Brand New Horizons

 As I alluded in my last post, I overcame a reading slump with a new-to-me author:  Christianna Brand. I read the first in her rather short Inspector Cockrill series, Heads You Lose (1941). Gosh, I loved it! What a joy it is to fall for a new author! 

Christianna Brand and friend

It’s astounding that this was Brand’s second novel:  it is so confident and witty, so full of voice and character, shining with a sense of not only self-assuredness, but also just plain self. As I alluded to in my
post on A.A. Milne and his mystery series that never was, I give a lot of grace to first novels. It takes some authors a few tries to find their footing, and that’s fine with me. Apparently not Brand:  Heads You Lose
excels at many of the qualities I value in a mystery. It has strong characters and a pretty decent setting! The voice is strong, it’s witty and even often funny, and it has a sharp observational edge for character that is one of the things I adore most in Christie.. While it had a small main cast, I liked that the omniscient third person took us into the heads of side characters, because they were interesting and added to the sense of place, as well as provided perspective on the upper-class circle of suspects that I always appreciate. That there’s also a very sweetly written dog is a cherry on top of a delight of a read. I wasn’t at all surprised that one of the first author photos I found of Brand features a dachshund–the beloved little dog, equally terrible and charming, is as character-forward as the humans. The little dog in this book is obviously written by someone who knows and loves dogs.

I won’t wax too much more about the characters, which were good but rather unevenly characterized. But I do want to pause to emphasize that this book does one of my favorite things, something that is often lacking in the modern cozy:  humanized victims. The first victim is Grace Morland, a trope of a pathetic spinster…. Only there is something very heart-wrenching and human about both her and the second victim that elevate them above their tropes and save them from being mere plot devices to get the murder investigation a-rolling. We spend time in Grace’s head in the book’s opening through the third-person-omniscient narrator, and what a difference this choice makes:  living with her hope and disappointment and embarrassment, seeing the careless way the more socially secure treat her, casts a shadow over the closed-circle suspects. Yes, they are charming, yes, they love each other, but I kept returning to poor Grace’s searing humiliation and particularly brutal end, and it reminded me to doubt the tight-knit upper class crew. Starting outside the group encouraged me to sense something sinister in their deep love for each other and the way it mirrored into profound carelessness about others. I think that this was intentional and not just me doing literary analysis, and I found it very interesting and fine. 

Other than the fine character writing, one of my favorite things about Heads You Lose is how it’s set not only in place but in time. Some contemporaneous mystery authors left World War II off the page (though it usually creeps through in themes and anxieties). Heads You Lose isn’t about the war, but it is textually present in some very interesting ways. Yes, it’s set in a classic country house–but Pigeonsford village is harboring Blitz refugees who have none of the traditional fealty to the country squire. Multiple character make judgmental comments about the German origins of the dachshund:  a recurring joke, but also revealing deep anxiety about foreign bodies infecting the homes of the upper class. One of the characters in the close-knit circle of potential murderers and victims is Jewish, and while the portrayal is marred by typical tropes of anti-Semitism of the time, Brand is still intelligent enough to understand how his heritage makes him more precarious than others in his social circle, more likely to be accused of a crime. After the discovery of the first on-page crime, the characters’ first impulse as they’re woken is to ask if it’s an air raid. Small details, but not only do they ground the book in time in a marvelous way, they add to a sense of anxiety and themes of an upper class besieged from the outside and (potentially) harboring violence within.

