PAUL THEROUX. A Dead Hand (2010).

Here’s a fresh work that hearkens back to the Great White Writers of yore—to authors like Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham, men who ventured to far-off lands so that they could bring back news of what happens when West meets East, and when “light” (represented by a protagonist who subscribes to the canons of European-style rationality) meets “dark” (made manifest in the lures and snares of a remote and “savage” place). In the Great White way of writing, the East often assumes the shape of a woman who beckons siren-like to a male-embodied West; she displays a willingness to be mastered but refuses to be fully known. In the Orient, the Great White Writer suggests, the exotic and the erotic twist about each other like tightly woven threads. The tales that he spins on the loom of that worldview alternately provoke and pander to the tastes and morals of his less intrepid readers, and they range in quality from certified high-brow art (A Passage to India) to fairly low-grade pulp (King of the Khyber Rifles).

Few people, in this post-colonial age, write in that vein anymore. But Theroux does. What distinguishes him from his Victorian and Edwardian forebears is the postmodern inflection that he adds to work that otherwise follows an old-fashioned narrative grammar. In this novel of mystery set in early 21st-century India, he gives an intertextual nod to classic images of mystification from the heyday of the Great White Writer: “the figure in the carpet,” from a Henry James tale of that name; “the dog that did not bark,” from a Sherlock Holmes adventure. Theroux, a writer who travels and a traveler who writes, also adheres to the postmodernist belief that stories about writing have as much potential to fascinate as stories about travel—that the work and the worry of a writer’s life are a proper subject for fiction. He even introduces a character named Paul Theroux, a famous writer-traveler who pops up to serve as a foil to the novel’s hero-narrator, Jerry Delfont, who is likewise a writer-traveler, albeit not a very successful one. Reinforcing that hall-of-mirrors effect are the particulars of Delfont’s biography and sensibility, which roughly match known facts about the real (“real”?) Paul Theroux.

Like many Americans who travel to India, Delfont can’t decide whether he has gone there to find himself or to lose himself. His literary powers appear to have vanished; he suffers, in his words, from “a dead hand.” (Others would simply call it “writer’s block.”) Yet destiny, or what will pass for destiny, finds him when a lavishly hand-written letter arrives at the cheap hotel in Calcutta where he is staying. It’s from an American woman, one Mrs. Unger, and she invites Delfont to apply his writerly know-how to investigating a puzzle that involves an Indian friend of hers. Thus, as if the everyday mysteries of India weren’t sufficient to his needs, he now has a pair of inexplicable phenomena to busy his mind. There’s a situational mystery: How did a dead body turn up in a hotel room occupied by Mrs. Unger’s friend? And there’s a personal mystery: Who, really, is this Mrs. Unger? To Delfont, she is powerful (a rich widow, she owns property all around Calcutta), and beneficent (a philanthropist, she scorns the attention-grabbing model of Mother Theresa in favor of quiet good works), and enthralling (a charismatic beauty, she also has a gift for tantric massage, as Delfont discovers to his immense pleasure). She arouses in him an obsessive ardor—and an urge to write again. His authorial hand shows signs of new life, and the result is the beginning of a story that he calls “A Dead Hand.”

As the novel unfolds, the meaning of that term ramifies in several directions. During his inquiry into the hotel-room incident, Delfont takes possession of a literal dead hand. It was, he learns, cut from the corpse of a small boy. He also learns that the hand bears no traceable fingerprints. Its owner, presumably forced to ply a trade that wore his fingertips smooth from overuse, lacked that universal mark of identity. Even in life, one might say, the hand had undergone a kind of death. Other clues emerge, meanwhile, and they lead the scribbler-cum-sleuth to a point where his twin mysteries overlap. Mrs. Unger is plainly too good to be true. Delfont extols her many charms and virtues (in an ingenuous and sometimes overweening tone that might count as the book’s main flaw)—and yet a dark aura swirls about her. She’s a figure drawn from the gothic tradition, an object of romantic interest who harbors secrets that form a barrier to genuine romance. Where does her evident goodness truly begin and end? Will the dead hand of that young boy figuratively touch her in some way? Those secrets remain hidden until the book’s effective and resonant finale.

 

HENNING MANKELL. Faceless Killers (1991).

