My last experience reading Tony Hillerman wasn’t simply unpleasant, it was aggressively so. After I finished the fifth chapter of The Dark Wind, I didn’t want to go on. When this happens, I usually put a book in the garage or trash. It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to finish what I began.
In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.
After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.
I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.
Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.
The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.
No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.
The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.
Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.
In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.
I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950's accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.
Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.
I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.
In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.
Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.
Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.
Showing posts with label Detective Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Detective Fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Tony Hillerman, Part 2
I’ve now finished the second Jim Chee novel and can tell you why I don’t like Tony Hillerman novels. This is obviously the place for someone who disagrees or who hasn’t read his books to stop reading.
At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.
A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.
There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.
When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.
Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.
I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.
Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.
The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.
Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.
He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.
The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.
I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.
When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.
In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.
In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.
Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.
The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.
It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.
At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.
A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.
There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.
When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.
Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.
I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.
Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.
The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.
Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.
He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.
The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.
I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.
When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.
In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.
In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.
Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.
The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.
It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Mysteries as Morality Tales
The oldest division in mysteries is the one between the English cozy, whose audience is supposed to be the older lady of genteel literary interests, and the American adventure story which appeals to the average, book-reading, if that’s not an oxymoron, male. The one goes back to Arthur Conan-Doyle, the other most famously to Dashiell Hammett.
While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.
The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.
Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.
And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.
In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.
The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.
The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.
One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.
In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.
One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.
I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.
Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.
While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.
The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.
Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.
And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.
In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.
The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.
The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.
One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.
In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.
One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.
I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.
Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Tony Hillerman, Part 1
Mystery books fall into many categories, but the most important are readable and unreadable. The distinction is all a matter of taste, for there are many very popular writers I put in the second group.
There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.
Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.
This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.
For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.
Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.
Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.
The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.
The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.
As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.
In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.
The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”
These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.
The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.
Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.
The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.
In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.
In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.
The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.
In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.
In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.
Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.
There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.
Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.
This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.
For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.
Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.
Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.
The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.
The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.
As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.
In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.
The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”
These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.
The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.
Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.
The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.
In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.
In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.
The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.
In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.
In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.
Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Cat of the Century
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.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Polish Puzzle
I recently decided perhaps I should work on a jigsaw puzzle when I wake in the night. In the past I would have read some mystery novel, but the publishing industry no longer satisfies my needs and has left me in a vacuum filled by nibbling and cruising the net at three in the morning.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile begins as a detective novel wrapped in a light comedy. By the end what Dame Agatha unmasks is not simply the murderer, but the falsity of the social premise of romance.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
The central plot focuses on a beautiful, wealthy young woman, Linnet, and her husband, Simon Doyle, who are honeymooning in Egypt. Doyle’s former girlfriend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, has been stalking them, going to the same public places they attend to stare. She follows them when they try to escape her on a cruise up the Nile to Luxor and Assuan.
The critical murder scene begins when a drunken Jacqueline shoots Doyle. While a nurse is sedating her and others are attending Doyle, Linnet’s murdered while she sleeps with the same gun that injured Doyle.
The rest of the novel is the search for the murderer by Hercule Poirot, who just happens to be on board. Since the novel has been set as a holiday adventure, I immediately applied the rules of comic opera and eliminated from consideration all the young people who should marry at the end: Rosalie Otterbourne and Tim Allerton, Cornelia Robinson and Ferguson.
I also eliminated the utilitarian characters who must be on board for the plot to advance: the doctor who attends Doyle, the nurse who attends Jacqueline, the foreign intelligence agent, Colonel Race, whose position gives Poirot the authority to question people.
As I read I reminded myself it’s always dangerous with Christie to eliminate anyone. In some of her first Poirot novels she upended the conventions when the utilitarian characters in fact were the murderers.
But, I told myself as I read the 1938 novel, she can’t repeat herself. She’s been exposed to the movie makers who adapt her novels. She’s remarried and her trips with her archaeologist husband must contribute to the plot’s mise en scene. Why not a happy ending?
