For this "C-pad", I intended to examine the mysteries of Rita Mae Brown, the author most often mentioned in association with Lilian Jackson Braun, but I'm a bit apprehensive to do so - I read the first of her renowned Mrs. Murphy books, Wish You Were Here, to get a taste of what the series was like, but I'm not sure that Wish You Were Here is a good example of it - it's full of "first novel"-type errors and missteps and thus is perhaps not the best representative of Brown's current writing style (though I know that Brown has penned other books before the Mrs. Murphys - but perhaps she just hadn't found her literary footing for this particular series yet). I've tried asking around to see if my suspicions hold true, but I haven't gotten any answers, so consider this article a preliminary report at best.
The book has a promising premise - two successful business owners in the small town of Crozet, Virginia are apparently murdered in grisly manners just day apart. No one can find a connection between the two victims - except Mary Minor Haristeen - "Harry" for short - the thirtyish local postmistress, who recalls that both received postcards of famous gravestones inscribed only with the message "Wish You Were Here". Naturally curious, Harry sets out to explore the mystery of the killings - as, unbeknownst to her, do her cat, Mrs. Murphy, and Welsh Corgi dog, Tee Tucker.
Though the Cat Who...s and Sneaky Pies share a sizable crossover audience, and though there are many surface similarities between the books, I really don't see many true points of comparison between the two series; though they both take off from the same (very) basic premise - inquisitve human in small, close-knit town investigating crime assisted by more capable feline sleuth - and each series will probably appeal to many of the other's fans for that reason, Braun and Brown's takes on their material are quite different.
The most obvious difference - in the Mrs. Murphy books, the animals talk. "Talk", that is, in the sense of the word in which most animals in family-oriented animal stories "talk" - the reader hears the animals' "speech" or thoughts, and the other animals can hear each other's "speech" or thoughts, but it just comes out as barking, meowing, or silent body language to the human characters in the story. From what I've read, lots of readers enjoy this conceit, but I'm not so sure it's as clever or successful as Brown believes it to be, primarily because of one big pitfall - the animals are characterized not as unique creatures unto themselves but as people would envision them - little miniature humans, acting out a simulacrum of human society, concerned only with human affairs (I thought it a little ridiculous when the cats started discussing the causality rates in World War II) and not with their own priorities. Braun, as demonstrated by works like The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Phut Phat Concentrates, or The Sin of Madame Phloi, is a mistress of insight into the feline mind; Brown - at least at this point in her series - is not, and falls back upon miring Mrs. Murphy et. al in human matters and human social conventions (Mrs. Murphy has an "ex-husband") and silly human distractions like gossiping about how much weight a neighbor has gained, seemingly not thinking them special enough to allow them their own unique perspective on the world. There are no Kokos or Phut Phats here, no feline creatures whose unique feline wisdom transcend the need to lower themselves to the level of crude human communication or concerns. Mrs. Murphy does have the same sense of lofty condescent that the others do when it comes to homo sapiens (and we get a few good quotations out of it, such as Mrs. Murphy's chuckling over a few folks' theological discussions about the nature and face of God, reflecting that "God was a cat, and humans were off the books entirely"), but, in her world and case, I don't see why, as cats and humans here don't have many differences between them - and that eliminates the "uniqueness" of the element of animal sleuths in the first place.
And the humans have their problems too - namely, they have too many problems. Melodramatic, soap-opera-ish problems - Harry is going through a bitter divorce from Fair, the local vet, the town of Crozet, drawn to this torrid li'l melodrama like sharks to chum and not too keen on the idea of an independent thirty-something woman in the first place, finger Harry as the one to blame and say nasty nasty things about the lass behind her back and to her face, the local beauty and former homecoming queen, Boom Boom Craycroft, tries to come to terms with the long-smouldering torch of passion she's been carrying for Harry's soon-to-be-ex, while Fair, "confused by life" (as the "Cast of Characters" preface describes him), wanders around spouting lines like "Why couldn't a woman like Boom Boom be sensible like Harry? Why couldn't a woman like Harry be electrifying like Boom Boom?". Moreover, many of the supporting characters are drawn too broadly and stereotypically (like society matron Mim Sanfield, an unrelentingly condescending, elitist pill who exists only to provide a cheap source of emotional manipulation of the audience for the author - to have us jeer when she spouts snobbish, patronizing insults at Harry and cheer when she receives her come-uppance and is humiliated) - or too outlandishly, purposefully colorful/eccentric/zany (and yet, strangely, aren't quite distinguishable from each other at first - during the first half of the book (before the cast of characters had been thinned out by the murders), I was constantly checking back to the character guide in the front to remind myself who was whom, a problem I never had with the Cat Who...s, whose author spends more time establishing her characters) - to achieve true dimension, and thus I really couldn't invest myself in their little melodramas.