The police-prodedural genre—in which a cop-hero marches through long days of investigative drudgery, all the while contending with the personal fallout from a professional life marked by too much work and too little reward—well suits the wintry outlook that the Swedish people are known for (not least by themselves). This novel, set in the Baltic-chilled region along the southern coast of Sweden, exploits that close kinship between narrative style and national temper. It’s the first of what has become a long and popular series of books that feature Inspector Kurt Wallander as their put-upon protagonist. Here, along with calling upon Wallander to make sense of the shockingly violent murder of an old farmer couple, Mankell immerses him in a flow of worries that includes a wife bent on divorce, an estranged daughter, and a selfish, senile father. A further layer of angst, derived from the view that immigration and the nativist response to it are disfiguring Swedish society, covers these grim proceedings like a sheet of thin, brittle ice. A love of opera and a submerged crackle of erotic longing humanize Wallander, and also pump some life into his saga, but they don’t fundamentally alter Mankell’s depiction of crime-fighting as a thoroughly unromantic affair, random is its course and devoid of dramatically satisfying contours. The murder gets solved, realistically but without surprise or panache. For Wallander and his troubled country, meanwhile, life just goes on: Sadly and stubbornly, it goes on.

 

GEOFFREY HOMES. Build My Gallows High (1946).

The movie based on this novel, Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Jacques Tourneur, stands today as the ideal type of a film noir. But the book deserves recognition as a classic in its own right. Short in length yet dense in its plotting, spare in its language yet shot through with casually vivid poetry, marked by a keenly observed sense of place (with locations ranging from the canyons of Midtown Manhattan to the hills and streams near Lake Tahoe) yet suggesting the universality of myth, this is a suspense yarn such as Hemingway might have wished to write. The mood here, evoking a lunch-counter America in which cosmic doom occupies a corner seat, recalls that of Hemingway’s short story “The Killers,” which also formed the basis of a classic postwar noir film.

Red Bailey, who operates a filling station in a remote Western town, one day discovers that his previous life as a New York–based private eye isn’t something that he can put behind him. Eleven years ago, a professional gambler hired him to track down a vamp named Mumsie McGonigle, along with some $50,000 of the gambler’s money that she’d taken with her. Once Red located her, she got her hooks into him, as vamps are wont to do, and he ended up running off with her and with the money. At that point, he might have known that he’d carved out a future for himself that wasn’t worth very much. But in the world of noir, knowledge and hope have a star-crossed relationship with each other, just as men and women do. So now, back in the present, Red must head eastward—toward the big bad city of his past and away from the sylvan land where, in the meantime, he has met an honest woman and begun to find a kind of happiness.

Red’s anguished plight suggests an alternate path to the one taken by an earlier tempted detective, Sam Spade. Mumsie McGonigle gained the kind of hold on Red that Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in the Maltese Falcon, could never quite exert on Spade. (Note the similarity in the women’s names, each one identifying an Irish-American colleen as a modern siren.) While Red does learn his lesson, it comes a crucial moment too late, and his tortuous course toward deliverance provides a cautionary tale whose moral is not rigorously hardboiled, as the moral of Spade’s tale is, but genuinely tragic.

 

ED McBAIN. Sadie When She Died (1972).

Steve Carella, star detective of the 87th Precinct, has a hunch. The knife that disembowelled and killed Sarah Fletcher bears the fingerprints of a hapless junkie-cum-burglar named Ralph Corwin. What’s more, Corwin has confessed to the killing. Yet Carella believes that guilt for the murder lies elsewhere, and his suspicion focuses on Gerald Fletcher, Sarah’s husband, who tells police at the crime scene, “[M]y wife was a no-good bitch, and I’m delighted someone killed her.” As Carella plays his hunch, a peculiar cat-and-mouse game unfolds, and the detective isn’t always be sure whether he or Fletcher is the “cat.” A highlight of that battle of wits comes when Fletcher gives Carella a Dante-worthy tour of the sexual netherworld that flourished in Isola (otherwise known as New York City) during the swinging early 1970s. From this dark game, Carella emerges as the winner, more or less—but even he isn’t prepared for the double twist of the narrative knife that concludes this slender, sharp-edged tale.

