Sallis knows: we don’t turn to mystery fiction to find the girl. You go and find that girl, and another will vanish right before your eyes. There is always another missing girl. We turn to mystery novels not for their answers, but for their questions: Why do people disappear? What do we solve when we solve a mystery? What does the detective know, and why are we so fascinated by it? Sallis has a knack for finding these core mysteries that every book in the genre circles around: “It all seemed so voluntary. But was she really in control? Or driven?” “What was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.”
It was this book that made me understand why I love mystery fiction, and why the mystery is such a central metaphor of our time. It isn’t because we really want to know whodunit, although, of course, that can be a lot of fun, and Lord knows I like fun. But ultimately, the mystery novel reflects back to us the fundamental state of our own existence: it’s a mystery. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing here (most of us don’t, at least), both in the big-picture sense of knowing why we’re here, and in the sense of knowing what we’re doing on any particular day. Why are we alive? Why do we love people who don’t love us back? Why do we sometimes want to be someone else? What do we owe each other, and how do we pay these debts? What’s the best way to get from Santa Monica to Silver Lake in rush hour? These are the questions the mystery helps us come to terms with. Not that it gives us answers, of course, but it makes us feel less alone in our state of having so many fucking questions—and gives us hope that, someday, maybe we might have answers of our own.
In a bookstore, Lew reads a poem that says: you must learn to put your distress signals in code. The line comes from the poem “An Interesting Signal / A Very Dull Movie” by David Lunde: I notice that my spirits are flagging. Metaphor establishes connections between unlike objects. If you would like help, you must put your distress call in code.
Of course that is what we writers do, every day, and what we have our private eyes do for us. We put our distress signals in a code, in this scenario, the well-known code of detective, client, and case. You would not want our distress if we just handed it to you, and you wouldn’t understand our frantic rantings, our tears, our implorations to not make our same mistakes. Why would anyone want a long, uncoded rant on identity and mysteries and time and personality?
Instead, Sallis has put his signals in code—a code that is a joy to read, but at the same time hits our deep receptors for distress signals. And we find ourselves listening, and putting out our own call in return.
Born in Brooklyn in 1971, Sara Gran is the author of the novels Come Closer (2003) and Dope (2006). Before making a living as a writer, Ms. Gran had many jobs, primarily with books, working at Manhattan bookstores like Shakespeare & Co., the Strand, and Housing Works, and selling used and rare books on her own. Her most recent novel, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011) is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, and features the “strange and brilliant” private eye Claire DeWitt. Visit her online at www.saragran.com.
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt (1992)
TANA FRENCH
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Donna Tartt (b. 1963), a native of Greenwood, Mississippi, is the author of just two novels, The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002). She published her first poem at thirteen, and attended the University of Mississippi and Bennington College in Vermont, where she went on a blind date with a fellow writing student named Bret Easton Ellis, later to become the author of American Psycho. “I can’t write quickly,” she once admitted. “If I could write a book a year and maintain the same quality, I’d be happy. But I don’t think I’d have any fans . . . ”
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When The Secret History came out, I was nineteen, and halfway through college. I started it on a plane, read straight across the Atlantic, got off the plane dazzled, went home, and read through my jet lag till I’d finished the last page. I can still remember the sense of sheer loss as I realized that I’d never be able to read it for the first time again.
The book is about a tight-knit clique of classics students in a small college in Vermont. Richard Papen—intelligent, arrogant, insecure, new to this rarefied world and entranced by it—is thrilled when he finds himself slowly being let into their group, but gradually he discovers that the intensity and ruthlessness that initially attracted him go much deeper than he thought. The complex web of relationships among the six of them grows and tightens until—and don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler—five of them kill the sixth. That act transforms all of their lives.
It wasn’t marketed as a mystery novel at all: it was presented as literary fiction, but I think it would be ridiculous to claim that it isn’t both. The book itself is one of the best arguments I’ve ever seen against that tired, lazy distinction.
It’s unquestionably literary fiction. It dives deep into enormous themes: the wild human urge toward losing the self, throwing away one’s own limitations by dissolving into something limitless; how that urge can turn savagely distorted and destructive when it’s trapped by a hyperrational, hyper-individualistic society that doesn’t give it room to take its course; the unstoppable march of action and consequence, the immense and unforeseeable chain of events that one small choice can set in motion. The characters drive the plot, rather than the other way around—this story could never have happened to a different set of people—and they’re explored down to the subtlest psychological nuances, with such depth that you come out feeling like you’re one of that group: a part of their intimacy, elevated by it when it’s going right, complicit when it turns dangerous, and bereft when it disintegrates. And the writing is stunning—savage, erudite, utterly beautiful, and so rich you could live on it.
