When we read a contemporary thriller, we make sure the back door is bolted and the balcony grill is locked. We jump at shadows. We leave the bathroom light on. But reading about a murder that took place in another century is less scary. When the character walking down a dark alley wears buttoned-up boots and swings her full skirts out of the path of a passing carriage, we are more detached. To truly chill our blood, she would have to be shadowed by Bill Sykes.
About a month ago I was in a mood for a retro thrill, something other than my well-thumbed Complete Sherlock Holmes. From the lending library I pulled out Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men, which was basically the conundrum of a murder inside a locked room. Then a Perry Mason from Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote a string of them, with alliterative characters from Anxious Aunts to Terrified Typists. It was full of old-fashioned foot chases, week-long stake-outs, sniping dialogue, and the beginnings of technology. Della Street’s “trained fingers whirled the dial with swift precision”. On a rotary telephone. Isn’t that sweet?
Then I went way back, before the trench coats and fedoras. The Mammoth Book of Vintage Whodunnits, which I happened on last month, has some big names and some modest writers who have much to be modest about.
Mark Twain, tongue permanently lodged in cheek, writes about the NYPD’s hunt for a lost white elephant. Bulwer Lytton, famous for his bad prose, cements his reputation with a silly ghost story. Alexandre Dumas, as always, has guillotined aristocrats on his mind. Edgar Allan Poe goes insufferably on about a purloined letter.
Today’s whodunit writers stick to a successful script. A dead body, questions, second body, detective kicked off the force and pursuing investigation on his own, fellow officer bumped off, renewed determination, hand-to-hand combat, and a bitter triumph. Our detective walks off into the dark, a shell of a man. But back in the 19th century, anything could happen. The investigator could die. The murderer could disappear or turn out to be an orangutan. Or it could all end in a joke, with no crime at all. No market-savvy publisher would tell Hardy, O’Henry or Robert Louis Stevenson to change things around. It wasn’t serious writing anyway, just something they did on the side.
Certainly the masters knew how to spin suspense, but it was their gift for character that kept the stories alive, not footprints, fingerprints and autopsies. Dickens expertly wove mystery into every one of his novels, most compactly in Great Expectations. His villains are creepy and their targets are memorable, not just ethereal and virtuous maidens but those haughty, secretive women haunted by their past and facing, at best, a hollow future.
And who can intrigue us like Wilkie Collins? In The Woman in White, a novel focused entirely on a crime and its detection, he put in the Victorian staples-orphans, madwomen, and a pasty hero. But he also created a winning team of villains, a baronet with a dodgy pedigree, an affable and ruthless accomplice, and his godawful wife, all of them ready to kill. Best of all was his black-browed heroine, who doesn’t let full skirts keep her from crawling along a window ledge on a rainy night to eavesdrop on a conspiracy.
Collins unpacked his story in letters, affidavits and diaries, consciously imitating the way evidence is offered in a court case. His legal knots are brilliant. The crime at its core is up to the minute-identity theft. The chills come from a woman's isolation and madness when her life has been erased and she can no longer prove who she is. As it turns out, the villain too is fighting for his identity. Plenty of market-savvy filmmakers and even BBC TV have messed with Collins’s story, but if you like to jump at shadows, read the book.
(Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad)
