Donald Dewey has published more than 30 books of
fiction and nonfiction. In 2015 he published two mysteries: the
double-book The Fantasy League Murders/The Bolivian Sailor,
and Green Triangles. Later this year, he will publish
the biography Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton and the Birth
of American Movies.
I always
know who the killer is. I don’t consider this either a
gift or a curse, though some people have sought to persuade
me it is one or the other. According to them, always knowing
the killer implies extraordinary insight into human behaviour
or means I can’t take pleasure from detective stories,
national scandals, or international conspiracies. The two sides
agree that (in the political cant of the day) it can’t
be easy for me to realize I’d known then what I know now.
Both
the flattery and the pity are misplaced. Always being able to
identify the killer is just intuition vindicated by suspect
imaginations, and in this I am hardly alone. Political rabble
rousers and media moguls, to name two groups, have displayed
the same abilities to their immense social and financial gain.
The only difference between us is the odd million people or
odd billion dollars.
Okay,
maybe one other difference, too. While the rabble rousers and
media moguls are always delighted to have their intuitions borne
out, I rarely am. Forget how exasperating it might be not to
be able to guess along with a detective hero until the near-end;
actually, zeroing in on the killer with his first appearance
on the page or screen can set in motion other chains of pleasures,
foremost the one about seeing whether the creator in question
'earns' his climactic unveiling. Similarly, I might grasp at
once who is wearing the black hat in some sordid tabloid tale
involving a public figure, but that doesn’t necessarily
prevent me from savouring over weeks and months the fine spirals
of descent from denials and no-comments to admissions, apologies,
and arrests.
In
short, I’ve never confused myself with Orson Welles, about
whom it was said he never truly enjoyed a movie because he was
too practiced in all its separate artistic and technical ingredients.
Whether true or not about Welles (and I doubt it is), it isn’t
my own brilliance that bothers me about my prompt identification
of killers. As I see it, the real problem lies in the sheer
predictability of so much of what passes these days for a mystery,
fictional and non-fictional. It simply depresses me that others
can regard “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as
a whodunit.
Start
with fiction. As any bookstore browser or movie-goer can attest,
we have traveled quite a distance from the once-standard plausibilities
of homicidal envies, jealousies, and angers. The terrain around
us today is more commonly dotted with lazy speculations about
serial psychopaths, computer-generated thugs, or genocide-bent
extraterrestrials. Even the extremes of human motivation have
been shunted aside as being too bland, replaced by a science-fiction
spirit of fixing ultimate blame on one kind of warped gene or
another.
The
convenient part of this trend for its creators is that they
don’t have to be any more responsible for their choices
than their characters do. They can be as acrobatic --- and insubstantial
-- as a Matrix entity. Even the logic that was stretched
to the limits of elasticity with a yarn such as Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express has lost whatever remained
of its resilience with lack of inventive commitment to coherent
plot and character: Instead of Everybody being revealed as the
culprit, contemporary stories ricochet back and forth in structureless
paranoia until, finally, Anybody steps out from behind the curtain.
And on the offchance that even Anybody might be construed as
being too specific, insinuating a hard creative choice, there
will be a few tacked-on endings -- the first usually contradicting
the thrust of the foregoing narrative, the second contradicting
the first, and the third contradicting any residue of sense
left. Within such an arbitrary perspective, how could I 'not'
know who the killer was?
The
wiliest fiction minds are those that, aware of troublemakers
like me, pretend to celebrate the classic forms of logical deduction
so we’ll stop our sniping. One of the best illustrations
of this diversionary tactic was the long-running TV series “Columbo.”
What, “Columbo” not logical? Well, yes and no. The
Peter Falk character himself was; he was nothing if not that.
But while the internal mechanics of the hero’s logic were
usually impeccable, there was seldom sufficient credibility
behind the manner in which he drafted the facts that activated
his reasoning processes. The key to this hocus-pocus, and to
the popularity of the show for decades? We the home viewers.
We always knew precisely how each elaborate killing was carried
out and for what motives. From this starting point we then conceded
knowledge, insights and suspicions to the Falk hero that, objectively,
couldn’t be conceded most of the time. For crucial clues,
in other words, the “Columbo” writers always depended
on us to do their writing for them. We in turn were so presumptuous
about what we knew that we forgot that the lieutenant, sly as
he was, could not possibly have smelled something amiss about
finding an ashtray on a left end-table instead of on the right
one. We were given answers to questions that, as in some solipsistically
demented version of “Jeopardy,” couldn’t legitimately
be asked of others. Or, as the “Columbo” creators
might prefer it, we were accomplices before, during, and after
the fact.
