The Faith of Mysteries

I read murder mysteries the way some people eat peanuts or potato chips, with gusto and unappeasable appetite. After a day of work that has redeeming social value, I find I can let go of the difficult and perplexing with a little murder and mayhem delivered according to the reassuring formula of a good whodunnit.

All mysteries posit a particular evil--usually murder, often coupled with additional wickedness--as the problem. By finding the killer, a detective restores the world to its natural state, which is fundamentally pre-murder or uncorrupted. So there's an optimistic premise operating.

Real-world evil is messy, ugly, dispiriting, painful, and confusing. This is especially so if the evil is systemic; that is, if a system of practices, beliefs, and institutions results in injury and disability to real people, and if we find ourselves implicated in such systems, as is always the case.

So the world of fictional violence and wrongdoing and their rectification helps me disengage from the real world, soothes my riled spirit, and, like a glass of warm milk, helps me sleep at night. Therefore I find it odd that the murder mysteries I like best and read most avidly feature women investigators or those other detectives whose sensitivities, not a part of mainstream problem-solving, are needed to understand the crime. (I include Tony Hillerman's Native American detectives Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn and Walter Moseley's African-American Easy Rawlins.)

When detectives come from the perspective of a member of an oppressed and/or minority group, something new is added--the reality of structural violence that compounds and complicates the simple bad deed/peril/solution formula. And yet the fundamental optimism of the genre remains to guide the action.

The acknowledgments to Sara Paretsky's latest book, Guardian Angel, thank two women who "made it possible for me to return to work. Without their help I might never have been able to do so again." She also thanks two other people who "supported my spirits through long months of pain." While the reader does not know what circumstances Paretsky refers to, it is reasonable to think that V.I. Warshawski's insistent anger in some way reflects her creator's own difficulty. Yet, though grumpy and often ungracious, Warshawski does her bit to disentangle the industrial scam that has resulted in murders and the defrauding of old people.

Warshawski and her kind have a number of authorial grandmothers. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple sees with the sharp eye and clear head that presage Mrs. Polifax, another elderly woman who "outdetects" the CIA. Both surprise the male crime-detecting establishment by observation, reasoning, and, in Mrs. Polifax's case, derring-do. Television's Jessica Fletcher is kin to these two wise women.

Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey comes alive with Gaudy Night, when he collaborates with Harriet Vane. Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Allyn, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I, brings a new kind of psychological engagement to the genre. Josephine Tey's Chief Inspector Alan Grant does his best work lying flat in bed with a back injury, from which position he reconsiders the life and times of King Richard III and sets about clearing his name of villainy in Daughters of Time.

Marsh and Tey have passed their baton to P.D. James, whose Adam Dalgliesh pays careful attention to real people and the details of their worlds. These women and their heirs have affected women writers, as well as men, whose detectives are more sensitive, vulnerable, and real because of their female counterparts.

THE NUMBER of women who write and star in detective fiction has exploded, suggesting to me that this genre has something important to offer the newly expanded imaginative universe available to both women and men. I am especially fond of Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski, Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, J.A. Jance's Joanna Brady, and, as she mellows, Amanda Cross' Kate Fansler.

For all of these detectives, place and relationships are important. Warshawski is mad at the world in a convincing Chicago. Sharon McCone works for a barely solvent legal cooperative in the San Francisco area. Kinsey Milhone is at home in Santa Inez, which sounds like Santa Barbara to me. Joanna Brady solves the mystery of her husband's murder and runs for sheriff in the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona. Kate Fansler, initially far too arch and learned, but increasingly impassioned, teaches at a New York university.

All but Kate Fansler are constantly told by males, particularly those with official crime-solving positions, to stay out of trouble and out of the way. (Fansler, a professor of English in a bastion of male privilege, is therefore already in trouble.)

Female detectives are tough, but when they are injured, they really hurt and take time to heal. When they kill in the line of duty, they have to face up to the anomaly that the giving and taking of life have been gendered tasks.

None of these women spends much time on glamour. The voluptuous women who figure in the adventures of fictional tough-guy male detectives are largely props, characterized mainly by male fantasies of beauty. Not for them is skulking under piers or climbing scaffolding or checking dusty library records. Their shoes, tight clothes, and hair would make these activities impossible.

Women detectives solve crimes to make a living. But they have a passion for justice defined in terms of the caretaking ethic being documented by such feminist thinkers as Carol Gilligan, Mary Belenky, and Sara Ruddick. The pursuit of wrongdoers also gives them the chance to use their brains, their wits, their powers of observation, their stubbornness, and their courage. Although men try to hinder them--sometimes by loving protectiveness--they find ways to function as independent women.

So why, if the schematic ease of detective fiction (its unriddling of the social universe) makes it so agreeable, do these more complex and novelistic versions of a simpler formula satisfy? I think the reason is that the power to act to remedy the world's ills is now not the sole preserve of men, but mine as well. Logically, such responsibility should keep me up at night. Instead I sleep the sleep of the just.

Liane Ellison Norman was founder of the Pittsburgh Peace Institute, author of Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight, and taught fund raising to non-profit organizations when this article appeared.

Excerpt: Inside Sharon McCone

...The hut had no roof, and two of the walls leaned in on each other at abnormal angles. I stepped through an opening where a door once had been onto a packed dirt floor. Loose bricks were scattered underfoot, and trash drifted in the corners; fire had blackened the pale clay.

I still didn't feel anything. No more loss or grief, no sense of horror -- none of the emotional shock waves that surge through me at the scene of a violent death, even though the death that had happened here should have touched me more deeply than any.

What's wrong with you? I asked myself. You can't have used up all your tears in one night.

For a few minutes I stood still, looking for something -- anything -- and willing my emotions to come alive. But there was nothing here, so I turned and went back outside. I felt a tug at the leg of my jeans and glanced down: a little tree, dead now. Poor thing hadn't stood a chance in this inhospitable ground. A few crumpled papers were caught in its brittle branches; I brushed them away. Rest in peace.

...I walked away from the hut where so much had come to an end and stood at the very edge of the headland. To my right lay the distant towers of San Diego and, closer in, the vast Tijuana riverbed. The river itself had long ago been diverted from its original course; it meandered westward, its waters made toxic by Mexico's raw sewage. Straight ahead was its destination, the leaden gray Pacific. And to my left, Baja California. A border patrol helicopter flapped overhead.

...For a long time I stood there, thoughts and impressions trickling randomly through my mind. I recalled the words "You keep what you can use, throw the rest away." And then the sluggish flow began to rush in an unstemmable torrent toward the obvious conclusion. When I finally began to feel, the emotions were not the ones I'd anticipated. I turned and ran back to where Andres still contemplated the sea.

I'd come here this morning on a pilgrimage, thinking that everything was over, finished. Now I realized my search was only beginning.

Excerpted from Wolf in the Shadows, by Marcia Muller (Mysterious Press, 1993). Used with permission.