Surely the firey romance between Cornelia and Ferguson and the gentler one between Rosalie and Tim are intended to contrast positively with the dangers of a woman who cares too much? The conventions require such balance.
And so the investigation progresses, revealing the hidden faults of each of the key characters. Some minor ones die. A spy is identified. And, finally, the murder is revealed with a method so byzantine, I leave it to Poirot to explain.
But, instead of the frisson of pleasure that follows from finishing a mystery, this left me with a chill because I knew, and Christie knew, all those pleasant little marriages at the end are damned.
It turns out Tim is a jewel thief working with Joanna Southwood, a friend of Linnette’s. Rosalie’s mother, Salome Otterbourne, is a drunkard. The girl is exchanging the life of enabling her mother to that of enabling a crook and living with the mother who created him. In some ways the trade is worse because, at least, her mother had once been a successful romance novelist, while no publisher will acknowledge Tim’s existence.
Cornelia’s father was ruined by Linette’s father. Her wealthy aunt, Marie Van Schuyler, is a kleptomaniac. The browbeaten girl refuses a proposal from a man who is secretly Lord Dawlish and instead accepts an older doctor who can help her understand her aunt’s problems and give her a new group of people to tend. Ferguson/Dawlish complains that given the chance for light and happiness, she chooses a new cave.
As for the heroine who has everything, her husband married her for her money. Her one friend becomes her tormentor, the other steals her jewels. Her trustees mismanage her funds. Her maid ungratefully quits after Linette’s detectives revealed she was planning to marry a bigamist. The young beauty dies not knowing how lonely she is.
In no other Christie book do I remember the warm experience of reading the mystery so different than the cold chill of having read it. It’s not simply that no one is what they seem, for that’s expected in a mystery. It’s that the society restored at the end is not what it seems. The thieves are still at liberty, the marriages are dooming young women into further submission, and the only passionate one lies dead at our feet. Poirot may claim to have "a high regard for human happiness," but Christie presents happiness as a false illusion.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Childhood Memories
Should an historian try to recreate a past era so completely the reader recognizes its very alienness or should he or she focus on those parts of the past that survive into the present and influence its form?
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
The first is the province of the historical novelist; the second drives the mystery writer.
A few years ago I took down a book by Hugh Walpole thinking then was perhaps the right time to read a genuine gothic novel. I didn’t think too much when it began with an adventure of an eight-year-old boy, but when I was half way through and the boy was only a few months older I realized I’d confused Hugh with Horace.
By then I was hooked on Jeremy, a series of childhood adventures published by Walpole in 1919. Nothing could be more removed from my experience, and yet every vignette rang true. Some were the events of psychological growth, when Jeremy got his first dog or when he realized he’d been tormenting his nurse. Others were just the things that happen, the first exposure to town life at the local fair or to the arts when his uncle took him to the theatre.
After each adventure I thought, yes, that’s how it was, not for Jeremy, but for me. The event wasn’t the same, but the experience was. Walpole wrote fiction, created an imaginary town from places he’d lived, yet he evoked the universal in those adventures.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the reading experience couldn’t have been more different.
She didn’t begin to write for an outside reader, but for herself in 1950 when she was back in Iraq with her husband after World War II. She says she didn’t know why she wanted, suddenly, to record the past, but I rather suspect it was the realization, that as she was turning 60, life as she had known it had changed dramatically during the war.
What’s obvious is that when she returned to it in 1965, at age 75, she was looking at the manuscript as a reminder of her past, not as a literary project. Indeed, her celebrity and her personal experiences prevented her from reworking the material. She knew that many would read it for errors, and so she was inhibited from reworking material the way the obscure Walpole could.
More she knew everyone wanted to know what led to her breakdown in 1926 after her husband announced he was in love with another woman and she had disappeared for a few days. She continually tells you she’s a private person, and the experience of being hounded by the media, omitted from this book, instead appeared in her novels when she focused on the horror of being wrongly suspected and the double villainy of a murderer who is willing to let an innocent person suffer for his crimes.