But the book is also a mystery. Not in the conventional sense—this is the farthest thing from a whodunit: on the first page of the first chapter, you find out who killed whom. The first half of the book is spent discovering why; the second half tracks the fallout from the murder, how each of the killers turns into a different person from the one he or she might have been, living in a different world. So there’s none of the standard whodunit suspense. But no book has ever had me devouring the pages, desperate for the answer, like this one; no reveal has ever left me breathless, with the hair on the back of my neck standing up, the way this one did.
And that’s one of the main reasons I love The Secret History: it breaks the rules. There are mystery books that are wonderful because they fit every convention in the most satisfying way. They’re perfect examples of the genre taken to its polished peak: Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example. And then there are mystery books that are wonderful because they stretch all the genre’s boundaries—Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, P. D. James’s Innocent Blood. Those are the ones I love best, and The Secret History is one of those. Sure, it’s about the mystery surrounding a murder; but it refuses to go along with the convention that says the real mystery is whodunit. For this book, the true mystery is deeper, buried inside the hidden places of the human mind: why the murder happened; what consequences it has for everyone it touches.
You still see people dismissing all genre fiction as cheap, formulaic fluff, or rubbishing all literary fiction as plotless, overwrought navel-gazing. I already knew that was silliness, but The Secret History was the book that really brought it home to me that a gripping plot, complex characters, big themes, and beautiful writing aren’t mutually exclusive; that writers can offer their readers and rather than or. It takes the conventions of the two genres, literary and mystery, turns them inside out, and weaves them together to create something recognizable but utterly transformed.
Here’s the other reason—well, one of the many other reason
s—I love it. The Secret History captures something that I’d never seen captured before: the power and the intricacy of those group friendships that you only make when you’re around college age. There are maybe six or eight of you, with varying degrees of closeness; you spend hours having passionate conversations about everything from literature to your deepest fears, you stay up all night getting drunk and dancing, you laugh yourselves silly over jokes that make no sense to anyone else, some of you kiss or sleep together or fall for each other or hurt each other. You create a delicate, intricate group balance that sustains all of you through some of the most intense emotions of your lives. My friends and I had boyfriends and girlfriends who came and went along the way; but for sheer power, the flash of adrenaline when I saw the man of the moment never came close to the click of belonging, the rightness, that I felt when I saw my friends.
The characters in The Secret History are all those groups of college-aged friends, taken to the extreme. That collective absorption in your private world, to the point where the outside world barely feels real: in the book, that intensifies to the point where the outside world becomes, in very real terms, merely something to be manipulated or destroyed in accordance with the needs of the characters’ private world. That sense of belonging to something special coalesces into a concrete form—this is the ultimate in-group, a tiny and almost inaccessible classics department within an exclusive college, an elite within an elite. That “secret language” of catchphrases and shortcuts and in-jokes becomes an actual secret language: when the characters need to talk past an outsider, they do it by speaking ancient Greek. That numinous sense of enchantment, of an unimagined new world slipping into existence and beckoning all around you:
I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together—my future, my past, the whole of my life—and I was going to sit up on my bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!
That slowly crystallizes into something real and tangible, with a role of its own to play. For these characters, all the inchoate things that define these friendships are distilled to the point where they take on tangible form.
Those friendships are powerful stuff, and, like all powerful things, they can turn dangerous. For most of us, the worst that happened was the odd broken heart; but for the characters in The Secret History, that danger becomes as concrete as everything else. In a lot of ways, that private world is the perfect setting for a murder mystery. The closed-room mystery is a staple of the genre—and it’s at its most powerful when the relationships between the suspects and the victim are intense and charged. Plenty of murder mysteries have been set among families, in workplaces, in all the other hothouse worlds where emotions are concentrated. But until The Secret History, as far as I know, no one had set one among those friendships.
Since then, plenty of writers have explored what happens when they turn fatal. Lucie Whitehouse did it in The House at Midnight, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason did it in The Rule of Four, and Erin Kelly did it in The Poison Tree. I did it in The Likeness, where a group of postgrads believe they’re erasing their pasts and creating a shining new life together in a ramshackle old house outside Dublin, until one of them is murdered and turns out not to be who she said she was. But The Secret History was first. It was the first book that held up that world and said it was not only important enough, beautiful enough, to be worth writing about—but also mysterious enough, and dangerous enough, to be the setting for murder.
For me, this book redefined the territory that mysteries can claim. When I started writing, more than ten years after I first read it, I was writing within a landscape that The Secret History had redrawn for me. I aim to write mysteries that take genre conventions as springboards, not as laws, and never as limitations on quality or scope; books where the real murder mystery isn’t whodunit, but whydunit and what it means. If I ever manage that, I—like, I’m willing to bet, a lot of other mystery writers of my generation—owe it to Donna Tartt.
