The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.
• Philip Guedalla, British barrister, biographer, and travel and historical writer
I am several books’ deep into my end-of-the-quarter-just-let-my-brain-vegetate-for-a-few-days reading. Of course this means forays into vampire- and zombie-related stuff for a presentation I’m working on and even some seriously pleasurable academic reading, including potential new texts for courses I teach. But it also means mounds of mysteries. I just finished a Patricia Cornwell book and I’m sorry to say that my affection for PC has been tested one too many times. I used to look forward to the latest adventure of Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta, one of the contributors to the current CSI craze, but no more.
While civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place.
• George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, best known to students as the author of the dystopian novel, 1984)
The last few Scarpetta books I’ve read have devolved into complexities dependent on remembering what I read earlier to give them depth and comprehensibility. If I were reading them one after the other, this might work, but years and years and many, many, many, many, many, many, many other books have come between previous and present reading about Dr. S and her colleagues and I just don’t care anymore about her or them or reappearing villains and ancient angst. I read this kind of book to forget, not to remember.
I read two a week in bed at night: can’t concentrate on much else then. . .To me they are a great solace, a sort of mental knitting, where it doesn’t matter if you drop a stitch.
• Rupert Hart-Davis, British publisher, editor, and biographer, on detective stories
At the end of The Scarpetta Factor (2009), there’s a notice listing seven books related to the one I just finished. I’ve read them all, and their cotton candy words have not stuck with me. As with all such books, I purchased my most recent Cornwell paperback in a thrift store a week ago; I never pay full price for disposable reading, so I seldom read a book immediately after it’s released, nor do I always read them in the order in which they were written, although I try. Still, a book that is likely to be picked up by someone looking for in-flight entertainment ought to stand on its own or at least provide clarification of crucial information early on.
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions, nor expensive diversions, or variety of company, if she can be amused with an author. . .
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762, early feminist and writer)
I’ve also realized that although I’m learning a bit about forensic science from this series, I’m not learning the same kinds of life lessons from Scarpetta that I once gleaned from my favorite Christie detectives, Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. These two sleuths initiated me into the Order of Recognition of Red Herrings (see the Oxford English Dictionary for more about the phrase “red herring,” originating in the practice of dragging a smoked herring across the path to cover the scent of a fox and divert the hounds). I practiced cogitation under their tutelage. I learned to look for clues on the page as well to read between the lines as they revealed the thinking that helped them solve the mysteries.
Detective stories help reassure us in the belief that the universe, underneath it all, is rational. They’re small celebrations of order and reason in an increasingly disordered world.
• P.D. James, British crime writer
I am a more annoying companion because of Marple and Poirot. I am also more annoyed because of them. It is their fault that I must write my insights about a movie’s conclusion on my palm—pen to skin—so that I can share them after the final credits rather than spoiling my companion’s opportunity to either solve a film’s challenge for hermself or be surprised. Who was Keyser Soze in the1995 film, The Usual Suspects? I knew long before the reveal. And because of Christie’s protagonists, I am annoyed by my ability to figure out a book’s ending many chapters before the dénouement. Plot twists and unexpected villains seldom surprise me.
“Poirot said placidly, “One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this – ” he tapped his egg-shaped head – “this, that functions!”
• Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Five Little Pigs, first published in the United States as Murder in Retrospect (1942), following its 1941 serialization under that name in the U.S. in Collier’s Weekly
Edmund Wilson, American social commentator, writer, and critic said that “[t]he reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.” I am not a smoker, nor do I enjoy the patterned precision of crosswords, but I am held captive by the mystery vice. Christie and Cornwell are only two of dozens of authors who companion my nights. I’ve gleaned something from just about every mystery I’ve gobbled over the years—a new word, a bit of trivia, an amazing fact—but none of them has given me what Christie did, insight into systematically solving problems through carefully examining evidence and engaging in sustained and creative thinking.
The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
• Agatha Christie
What kind of reading is your vice? What kind of virtuous reading do you do? Do vice and virtue ever overlap?
“Poirot,” I said, “I have been thinking.”
“An admirable exercise, my friend. Continue it.”
• Agatha Christie (1932), Peril at End House
Shelf Analysis 