impliquer le spectateur. Même s'il manifeste un souci de recherche visuelle que l'on associe rarement à Walsh - sans doute parce qu'il optera dès son arrivée chez Warner pour une mise en images plus nerveuse, plus fonctionnelle - Regeneration est un remarquable exemple de cinéma américain premier, par opposition à celui plus teinté d'influences étrangères qui se développera à partir des années vingt.
Mais c'est sur le plan de l'interprétation que Regeneration est le plus remarquable, et le plus moderne. La direction d'acteurs walshienne est complètement exempte de l'emphase mélodramatique qui rend certaines scènes de Birth of a Nation ou Intolerance assez difficiles à supporter en gardant son sérieux - tous ces tics que Feuillade qualifiait dédaigneusement de "vieux ciné". Walsh demande - et obtient - de ses acteurs des interprétations aussi nuancées et naturelles que l'époque et les limitations du medium le permettaient. La jeune héroïne en particulier n'est pas une créature éthérée telle que Griffith les affectionnait, et annonce les futures égéries walshiennes - des femmes indépendantes, dont l'obstination n'a rien à envier à celle des hommes, et qui ne s'abaissent jamais devant eux.
En bref, Regeneration est un film qui justifie pleinement la petite heure de votre vie que vous lui consacrerez, et vous la rendra au centuple. Un bon moyen aussi de remédier à certaines idées reçues sur le cinéma de cette époque.

JDC/HPL

It's been three months since I last posted on this blog, and I apologize to my few devoted readers for this unforgivably long silence. Let me say as an attempt to an excuse that I depend on inspiration to write - and, for several reasons I won't bother you with, inspiration just wasn't there. Now it seems to be back, at least for the time being, and I seize the occasion to raise this blog from the dead.

Michel Houellebecq's essay on Howard Philips Lovecraft is an old favorite of mine, somewhat surprisingly at first glance if one considers that I am not a fan of either the author or his subject. I never read any of Houellebecq's novels and the few Lovecraft stories I sampled left me cold. Why then do I re-read this slim volume on a regular basis? Well, first, because it's eminently readable, informative and insightful - but this is not the whole story. What interests me most is Lovecraft's literary doctrine, this definitive refusal of realism rooted in a no less definitive refusal of reality. Lovecraft, Houellebecq says, found both the modern world and life in general to be boring and repellent, and antithetic to artistic creation. Hence the radically abstract character of his work: Lovecraft had no interest in painting a faithful portrait of the society he lived in, nor in creating psychologically sound characters; instead he created a mythology, an architecture, even a geography (Arkham, Innsmouth, the Miskatonic Valley) out of scratch and peopled his universe with puppets whose sole purpose was to meet some unspeakable horror, write about it and either die or getting mad. As Houellebecq notes, such an approach is quite radical even within the weird genre and none of Lovecraft's many imitators and followers adhered completely to it.

To the mystery fan, Lovecraft's anti-realistic stance reminds strongly of another author with a taste for the baroque and no time for the trivialities of daily life: John Dickson Carr. Both had more in common than one would imagine - extremely intelligent and well-read people with a markedly reactionary mindset and almost pathologically good manners. Like Lovecraft, Carr hated realism in fiction, and made it a central tenet of his own literary doctrine, which he defended with vehemence against all enemies (or, to be more accurate, against the enemy, his evil twin Raymond Chandler) The early Bencolin novels have a distinctly weird flavour and the supernatural (or appearance of such) always played a major role in Carr's work, culminating with The Burning Court. Both HPL and JDC thought of themselves as "displaced persons" born in the wrong time and the wrong place; they also seemed ill-adjusted to adulthood (which Lovecraft compared to "hell") How comes then than their works are so markedly different?

Carr's irrealism is not as radical as Lovecraft's; it is first and foremost a rejection of verisimilitude: Carr can't be bothered with concepts like probability or plausibility. Still his stories as outlandish as they are take place or are supposed to take place in the world he and his readers inhabit. His Paris may be ghastlier, his Germany more baroque, his London more foggy than the real things and his countryside may be somewhat idealized, but they are (admittedly distorted) projections of real places. Attention is paid to the mores of the times, especially in the heavy-on-documentation historical novels he wrote in the second part of his career. Also, while his characterization skills were and still are heavily debated, Carr grants his protagonists real if sometimes sketchy backgrounds and feelings. The only bigger-than-life characters in Carr's work are his detectives, and even they remain concrete and at least possible. 