Which contributes to perhaps the book's greatest weakness in comparison with the Cat Who...s - Crozet never really came off as a community to me. Without any particularly strong individuals in the cast, my impression of the folk of Crozet was formed by the citizens' behavior as a whole, and, to be frank, the impression I got was: these people are mean. In some cases, not intently, maliciously mean, but...dislikable. As much as I complain about Moose County's closed-minded behavior concerning outsiders and those who are different, I can honestly say that the folks there are a basically good, basically friendly buncha folks who can, when need be, get along together and make good company for the reader. The citizens of Crozet, on the other hand, are too wrapped up in enforcing the constrictions of social mores and their own private wars to be good company for anybody - their only interactions with each other In a way, it's no different if the book were set in the big city, for Crozet is just as hostile - the only times they stop to interact with each other, it seems, is when they want to spread malicious rumors about their neighbors, and Crozet citizens don't look upon gossip as a leisurely, passive, just-for-entertainment hobby like Moose County folk - these people hate each other, and the gossip is a stab-you-in-the-back, vicious expression of that hate. These are not folks with whom one would like to spend time, and, therefore, the (highly) unwarranted amount of time Brown devotes to these gab sessions - and the sordid, sophomoric divorce stuff (was Brown getting over a vicious divorce herself at the time and using this book as catharsis? Because she seems far more interested in winning vindication and justice for the wrongs Harry has weathered than for the murder victims) - wore thin reaaaaaalll fast - this is one book that could have benefitted from some assiduous editing.
But, then again, the messy, meandering story structure helps to cover up the book's other main weakness - the shoddy mystery. Two murders happen at the start of the book, and there's really only one pertinent development in the mystery along the way - the melodrama acts as filler to stretch out the shallow whodunit. The investigation ends with a desperate gambit to send out bait that, we're supposed to believe, lures the perpetrator into reacting the way only the killer would and giving him/herself away - but a couple other folks react the same way the eventual killer does, so it's implausible for Harry and her allies (or the reader, for that matter) to take the results of their trap as airtight evidence of the killer's identity - it's just a defective plot device to force the story to its end. Moreover, Harry and her best friend (if one can have true friends in Crozet), Susan, hold whole conversations fraught with dreadful import on how people in small towns keep up façades to conceal their true natures and how "we don't know one another as well as we think we do. It's a small-town illusion - thinking we know each other" to hammer home again and again the inelegant "foreshadowing" the supposedly shocking revelation that the murderer is a neighbor hiding Deep Dark Secrets, One of Our Own (though, really, the killer can't be anyone else but One of Their Own, since there aren't any out-of-town characters in the story, and one would think that just being a murderer would be a deep, dark secret enough - though, to be frank, if I'd grown up amongst the tiresome bunch of nitwits in Crozet, I'd be inclined to thin out the population a little myself, so the sentiment can't be all that astonishing). The graveyard postcard gambit is fantastically creepy - but, unfortunately, it also helps to undermine the whodunit, for there's only one person in Crozet with enough genuine style and bitter sense of humor (no matter how morbid and sinister its application) to conceive such an audicious and fiendish device to herald the crimes. And if you don't know what substance widely found in novels of this genre smells like bitter almonds - which is treated as a big enigma here - you deserve to be drummed out of the mystery reader corps.
