The Saint and the Detective: An Apologia for the Regional Mystery Novel

As the last few days of my vacation wind up, I sometimes find myself touched by melancholy. And, as I consider the pages of my pocket guide to the Eternal City, I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m leaving my hometown soon or because I’m longing for Rome and I’m not yet there. But my work, I believe, is finished here. My grandmother is on the mend. I’ve shared those treasured fireside naps and chats with my parents. I’ve had my turkey-and-dressing Christmas dinner at long last.

Another thing on my little list of nostalgias was, strangely enough, stopping by Tallahassee’s branch of Borders, one of those grand, faceless chain bookstores that dot parking lots across the nation. Twelfth-century France had her white garment of churches, but today’s America has clothed herself in an ecru polo shirt of bookstores and Starbucks. I can’t say I don’t dislike this development; maybe it’s the sandwiches or the mint brownies or even the large, if somewhat haphazard, selection of books, but the place starts to grow on you.

Let me remind you we have to take our literary kicks where we can. Towns like Tallahassee tend to be places the principal method of intellectual discourse is checking out whether the decal of Calvin (the cartoon character, not the Reformation killjoy) on the truck in front of you is praying before a cross or urinating on a rival automobile logo. We simply don’t have the history of cozy little hole-in-the-wall bookshops and bobo coffee-houses of New York, so I take what I can get.

Admittedly, Borders sometimes drives me nuts. The eternal Dan Brown crypto-Gnostic tie-ins and the inauspicious placement of occult grimoires opposite the Religion section shelves will set me flying out the door in a litany of mutters and crossing. But perhaps I am too hard on the place—the other day I actually found a surprising number of orthodox theology amid the selections of Hans Küng and Gary Wills.

Still, the point remains for me that it is often enough simply to be among books. Borges described money as “future time,” a symbol of our free will to buy a particular pleasure or experience; without delving into the morality of that quip I often feel the same thing is true of books. It is future time, and future borrowed time. You walk down the fiction aisle feeling the beckoning of dozens of doors into other people’s lives, other places, other times.

Reading becomes in a sense, a healthy vacation from oneself. The sheer variety of experience available, the number of titles and authors crying down from the shelves to drop by for tea and cakes, becomes wonderfully mind-boggling.

I think I feel this peculiar and pleasant sensation most while having a turn past the ranks of mysteries. I will freely and unashamedly confess to being something of a mystery junkie. One of my favorite bookstores was the bare-bones Rue Morgue in Boulder, Colorado, which allowed no other genre on its shelves, while one of the more memorable pleasures of Notre Dame is waiting for the yearly release of Professor McInerney’s latest whodunit.

It’s a harmless, wholesomely bloodcurdling hobby, I think. There are many reasons to love a mystery, but my own are, I believe, unique. It’s because the modern mystery is the most successful fruit of one viable literary idea of modern times.

I mean, of course, the school of Regionalism. One writer has called the great forest of paperback thrillers and police procedurals the last refuge of the regionalist. Tony Hillerman has created a Navajoland as famous as Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s Yowknapatawka County, while Iain Pears’s chaotically genteel evocations of Rome are almost as fun as the real thing. It’s democratic, too—every aspiring writer sees their home town and thinks, hey, I could have some fun here.

However, regionalism is everywhere, mystery or not. Perhaps it’s my bias for travelogues, but it’s hard to deny the prevalence of place for today’s novelist, whether he plans to gruesomely murder or graciously marry his heroine. It’s an eccentric and strange novelist who doesn’t want to evoke the sinister Massachusetts of The Scarlet Letter and a cold and sad reader who doesn’t ache to visit New Mexico after closing the last page of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Nobody these days fastidiously names their hero Mr. X and sets his romance with the beautious Y in the splendid city of Z.

The previous centuries are full of nebulous literary surroundings. There are Dosdoyevsky’s despairing Russian streets named only by initials, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s slovenly metropolitan geography and mechanical descriptions. Even the great Chesterton’s incandescent imagery have a certain dreamlike unreality to them. Sometimes, there’s a certain magical vagueness there, as in Anthony Hope’s dime-novel kingdom of Ruritania, but other times it verges on the frustrating for those of us who crave the reality of cities, the taste of their air and the colors—dull or eye-searing—of their great panoply of life.

However, the regionalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their idea has endured. Even fantasy novels come with maps and glossaries that are detailed to the point of absurdity ever since Tolkien created a realism—and regionalism—for a magical world that never existed.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. There aren’t many other paths for the writer to tread. The other great experimental flowers of the modern age are simply irreproducible. T.S. Eliot’s quotidian polyphony is perfect, and Borges’ pre-post-modern headgames are splendid, but both are easily imitated and poorly reproduced. The result has been a ludicrous overflow of authorial conceits from books-within-books, to novels based on crossword puzzles and magical-realist dictionaries. They’re sometimes fun, sometimes preposterous, but ultimately a dead end.

We consciously notice the surroundings in mysteries because the plot’s already a given. We know the irritating actor slated for the part of Pooh-Bah will get the axe or the spunky young female dogsled-racer will solve the case. For those raised on the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the cadences of a predictable plot have a certain harmonious rightness to them. We can sit back and enjoy the mental scenery as a result.
But what are we to make of the mysteries of regionalism, and the regionalism of mysteries?

The mystery as a genre has changed substantially from the golden age of Agatha Christie. Perhaps all the great plots have been exhausted—how many more locked-door murders or purloined do we really need? There are plenty of new angles that verge on the gimmicky, from obsessive-compulsive detectives to investigators who practice feng-shui. Silly.

But perhaps there was also flaw with those intricate gilded plots themselves. I could never really love Agatha Christie’s novels—her Poirot seemed a pale comparison to David Suchet’s splendid impersonation with his stylish televised art-deco universe. On paper, we’re reduced to simply knowing he has a silly mustache, a Belgian background and likes modern furniture.

The Poirot mysteries were ingenious puzzles; but I didn’t want a crossword, I wanted company, a pleasant chat on the plane or the long car-ride. Indeed, those mysteries of the golden age of detection that still stick with us long after we’ve read them—Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, all of those wondrous immortals—they’re about people and places. About people and places with problems, not the problems themselves.

We love a good mystery because, as we solve it ourselves, we feel we’re working hand-in-hand with a new friend in new and exotic surroundings. We love Sherlock Holmes not because he is a genius, but because of his dressing-gowns and his tobacco and his crowded, very real flat at 221 B, even if perhaps the streets of the city beyond sometimes are confounded and you can’t find Saxe-Coburg square on any map. We love Lord Peter because of his wit and style—and the essential good-heartedness we see as he moves between brilliantly-evoked quaint villages, chic London and studious Oxford.

The best detectives are flawed like ourselves, as they stumble through a very physical world clues and the discovery of second body, but ultimately they triumph, which gives us hope.

I’d go as far as to say that we love a good detective novel with its regional color for the same reason we love the lives of the saints. Every nation has its detectives—and its holy men. Could you imagine London without Sherlock—or Cardinal Newman? Could Jim Chee solve mysteries in South Bend and Roger Knight patrol the Big Rez? Could you imagine a Father Brown who came from Rome or a Philip Neri born in London? All struggle with the same evil, but in their own unique way. The regionalist mystery is Catholic in its mingling of universal knowledge and splendid provinciality.

Both the saint and the detective, despite their own flaws and the omnipresence of wickedness in the world around them. There’s a fairy-tale familiarity to both, a struggle between good and evil that, for all the setbacks, ends in a Truth that sets us free.