Murder is a crime against society, or so W. H. Auden believed.
In his much reprinted 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage,” he divided crimes into those against individuals, those against society, and those against God. He then argued the mystery story was an attempt to return society to the state of innocence that existed before crime disrupted the social order.
So, what happens to the detective novel when the author doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of society, only accepts the hegemony of the individual?
You get Rita Mae Brown’s Cat of the Century.
Brown began writing mysteries after Lilian Jackson Braun had published The Cat Who Could Read Backwards in 1966 in which a pair a Siamese cats brought a journalist’s attention to oddities that led him to solve a mystery. This 2010 book features Mary Minor Haristeen, known as Harry; her dog, Tee Tucker, and two cats, Mrs. Murphy and Pewter.
Brown’s novel begins like a classic detective story with conflicts within a small group, in this case the board of the alumnae association of what had been a woman’s college in Missouri, a finishing school that had grown into a university. Two women on the board, Mariah and Flo, have been feuding since they were students. Their bickering has forced the retired chairman, Inez, to return to replace a woman, Liz, who couldn’t control the board meetings.
Flo makes clear Mariah is selling fakes in her high-end jewelry store and Mariah accuses Flo and Liz of promoting fraudulent investments. Flo is murdered and Mariah disappears.
The dog smells blood in a manure pile. If this were Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, Tucker would have continued to fuss until Mariah’s body was discovered. But there’s a blizzard and this is a description of a narcissistic society in which private knowledge is sufficient. The animals, acting more like a Greek chorus than Koko and Yum Yum, simply comment among themselves and let the humans be.
About page 149, I reached the point where I realized 17 pages had passed since the murder, that nothing was happening and there were another 127 pages to get through. Actually, nearly a hundred passed before anything more important occurred to explain the murders.
A reader of classic writers like Agatha Christie or Rex Stout would be hard pressed to keep reading the sections that seemed little more than an updated Ladies Home Journal filled with product endorsements for Fred Perry, Volvo and Trader Joe’s mixed with descriptions of houses filled with “cinnamon-scented pillar candles” and meals of poached salmon with hollandaise, “endive salad and new potatoes with parsley” or “roast chicken, crisp baby potatoes, and a light salad.”
But this is not a traditional who-done-it. This is one where characters are criticized for believing in a society of laws and where people never outgrow the values of a status conscious college, where civility is prized and a lady never speaks honestly to anyone but her trusted friends.
If one looks at the book as unraveling a crime against the individual, rather than society, it makes more sense.
To conform to Auden’s views of mysteries, this type of narrative needs to describe the bubble that envelopes the lead character, then show escalating threats against it, until the source of danger is removed and life in the bubble restored to its former tranquility.
All the words spent describing the houses and meals, the shopping trips and clothes build the details of a world we want to join, don’t wish to see destroyed. We learn to care about the people who inhabit that world, Harry; her husband’s first partner, Inez; Inez’s best friend, Tally; and, of course, their pets. After all, they are the victims, not Flo.
The real drama isn’t the murder, but the disintegration of a store keeper, Terri Kincaid. In the opening chapters, she makes Harry actually pay for a pot her dog broke. We’re told Harry always considered her to be “a pain in the neck,” “one of those benighted souls who believed laws were the answer,” and a “smarmy little social climber.”
The bickering among the women on the alumnae board is dangerous, not because it leads to murder, but because it disrupts the world of another member of the protected society by making 98-year-old Inez feel too old to handle difficult people. It also threatens to upstage a celebration honoring Tally.
The murder of Flo becomes something the small group can pass time discussing when they meet in one another’s homes in Virginia. The harassing email messages signed by the dead Mariah are less serious threats to their world than the weather, a blizzard in Missouri, sleet in Virginia.
All these seemingly trivial details that destroy the momentum of the traditional mystery story actually contribute to the feeling of a good world that exists outside society besieged by danger from contact with that society.
Kerri turns out to be a link in a chain of drug dealers who has become an addict herself. Harry realizes the situation when she returns to the store and Kerri throws a china figurine at her. She doesn’t tell her police friend, but instead repeats a private solution: it’s “best to steer clear of those people, especially if they won’t go for help.”
The master drug dealer is revealed to be Liz, who murdered both Mariah and Kerri because they threatened to expose her. None of this is figured out by the principals, but is information passed on by their policewoman friend after Liz attacks Inez and Tally to keep them quiet.
The only comment we get from Harry is that Liz was another “social climber” filled with “tawdry ambition.” Earlier another character had told Flo, Liz “suffers from attention-deficit syndrome,” meaning she always has to be the center of attention. Her crime wasn’t bilking investors or selling drugs, but not being sufficiently acclimated to Harry’s social world.
This novel, like most mysteries, has a subplot that’s supposed to serve as a red herring: the death of a heavy drinker whose wife had already left when he was run over twenty years before. In the end, the murderer is prompted to confess. He’s the black, possibly gay, store keeper whose men’s clothing store is next to Kerri’s.
Throughout Garvey is shown to be everything Liz and Kerri are not, a proper retailer who flatters his customers to make his sales, not one who presumes equality. Since he’s moved into the protected society by knowing his proper place, he’s forgiven for his youthful indiscretion, leaving the scene of an accident, and asked to serve a token number of hours of community service as punishment.
In a mystery whose purpose is to protect a good society from the chaos of the outer world, the list of likely motives changes. In the beginning, when the book still resembles a classic detective novel, Flo thinks the reason people fight is sex or money, then giggles at the thought of sex among the members of the alumnae board.
After Mariah’s disappearance, when attention is still focused on her attempt at embezzling money from the alumnae society, Liz suggests the reason is taxes. What begins as the comment of a single character is repeated in so many contexts that the view no longer differentiates individuals, but begins to characterize the authorial presence. After Kerri’s death, Garvey repeats drugs are a “nontaxable milk train.”
In a society that is perceived to be run by politicians driven by ego and financed by drugs, there is no social order, and therefore no role for logic. After their local policewoman friend explains Liz’s financial shenanigans, Harry admits “I would never have figured it out” while Inez and Tally repeat what they learned in college, “Trust your instincts and don’t expect life to be logical.”
We never learn anything more about Flo’s death than we knew when it occurred. Such details are immaterial to the core story, the description of a perfect world, threatened by deranged individuals who are removed, not by society, but by their own actions. People inside the bubble don’t need to figure out who did it, only observe, confident their particular shell of privilege will protect them.
After the outside threats are removed, we know the world has been restored to Auden’s innocence when the 100-year-old Tally says the adventure made her “suddenly felt forty again.”
Their’s is a special world where both natural and manmade laws are suspended. Tally repeatedly says she expects to outlive them all.