“Columbo”
has hardly been alone among whodunits in relying on an audience
for vital complicity; the motion picture and television industries
have been obligated to that relationship for generations. More
than once, Hollywood’s investment in star image has meant
compromising the logical conclusion of a given story. Perhaps
the most notorious case occurred back in the big studio era,
when even Alfred Hitchcock feared making Cary Grant the murderer
in Suspicion, bowing to front office pressures to re-edit
the completed film so that it had a relatively happy ending
and the star’s fans ended up with a relatively familiar
Cary Grant. Other performers have shied away from earning hisses
with such career-first arguments as their desire to do only
‘positive characters’ in suspense thrillers or their
anxiety about doing two bad guys too close to one another. The
point isn’t that just our knowledge of these priorities
through gossip columns, magazine shows, and the like thwarts
guessing games in the orchestra (“So why couldn’t
they have stayed out of the picture altogether?”), but
that we are seen as indispensable abettors of career tactics,
however ruinously that function affects a given story’s
intelligibility.
Another
kind of image factor is at work in the abasements known as reality
shows. In the interests of remaining Topic A around the water
cooler the following morning, program producers will see to
it that the surviving apprentice, maggot-eater, or mate-swapper
will be the creep or bitch who has made the most chilling case
for life not being fair and for not wanting to make it any more
so. This is called many things in the trade -- staying ahead
of the curve, pushing the envelope, taking a day off from worrying
about role models -- but what it comes down to is honouring
the people you most want to see in Sumatra because then they
won’t be anywhere near your life. In fact, in this cathode
sea of reality show sharks and their parasites the only stations
still upholding fabled honest grit as virtue are Nickelodeon,
where reality is 20 years behind, the History Channel, where
the program subjects all died on grainy newsreel film, and the
Family Channel, in the hours before and after its transmission
of the “700 Club.” As they say in sportscasting
booths, again a no-brainer.
My
perceptiveness has been even less remarkable in arenas outside
those traditionally associated with light entertainment. Indeed,
when the killing has been very literally killing, I have yet
to be compensated a single time for an ability mobs of others
have turned to coin. Murder trial jurors, for instance, now
go directly from the reading of a verdict to some interview
where they identify themselves, their career desires, and the
epiphanies that prompted their vote in the jury room. Crime
scene technicians are still chalking the floors of Beverly Hills
mansions when lawyers promote their firms by going on Fox to
arraign and indict those taken into custody. By the time they’re
finished thanking their hosts for their lynch mob discussion,
the only ones who don’t know O.J. and Robert Blake did
it are ex-Buffalo Bills teammates whose book deals fell through
and the specially challenged descendants of Baretta’s
parrot.
Knowledge
of the killer’s identity has become such a presupposition
for everyday affairs that pollsters spend as much time asking
if we ‘care’ who the villain is as soliciting views
on his or her name. Whether it’s a third cousin of Osama
Bin Laden or American military jailers at Guantanamo, we are
assumed to be so savvy as to have already progressed to having
to choose among outrage, cynicism, or some heartsick combination
of the two in response to our discernment. Blank percent of
us want the killer punished, blank percent of us want the culprit
left alone because we’ve all been crumbs from that particular
cookie at one time or another, and blank percent of us mainly
want to be left alone. It is whodunit-by-plebiscite, a national
game of Clue in which the pieces are maneuvered around the bored
to gauge to what degree we actually are.
In
recent years, Muslims have provided an important intersection
in the identification of fictional and nonfictional killers.
They have filled this role far more adequately than the previously
invoked Soviets, who never really included more than a handful
of leering fat men in wide cardboard military epaulets or cheap
brown suits weighed down with pawn shop medals. The Soviets
were never the Russians, happy people who drink vodka and dance
on table tops, they were just the Soviets, enemies not to be
trusted near a nuclear bomb button.
The
Muslims, on the other hand, are every swarthy who ever heard
of the Koran. They are so ubiquitously the killer they can be
deployed effectively as red herrings. Only after they have been
grilled by all the top-rated “CSI” investigators
or left to rot in some Immigration cell for a few years are
they pronounced not guilty. They are Anybody as Everybody, and
with such odds it really doesn’t matter if they did the
particular crime in question or not since they are clearly capable
of similar ones.
Some
of this might sound as though knowing the identity of the killer
is simply a matter of recognizing what we have been told to
see. So what? That’s what Sherlock Holmes meant by elementary,
wasn’t it?
