EENY MEENY MURDER NO

by Rob Lopresti

My wife has one shortcoming, which is reassuring, because perfection is so intimidating. Her flaw is this: she prefers science fiction to mysteries,

Shocking, I know.

When she reads a mystery it is usually because it is funny (Kinky Friedman, Donald Westlake) or because she thinks the setting is interesting (Tony Hillerman, Marissa Piesman). The latter is the reason she recently picked u a new book called Wife Of The Gods, by Kwei J. Quartey. The book is set in Ghana, with a cop from the capital trying to solve a murder in the rural district east of Lake Volta.

But, she told me, as she read the book something very unusual happened: she found herself actually caring whodunit. This was partly because the book is very well written and partly, I think because of the situation Quartey sets up: one of the characters is a trokosi, which is to say she has been forced to be into polygamous marriage with a fetishist priest, in order to relieve her family of a supposed curse. Quartey makes it clear that the trokosi tradition is illegal, but says no one has ever been prosecuted for it. Some people claim it is a cherished tradition and they say that those who are against it are imposing western views. Quartey makes it seem pretty dreadful, and it is easy for the reader to take sides and start rooting for who will and won’t turn out to be bad guys.

So Wife of the Gods is a terrific first mystery and I recommend it highly, but — surprise! — that’s not actually what I wanted to write about today.

To care or not to care

Let’s assume a traditional mystery, one in which we don’t know the identity of the murderer. How important is it to you that you care who that killer turns out to be? In most mysteries my wife reads she doesn’t give a hoot. Doesn’t keep her from enjoying the book.

We have all come across books or stories that are not much more than logic problems. You know the kind I mean: “Only Ames, Bell, or Carr could have killed Drew, but Ames was left-handed and Bell was allergic to duck feathers, so …” At the extreme point we are dealing with a game of Clue, not a work with breathing characters.

I call that kind of story eeny, meeny, murder, mo, which was the title of a Rex Stout novelette in which one of four men sitting at a table had apparently murdered a fifth. (Stout being Stout, the solution turns out to be somewhat different.)

The opposite extreme are books in which you care desperately about the characters, and worry about which one might be the killer, and perhaps are shocked by the final revelation. Three examples off the top of my head: Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,and Stout’s own A Family Affair.

Those books are self-limiting in a way. How many times in a series can the detective be betrayed by his lover, best friend, etc., before the series begins to look a little silly? Only in TV do they get away with that sort of stuff.

The formal solution

There is another plan, somewhere between the cold logic of Eeny and the passion of Family. That is the story in which the shock comes not from which character did it but the character’s formal role in the story. Agatha Christie was the master of this. Not giving away any details but she wrote books in which the murderer was: the detective, the Watson, one of the victims, all of the suspects … you get the idea. I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who parodied this trend by writing a story in which the murderer was the only unlikely suspect left, the book’s publisher.

Over to you … How important is it to you that you care about the identify of the killer? Or is that not what you read traditional mysteries for?

The FINAL solution

But before I turn you loose, here is the solution to last week’s quiz. The numbers tell you on which line each word in the title was found.

1. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler (21-7-14)

2. Half Moon Street – Anne Perry (14-13-15)

3. Some Buried Caesar – Rex Stout (18-2-20)

4. Seneca Falls Inheritance – Miriam Grace Monfredo (20-5-18)

5. Practice to Deceive – David Housewright (8-21-4)

6. No Humans Involved – Barbara Seranella (3-14-10)

7. Very Old Money – Stanley Ellin (2-11-6)

8. Three Blind Mice – Ed McBain (12-18-7)

9. Death Is Academic – Amanda Mackay (13-10-8)

10. Angel Under Arms – Mike Ripley (5-12-21)

11. Hare Sitting Up – Michael Innes (16-8-5)

12, Rest You Merry – Charlotte McLeod (19-1-2)

13. Naked Once More – Elizabeth Peters (1-6-9)

14. Morons and Madmen – Earl Emerson (17-20-19)

15. Ripley Under Water – Patricia Highsmith (10-16-13)

16. Funerals Are Fatal – Agatha Christie (4-17-11)

17. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy Sayers (9-4-1)

18. Money For Nothing – Donald Westlake (6-19-3)

19. Tell No One – Harlen Coben (11-3-12)

20. Taming A Seahorse – Robert B. Parker (7-15-16)

21. Kiss Me Deadly – Mickey Spillaine (15-9-17)