By the time she published her autobiography, Christie also had the view that "we are all the same people as were at three, six, ten or twenty years old." Youth is a time of inventing oneself and maturity occurs when "it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day."
And so, Christie focused on the points of continuity, her life of the imagination when she created dramas in her mind about some kittens, or later some girls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember exactly what those stories were or how she created them, only that, in fact, she had done so. Her childhood of unrecallable events and ones unmentioned lest they be used to scout out her psychology makes for very dull reading.
The differences between Walpole and Christie are vast: the second was far more successful and more creative. Although both were writing immediately after wars, one was writing in his mid thirties when life was still unfolding as a series of new adventures, while the other was much older and seeing only what had survived the transformation of war.
Still, it’s Walpole who was the better writer of childhood because he was able to capture the inner life of the child. The older Christie was too wise to consider what she couldn’t recall had mattered very much after all.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Elephants Can Remember
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote "there are no second acts in American lives."
When I was rereading Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember, some unexceptional sentence crystallized the pattern in her mysteries that for people who labored for the British Empire, there were three, clear and distinct acts: one’s youth in England, one’s time in India and one’s retirement back to England. If one had children abroad, they were sent home to relatives to ensure the first act.
The pattern fits the basic quest motif of a young man setting out to prove himself, then returning home. Home, in Christie’s mysteries, was rarely the actual birthplace, because, with World War II, there were no unchanged homes. Even her St. Mary Mead had been developed. Still there were places in England where returned colonials could cluster.
Her books also include the unfinished stories of people who leave for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada that is the theme people attribute to Fitzgerald’s comments in his notes for this unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Once people achieve or fail at whatever it is they first intend, there is nothing left to do, no place to return.
Michigan is like the England of primogeniture where there was so little opportunity, younger sons had to leave to live, then to the military or church. Most people in my high school graduating class have moved elsewhere as the economy shifted south and west. Some have returned to care for their parents, or have moved to be near their children to be looked after. But for most, the temporary move has become a permanent alienation from their childhoods.
Perhaps it’s why we cling to the idea of our class reunions. Nearly half the people I graduated with keep in touch with the local reunion committee, although far fewer actually make the trip cross country to the events. We maintain a collective fiction that we were once a community, and that some part of us still cares about those people we really don’t want to spend any time with again.
If I say these are people with whom I spent 13 years of my life, it makes the relation sound stronger than many marriages. If I try to think of one person I actually saw most days of those years, I cannot. People came and went, we moved from five elementary schools and several country ones to a single junior high, peer groups changed.
And yet, in a community where people were able to spend their entire public school life, there were ties. For many, churches like the Methodists, Catholics and Baptists brought children together from the scattered neighborhoods. For boys, there was organized softball in summer, for girls Camp Fire Girls or dance lessons in winter. There was the swimming hole, the skating pond and area lakes where children with similar interests became aware of one another.
I grew up when television sets were just being purchased and our youngest years weren’t spent in isolated living rooms with siblings watching whatever was on. In those years, the two available stations were both the same network, and there was often little worth seeing anyway.
We also came of age before conglomerates began buying, then downsizing local industries and people had to move with their parents when they were in high school. Only children of the college faculty and oil field workers led the migratory existence that characterizes so many today.
In the first years after graduation there were those who attended or sent back notices of Fitzgeraldian bravado that hoped to prove they had finally gotten the best of those who snubbed them then. That wish for vengeance or triumph has inspired many class reunion novels, including Jane Haddam’s Somebody Else’s Music and Jo Dereske’s Miss Zukas and the Island Murders.
But with time, none of my classmates has achieved great success and few have even had the stable marriages they had expected. We have had to settle for whatever it is we have become. If we’ve been able to overcome the demons that drove us in adolescence and can care about who we once were, no matter how ruefully, then indeed we do care about these people who were part of that world.