[ADDENDUM: I came to the 87th Precinct series late in my reading life. For too long, I shunned the entire police-procedural genre, assuming that because the word "procedural" sounds so boring, the fiction written under that rubric must also be boring. Publishers and writers, moreover—including McBain, whom many observers credit with launching the modern American police-procedural form, back in the mid-1950s—have tended to market the genre as one devoted to realistic depictions of workaday crime solving. But who wants a detective story to be "realistic"? In the real world, most murders are committed by an obvious culprit, or else they go unsolved. And the circumstances behind them, far from evoking either intellectual stimulation or emotional investment, are usually as predictable as they are tawdry. Fortunately, McBain didn't take his realism too far. Within the procedural framework, he created all manner of mystery and suspense stories, including a taut psychological thriller like Sadie, an occasional old-school whodunit, and even a ghost story.]

 

FREDRIC BROWN. The Screaming Mimi (1949).

Published at mid-century, this slim yet action- and antic-packed thriller foreshadows a story type that would flourish in the latter half of the last century: the tale of psychopathic murder, usually of a “serial” variety. Blending the motifs of horror with those of straight detection, it’s a sub-genre that aims to agitate and titillate readers as much as it does to bamboozle and bedazzle them, and it favors the darker mysteries of sex and violence over the lighter fare that animates older forms of the mystery genre. All the same, this work casts a backward glance as well. Writing with the wisecracking insouciance and the madcap verve that characterized a major strain in popular entertainment during the 1930s and 1940s, Brown clearly wants his Mimi to scream not just in the spirit of blood-chilled fright, but also with the sound of high-spirited laughter. While he doesn’t wholly succeed in balancing the two sides of that equation, he does produce a minor classic of an oddly hybrid sort—Psycho by way of The Front Page .

The opening set piece typifies all that follows. Bill Sweeney, a reporter for the Chicago Blade, is coming off a two-week bender. As he stumbles through the Loop in the wee hours of the morning, he chances upon a sight such as dreams are made of, dreams of the kind that easily blur into nightmares: A woman of striking beauty lies prostrate in the foyer of an apartment building. There’s a gash across her abdomen, oozing blood onto the slinky dress that she’s almost wearing, and there’s a huge dog next to her, poised to attack. The dog leaps—not to attack the woman, but to bite and pull the zipper on her dress, which thereupon falls to the floor, revealing that she has naught on beneath it. Apart from a smear of red on her belly, she looms as a vision of alabaster perfection. Sweeney, mesmerized by the woman, vows to find a way into her heart, and he surmises that the best route available to him will involve catching the maniac who slashed her.

From this cockamamie start, Brown launches his boozing, breezy, brazen hero on a quest to nab a perpetrator whom headline writers have already dubbed “the Ripper.” For Sweeney’s beloved—Yolanda Lang, by name—isn’t the first gorgeous Chicagoland blonde to undergo a knife attack in recent weeks. This Ripper creature has previously taken a blade to three women who fit that description, and, unlike Yolanda, none of them survived the experience. Sweeney has just one substantive clue to follow: a black statuette of a naked woman, her face and form posed in what appears to be a state of abject terror. (That weird bauble is the “Screaming Mimi” of the title, and it’s depicted on the cover of the book’s original hardcover edition, shown above left.) Having linked the statuette to one of the Ripper’s victims, Sweeney pursues a hunch that it might lead him to Yolanda’s assailant. And it does so lead him, more or less, though not before sending him on a brief, rollicking tour through a far-from-wholesome side of the great American Midwest.

As a rule, the serial-murder form doesn’t mix well with the whodunit form. In the hunt for a killer who targets several victims with no obvious relation to one another, the key move is to figure out what actually does tie those unfortunate souls together. Once the hidden pattern becomes clear, it’s well-nigh impossible to keep the killer’s identity hidden; there just aren’t, in most plausible scenarios, more than one or two suspects who fit that pattern. To effect a surprise ending within such a constraint, a writer must essentially yank a very big rabbit out of a very small hat. The trick ending here probably won’t surprise many readers who have encountered myriad variations on the serial-murder theme over the past half-century. But the trick is clever enough and provocative enough, and Brown does pull it off.

[ADDENDUM: Googling this book turned up a couple of noteworthy tidbits. First, those who don't want to pay for the book can find a free copy of it online. Second, those who don't want to bother with reading it can hunt down a movie version, released in 1958 and starring Anita Ekberg in the Yolanda Lang role. Otherwise, given the wide range of work that Brown produced in both the mystery and science-fiction genres, it's surprising that there appears to be relatively little commentary about him on the Web.]

