RANDOM ACTS

by Steve Steinbock

Last week I lamented the sad demise of the word Random, which I thought at the time had become new youth slang for anything useless or idiotic. I was hoping to be able to tell you, like Mark Twain, that reports of the death of randomness were greatly exaggerated. But in a random moment, I put it to the test. I asked my twelve year-old son to define “random” for me. His answer, “it’s like, when someone in class says something totally irrelevant and off the topic.”

I said, “That sounds pretty idiotic.”

He said, “Yeah, it is.”

I asked, “Is randomness always idiotic?”

Without pausing, he said, “Yeah, that’s what it is.”

“What about random numbers?” I asked. “Like what happens when you roll the dice?”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s a different kind of random.”

Sometimes I feel like the March Hare, wishing that people would say what they mean and mean what they say. It would have been an interesting tea party (not that it wasn’t already) had Lewis Carroll invited Humpty Dumpty to cross through the looking glass and join the Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse. Then again, perhaps the argument might have gotten a little too heated, and they’d be stuck with omelets. Or Alice might have wound up with egg on her face.

I suppose that’s random.

Also in the last installment of Bandersnatches, I reported that I settled down with was Paul Auster’s City of Glass. It’s a short novel, and was later collected under a single cover with two other short novels (Ghosts and Locked Room) to form The New York Trilogy. City of Glass is the story of a writer named Daniel Quinn who writes detective novels under the name “William Wilson.”

What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so – which amounts to the same thing. . . .

The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eyes, experiencing the proliferation of details as if for the first time. . . . Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter “i,” standing for “investigator,” it was “I” in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him.

These words take on a new meaning when Quinn’s phone rings in the middle of the night. It’s a wrong number. The person at the other end of the line is asking for Paul Auster, the private investigator. Quinn decided to take on the persona of Auster in order to learn, first hand, what it means to be a detective. In the course of the investigation, Quinn finds himself contemplating the Cervantes, Tower of Babel, and even Humpty Dumpty as he follows a labyrinthine path through New York City and eventually falling through a rabbit hole of obsession.

It’s a powerful and mind-bending story. I’m certain that Auster was influenced, in some way or other, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was a lover of detective fiction, and it shows in the patterns and motifs of many of his stories. But that’s a topic for another Bandersnatch.

Reading the book put me in a strange frame of mind in which I was, like Quinn, finding connections in random details.

After finishing City of Glass, I began reading The Thirteenth Hour by Richard Doetsch. Doetsch dedicated the book to his wife, Virginia. Although not that unusual a name, it is uncommon today. It is also the name of Daniel Quinn’s client in City of Glass. Wait, there’s more: the hero of The Thirteenth Hour is a man named Quinn who is suspected of murdering his wife.

On the recommendation of novelist and short story writer (and occasional visitor to Criminal Brief) Martin Edwards, I picked up a few books by the late Julian Symons. The one that I was immediately attracted to was Symons’ 1964 novel The 31st of February. The title is clever, in and of itself. But in my random frame of mind, I noticed the juxtaposition of numbers: The Thirteenth Hour and The 31st of February. There are no Virginias or Quinns, but the plot does begin, like Doetsch’s novel, with a man being held by the police, suspected of murdering his wife.

If I get any strange phone calls in the middle of the night, I’ll let you know.