Our class has become a collective illusion, a virtual community we inhabit as we age that gives us a sense of that third act when social and economic realities have made the actual return impossible.
When I was rereading Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember, some unexceptional sentence crystallized the pattern in her mysteries that for people who labored for the British Empire, there were three, clear and distinct acts: one’s youth in England, one’s time in India and one’s retirement back to England. If one had children abroad, they were sent home to relatives to ensure the first act.
The pattern fits the basic quest motif of a young man setting out to prove himself, then returning home. Home, in Christie’s mysteries, was rarely the actual birthplace, because, with World War II, there were no unchanged homes. Even her St. Mary Mead had been developed. Still there were places in England where returned colonials could cluster.
Her books also include the unfinished stories of people who leave for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada that is the theme people attribute to Fitzgerald’s comments in his notes for this unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Once people achieve or fail at whatever it is they first intend, there is nothing left to do, no place to return.
Michigan is like the England of primogeniture where there was so little opportunity, younger sons had to leave to live, then to the military or church. Most people in my high school graduating class have moved elsewhere as the economy shifted south and west. Some have returned to care for their parents, or have moved to be near their children to be looked after. But for most, the temporary move has become a permanent alienation from their childhoods.
Perhaps it’s why we cling to the idea of our class reunions. Nearly half the people I graduated with keep in touch with the local reunion committee, although far fewer actually make the trip cross country to the events. We maintain a collective fiction that we were once a community, and that some part of us still cares about those people we really don’t want to spend any time with again.
If I say these are people with whom I spent 13 years of my life, it makes the relation sound stronger than many marriages. If I try to think of one person I actually saw most days of those years, I cannot. People came and went, we moved from five elementary schools and several country ones to a single junior high, peer groups changed.
And yet, in a community where people were able to spend their entire public school life, there were ties. For many, churches like the Methodists, Catholics and Baptists brought children together from the scattered neighborhoods. For boys, there was organized softball in summer, for girls Camp Fire Girls or dance lessons in winter. There was the swimming hole, the skating pond and area lakes where children with similar interests became aware of one another.
I grew up when television sets were just being purchased and our youngest years weren’t spent in isolated living rooms with siblings watching whatever was on. In those years, the two available stations were both the same network, and there was often little worth seeing anyway.
We also came of age before conglomerates began buying, then downsizing local industries and people had to move with their parents when they were in high school. Only children of the college faculty and oil field workers led the migratory existence that characterizes so many today.
In the first years after graduation there were those who attended or sent back notices of Fitzgeraldian bravado that hoped to prove they had finally gotten the best of those who snubbed them then. That wish for vengeance or triumph has inspired many class reunion novels, including Jane Haddam’s Somebody Else’s Music and Jo Dereske’s Miss Zukas and the Island Murders.
But with time, none of my classmates has achieved great success and few have even had the stable marriages they had expected. We have had to settle for whatever it is we have become. If we’ve been able to overcome the demons that drove us in adolescence and can care about who we once were, no matter how ruefully, then indeed we do care about these people who were part of that world.
Our class has become a collective illusion, a virtual community we inhabit as we age that gives us a sense of that third act when social and economic realities have made the actual return impossible.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Corporate Detectives
My favorite detective writers are the ones who maintained a series for many years, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout.
There are many reasons I prefer them to the American hard-boiled writers, including the quiet murders rather than the graphic violence and the respect for most of the characters rather than the gratuitous exploitation of women. There's also the expectation in the one that intelligence rather than action was critical to solving a mystery, and the assumption that, in the end, one could know the truth.
Now that I’m rereading the Christie novels I realized there is also a class difference between the writers I like and the ones I do not. I’m not talking about the obvious one between the upper class that inhabits the world of my favored writers and the mean streets of the other. Indeed, while Nero Wolfe indulges expensive tastes, both Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason are quite bourgeois.
