Proposition: A Good Mystery without Solutions
The problem with mysteries is the mystery itself, what culminates in every bad ending with an overly-rational conclusion. This is a shame because the mood, the tone, and situation set up in mystery stories create immediate interest in the reader, who feels that they are being enticed, who cannot help but keep moving onward. Then the ending arrives, and the murderer is found, and every conceivable moment of note in the story is conscientiously explained.
The real mystery should encompass life’s mysteries where the answers sought are metaphysical. Maybe second person point-of-view along with first person to travel disheveled rooms, like those archaic narrative video games that brought you to room after room with clues and that were populated by not a single other person. I enjoyed the calmness of these game mysteries where it was just you and an endless landscape of interiors and exteriors, objects that became keys that led you to more places to find the final clue that would unlock the meaning of it all.
When I think of mysteries, I think of Raymond Chandler. I think of memos to myself, the writer. Just write like Raymond Chandler, I would remind myself. That was my solution, except there was the one thing that pulls his work down a notch. It was the pulp tradition that still held traces of evidence in his stories. Chandler evokes this in moments when his private eye, Marlowe, goes into his desk drawer and straps on the gun. This decision comes after incidences when he gets caught and beaten up, when he meets vampires and ghouls bred in Hollywood in exotic settings from a Conan the barbarian story. Unknowingly, Chandler tips his hand, revealing his sense of Dashiell Hammett, the creator of hard-boiled fiction who happened to write for the pulps like Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. It was boy’s fiction, in other words. Boys needed to grow up tough to knock out the rival boy and then grab the girl. Hammett did not bother hiding any of these notions, and that is why some of his work is hard to read today.
Chandler is different, more flexible, with greater reach through the decades. Chandler credits Hammett as the source of the hard-boiled strain of the mystery, and it is true that Hammett’s best stories open the curtain for Chandler. Though Hammett created it, Chandler made his entrance afterward and truly perfected the form.
Even though it retains snippets of what I recognize as Conan.
As I have always said, I enjoy mystery novels… until we get to the ending. Perhaps it could be that I am strange, and there is something to be valued in having all loose ends tied up. I don’t know. To me, such clarity does not depict any reality I know. Mysteries in real life almost always remain mysteries, and you find this out eventually, after having sought their solutions for too long.
If a mystery story is like filling out every correct answer in a questionnaire, then the day I write one, I will use the questionnaire as a starting point and keep it close until we get near the ending, where the questionnaire has been cut into smaller pieces with its words reorganized so that it answers itself. I am not going to be the one to answer them. I propose tales that don’t require even half the answers expected, where the mystery goes beyond the crime, where the tone is a spiritual blood relation to the style of Chandler (without mimicking him, mind you), and doing away with that one flaw in every writer who introduces a gun and then is obligated to have it go off — where if you strap on a gun, you never end up shooting it, because if you get a chance to use it, you will see that it mires your path instead of opening it by blowing holes in it. The gun is not the one Chekhov propounded. It is a gun that makes an appearance that does not need to be shot at all, but if it is shot, you could end up merely hitting birds with it. But you still have to strap it on because the possibilities open up the moment you do. I like that kind of story where the possibilities do not narrow as you get to the end, but expand. You don’t know where the story is going, but it takes you…