Tana French’s first book, In the Woods, swept all of the main mystery fiction awards, including the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, when it was published in 2007. She has since published three further novels, the latest of which is Broken Harbour. Visit her online at www.tanafrench.com.
Murder . . . Now and Then
by Jill McGown (1993)
SOPHIE HANNAH
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While still at school, Scottish author Jill McGown (1947–2007) was taught Latin by Colin Dexter in his pre–Inspector Morse days. McGown wrote her first novel after being made unemployed by the British Steel Corporation. A Perfect Match was published in 1983, featuring Chief Inspector Danny Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill, and McGown would eventually publish thirteen novels in the series. She also published five nonseries titles, the first, Record of Sin, arriving in 1985, the last, Hostage to Fortune, published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Chaplin, in 1992. In an obituary written by Val McDermid for the Guardian, McGown was described as “one of the generation of crime writers who shifted the genre firmly into the contemporary world.”
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Long after I’ve forgotten the precise details of a book’s plot, I remember the feeling I had while reading it. When I first read Jill McGown’s Murder . . . Now and Then in 1994, the ending had an effect on me that I will never forget. First, it gave me goose bumps, but these soon gave way to a weird, mind-bending, spine-prickling ripple of recognition as I realized that the threads of the book’s denouement were so seamlessly and brilliantly woven into the fabric of the entire novel that the ending of the story was there right from the beginning, unobtrusively all-pervasive. This was not a book that might have concluded in any number of ways, any more than a square can become a triangle at its midpoint.
The structure of Murder . . . Now and Then, with its double time line of past and present, was flawless; none of the ingredients—plot, character, dialogue, narrative choreography—could have been other than it was without bringing down the whole edifice. I believe this is the mark of a true masterpiece: that, reading it, one has a feeling of, “In no possible world could this novel/story/poem/song have been any different.” There’s an archetypal inevitability about the way such works of art unfold, and there’s no doubt that Jill McGown was an artist in the field of crime fiction, one who demanded that her readers focus on every tiny detail of the pictures she painted for them.
All McGown’s books are architecturally excellent. Choosing only one to write about was tough. I picked Murder . . . Now and Then for a sensible, empirical reason: because it created the farthest-reaching reverberative ripples in me (of the sort described above) on my own personal Ripple Richter Scale. That ripple of recognition is what I still crave when I read detective novels or thrillers. What I’m hoping to recognize, and what all too often is absent even in some pretty good crime fiction, is a shape that cannot be improved upon—a construct that feels so organic and predetermined, but at the same time so irreducible and impossible to confine to any definition, that it makes me question whether it can have been put together by a human being without celestial assistance.
The plot of Murder . . . Now and Then, when I describe it, won’t sound particularly spectacular: at the opening of a local factory in the town of Stansfield (based on Corby in Northamptonshire, where Jill McGown lived until her death in 2007), Victor Holyoak, the factory’s owner, is murdered. One of the guests at the opening is Chief Inspector Lloyd, who recognizes a face from the past, though he can’t remember where and when he has seen that face before. Soon Lloyd and his sidekick—and significant other—Detective Sergeant Judy Hill have discovered a connection between Holyoak’s murder and another murder from thirteen years ago. The novel follows both story lines, via a parallel narrative structur
e that works brilliantly, to their unguessable conclusion.
If that blurb makes Murder . . . Now and Then sound ordinary, it really isn’t. The crimes themselves are not particularly unusual or high-concept in McGown’s books; the magic is in the way the stories unfold—and then keep folding and unfolding in surprising directions, creating fascinating and unexpected shapes within shapes, like literary kaleidoscopes. All this is done with quiet efficiency, as if the author and her detectives are slightly embarrassed by their own considerable talents. The plot of Murder . . . Now and Then is a brilliantly ambitious and complex maze that expands readers’ conceptions of what story can do: how many tentacles it can have and how many convergences there can be between them.
In contrast to the baroque plotting, McGown’s series detective protagonists, Chief Inspector Lloyd and Detective Sergeant Judy Hill, are relatively ordinary. They’re warm and likeable, professional and functional. They have their flaws and quirks that prevent them from being dull, but the best thing about them—particularly when you consider the egotism of many fictional detectives, who insist on mattering more than the story they’re in—is that Lloyd and Hill consistently demonstrate that they are at their most interesting when thinking not about their love lives or promotion prospects, but about the crimes they’re trying to unpick. Their everyday ordinariness is their primary characteristic. They express themselves and their realities moderately, which is a sign of psychological health, and tend to retain a sense of proportion even when tested by events.