Instead, Christie, Gardner and Stout create corporate detectives who depend on the specialization of function that enables mass production. Poirot is a retired policeman, Mason a lawyer, and Wolfe a professional inquiry agent. When each needs information, he hires someone, who in turn hires someone else to do the actual work. So, Poirot uses Mr. Goby who pays runners, Mason uses Paul Drake who runs a detective agency, and Wolfe uses Archie Goodwin who calls on Saul Panzer.
I’m not sure what it means that each of my favorites inhabits a three-tiered, capitalist world while the Americans do everything themselves. I would think my preference would be for the latter. Perhaps it’s just that I appreciate the first as products of a complex civilization they uphold in their pursuit of justice rather than the others who remain hunter-gatherers navigating a world without a social contract.
There are many reasons I prefer them to the American hard-boiled writers, including the quiet murders rather than the graphic violence and the respect for most of the characters rather than the gratuitous exploitation of women. There's also the expectation in the one that intelligence rather than action was critical to solving a mystery, and the assumption that, in the end, one could know the truth.
Now that I’m rereading the Christie novels I realized there is also a class difference between the writers I like and the ones I do not. I’m not talking about the obvious one between the upper class that inhabits the world of my favored writers and the mean streets of the other. Indeed, while Nero Wolfe indulges expensive tastes, both Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason are quite bourgeois.
Instead, Christie, Gardner and Stout create corporate detectives who depend on the specialization of function that enables mass production. Poirot is a retired policeman, Mason a lawyer, and Wolfe a professional inquiry agent. When each needs information, he hires someone, who in turn hires someone else to do the actual work. So, Poirot uses Mr. Goby who pays runners, Mason uses Paul Drake who runs a detective agency, and Wolfe uses Archie Goodwin who calls on Saul Panzer.
I’m not sure what it means that each of my favorites inhabits a three-tiered, capitalist world while the Americans do everything themselves. I would think my preference would be for the latter. Perhaps it’s just that I appreciate the first as products of a complex civilization they uphold in their pursuit of justice rather than the others who remain hunter-gatherers navigating a world without a social contract.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Tolerance - Part 1 - Dell Shannon
Liberals constantly face the Skokie conundrum, what to do when one’s belief in tolerance requires allowing people so intolerant to exist they would rewrite the constitution if they could. At what point is it necessary to become intolerant to preserve an environment of tolerance? Or in that 1977 case, how does one separate the right of a group to request a parade permit through a Jewish neighborhood, from their right to receive that permit?
Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?
Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.
At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.
Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?
Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.
First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.
Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.
She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.
Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.
Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.
The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.
She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.
While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.
Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.
Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.
She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.
Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.
I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.
The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.
If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.
Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.
Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.
Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.
Liberals flock to the cause of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe who’s shows are censored by people who dislike the subjects. But what does one do with a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Céline who’s accused of supporting the Nazis in France in world war II?
Elizabeth Linington poses such a problem. At the same time she wrote mystery stories under the name Dell Shannon that glamorized the Los Angeles police force, she also supported the John Birch Society.
At the time I wondered if I bought one of her books, was I was making a contribution. My immediate solution was to buy books from used book dealers. Unfortunately, that meant enjoying her work without paying her for her effort.
Her anomalous position became more obvious when O. J. Simpson’s lawyer dramatized general incompetence and brutality of her force. She was often accused of not knowing much about police procedures, so did she deliberately romanticize the authority figures as ideology?
Since I didn’t remember a strong streak of propaganda in her books, I decided to read some to see. By now, of course, they’re only available from used book dealers and she’s been dead since 1988.
First, let me say she’s a decent story teller with an ability to pace her narrative. She usually has one major plot that alternates between a number of minor tales, some resolved, some not. Her aim is to dramatize the work flow in a large organization.
Most of the minor plots are the humdrum of daily police life, the routine accidental homicides and thefts. Some accuse her of lifting them from police blotters. It’s probably what she meant when she said she did extensive research.
She also tries to portray a functioning bureaucracy with a number of people working on multiple problems, able to still concentrate on a few, but realizing many simply must be ignored. The idea of a functioning civil service is anathema to many conservatives today, but was not necessarily a tenant of the John Birch group.