I've pretty much ripped Wish You Were Here apart. Was there anything I liked about the book? Yes, actually. I did very much like Harry - she was a buoyant-yet-tough, affable and, like Qwilleran, unrelentingly fair-minded and sensible in a judgmental world; despite her pragmatism and current troubles, she also allows herself to dream and wonder, a welcome little human touch to the character - the opening scene of her reading other people's postcards from Paris and Zurich and envisioning herself in such exotic places is magically winning. She's not quite as instantly engaging as Qwilleran (but, then, Qwill is a unique character unto his own), but then she (sadly) does not have as much of the stage in her series as Qwilleran does in his. And, despite my complaints about Brown's lack of feline insight, I did like Mrs. Murphy, a firm-minded, bossy yet genteel, aging southern belle-type of cat, even though, in my estimation, she wasn't as half as clever as she thought she was (Koko could run rings around her. Heck, Yum Yum could run rings around her). I took a shine to two of Harry's close allies in her inquest, the professional-yet-personable Officer Cooper and Mrs. Hogendobber, the "Bible-thumping widow" - though such characters are usually made so self-righteous to the point of unbearability, Mrs. Hogendobber came off as a very real, very believable character instead of just a dogma dispenser - a, to quote Harry, "good person" - a militantly, confidently good and honest person - with strong values to which she held steadfast and yet which she didn't allow to totally blind her - not pigheaded but very assured (and, actually, rather brave) - and, in this little settlement of hypocrites and treacherous wretches, I admired her for that. And I do appreciate Brown's resistance of the temptation to make Boom Boom into a bimbo, but the personality she does end up with is blah, and I'd like to able to praise her for being something instead of not being something.
See, this's ultimately a novel of contradictions; for every element done right, I can find one or two done wrong. Wish You Were Here includes more "grown-up" elements - the divorce material, the abundant (and, in my opinion, tacked-on and excessive) profanity, the gruesome manners by which the victims' bodies are mutilated - than most other cozy mysteries, but they're handled amateurly and lose all their maturity in the process; they may be more "true to life" than Moose County's innocuous Lake Wobegon façade, but the material is given such a soap-opera-ish, amateur treatment that it eschews all realism - and much of the cutesy kittycat antics seems to target a younger audience than for which some of the other material is suitable. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker are given the spotlight, yet their contributions to the investigation are minimal, as the humans discover on their own most of what the animal sleuths do; if this were a Rules post, there'd be no way Wish You Were Here'd be passing Rule #3. Brown lauds Harry's unprejudiced mind, but ladens the novel with her own didactic self-indulgent sermonizing on the faults and evils of such topics as Southern women or Christian mail-order catalogs. (Wish You Were Here also includes a great deal more descriptive prose than in Braun's stuff, but Brown relies too much on outright statement than on illustration, as if she doesn't trust the reader's mental faculties to be able to draw their own conclusions based on the events and behavior presented before them - a mistake Braun rarely makes.) We are treated to some genuinely insightful tidbits along the way, such as Harry and Susan's discussion about how owning a Ferrari in a small town is "tacky" because "that's what people did in the big city to impress strangers" or Mim's haughty logic concerning her expectations of being granted social and governmental leadership by the community - "since God rewarded Mim and Jim with money, it seemed to her that lower life forms should realize the Sanburnes were superior and vote accordingly" - but for every dead-on, trenchant line, we get a Bulwer-Lytton howler like "Rick had grown accustomed to the vileness of men" or "blood and guts were one thing; vomit was another". And a goodly number of literary and genre clichés, such as Mim talking about inviting "a hundred of my dearest friends" to her yacht party or a victim late in the book being surprised by the killer and exclaiming "You!" a split second before being killed, acknowledging the victim's recognition of and shock at the identity of the killer but not revealing anything to the audience.
There's good in Wish You Were Here, but it's weighed down by a lot of amateurish badness, most of which seems to stem either from Brown having an agenda or an axe to grind (the overbearingly overt lecturing, the divorce) or from the author's laziness of falling back upon stock characters and clichés (and trying to compensate through unwarranted self-confidence for what her story lacks in originality) - whereupon the good, as the characters of Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber, is well-developed and seems to come from a unique, fertile part of Brown's mind and imagination. This suggests that this series might have not quite found its voice yet in its first installment; as Brown becomes more familiar and comfortable with this little universe, she might grow inclined to look a little further into its workings and develop it a bit more deeply - to rely less on facile shopworn plot devices and focus more on what's good and worth cultivating in the material (then again, as I mentioned, she already seems very assured of herself and her writing abilities at this point in the series, so perhaps the thought of second-guessing herself is out of the question). Folks who flock to the Cat Who...s mainly for the kitties will probably gleefully overlook the book's faults and enjoy it for Mrs. Murphy, but I doubt other Cat Who... fans will be content. In the meanwhile, for me, the wrong turns in Wish You Were Here serve to make me appreciate what Braun's done right in her take on its subjects all the more.
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