Obviously, there was a lot I liked in this book, and my enjoyment is my overriding takeaway. But it isn’t perfect. I’ve written paragraphs and said nothing about “Cocky”, the detective, because what is there to even say? He’s underwhelming. There are elements to his character that could prove interesting in later books, like an intriguing cynicism, but they’re more told than shown. I got almost no sense of him as a detective, or a character:  for all Brand jumps around different points-of-view, we spend little if any time in the mind of her detective. It didn’t hurt the book for me, really; I don't need a detective as main character to enjoy a book. I’m curious to see what happens with the character. The other weaker element is the plot itself. From my survey of mystery blogs, it seems like the ending of this book is particularly unpopular. I didn’t find it all that bad. I wasn’t disappointed by the identity of the culprit, which makes perfect sense (perhaps too much sense for it to be much of a mystery as much as a thriller), but I didn’t like the way other characters reacted to the revelation. I am willing to read a layer of critique into it, because class solidarity is one of the only explanations for how nonplussed the circle of suspects are when the murderer is discovered. For me, the plot is fine. If this is one of Brand’s worst, I am buzzing with excitement to see what comes next! 

Why Read Mysteries?

 I've been a bit less regular in writing here than I intended for a couple of reasons of late:  the first being that I read a few contemporary books by living authors that I didn't like. Nobody reads this blog and I expect few ever will, but I'm still not sure if I want to be putting total pans up on the internet for anyone to stumble upon. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future, but for now, I'm keeping ungenerous thoughts to myself. The second reason is that the string of duds led me to a palette cleanser genre swap to my other favored genres of fantasy and non-fiction history. But I'm feeling reinvigorated. I got a dedicated audio listening device, and I'm back on mysteries with full force. I'm very excited about my current read (my first ever by Christianna Brand), but since I'm not done with that yet, here's a short and sweet meta post with my answer to a question I'm often asked:  why read mysteries? 

Over the decades, many have tried to articulate the appeal of mysteries. P.D. James argued that the appeal of the genre is the solution of puzzles, “order brought out of disorder.” This leads into the Foucauldian notion that the mystery genre reasserts societal order. I’m not sure this is completely wrong, I probably wouldn’t argue against it. In some cases it is likely correct and there's nothing more to it. But it is too tidy for my taste, and it doesn't ring true to what I find compelling about the genre.

Before getting into that, perhaps a pause for a definition:  what even is a mystery? I have more thoughts about genre differences that I'll probably unpack over time, but broadly, I feel pretty strongly that in order for a book to be shelved in mystery, there should be a solution. If there’s no solution, put it in thriller or suspense or literary fiction. In the romance genre, readers are firm in their expectation of a HEA (happily ever after) or, at a minimum, a HFN (happy for now). I feel similarly about mystery:  it’s okay to have some ambiguity or uncertainty, but I do expect solutions. 

And the solution is key for me. I don’t feel like making broad statements about the appeal of mysteries for everyone across all of time, but I do feel quite confident in articulating the appeal that I find in them, though it’s not the only appeal. I do like mysteries for the comfort of assured solutions, and I'm not ashamed of it. I don’t think this has anything to do with a passion for societal order as it currently exists. Instead, I am interested in justice, something that in the real world is quite rare. I’m someone who has been the victim of two crimes:   one that received the dubious justice of a plea deal and one that did not and never will. I like mysteries for the catharsis they provide, and for their fantasy of justice. Or at least the fantasy of a world in which investigators care enough about victims to solve crimes. 

For me, the justice in a book doesn’t have to equal prosecution, and they’re demonstrably not synonymous in detective fiction or mysteries, either! Last year, I loved Tana French’s The Searchers, a book with a central theme of what constitutes justice and whether it can be provided by the police. But heck, the idea of community action against crime is hardly new:   no spoilers, but the question of what justice is possible after the system fails is something that Christie visited a few times. Those are some of her most enduring books for a reason, I think. 

It’s odd to me when mysteries are framed as some sort of oppressive genre that inherently exists to uphold the status quo. Sure, there are definitely mysteries that are and do; for example, there are police procedurals that primarily function to issue copaganda. But it’s also a genre that may place power in the eyes and hands of outsiders and the oppressed. It’s a genre that may look unflinchingly at violence and victims and acknowledge the pain and rage and loss created by crime. It’s a genre that has, for at least 100 years, been thinking pretty deeply about justice, systems, violence, and human nature!