Her selection of crimes and creation of undifferentiated policemen represents the realism in her work. There’s nothing about the view criminals are either stupid or ordinary people that is characteristic of a conservative ideology.
Her weaknesses as a writer leave her more vulnerable to political criticism. She has no ear for dialogue. When she portrays confrontations between suspects and police, she has them mouth polite euphemisms, especially for black cops. When the police are looking for suspects, they call them fags.
The one represents isolation, the other homophobia. Neither are representative of the John Birch society, but may be reasons one would not read her book.
She also has no ability to develop characters. Her black, hispanic and white cops, suspects and victims are interchangeable. When she tries to characterize individuals, she falls into stereotypes. The black policeman, Jason, is the son of a doctor who is an expert at everything. Lieutenant Mendoza inherited money from his grandfather and plays poker without being a gambler.
While there’s no malice in her limited imagination and writing skills, there’s a more subtle class bias. The policemen are all working class men with families, who worry about mortgages. Luis Mendoza doesn’t need his salary, has married an artist and lives in a renovated hacienda with horses and sheep. No alcoholics, no divorces, no wild bachelors.
Mendoza falls into the tradition created by Dorothy Sayers with Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn. Unlike many of her contemporaries who also create well-to-do, intelligent heroes, she does try to provide the more realistic background of the typical police force.
Readers of genre fiction accept a number of conventions in exchange for a realistic portrayal of problem solving. However, her uneducated portrayal of the Los Angeles police force could not survive the reality of the O. J. Simpson case, when no one showed the skills and tolerance of her most minor police inspector.
She’s also been done in by advances in technology. Her books were written before DNA testing and computerized databases. The best she can do is match blood types and fingerprints. With no ability to gather evidence, she can only solve many of her crimes with suspects willing to confess as soon as policemen ask the correct questions.
Her estate and publisher don’t mention her political interests, probably because they don’t want to alienate potential readers. Her most ideological comments in the books I recently read occur in The Motive on Record (1982) when Mendoza’s wife visits travel agencies and is upset when they offer the newly available tours of eastern Europe. She constantly frets, why would anyone want to support a communist country with tourist dollars.
I wonder what a John Birch mystery would be. Someone who wanted to use fiction to spread a message would be more likely to choose the genre of Ian Fleming and John LeCarre. Within the context of a city police department it’s impossible to have authority figures who are always right.
The kind of policing we hear about with helicopters patrolling the slums of LA would not be used by burglary-homicide, despite the example of Simpson. The closest she comes is an interrogation in Death by Inches (1965) that inadvertently shows the fine the line between questioning and torture.
If the police can’t be John Birch heroes, then the villains must be communists. Starting her career in 1962, she would have needed murders in labor unions or anti-war groups, either communist infiltrators of legitimate groups or agent provocateurs in Marxist groups. Instead of religious zealots who kill infidel children, they would kill them when they became college atheists.
Those aren’t her plots. They don’t fit her vision of the daily routine of a city police force.
Without the plots, villains, heroes, or political vision she is simply a limited writer with an interesting vision of solving murders, hampered by her gentility. One can boycott her works for economic reasons, but there’s no reason to keep them away from innocent children who might be corrupted by her propaganda. She tries to dramatize a kind of tolerance with her diverse police force, and her writing requires readers exercise the same tolerance.
Disliking or liking them for aesthetic or emotional reasons is altogether another matter.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Failure - Part 2 - Strategy
Sherlock Holmes, the omniscient, begat Dashiell Hammett whose grandchildren solve problems simply by being themselves, often clueless, but of the right social order. Once the villain could be anyone in the reader’s closest social set; now it is the butler recast as the outsider, the parvenu, the upstart who threatens the status quo with guile.
