Dark Passages: An Archive of Columns

DARK PASSAGES

Meta-murderers

The majority of current crime fiction adheres to a well-worn template, even if writers don't admit as such. A murder turns carefully crafted order into chaos, and the process of investigation not only unearths how deep those layers of chaos are but also restores a sense of order with the murder's solution -- however illusory. Nowadays, that template acts as a bass line for the progression of a variety of character-driven melodies and harmonies based on plot and setting, and the whiff of formula is fading into the background of literary chord progressions. Today's readers are invested more in human behavior at its most extreme than in the intellectual exercises of a previous age of mystery that we call a Golden one.

DARK PASSAGES

The summer serendipity of 'blanc fiction'

"The dog days of summer" is an expression that resonates with extra fervor in this particular year. Gas prices are high and the price of groceries seems to climb a few extra cents with each visit to the store. Mortgage is to foreclosure what bread is to butter. Jobs are being cut and the mood is grim. And in the book world, the running joke is that the month of August is a publishing-wide holiday, so forget about accomplishing much in the way of anything.

DARK PASSAGES

Serially thrilling

The serial novel conjures up images of a bygone century, of a time when Charles Dickens made his name by teasing out the life and death of Little Nell in monthly installments. But one need only look to the flurry of posts on Jacket Copy last month discussing the first installment of Denis Johnson's serial noir novella "Nobody Move," published in Playboy, to sense renewed interest in this supposedly dead format. More intriguing, however, is how mystery and thriller stories figure prominently in serial fiction's current revival.

DARK PASSAGES

The narrative thread of real-life crime

WHEN I WORKED at one of Manhattan's independent mystery book shops a few years back, a prospective customer came in every so often with a request for a true crime book. The first time this happened I bounded from behind the cash register to hunt for a section that, much to my surprise, was nonexistent. The disappointed customer left (presumably for the nearby chain store) and I conferred with one of the store's owners. True crime doesn't sell very well in store, she explained, so unless it's a blockbuster title -- think Patricia Cornwell's "Portrait of a Killer" or John Grisham's "The Innocent Man" -- stocking a full section makes no economic sense.

DARK PASSAGES

Charlotte, Oscar & Co.

Where better for a writer to turn for inspiration than to reality? This is especially true of the mystery fiction micro-trend in which authors fashion real-life figures into detectives. It's tricky territory because the margin of error is so tiny. For every "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," the 1974 novel in which author Nicholas Meyer brought Sigmund Freud into the orbit of Sherlock Holmes, there is "Dead, Mr. Mozart," Bernard Bastable's less-than-stellar 1995 book in which the famed composer becomes a detective, or the perplexingly popular Queen Elizabeth I crime novels by Karen Harper.

DARK PASSAGES

Into Africa

Global publishing phenomena can strike the most unlikely people in the strangest places. That was certainly the case a decade ago for Zimbabwe native and Scottish medical law professor Alexander McCall Smith when inspiration struck him during a visit to Botswana. Much ink has been spilled in the intervening years about McCall Smith's ensuing creation, No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency proprietor Precious Ramotswe, and her penchant for taking on the most mundane of mysteries. Much more scrutiny will follow when the HBO miniseries, directed by Anthony Minghella, who died last month, debuts this fall. What's ignored in the midst of McCall Smith's ascendance to literary superstardom, however, is how this charming and witty series, nine books strong with this week's publication of "The Miracle at Speedy Motors" (Pantheon: 216 pp., $25), has opened up the floodgates for crime fiction based in Africa.

DARK PASSAGES

Posthumously yours

Every year, the mystery community mourns the deaths of notable authors, but the toll has been remarkably high of late. In 2005, we lost Ed McBain and in 2006, Mickey Spillane; last year, we said goodbye to Michael Dibdin, Magdalen Nabb and Ira Levin, to name only a few. Just a month into 2008, eternity has already claimed presidential daughter Margaret Truman, romantic suspense pioneer Phyllis A. Whitney, PI author Benjamin Schutz and prolific short-story giant Edward D. Hoch. As a result, I now dread clicking onto the Gumshoe Site (the genre's longest-running blog) for fear of what I'll discover next.

