There are great books, wonderful stories, well written novels, carefully crafted characters and intricately woven plots, but you don't often find them in the same book. There are some authors known for their twisting story-lines or some for poetic prose. There are writers who began certain themes within the mystery world or who set a certain feel for a type of story. But there is an entirely different class of mysteries that have it all. Perfect books. Call them Perfect Crimes.
I'd say that there are historical representatives. I'd put Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" on the list. I'd include James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity" and Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon", Paul Cain's "Fast One", Jonathan Latimer's "Soloman's Vineyard", Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and Sayer's "The Five Red Herrings". The temptation is to pick one by All Big Names and one probably could. After all, this is a very subjective list.
But I'd argue that the requirements of inclusion on a list like this is that the book is a perfect book. A word that I use to denote this type of books is "organic". That means that the writing is of the best calibre, the plot is unique and unfolds inevitably as the pages turn,motion to the book, a narative drive, the characters are sharply drawn and the book as whole is a self-contained gem. The story is finished when the book is ends; it may be an individual book out of an on-going series but it stands by itself. The elements of the book clearly are not new - murder, suspects, past crimes, puzzled sleuths, bad people - but these elements are utilized in a way to make them seem fresh, as if used for the first time. As Chandler said of Hammett, "He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."
And there must be, I am sure, a level of tragedy in the classic sense, there is a sense of doom, that no one can stop what has been set in motion and are themselves participants sharing responsiblity for the horror that is to come. No one will escape unscathed and the scars may be more than psychological.
A list of these 'modern classics' would have to include Dennis Lehane's "Darkness, Take My Hand", James Lee Burke's "Heaven's Prisoners", Michael Connelly's "The Poet", Vicki Hendricks' "Miami Purity", James Crumley's "The Wrong Case", James Ellroy's "American Tabloid", Lawrence Block's "When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes" and my latest addition, Carol O'Connell's "Winter House".
I've been a fan of O'Connell's books from the start. Her writing is casually poetic. She will capture an action, a look, an event in a single line that will other authors will take a paragraph to sketch. I've also maintained that she's taken the most original course in developing her central character Kathy Mallory: the books are told third-person and, while you get inside the heads of every other character, you never get to experience Mallory from the inside. Mallory is a void, in a great sense, and is constructed by the way all of the other characters react to and tip-toe around her. No other series, that I know of, has a main character like this. It is remarkable.
As the series progresses, we learn more and more of Mallory's past and a bit more about her psychology, though there is enough left blank to keep us and a team of doctors busy for decades. There are now nine books in the series. We know where Mallory was born, pretty much how she ended up in NYC and on the streets, her early years with the Markowitzes, and her last couple of decades. The 9th and newest in the series - "Find Me" - fills in more, but I'm not going to spoil anyone's fun by saying how now. These are all fine books, filled with dark humor, flowing lines and convoluted plots. But the 8th in the series, "Winter House", stands above the rest.
"Winter House" opens after a death has occured in a residence where one of the most infamous crimes in NYC happened a half-century ago. The characters are introduced the start and the new crime seems to echo the past crime. The past crime is one that nearly everyone knows but it was never really solved, so the new crime gives new life to the old. If you've read enough mysteries, you know that the past cime will have to be solved to solve the new crime - but it all seems new somehow. (That, after all, is the magic of the perfect book... how can such constantly used elements feel new?There is, after all, as the Great Detective said, nothing new under the sun.)
In "Winter House", the backdrop is not only the history of this old massacre and everyone's reaction to it, but the house itself and this massive and odd staircase at the center of the house. The house itself is a character, looming over the action and participating along with the characters. As the book unfolds, we learn more and more of the people who live there now and once inhabited it, about the original crime and its impact on those who lived there and those who investigated it. The book is well named: the structure is a cold and inhospitable place and many things will come to their end before the story does. According to some who have spent time in it, it doesn't like flies or mice, killing them itself. If a home has that reputation, good god what would it be like to live there?
"Winter House" has it all:
- characters who are fully rounded beings that seems to have corporial substance but who seem to have never appeared in fiction before - even the ones who seem to have been born with a personality.
- a plot that unfolds so inexorably that you are not sure who is who or what is what until the very end.
- writing that will make you stop and re-read lines and paragraphs to simply enjoy their clarity and strength.
- enough references to the developed history of the series characters to let new readers in on the subtexts while not boring long-time fans AND adding to the background of those beloved characters - no small trick!
- an investigation that weaves forward and backward in history, eventually telling us who these people are, where they came from and how they got to where they are as the story starts, distracting us from the core of the investigation while all along gliding back to it so that we don't lose track of the center of the plot and where it has to end.
- humor and horror, equally dark, are generated by these all too human characters who are handled with equal levels of care and dispassion.
There is not a false note, not one loose end, not a single character, event, description that does not serve the whole. It is complete, a closed system, a fully-formed unit, a well-oiled machine of smooth action and crystalin motion. You could neither add to or subtract from its precision. It is what is needs to be, what it should be - no more and no less. "Winter House" is a perfect book, a perfect crime, a perfect mystery, a work of art.
- JB
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