The cultural transition from the hope for discovering the solution to the pragmatic acceptance of the possible is reflected in data processing. When I began in the 1970s, programmers were supposed to collect all the requirements for a project, then implement them. Every contingency was supposed to be considered. Now, companies buy packages, maybe with consultant services, and bumble through.
The goal of the perfect application written by employees was well neigh impossible, and often produced systems that were far more complicated than necessary. One critical problem was that one person was supposed to talk to users about their needs; design, write and test code; write documentation and do training.
An equally serious problem was that it assumed users could articulate what they wanted. Since many found it difficult to extract the general from the day-to-day, one either found people who talked grand rhetoric with no details, or found people could not be found. Words like "blue sky" and "bells and whistles" became common, and were to be avoided.
Programmers were either trained in math departments or community colleges. Both focused on teaching how to code, the one with more emphasis on theory, elegance and efficiency. Few taught students to do user documentation or training. And certainly, no one offered classes in interviewing techniques, not even for anthropologists or social workers.
Companies began to talk about how to manage failure. At my last job, our customer sent us a video that told us more than 80% of the information systems projects were never completed. The rest weren’t what was needed, came in late and/or were over budget. I don’t remember if the sample was government projects or projects in general, local or national in scope.
The perception that managers were handling failure prone projects caused by creative individuals like Holmes has persisted. My last supervisor loved to tell me the problem for GM was that engineers would spend too much money creating the perfect vehicle if left alone. It was the duty of a good manager to keep them under control. He, of course, had never worked in Detroit, and was passing on received wisdom. The memorat probably goes back to Frederick Donner who was chairman in the 1960s.
In that last shop, my supervisor’s managers believed a new release of an application should be installed exactly as it already existed. Then, in a later phase, users could request some of the added features. He couldn’t make them understand that not planning for those changes meant implementation decisions were made that made some enhancements impossible.
Users were unhappy in the 1970s and are still unhappy, but the costs in the last shop were exactly as predicted. Higher level managers who look at budgets were happy, even as they blamed their subordinates who couldn’t produce desired reports. The costs for the future change were the problem of the next manager. A new phrase appeared, "foul up, move up."
In the planning phase, my supervisor created a set of specifications which I was supposed to read to the users. He modeled it on the list of requirements provided by the purchased package he hoped would be chosen. He told me I could not add anything, even if it was what someone needed, because the salesman would get too creative and use any modifications as an excuse to raise the price.
I persisted in the old-fashioned methods and asked the man who ran the warehouses how he wanted to run his operation. I told him, nothing he wanted was likely to be in the application, but if we didn’t know what he wanted, it would be difficult to plan a future transition path. My underlying purpose was to get him to talk about his department in concrete terms so he would pay attention to the predigested specification. I was taken off the project.
Once the application was installed, the inventory manager wanted to know why he couldn’t change his costing method, and discovered what he wanted was not available. The already contracted vendor was more than happy to quote a price to write the code, and he somehow managed to convince whoever controlled the budget to sign the contract addendum. Then he left before it was available. The supervisor had already gone, and the IS managers had been replaced.
Failure was transformed from a problem into a marketing strategy. The software company would charge us the full cost of development. If other companies asked for the same thing, they could make minor modifications and recharge them for development costs. If the modifications were useful they could introduce it in a future release with no development costs.
Failure became an ad hoc means of defining user requirements. Programmers were told to convert all existing reports, but not find out if they were used.. The assumption was that if something was important, users would tell them when it was missing, and that would set the priorities.
Needless to say, report problems were never discovered until they were needed, and the programmers lived in constant crisis. When they stayed late to get something ready for the next morning, the success of the department was highly visible. Managers hoped their responsiveness would disguise their failure to plan; if not, replacing a programmer would show their willingness to improve.
All that happened in the years between the time I worked for Shatterproof and my last shop is expectations for programmers were lowered, and, hopefully expectations by users were lowered to an equal level. Once the goal was set at the attainable, success was guaranteed, especially if the initial costs were kept within budget.
