Our critic recommends old and new books
Dear readers,
An anagram of “New York Times” is “Monkeys Write,” which has always pleased me immensely. Rearranging groups of letters is a low-energy mental game that affects me like a tablet of Xanax, with the benefit that I can make anagrams while operating heavy machinery, if I wish. And it’s free.
The same doesn’t apply to reading, but there is a category of book known to combine tranquilizing and entertaining properties. That category is the subject of today’s newsletter.
Welcome to the Mystery Edition!
—Molly
“Murder Ink,” by Dilys Winn
Nonfiction, 1977
Perhaps you’ve come across a book titled “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a witty faux-ethnography of American Wasp culture published in 1980. When I encountered “Murder Ink,” a guide to mystery novels released three years earlier, I could not shake the conviction that the former was a direct rip-off of the latter — it featured every visual flourish and fancy of its predecessor, right down to the font! (Baskerville.) My little suspicion was dispelled when I noticed that the books had the same publisher and designer.* Not a crime, then. An intended duplication.
But see, this is the book’s fault. Submerging yourself in mystery fiction is a recipe for inferring malevolence in all of life. “Murder Ink” is a jumbo collection of essays, interviews, morphologies and illustrations on such topics as “The Correct Use of the Blunt Instrument” and “Innocuous (seemingly) House and Garden Plants That Will (quite simply) Slay You” and “The History of the Trench Coat.”
There is even an account of what it’s like to live with a mystery author as written by his wife, who reports that her spouse’s desk is “as organized as a professional carpenter’s workshop” and also that he “is sex-crazed, but I’m not gong to talk about that.” The book’s inside back cover is a deep crimson that “exactly matches the color of arterial blood.” This is essential reading for fans of the genre and for nobody else.
*Workman Publishing and Paul Hanson, respectively. Hats off to Hanson for creating a delightful and adaptable design.
Read if you like: Whodunits, howdunits, whydunits, wordplay, list-making, keeping secrets.
Available from: Check your library or used bookstore of choice.
“O Caledonia,” by Elspeth Barker
Fiction, 1991
Here we have a novel that has the appearance of a mystery — it starts with a slumped corpse — but not the temperament of one, which turns the reading experience itself into a meta-mystery. (The puzzle being: “What’s the author up to here?”)
The protagonist and murderee is Janet, who lives in a damp castle in Scotland. As a child she lies, mistreats her dolls and buries her baby sibling under a pile of wet leaves. Janet’s parents employ a child-rearing style that could be described as “largely indifferent,” with occasional eruptions of punishment for their imp of a daughter.
If you need proof that novels are the best available technology for placing yourself inside the consciousness of an imaginary figure, “O Caledonia” makes a strong case. It is impossible not to merge with Janet as she makes her way through childhood and early teen years, reading Greek and adoring the scent of pine trees and hating gloomy afternoon teas featuring rock buns “assembled on snowy doilies, malignly aglitter with the menace of carbonized currants.” (Has a snack ever been described with such vicious precision? You can practically taste those arid pebbles of fruit!)
Read if you like: Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle,” the film “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë OR Kate Bush
Available from: Simon & Schuster
Why don’t you …
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Get “L.A. Woman,” by the Doors, mercilessly stuck in your head as you prowl the city’s UNDERBELLY, sweeping aside poisoned hummingbirds and fast food wrappers to get to the bottom of a serial killer case?
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Discover whether you’re in the “love it” camp or the “hate it” camp when it comes to Martin Amis’s riff on the DETECTIVE STORY? (Me, I love it.)
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Resort to an underrated Agatha Christie specimen once you’ve exhausted the hits? Hercule Poirot applies his LITTLE GRAY CELLS to a murder that took place 16 years ago, and the “all talk and no action” plot is surprisingly compelling!
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