A friend proposed we write a mystery together — actually, a series and we’re now batting ideas around. As part of our brainstorm, we agreed to loan each other mysteries from our shelves. The Middlebrow quickly noticed how bare his shelves were of these books, after years of tending more towards The Mysteries of Pittsburgh than the The Mystery of the Blue Train, though I recall making some attempts at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in my early high school years, but I never caught the bug.
In some ways, television put me off the genre. The police procedural, especially the long running Law & Order series and its spinoffs frustrated me as propaganda for cops and prosecutors. It seems like to really be part of a mystery audience, as reader or viewer, you need some passion for seeing wrongs outed and punished. I’ve always subscribed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s view here, which is: “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” I don’t even like to see criminals go to prison in real life. I thought it was sad and unnecessary, even, that hedge fund Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff died behind bars.
That said, many of my favorite writers were avid fans of mysteries and let the form influence their work. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is almost a parody of the hardboiled detective novel. David Foster Wallace famously liked to read thrillers and mysteries. Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery is one of his funniest comedies and playwright David Mamet really mined the form in books, film and television. One mystery writer I’d been really into was Arturo Perez-Reverte, whose literary adventures focused on the detective Corso includes The Club Dumas, which was the basis of Roman Polanski’s film The Ninth Gate.
Which all reminds me of another connection I have to the genre — my brief collaborations with writer John Gilmore, back in New Mexico in the late 1990s. The Middlebrow had adapted Medea for a local theatre company and Gilmore either saw the show or noticed (this was never clear) and called the theatre asking for the writer. Having no idea who Gilmore was, but willing to meet anybody who introduced himself as an author, I grabbed coffee with him at a downtown diner the next day.
Gilmore was a memoirist and sometime gonzo journalist. His father was an Los Angeles police detective who had worked the Black Dahlia murder case, and Gilmore had written a book about it called Severed. Gilmore was a former actor who wrote embellished stories of adventures and affairs with James Dean, Janice Joplin, Marilyn Monroe and his collaborations writing dirty novels in partnership with Ed Wood. He had fantastic and mostly difficult to believe stories about his exploits, but had also published more than a dozen books and his film credits were real.
John had a proposition — he wanted to turn The Garbage People, his book about the Manson Family, into a feature film and I would help with the screenplay. He had a producer/director interested, he said, named Floria Sigismondi, who had just difected Marilyn Manson’s 1996 video Tourniquet and was at work on David Bowie’s Little Wonder.
It was all kind of random and never worked out. The Middlebrow is basically a comedy writer when it comes to the creative stuff. The Medea adaptation had been a one-off. I could not capture the nuttiness of the Manson family in a screenplay and Gilmore wanted to add all sorts of extra characters to the story anyway. Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what Quentin Tarantino did with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Perhaps we were ahead of our time.
The Middlebrow did manage a first during those months with John Gilmore, by writing the liner notes for the spoken word album he released alongside his memoir Laid Bare.
Now it’s back to the world of murder and intrigue. At the behest of my partner, I am reintroducing myself to the genre through Agatha Christie. The Body in the Library is surprisingly funny, right from the title possibly being a play on Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It opens with the murder. We’re at Gossington Hall and its owners are awakened on page one with news from the maid — there is a dead girl, lying strangled in the library.
Dolly Bantry, the lady of the house immediately calls her friend Miss Marple to come help solve the case and she seems far more concerned with making an adventure out of it than the fate of the dead girl. Heck, nobody cares about the dead girl at all, they only seem to care if Colonel Arthur Bantry was having an affair with the girl (though we readers are oddly assured at the start that the poor girl is a virgin).
We’re off to a rollicking start, it seems. Can’t wait to see where the mysteries take me.