The cultural transition from the hope for discovering the solution to the pragmatic acceptance of the possible is reflected in data processing. When I began in the 1970s, programmers were supposed to collect all the requirements for a project, then implement them. Every contingency was supposed to be considered. Now, companies buy packages, maybe with consultant services, and bumble through.
The goal of the perfect application written by employees was well neigh impossible, and often produced systems that were far more complicated than necessary. One critical problem was that one person was supposed to talk to users about their needs; design, write and test code; write documentation and do training.
An equally serious problem was that it assumed users could articulate what they wanted. Since many found it difficult to extract the general from the day-to-day, one either found people who talked grand rhetoric with no details, or found people could not be found. Words like "blue sky" and "bells and whistles" became common, and were to be avoided.
Programmers were either trained in math departments or community colleges. Both focused on teaching how to code, the one with more emphasis on theory, elegance and efficiency. Few taught students to do user documentation or training. And certainly, no one offered classes in interviewing techniques, not even for anthropologists or social workers.
Companies began to talk about how to manage failure. At my last job, our customer sent us a video that told us more than 80% of the information systems projects were never completed. The rest weren’t what was needed, came in late and/or were over budget. I don’t remember if the sample was government projects or projects in general, local or national in scope.
The perception that managers were handling failure prone projects caused by creative individuals like Holmes has persisted. My last supervisor loved to tell me the problem for GM was that engineers would spend too much money creating the perfect vehicle if left alone. It was the duty of a good manager to keep them under control. He, of course, had never worked in Detroit, and was passing on received wisdom. The memorat probably goes back to Frederick Donner who was chairman in the 1960s.
In that last shop, my supervisor’s managers believed a new release of an application should be installed exactly as it already existed. Then, in a later phase, users could request some of the added features. He couldn’t make them understand that not planning for those changes meant implementation decisions were made that made some enhancements impossible.
Users were unhappy in the 1970s and are still unhappy, but the costs in the last shop were exactly as predicted. Higher level managers who look at budgets were happy, even as they blamed their subordinates who couldn’t produce desired reports. The costs for the future change were the problem of the next manager. A new phrase appeared, "foul up, move up."
In the planning phase, my supervisor created a set of specifications which I was supposed to read to the users. He modeled it on the list of requirements provided by the purchased package he hoped would be chosen. He told me I could not add anything, even if it was what someone needed, because the salesman would get too creative and use any modifications as an excuse to raise the price.
I persisted in the old-fashioned methods and asked the man who ran the warehouses how he wanted to run his operation. I told him, nothing he wanted was likely to be in the application, but if we didn’t know what he wanted, it would be difficult to plan a future transition path. My underlying purpose was to get him to talk about his department in concrete terms so he would pay attention to the predigested specification. I was taken off the project.
Once the application was installed, the inventory manager wanted to know why he couldn’t change his costing method, and discovered what he wanted was not available. The already contracted vendor was more than happy to quote a price to write the code, and he somehow managed to convince whoever controlled the budget to sign the contract addendum. Then he left before it was available. The supervisor had already gone, and the IS managers had been replaced.
Failure was transformed from a problem into a marketing strategy. The software company would charge us the full cost of development. If other companies asked for the same thing, they could make minor modifications and recharge them for development costs. If the modifications were useful they could introduce it in a future release with no development costs.
Failure became an ad hoc means of defining user requirements. Programmers were told to convert all existing reports, but not find out if they were used.. The assumption was that if something was important, users would tell them when it was missing, and that would set the priorities.
Needless to say, report problems were never discovered until they were needed, and the programmers lived in constant crisis. When they stayed late to get something ready for the next morning, the success of the department was highly visible. Managers hoped their responsiveness would disguise their failure to plan; if not, replacing a programmer would show their willingness to improve.
All that happened in the years between the time I worked for Shatterproof and my last shop is expectations for programmers were lowered, and, hopefully expectations by users were lowered to an equal level. Once the goal was set at the attainable, success was guaranteed, especially if the initial costs were kept within budget.
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