Glimpses of Space, Patterns like Music.

Geoffrey O’Brien, in an NYRB review (February 8, 2024; archived) of several books on mystery novels, concludes with some thoughts on patterns in such stories that I thought were worth bringing here:

Such a book was a city held in the hand, a portable labyrinth. Every plot was also a geography, even if the action was confined to a single room or, in the end, to a single exchanged glance, as in Agatha Christie’s masterpiece Five Little Pigs (1942). The words were a diagram. To read them was to advance into different spaces, sensing a continuity of passageways from one book to another. At every turn signs could be detected, marks hovering in the air around faces, housefronts, patterns of rubble and erosion denoting a shifting border between safety and terror, free movement and confinement. It was a lot like moving through an actual city, newly conscious of such borders, recognizing their scuffed surfaces almost everywhere and finally learning to mistrust even the shiniest and most thoroughly sanitized wards.

Glimpses of space flickered in patterns that were like music. The music reverberates through Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”:

It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors, passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them…the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green, unhealthy blotches.

Or Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep:

A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor…the fire stairs hadn’t been swept in a month…crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper, matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocketbook.

Or David Goodis in The Moon in the Gutter:

The place had never been renovated…. All the paint and varnish had vanished long ago, but the ancient wood glimmered with a high polish from the rubbing of countless elbows…. It was the kind of room where every timepiece seemed to run slower.

Or Jim Thompson, in A Hell of a Woman, passing almost beyond the visible:

I looked around in there, and it was like I’d never seen the place before…. Everything seemed strange, twisted out of shape. I was lost in a strange world, and there was nothing familiar to hang onto.

I found those words in stained old books retrieved from thrift shops and attics. The places where they were found became part of the words, the words belonging to the world of which they were made and just as real—or more real, since they continued to exist while the world they came from had vanished in midair.

If you cared to, the trails could be followed much further back, to Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843), in which “one dark, pestilential alley led to another one that was still darker and more diseased. They were connected by stairways so steep that one could barely climb them, even with the help of the ropes attached by iron clamps to the fetid walls”; to Balzac, in Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1838), finding in “the smallest details of Parisian life”—“the passers-by, the shops, the hackney carriages, a person standing at a window”—the same “poetry of terror” that James Fenimore Cooper had discerned in the “ominous” marks left by warring Native American tribes: “a tree trunk, a beaver’s dam, a rock, a buffalo skin, a motionless canoe, a branch drooping over the water”; or to George Lippard, in his novel The Killers (1849), finding in Philadelphia not echoes of Indian warfare but the contemporary reality of the “narrow space” where

twenty-four families managed to exist, or rather to die by a slow torture…. Whites and Blacks, old and young, rumsellers and their customers…packed together there, amid noxious smells, rags and filth, as thick and foul as insects in a decaying carcass.

The “poetry of terror” that Balzac transposes from the forests of America to the streets of Paris is echoed distantly by G.K. Chesterton, who in 1901 finds in the detective story “some sense of the poetry of modern life.” The poetry in its most obvious form is ideogramic—Sherlock Holmes in “The Musgrave Ritual” brandishing a flagrantly random bundle of clues (“a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old disks of metal”), or Hammett’s Continental Op registering in Red Harvest the half-light in the moments before a violent police raid in a tiny imagist sentence (“The street was the color of smoke”)—a notch, a scratch, a wedge that acquires opaque force by obtruding from a larger structure that is never seen but whose pressure is felt at every point.

I read the start of Les Mystères de Paris and remember being struck by that passage; I probably read Five Little Pigs sixty years ago when I worked my way through my brother’s Agatha Christie collection, but I have no memory of it — clearly I should reread it. I should reread Hammett too — “The street was the color of smoke” reminds me of how much I like him. And in general O’Brien gives me an interesting angle from which to view mysteries, which I have always enjoyed without ever focusing on them as I did on science fiction.