 

PATRICK McGRATH. Asylum (1997).

A justly heralded classic of the neo-Gothic horror genre, this brooding tale of obsessive desire and psychic damage bears comparison with the fiction that Ruth Rendell writes under the name Barbara Vine. As in the Vine novels, the mood here is one of steadily emergent dread—a dread whose true source or meaning lies veiled beneath the narrative surface until, like a suddenly uncoiled spring, it snaps into place in the book’s final pages. Using as his setting the rarefied, enclosed world of a rural home for the criminally insane, McGrath construes an elegant pattern of overlapping love triangles, each one more unstable than the next. At the center of this pattern is the illicit bond that develops between Stella Raphael, the bored wife of a staff psychiatrist at that institution, and Edgar Stark, an artist who was sent there after the brutal murder of his wife. As told by Peter Cleave, a psychiatrist who ends up treating both of them, their story takes on a macabre grandeur that transcends both the clinical verities of modern “mental health” and the easy nostrums of traditional morality. One thing only is clear: By the laws of Gothic irony, the eponymous asylum can offer no sanctuary to its denizens.

 

GRAHAM GREENE. The Third Man (1950).

Rollo Martins, a scribbler of Western tales that earn him little money and even less esteem, comes to postwar Vienna at the summons of an old school chum, Harry Lime, who has some scheme going in which Martins might play an unspecified part. Lime, it seems, has always had some kind of scheme going. Now, though, the scheming has presumably ground to a halt: Martins arrives in the bomb-scarred Austrian capital just in time to attend his friend’s funeral. There, he encounters Colonel Calloway, an investigating officer in the British occupation forces whose questioning of Martins spurs the hack writer to become a sort of hack detective. Officially, Lime died from injuries suffered in a jeep accident. But how “accidental,” really, was that death?

Greene tells the story of Martins’s quest for truth and justice not in the man’s own voice, but through the icily sardonic narration provided by Calloway. That device disorients the tale in exactly the right way, rendering it at once darker and more comic than the standard sleuth-driven thriller. Written not be be read, but rather to form the basis for a screenplay, this brief, delicate, and yet dense work of fiction—the literary equivalent of a thin, rich slice of Viennese torte—benefits from the forced compression of its unusual genre. The result, like the landmark film that emerged from it, is a classic short work in which scene after scene beautifully conveys both casual realism and symbolic urgency.

[ADDENDUM: The movie version of The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime and Joseph Cotton as Holly (not Rollo) Martins), departs from Greene's novelized treatment in ways that are few but intriguing. In the short novel, the Lime and Martins characters are not American, but Englishman. That's a bit of a surprise, in light of Greene's well-known penchant for attributing a certain destructive innocence to Americans: Together, the characters played by Welles and Cotton seem to prefigure the Alden Pyle character in The Quiet American, but Greene didn't conceive of them that way. Equally counter-intuitive is the fact that Greene wrote a relatively conventional happy ending for the book version of the story. In the final scene of the novel, he has Martins "get the girl" (the one played by Alida Valli in the movie). Reportedly, it was Reed who quashed that ending in favor of the wry, downbeat coda that concludes the film. Another key element of the movie that doesn't appear in the book, of course, is the splendid zither-based score composed by Anton Karas. But it's nice to think, and plausible to suggest, that the mordant yet playful tone of Greene's writing had some influence on that musical choice.]

 

STEVE HAMILTON. A Cold Day in Paradise (1998).

The north woods that rim the Great Lakes make a strangely fitting scene for murder. Foundering Rust Belt industries have left behind a wreckage of human spare parts—people who survive by working in Native American casinos or by serving the needs, both common and carnal, of the big-city rich folk who own lakeside cabins. A note of seedy desperation echoes through the seemingly peaceful pines, rising now and again to produce a crescendo of violence.

