I've been branching out and sampling a few other cozy mystery series lately, and, to my chagrin, I'm discovering that many of what I've perceived as weaknesses in certain recent Cat Who... installments - such as an anemic mystery or an overblown villain - are de rigeur in other titles. (Not that I don't still consider them weaknesses - it's just that they appear to be common weaknesses. And I expect more and better out of the Cat Who...s in any case.) But there're several common traps that I'm very grateful the Cat Who... series rarely, if ever, seems to fall into, and, in appreciation, I'd like to enumerate them here. For example...
I want to make it clear that characters like Tailed a Thief's Danielle Carmichael and Sang for the Birds's Chester Ramsbottom, who are both annoying and, eventually, antagonists, do not qualify, as AA's, lamentably and inexplicably, are inviolable recurring characters who cannot be removed from the series even (as in Bernine Sage's case) upon perpetration of multiple felonies. They have seemingly nothing in life to do but unrelentingly annoy/harass/put down the hero, with no apparent motive for putting such considerable effort into doing so. They exist solely for cheap emotional manipulation, to give us someone to hate. For me, these characters never work, either in their intended purpose or otherwise, since they are so unbelievable and cardboard to begin with. All they succeed in inspiring is indignation at such a transparent insult to the reader's intelligence.
The closest the Cat Who...s have come to an AA was June Halliburton. She fulfilled the requirements for sheer persistence. But there were intriguing hints of something more behind her antagonism; it didn't really consist of anything she said or did, but of a vague but assured, self-satisfied air of challenge about her - a subtle smirk of an attitude intimating that she - truly - knew something you didn't. You could tell she was intrigued by Qwilleran and saw the passive-aggressive pseudo-teasing as a sort of contest of wills (in which, I might add, Qwill always held his own - unlike other mystery heroes, who never lift a finger to fight back against their own, more virulent persecutions). I actually wanted to see more of June and, though I assume the decision to remove her from the story was right-heartedly motivated out of fear of someday slipping down the AA path, I was disappointed when she made her premature exit - I wanted to get into her head more, know what she had up her smug, still-cloaked sleeve. One could never say that of an AA.
No, June did not meet the standards of shallowness that make AA's such unrewarding characters. I understand that many of the major cat-mystery authors started out in the romance genre (Douglas and Brown both did, I know, and Murphy's Joe Greys read like romance novels half the time in any case), and one might theorize that this tradition finds its roots in the Erica Kane-ish love-to-hate-'em villains of the soaps. But there's nothing "delicious", so to speak, to sink one's teeth into and savor in AA villainy - it's unmotivated, it's jejune, it adds nothing to the proceedings but irritation. Both the actions and actors are nothing but vicious, annoying, and unnecessary.
Not to say that the Cat Who...s are wanting for female prey; though the figures are counter-balanced by the plethora of active, capable women found in Braun's books, mentally tabulating, I can count more women than men throughout the series who've found themselves in particularly lamentable straits. But one has to admit to the existence of a singular vileness in these other books' miseries - the sleazy way the stories linger and revel in their horrific detail, the way they're never redressed. The females are endowed with nearly no personality traits besides being victims - more often than not of their own stupidity - and are utterly, unilaterally helpless in the face of danger; I'd call them damsels in distress, but half the time the authors don't seem to feel they even deserve to be rescued. And most often, the traumatic events which befall them, once properly milked for their full exploitative potential, are not further addressed, developed, or resolved - they're just crosses for the heroines to bear, cheap and disposable as their victims, shoddy, facile hooks to grab the readers' sympathy in lieu of absorbing expository character writing. No woman is a character; she's just a potential inflictee.
Key here is Braun's greatest technical device, her engagement and deployment of the reader's imagination to complete the storytelling process through the power of mere implication, suggestion, and deliberate omission. After Iris's tense, dark, early-morning discovery of her husband's death in the best portrayal of the true horror and shock of realized dread I've ever read, the story soon switches to a scene with Qwilleran driving Iris to the airport so she can find temporary refuge with her son in St. Louis. Qwilleran, mind racing as to how to momentarily alleviate Mrs. Cobb's suffering during the awkward and painful ride, desperately babbles on about various topics of presumed interest to her, Mrs. Cobb detached and distant in her half-hearted answers. Qwill finally seizes upon a stray comment about bringing food to a neighbor to strike up talk about her baking -
"'How do you make bourbon cake?' Keep her talking.
'With eggs and flour and walnuts and raisins and a cup of bourbon.'
'Nothing could beat that coconut cake you made the other day.'
'Coconut was C.C.'s favorite,' she said, and then she fell silent, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing beyond the windshield."