DARK PASSAGES

Masters of reinvention

By Sarah Weinman

DARK PASSAGES

More than elementary, dear Watson

Thrillers with heavy forensic elements date back to the earliest detective fiction. Although his work predates the term "forensic," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made use of current scientific techniques and foreshadowed future developments in his stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Conan Doyle's international success spawned many imitators, including Arthur B. Reeve, whose spate of "scientific detective" novels featured the Holmes-like professor Craig Kennedy and the rough-and-tumble agent Guy Garrick, who preferred to mix gunplay with scientific investigation.

DARK PASSAGES

Smiley's model

James Bond may be the prototypical English spy, but more discerning readers know that John Le Carré's novels come as close as possible to depicting a "true" portrait of the men and women who populate British intelligence. His most indelible creation, George Smiley, is worlds away from Bond: "short, fat and of a quiet disposition . . . [appearing] to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes." Instead of indulging in international jet-setting and world-saving, Smiley chafes at Byzantine government schemes and covert operations so complicated that a labyrinth wouldn't do proper pictorial justice.

Dark Passages

Mind games

Thomas Harris has a lot to answer for. Before he created Hannibal Lecter, the mere idea of a multiple murderer was enough to scare people into locking their doors and avoiding anyone remotely suspicious. Seemingly ordinary, many serial killers lived "normal" lives with wives and children, masking monstrous deeds with a placid veneer. Novelists Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson and Robert Bloch evoked these chilling figures to outstanding effect, respectively, in "In a Lonely Place" (1947), "The Killer Inside Me" (1952) and "Psycho" (1959).

DARK PASSAGES

Post-9/11 thrillers

In February 2004, former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath created a minor controversy with an essay in which he wondered why most contemporary thriller writers "don't seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape." The mystery world is excellent at defending its turf, so it's hardly surprising that several months later, spy novelist Gayle Lynds would write a rebuttal piece. Citing upwardly trending statistics and her own career as a model, Lynds challenged McGrath and readers to "look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They're not only alive, readers are excited about them."

The what-might-have-been genre

Mysteries and thrillers hinge on basic questions: whodunit, whydunit and the dreaded had-I-but-known. Then there's what-might-have-been, which is the domain of thrillers that recount alternate histories. Instead of fashioning chaos out of order in a world with which we're familiar (or, as in the case of historical fiction, one that predates us but did, in fact, exist), alternate histories engage in narrative hypotheses. What if the South had been victorious in the Civil War (the premise of alternate-history king Harry Turtledove's latest forays into this subgenre)? What if a section of Alaska became the site of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland (as in Michael Chabon's genre-bending "The Yiddish Policemen's Union")? And, most popular of all, what if the Nazis had won World War II?

Dark Passages

Booze & private eyes

Crime fiction and alcohol may not go together as much as, say, bagels and cream cheese or toast and jam, but they are very close kin. Thanks to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler -- as well as the later trend toward psychological insight -- the genre has been inundated with tortured protagonists washing away their demons with oceans of booze.

DARK PASSAGES

When graphic novelists turn to prose, the result is something wicked

One might not have expected Comic-Con International, the extravaganza held in San Diego every July, to become a major promotional vehicle for mystery writers. But in recent years, increasing numbers of crime novelists have flocked to the graphic format and made it their own. Greg Rucka is better known for his "Whiteout" and "Queen & Country" comics than for the Atticus Kodiak thrillers that originally launched his writing career; Denise Mina, the author of gritty Glasgow-based novels, penned an entire run of "Hellblazer"; David Morrell (of "Rambo" fame) signed on for a stint scripting "Captain America"; and internationally bestselling novelist Karin Slaughter recently teamed up with Oni Press to launch a new line of graphic novels.