These differences stem probably in part from the psychological and ideological differences between the two men. Carr, for all his yearning for a bygone era, never fell for Adolf, Benito or Francisco; neither did he embrace racist theories. He was definetely not a puritan and sex is a driving force in his universe - a Carr book without a female character is unimaginable whereas Houellebecq counted only two appearances of women in Lovecraft's whole output. Also, Carr was less cerebral, less solispstic than Lovecraft; fiction to him was about fun, at least in his younger days - the greatest game in the world - and while his worldview may not have been necessarily sunnier than his Providence colleague's, he always took pains not to pollute his work with it. 

Further reading on Lovecraft:

Extract from Houellebecq's book on the Guardian website.

"Master of Disgust" by Laura Miller

Middle Golden Age (1926-1939)

This article is the second instalment in the Golden Age(s) series.

To most people, the period I am now about to discuss is the one and only Golden Age. A time of eccentric detectives and baffling mysteries when the genre reached unparallelled heights of virtuosity and ingeniosity. A time when locked-room murders and dying messages were business as usual and the police would routinely turn to gifted and wealthy amateurs to solve the most complicated cases. A time when the game element of the genre was emphasized with many books including challenges to the reader and rules being set out to prohibit cheap tricks. And yet a closer look at the period paints a more complex picture, one that is rife with contradiction and dissension; it also helps to correct some enduring misconceptions.

Middle Golden Age for the most part continued, amplified and institutionalized the changes initiated in the previous period; it also added a major one of its own. Early proponents of fair-play valued it on both aesthetical and ethical grounds; to hide major clues from the reader ruined the story's overall effect and was an appalling thing to do. Their successors, on the other hand, objected to not playing fair because it was cheating. The detective story, in short, had become a game, a "recreation of noble minds" and games need rules. Mgr. Knox in Britain and S.S. Van Dine in America were happy to oblige. While the former was chiefly concerned with purging the genre of antediluvian clichés that still showed up now and then, the latter's commandments amounted to a bill of divorce from standard fiction.

Practice differed sensibly from theory, however. Middle Age detective fiction for all its challenges to the reader and assertions of fair-play was actually more akin to prestidigitation than cluedo. The author presented the reader with a baffling problem and - ideally - gave him all of the clues, yet at the same time used his best smoke and mirrors to make sure he couldn't make sense of the evidence, revealing in the end the unsuspected truth to general bafflement then thunderous applause including from the defeated reader. Pace Van Dine, the closer equivalent to a detective story was not a ball game or a cross-word puzzle but a magician pulling a rabbit off his hat.

One might think - and it has often been told - that this conception of the detective story as well as the existence of a firm corpus of "laws" resulted into standardization - authors writing much like the other, books so alike that reading one spared one reading the rest. Another frequent criticism is that by focusing on the plot and viewing their books as mere games, authors ignored or at least neglected characterization, "realism" and social comment. Both criticisms are correct to an extent, and wrong on the whole. The period admittedly had its share of formulaic writing of no more literary merit than a sudoku problem but it was not the end of the story. Contrary to popular wisdom, playing "the grandest game in the world" was not contradictory with literary ambition (Sayers, Wade) genre-bending (Carr) parody (Innes) or wild imagination (Mitchell) Also contrary to accepted wisdom, whodunit is not the only genre thriving in the period. Middle Golden Age also sees the dawn of hardboiled (Hammett) and noir (Cain) fiction as well as of the crime novel (Francis Iles, Richard Hull, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes) whereas the transmutation of HIBK into suspense is underway with Ethel Lina White in Britain and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding in the US.

At the core of Middle Golden Age writing was the triumphalist notion that crime was only a temporary disruption in the immutable order of things and that reason would always prevail. This notion suffered repeated blows in the Thirties as totalitarian regimes took hold of Europe and war became increasingly probable. Detective fiction by the end of the period is more prosperous and fertile than ever, but the seeds of doubt have been sown with Berkeley and Sayers defecting and newcomers displaying a more skeptical attitude to the rules of the genre as well as its ethos.