The scene trails off at that. Iris's quiet, lonely last line and frozen demeanor drives home the essence of the whole sequence - nothing can compensate for or divert her mind from the loss of her husband, so great and pervasive that every little thing contains a reminder of him. Other emotionally charged situations in the series are handled with similar gentle discretion: the pitiful pseudo-confrontation with Joanna in Went Underground, a mess of panicked half-answers that gradually reveal a deeply hurt, deeply sick, unbalanced, and unaware soul who before long flees the scene like a scared, wounded animal, that ends with a single line of Qwilleran resignedly, "slowly and with regret", picking up the phone to dial the police; the turning point in Saw Red where Qwilleran, peering through a crack in the wall, witnesses Dan Graham in incriminating behavior that inarguably confirms the fate Qwilleran knew had befallen Joy deep down all along but would never admit to himself - whereupon both he and the narrative sadly, wordlessly turn away from the scene. In both Qwill's case and our own, further voyeurism won't tell us anything we don't already know. Reflection upon Qwill's warm, beatific gladness upon his reunion with Joy and his internal emotional struggle throughout the book in the aftermath of her disappearance makes it evident how much pain this moment is causing him, and the story cares about him - assumes that we readers care about him enough where we wouldn't want to see him suffer - to leave him alone to grieve, allowing the audience's familiarity with and compassion for the character to take over where the narrative dares not pry. It gives us enough to paint an effectively heartrending portrait of the tragedy but doesn't wallow in the horror.
On a certain level, it boils down to a matter of sheer quality - the Cat Who...s are simply better-written and -planned than most other modern mystery series. But there's a often-vast gap in attitude, too - while other series star impassive sleuths who barely seem to have a motivation to be so consumed with a case, the Cat Who...s distinguish themselves in that there is always someone who cares about what happens, whether it's Qwilleran crusading alone to see justice served for people he barely or never knew on simple humanistic principle in Played Brahms and Played Post Office or the whole of Pickax most inspirationally banding together to right the death of one of their own in Wasn't There. And there's true sorrow felt in Braun's works toward the crimes - the genuine regret that these horrible things have befallen good people that reinforces the necessity of setting things right. In short, the stories bear the hallmarks of the decorum and decency one would expect from an author who once left her industry because she thought it too obsessed with the cheap titillation of sex and violence - of a great reluctance to use such imflammatory tools but sparingly and judiciously, at the service of a complex, well-reasoned, compassionate story adult enough to deal with the full implications of what it has wrought.
I take such great issue with - and offense at - the trend toward the opposite in popular mysteries, not only due to the above problems with bad authorial attitude and poor writing, but because several of my close friends and I myself have been through similarly harrowing, despairing experiences involving various grievous legal injustices or the consuming, debilitating, prolonged illness and/or death of one or several loved ones. To have something horrible befall someone you care for and, despite one's most desperate, frenzied efforts, be totally, utterly powerless to save them is without equivocation one of life's worst tortures. Contrary to the apparently prevalent attitude in today's mystery world, such suffering is not fun, which is why I am inclined to think that only people who have never had to endure any such nightmarish situations - people for whom, through unfamiliarity, unrelenting misery would hold an exotic fascination - would treat and employ them so lightly, thus belittling the gravity of the actual horrors.
One cannot close discussion on this subject without reflecting upon the fact that not only it is always women who're put in these dreadful situations but also, oddly, most often women authors who concoct them. And why? The majority of cozies have a predominantly female audience - not that this behavior would be any more acceptable in a by-males-about-males-for-males book series, but it's, to invoke the lightest adjective that comes to mind, curious to show such a scabrous attitude towards one's own demographic.
And yet...no one even bats an eye. I haven't yet read one complaint about - even one innocent inquiry into - this sadistic, misogynistic phenomenon, and I find this outright horrible. No more elaborate verbiage can better express my dismay and anger. It's horrible. Perhaps, rather than "why do authors do this?", "why does no one object?" is the more important question at hand here. I myself can't even begin to answer.
The infatuation with victimhood is most deeply puzzling when you look at it through the larger context of the genre. Aren't mysteries at heart a truly enpowering genre, their idea that one person can set wrongs right through ingenuity and sheer determination a basic component of their appeal? Mysteries play on and nourish our sense of justice and order, our desire to see evils avenged; to introduce elements like the Annoying Antagonists and the despairing sad-sack tales that foster a general atmosphere of unfairness and injustice seems self-destructive and counter-productive - especially in the hands of a story and author that refuse to deal with their consequences.
Mystery, as with romance and fantasy and sci-fi, can be looked upon as a hack genre - a category of literature largely composed of a great many by-the-book titles churned out for a mainly paperback market. The great Cat Who...s prove that the seeming pervasive mediocrity in the stuff that gets published is due to the push to feed market demand rather than the constraints and inherent traits of the genre, but it's despairing to see it dragged down to hack sensibilities just the same. The situation reminds me of a scene in the aforementioned Sang for the Birds, where Phoebe Sloan asks Qwilleran if she should move in with her boyfriend against her parents' wishes. Qwilleran responds - "'Some of us are grown-up at age twelve; some of us never mature. It's not a question of whether you're old enough to make your own decision; are you old enough to take responsibility for the outcome if it turns out to be a bad decision?'" At heart, that's the dilemma here - the bad decisions made in regards to the material, and the even worse abandonment of responsibility for its aftermath.
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