Twice a month my mother walked into our village’s small library with a sturdy canvas sack, waved at the librarian’s empty desk, and swept a row of books off the shelf into the bag. She read mysteries, exhausting the library’s stock as she traveled alphabetically by author, returning the alphabetical end of authors, Patricia Wenworth (Miss Silver Deals With Death) through Margaret Yorke (Once A Stranger) and starting again with Robert Arthur, Jr. (The Case of the Stuttering Parrot) through Lillian Jackson Braun (The Cat Who Could Read Backwards). Some authors, notably Agatha Christie,  Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Mary Roberts Rhinhart, Josephene Tey, P.D. James, Dick Francis, and later Mary Stewart were in her permanent collection, immediately available if she went through the canvas bag too quickly.

Having retreated to my room sometime in 1958, I grabbed and read most of her haul as she finished, developing a fondness for complicated murders and crafty detection which remains to this day. It’s probably not surprising that what was once a relatively homogenous genre has splintered into a very wide range of murderous narratives; even a casual visit to the nightly news brings fresh accounts of unspeakably vile behavior from coast to coast. My wife and I have become inured to these rancid accounts, huffing with contempt as yet another husband is nabbed after conducting a sketchy search on a home computer. My favorite was the question: “How long can a body last before it starts to smell?” A close second is the pithy: “Neck Snap Break?” Wives, too, seem to have dumbed down the art, siphoning bleach into hubby’s coffee as a means of starting a new romance. Without bogging down in the catalog of homicidal varieties, I will confess that I am fond of police procedurals when cases are handled by Jo Nesbo or Michael Connelly and equally pleased when brilliant amateurs bumble their way to brilliant solutions.

I’d like to be more charmed by “Cozy” mysteries, but even those featuring baked goods, charming seaside villages, basset hounds, and burgeoning romance lack the tang of an old fashioned murder in a locked room or the icy charm of a contemporary serial killer.

All of this is at play this afternoon as I contend again with my own inability to write the sort of novel I might actually like to read. There are a plethora of hideous things to do to victims and a gigantic catalog of quirky habits and curious obsessions with which to decorate my masters of detection, and yet, as I set out once again, I find myself sliding into the most overworked and obvious crimes and settings. My inclination is to inhabit the persona of the quirky, brilliant sleuth and let a case come to him as cases must. I still need a crime to solve. Does inspiration arrive on cue? No, then I find myself searching for “hideous ways to murder someone”, barely done researching the efficacy of venom milked from the common krait when it strikes me that should anyone in my zip code disappear without explanation, that search will land me in the top tier of suspects to be sweated in an airless interrogation cell.

I did find out, however, that the common krait is one of the “Big Four” most poisonous of snakes, information that has left me with skin still crawling. The other three are Russell’s viper, the indian cobra, and the saw-scaled viper, information which has guaranteed that I will never set foot in India. 

Leaving vipers aside for the moment (forever!), I’m currently reading Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy, in which a “button man” dispatches his target, a U.S. Senator, by putting curare in the water glass holding his dentures. Duh! Who wouldn’t think of that? Obvious!

Recently a very kind acquaintance asked me which of the books I’ve written would be one he might enjoy. I loved writing each of them, but it’s become clear to me that although they amused me, I’m more than a little shy on plot. Sure, things happen, but “plodding” would be a kind term of description of the events that creep across the two or three hundred pages of wry discourse on affairs of no concern to anyone outside my brain.

I do still read quite a number of mysteries, not alphabetically by author, but with little critical ambition. A relatively forgettable novel (Can’t remember the title) presented “The Rules of the Game” from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – all ten of which are presented below as further impediments to any project I might begin, allergic to rules as I am:

1. The criminal must be presented early in the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passageway is allowed.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No person from China may figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he have an unaccountable intuition that turns out to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.
9. The sidekick of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Leaving aside the unfortunate misogyny and racism of the Golden Age, the rules do prevent the sort of “Evil Twin” or unreliable narration that can make contemporary detection fatuous and annoying. Kudos to those of an earlier time who foresaw supernatural horseplay and the sharing of thoughts belonging to nasty characters; it’s a shame that our most successful contemporary thrill merchants pretty much obliterate the rules.

So, the gauntlet has been thrown, the challenge etched in blood. I have the temerity to scoff at authors who regularly churn out more plot in an hour than I have in a lifetime; now it’s my turn to play by the rules. My opus, the mystery I was born to write, ought to be finished by Halloween at the latest.

Or …