This Edgar-winning first novel carries echoes of its own. Like In the Lake of the Woods (1994), by Tim O’Brien, it derives narrative tension from the contrast between the idyllic aura of a sylvan retreat and the haunting mood that arises from an unquenchable passion. Like Anatomy of a Murder (1958), by Robert Traver, it takes place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and features a jaded, beaten-down protagonist. (In the 1959 film version of Traver’s novel, that figure was memorably played by Jimmy Stewart.) In this instance, the reluctant hero is Alex McKnight, a onetime Detroit cop who carries with him a bulky edition of the standard back story: Several years ago, he watched helplessly as a madman slaughtered his partner; reeling from that trauma, he quit the policy force soon afterward. Nowadays, he has no wish to embroil himself in a murder investigation. But he doesn’t have much choice in the matter when Edwin Fulton, a friend of sorts and the cuckolded husband of his former lover, calls him from a blood-spattered motel room where Fulton’s bookie lies dead. Before long, signs emerge that point to the involvement of the crazed perp who killed his fellow cop, and that’s when McKnight proves his mettle. He puts hundreds of miles of wear-and-tear on his truck, and wears himself out in the process, and eventually he discovers who murdered whom. Hamilton declines to resolve every element in the larger story, however—presumably in order to give readers an incentive to pick up later installments in the McKnight saga.

 

ED McBAIN. Nocturne (1997).

Night and the city are the perfectly twinned themes of this late entry in the 87th Precinct series. The nocturnal dark provides cover for dangerous urban transactions of every sort. A trio of cocky prep-school boys, all white, bargain with a black pimp for the services of a white prostitute (19-year-old Yolanda Marx, a nice Jewish girl from Ohio). The prostitute, in exchange for agreeing to take on all four of those men, bargains for more money and for an extra “jumbo” vial of crack. Elsewhere in the precinct, an old Russian woman bargains both for her own life and for the life of her cat. Later, two goons each bargain with their shallow conscience over some cash that belongs to the Russian woman’s granddaughter. Murder, and lots of it, will round out the night for these characters, and the cops of the 87th—the noble Steve Carella, the earnest Cotton Hawes, the bigoted Fat Ollie Weeks—will stalk the Stygian expanse of Isola to locate the perps. As always with McBain, what he calls the Big Bad City functions as a character in its own right. A slightly off-kilter replica of New York, Isola has the mythical, timeless quality of a place where anything can happen, especially between dusk and dawn.

McBain, true to the book’s title, waxes lyrical about the noirish charms of this imagined metropolis, this Baghdad on the River Harb. Yet he knows just when and how to keep his poetry in check. Life in the modern city is messy, and he shows the mess. And while narrative convention might call for the novel’s two main plot lines to converge, McBain is content to let them glance off one another, like ships passing in the proverbial night.

 

BARBARA VINE. The House of Stairs (1988).

Elizabeth Vetch, the narrator of this largely retrospective tale of deceit and murder, has lived her entire life in fear that the obscure disease that crippled and killed her mother will do the same to her. That fear engenders in Elizabeth both desperate yearning and a sense of rueful detachment, an urge to grab what she can from her possibly abortive life and a suspicion that her grasping is for naught. Those impulses, in turn, lead to her involvement with two women who temperamentally have little in common with her, and who have little in common with each other beyond a genius for strong, unconflicted passion: Cosette, her newly widowed aunt, and Bell, a young waif whom Elizabeth meets on a London street. Those same impulses also inform Elizabeth’s edgy, observant account of how—in and around the ominously depicted House of Stairs, during the late 1960s and early 1970s—Cosette and Bell all but destroyed each other’s lives and profoundly damaged her own.

Ruth Rendell, as in other novels that she has written under the Vine pseudonym, here demonstrates that as a weaver of fiction she can do anything. She can evoke the multifaceted decadence of Swinging London and its sober, bittersweet legacy. She can fashion a plot that is labyrinthine in its complexity without appearing contrived in its exposition. She can render as equally human the blithe amoralist and the earnest benefactor, the bounder without scruple and the bounder who undergoes a change of heart. Most impressively, she can make the horrific seem normal and even, in a poetic sense, necessary.

[ADDENDUM: Rendell can also take the highest of high-brow novels and adapt its central device to her own literary ends. Quite explicitly, she borrows the triangle-based structure that undergirds the Henry James masterpiece Wings of a Dove and adapts it to this novel—a work that seems, at first glance, to be just another middlebrow thriller. To say more about that structure would risk spoiling the plot of the Vine novel (and also, by the way, the plot of Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie).]