Mystery Novel

Science fiction, historical novels and spy novels all lend themselves to formulaic treatment which allows the author to manipulate stereotypes whenever invention flags. Even the best rarely avoid giving off an impression of deja vu, at least in parts. Familiarity of this sort makes for easy reading; nothing is so undemanding as the formula novel. This criticism can be levelled with even more force at the classical English mystery novel, which in the hands of its best practitioners like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Michael Innes achieved the remarkable feat of rendering even the bloodiest murder abstract. Raymond Chandler claimed to have given murder back to the people who commit it, but he did so by restricting crime to a criminal milieu. P.D. James and Ruth Rendell have avoided this limit while restoring the seriousness of the act of murder.

James writes only orthodox detective stories, scrupulously adhering to convention, creating an intellectual puzzle, which nevertheless do not exclude complexity of emotion. Rendell is extremely prolific, writing police detective stories and psychopathic studies under her own name, and also dense explorations of buried crimes, decorated with Gothic motifs, under the name of Barbara Vine. Both are addicted to an excessive degree to literary allusion – James's police detective is a poet himself, while Rendell's is an omnivorous reader with a remarkable memory. Despite this, both writers have succeeded in reintergrating genre fiction in the mainstream novel. James's last, A Taste for Death (1986), could most accurately be described as a novel of character turning on the investigation of a murder; in this it was closer to the Victorian master Wilkie Collins than to Christie and Sayers. Rendell's fecundity and understanding of psychopathic personality recall the Franco-Belgian Simenon, whom Andre Gide once described as "the best living French novelist." Rendell has not perhaps marked out her territory as decisively as Simenon did; but her work is of quality comparable to his.

Novel Is a Piece of News

The novel has always been a loose and capacious term; for every discernible trend it has been possible to find contemporary countercurrents. So, today, while it may seem that the future of the novel is to appeal to an international readership, it does not follow that this excludes the local or particular writer. The Japanese author Shusako Endo is an example of one who has achieved international success without diluting his native culture.

In remains certain, however, that the novel can only flourish if it remains aware of its own definition as a piece of news. Novelty may rest in subject matter or manner, and the degree of novelty may be hard to identify. It must nevertheless be there if the book is not to stink of stale fish. All the writers considered here are to some extent at least conscious of their responsibility in this respect. They respond to changing social values and the changing shape of society with new perceptions. They are aware, even the most apparently naturalistic of them, that reality can no longer be complacently defined. They are aware too of paradox: the concept of character has been challenged by physiological and psychological advances and theories; yet perception of "real" character remains central to the way we try to understand the world. It is the novelist's task to explore this paradox.

They duty of exploration may indeed be taken as the imperative which drivers the novelist. The novel is an exploratory form, seeking out routes by which author and reader can together come to a truer understanding of the world. Dealing in imperfections, the novelist understands that this understanding can itself can itself be never other than imperfect. This is why it is not a form suited to the ideologically committed. Orwell described it as "a Protestant form"; inasmuch as his phrase retains value, it has lost its sectarian significance. But it reminds us that the writing of a novel is an act of individual judgement, or rather that it is composed of myriads of such acts. Reading a novel is of the same order. Both writing and reading depend on the use of the imagination. This is true whether the novel superfically seems to set out to achieve a close resemblance to everyday life or whether it flies far away from it. Neither mode is admirable in itself; it depends on how it is done.