Mysteries That Bloom in Spring

By Michael Demarest

New trends and names keep the plots boiling

They are the insomniac's solace, the commuter's opiate, everymitty's escape from idiot box and cuckoo's nest. Novels of crime, mystery and suspense are by far the most widely read form of literature in most of the Western world, and not infrequently the best written. Asked some 35 years ago to name the worthiest American novelist, Andre Gide replied unhesitatingly: Dashiell Hammett. (Because, said the author of The Immoralist, Hammett "never corrupted his art with morality.") Yet few contemporary critics treat the mystery as anything more substantial than a mental pacifier; the genre is accorded scantier and less prominent review space in most journals than the mindless TV special or the memoirs of unmemorable statesmen.

No wonder, as the redoubtable crime writer Stanley Ellin (The Luxembourg Run) observes, that "there's this mystery writers' syndrome, the feeling that we're really not top drawer. We've never been mainstream, we'll never be nominated for Pulitzers. The word is that Graham Greene will never be considered for a Nobel because he's cursed with the mystery stigma."

It is a truism nonetheless that future historians may get their surest handle on today's world by studying Martin Beck's Stockholm, the Amsterdam of Van der Valk and Grijpstra, the England of Merle Capricorn and Adam Dalgliesh, Inspector Ghote's Bombay, Jose Da Silva's Rio, the Manhattan of Inspector Schmidt and Detective Steve Carella, Fred Fellows' Connecticut, Sam Spade's San Francisco and Travis McGee's Florida.

At the weeklong Second International Congress of Crime Writers, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America* and attended by some 300 practitioners in Manhattan last month, there were clues aplenty that the literature may be headed for better days--even, as Author Edward Hoch (The Spy and the Thief) suggested, for a new Golden Age comparable to the period of the '20s and '30s. Among other hopeful portents, an increasing number of colleges and high schools are offering courses in mystery writing. The University of California's San Diego extension has embarked on an ambitious program reprinting classics, and it is assisting with a thriller series for public television. A number of mystery bookshops are flourishing, from London's Shepherd Market to Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles. Several small presses thrive on hard-cover editions. For example, the two-year-old Mysterious Press, founded by New York's Author-Editor Otto Penzler (The Great Detectives), has already published six new hard-cover titles, including Isaac Asimov's ingenious Sherlockian Limericks.

Crime and mystery authors are as devoted to their roots as Alex Haley. Among the literary influences and progenitors they mostly soberly cite are the Old Testament, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Leibniz, Spinoza, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Voltaire, Diderot, Hugo, Conan Doyle, Vidocq, Gaboriau, Twain, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Coleridge, Melville, R.L. Stevenson and Vachel Lindsay--not to mention the modernists from Maugham to Christie to Greene, Simenon to Deighton and Le Carre. Even Nabokov.

Certainly the congress delegates --from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Israel, Sweden, Italy and Japan--bore no marks of second-class citizenship. "We're all survivors," said one jolly fellow who has dispatched, at last count, 332 odds and sods. They are a joky, well-tailored squad who, amazingly, carry no stilettos for their fellow authors. Some of the most famed and envied than-atologists are, of course, very rich: Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert Ludlum, Fred Dannay (a.k.a. Ellery Queen) and Ellin, among others. Britain's artful Desmond Bagley, who has yet to make much of an imprint on the U.S. audience, still clears $250,000 a year.

More than ever, to the benefit of their checkbooks and their readers, crime and mystery writers work at other professions. Britain's Don Rumbelow (The Complete Jack the Ripper) is a London bobby; Los Angeles Cop Joe Wambaugh only recently quit the force. In the tradition of Erie Stanley Gardner, many are lawyers, notably Harold Q. Masur (Bury Me Deep), Francis ("Mike") Nevins Jr. (Publish and Perish), Joe Hensley (A Killing in Gold), and, of course, Englishman Michael Gilbert, creator of the Patrick Petrella series and, be it noted, the author of Raymond Chandler's will. The remarkable P.D. James has a full-time job in the criminal division of Britain's Home Office. Other practitioners also work as journalists, critics, doctors and even perhaps as agents of the nonliterary kind.

One writer has perforce abandoned a well-learned profession for the typewriter. Kojak-bald Al Nussbaum, 44, was on the FBI's Most Wanted list in 1962; convicted on seven charges of bank robbery (he won't say how many other jobs he pulled), Nussbaum served 14 years in federal pens where he became a prolific and successful crime writer, mostly for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. He now turns out screeds under his own name, which is German for nut tree, as well as Alberto Avellano and A.F. Oreshnik, which have similar meanings in, respectively, Spanish and Russian. E. Richard Johnson is another con, whose fine first novel, Silver Street, won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award in 1968. Johnson, alas, is back in the slammer: a slight case of armed robbery.

The successful crime-mystery-suspense novel today, unlike a great deal of current fiction, must be skillfully plotted around a cast of credible, disparate, motivated characters; it almost invariably entails expert knowledge of a milieu or a profession; and it depends heavily on the author's familiarity with locale, which can range from the Arctic to the Sahara, Manhattan to the Mojave. Moreover, as Brian Garfield (Death Wish) argues in I, Witness, "the literature of crime and suspense can provoke images and questions of the most complex intellectual and emotional force; it can explore the most critical of ethical and behavioral dilemmas." As C. Day Lewis--who was once Britain's poet laureate and, as Nicholas Blake, a canny suspense writer (The Beast Must Die)--put it, the mystery story is "the folk myth of the 20th century."