As with the former period, Middle Golden Age closes with a Christie book, this time And Then They Were None which fittingly appeared in 1939. This book, one of its author's masterpieces, combines the extreme cleverness in plotting which is typical of the genre and the era with a gloomy worldview that is much less so: No one on Indian Island is innocent and there is no Poirot, Holmes or Wimsey in sight to rescue the inhabitants from their fate and restore order in the end. The jolly days of Mayhem Parva were gone; now detective fiction must deal with the sound and fury of a definetely disordered world. How it would an whether it could is what we'll see in the next and final instalment in this series.

Only Ten?

Rob Kitchin has a challenge for classic mystery aficionados:

Imagine a reader new to crime fiction and wanting an education in the classics. Or consider a seasoned crime fiction reader who’s barely read a crime novel published prior to 1970. Well I’m that latter reader. I’ve read several hundred crime novels but nearly all of them are from the contemporary period. This is the year I intend to right that by reading some of the crime fiction canon. What I need though is a curriculum - a list of ten must-read crime fiction classics.And this is where I need some help. So to that end I’m setting up a relatively straightforward challenge, one that doesn't even require any reading. The challenge is to set a ten book, pre-1970, crime fiction curriculum and to either post the list on your own blog and send me the link or post the list in a comment to this post by January 31st. I’ll then compile a curriculum based on the most popular choices (and provide link-backs to posts). Ideally, the selection of books needs to try and capture different crime fiction sub-genres and styles.

Needless to say, I have a plenty of suggestions, but Rob wants only ten books. All of those I have in mind have an equal claim to greatness and importance and choosing one rather than another is a pretty painful experience, but that's what challenges are about. So here is my not-so-final round-up of the ten mysteries you should read before I change my mind again; it is as varied as could be given my admittedly biased tastes, but no one I think will waste his/her time checking these out.

John Dickson Carr, The Emperor's Snuff-Box - His most atypical work in many respects - no impossible crime, no hint of the supernatural and no Fell/Merrivale - but a towering achievement all the same for its deceptively simple plot and excellent characterization (go read it and tell me Carr had no sense of character...)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown - Absolute perfection. Period.

Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs - Not her most-often cited book, but the one where she's really at the height of her powers as both a plotting genius and a writer.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone - If you are to read only one detective novel in your life, be it this one (or The Hound of the Baskervilles)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles - If you are to read only one detective novel in your life, be it this one (or The Moonstone)

Stanley Ellin, The Eighth Circle - A private eye novel with a difference by one of the greatest short-story writers ever.

Cyril Hare, An English Murder - A dirge for a society, a class-system and a whole genre; the mystery equivalent of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game.

Charlotte Jay, Beat Not the Bones - A thriller like no other: Joseph Conrad meets Cornell Woolrich.

Margaret Millar, A Stranger In My Grave - Her whole output would deserve inclusion here; I'm picking this one in particular because of its superb title and the character of Steve Pinata which sadly never reappeared again.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? - One of the most brilliant debuts in the history of the genre, and the best was yet to come.

Readers of this blog are strongly encouraged to submit their own "classics" in the comment section.

(via Petrona)

Romancing the (Moon)Stone

The Moonstone is one of my personal candidates for the title of best mystery novel ever written (other nominees include The Hound of the Baskervilles, Gaboriau's Le Crime d'Orcival or J.D. Carr's The Three Coffins among many, many others) and this review sums up what makes this book so great very well.

Believe it or not, it remained on my shelves for ten years before I actually got around to read it - I was negatively impressed by the length of the book as well as by his age; surely its only interest was of a historical kind. And then one day I finally opened it, read the first three pages and I was hooked. I couldn't put it down and the only disappointment I felt when finally closing the book was that it was already over.

Pace Barzun, T.S. Eliot had every right to label this book "the [...] greatest of English detective novels" (he also thought it was the first, but was wrong on this count as primogeniture belongs to Charles Felix's obscure The Notting Hill Mystery) as everything about this book is perfect or near-perfect from the masterful construction to the equally wonderful characterization. It is also strikingly modern, absolutely not the period piece you might expect. One century and a half ago, the detective novel had already taken on most of its definitive shape and to see it emerge before one's eyes is but one of the book's many pleasures.

Now talking about it makes me feel like reading it again. A good way to start a new decade, isn't it?