The ten current and compelling exemplars:

Catch Me: Kill Me by William H. Hallahan (Bobbs-Merrill; $7.95). New Jersey-based Hallahan, 52, a former adman, won his Edgar with a thriller that scurries from the lower depths of Manhattan to the higher reaches of Washington, D.C., and Moscow, with a side trip to the underside of Rome. Its main sleuths, a burnt-out CIA agent and a doughty Immigration official, set out separately to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a minor Russian poet whose scattered dactyls are the clues to a major East-West confrontation. A masterpiece of bamboozlement, Catch Me is a kind of catch-22 between rival and riven U.S. agencies, written in a style that ranges from hardest-boiled yegg to souffle, with nothing poached.

Copper Gold by Pauline Glen Winslow (St. Martin's; $8.95). A former Fleet Street court reporter who now lives in Greenwich Village, Winslow, fortyish, focuses on swingin' London's demimonde with Hogarthian relish. Her world of pushers, prossies, punks and rotting Establishment pillars is counterpointed by the decent, diligent coppers who come a cropper. What might otherwise have been a merely expert Scotland Yard procedural is elevated by Soho low jinks and, believe it or not, a pervasive and finally persuasive romanticism.

The Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering (Houghton Mifflin; $7.95). The Dutch-born author, 47, who has sojourned in many exotic places and once lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, now inhabits Maine and writes cleaner English prose than many a Yankee aspirant. However, his stories are still set, with occasional departures (The Japanese Corpse), in Amsterdam, where his sleuths have taken over the turf once occupied by Nicolas Freeling's late, lamented Inspector Van der Valk. Van de Wetering's latest Dutch treat, starring the familiar trio of Detectives Grijpstra and de Gier and their commissaris, is cerebral, comradely and sensual, within the generous Hollander dollops that make KLM a perennially popular airline.

Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith (Norton; $8.95). In a tour de non-force suspense novel that mixes virology and American Indian mythology, Hopi hopes and bureaucratic horrors, Author Smith, 35, weaves an all too believable parable of tribal endangerment. His unlikely detectives, a flaky young Indian deputy and an obsessed paleface scientist, encounter a mass killer of a different sort: a vast horde of plague-spreading vampire bats. Smith, who is one-half Pueblo, explicates the Indian psyche and bat pathology as deftly as he creates blood-filled characters.

Gone, No Forwarding by Joe Gores (Random House; $6.95). Gores, 46, who was a card-carrying private eye in California before switching to literary license, dissects a Mob-connected conspiracy to sue, harass and murder the Bay Area-based Dan Kearny Associates detective agency out of business. DKA, as in two previous novels, survives--after an adrenaline-pumping, nationwide search for a missing witness, conducted in large part by the niftiest black op in the literature.

Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James (Scribner's; $8.95). Since James, 57, is English and a woman, she is frequently hailed as a worthy successor to Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. James' knowledge of locale (in this case, East Anglia's murky, misty fen country) and contemporary mores (some pretty kinky), her familiarity with forensic science (which is what Expert's plot is mostly about) and keen psychological insight, all mark her as an original. Her seventh and best mystery novel brings back Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgliesh, who writes offbeat poetry.

The Enemy by Desmond Bagley (Doubleday; $7.95). One of Europe's bestselling suspense writers concocts drama of genetic manipulation, incidental assassination, government machination and Russian marination. Bagley, 54, who knows his computers and test tubes, is equally at home with his locales (England and Sweden, in this book) and his personae, who can be both touching and tough. The Bagleyan denouement raises his novel from mere artifice to the artful.

Waxwork by Peter Lovesey (Pantheon; $7.95). Lovesey's mysteries are set in late 19th century London, which in too many other authors' hands now seems exclusively Sherlockian. He writes with accurate verbal and social perception about the upper and lower reaches of Victorian sanctimony and contrivance. Waxwork, 41-year-old Lovesey's eighth novel, is at once charming, chilling and as convincing as if his tale had unfolded in the "Police Intelligence" column of April 1888.

The Baby Sitters by John Salisbury (Atheneum; $9.95). John Salisbury is the well-guarded nom de plume of a fortyish British historian, political writer and playwright--which adds spice to his first political thriller right from page 1. It is the story of an Orwellian attempt (in 1981) to turn Britain into a fascist state, led by a fanatical Muslim group riding high on Arab oil and abetted by some of England's leading politicians. The conspiracy is defused by Bill Ellison, a brilliant Fleet Street digger whose investigative team resembles the London Sunday Times's muckraking groups. Salisbury gives his improbable tale crackling credibility--and is already working on a sequel.

Talon by James Coltrane (Bobbs-Merrill; $8.95). In his first suspense novel, James Coltrane--in real life a Hawaii-based lawyer named James P. Wohl, 41--shows himself a young master of the medium. His antihero, Joe Talon, is a superefficient analyst of satellite photos for the CIA in Manhattan. He is also an unrepentantly laid-back hankerer for the surf-and-grass California scene. When Talon detects a curious and erroneous--or doctored?--cloud cover masking a remote area of Nepal, he bucks the Establishment to prove his suspicions, survives sundry assassination attempts and blows open a nasty conspiracy within the Company. He also manages a rather touching love affair and some motorcycle exploits worthy of Evel Knievel.

-Michael Demarest

* Patron saint: Edgar Allan Poe. Motto: "Crime does not pay--enough."

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