Are Depressing Mysteries More Fun?
Does crime fiction privilege despair and cynicism? I came to this question by way of cats, fictional cats. Not Harry Potter’s Crookshanks or Dr. Seuss’ Cat in a Hat or even Nobel laureate TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. No, I mean cats in what would come to be called cozy mysteries. Prolific author Dolores Hitchens (1907-1973) wrote twelve cat mysteries probably initiating the tradition of including a feline in a murder mystery that would turn into the cat cozy niche killing it today. (My impression: let me know if you can find any annual sales figures grouped by sub-genre).
Hitchens produced forty-five novels: twelve cat mysteries featuring astute seventy-year-old amateur sleuth Rachel Murdock, two hard-boiled mysteries with a cynical alcoholic private investigator protagonist, five railroad detective novels, six mysteries featuring Professor A Pennyfeather and two dozen others including a couple westerns. No writer’s block at Dolores’ typewriter. Her 1958 novel Fool’s Gold was made into Jean Luc Godard’s New Wave film Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders), which Godard described as ‘Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka.’ Quentin Tarantino liked the movie so much he named his film production company A Band Apart.
But who remembers Hitchens’ The Cat Saw Murder or Cats Don’t Need Coffins or Death Walks on Cat Feet? It required Lillian Jackson Braun’s thirty ‘The Cat Who…’ novels, starting with three in the late 60s but not really cranking into full speed until number four appeared in 1986, followed by twenty-five more over the next twenty years, to establish the tradition.
Why did Hitchens only write two hard-boiled mysteries out of forty-five novels? Could it be that a pessimistic corrupt world peopled by hopeless violent angry people didn’t appeal to her? If only that had been her cup of tea she might be as well known today as Patricia Highsmith or even the male members of the hard-boiled authors club.
But back to cats. Hitchens’ cat mysteries are not the equivalent of cat cozies today. The silky black cat Samantha neither talks nor solves mysteries. She’s just a realistic cat, the pet of white-haired Rachel Murdock who is better at pinpointing murderers than burly police detectives are. The cozy cat sub-genre would take decades more to develop. Even Lillian Jackson Braun’s first few ‘The Cat Who….’ mysteries were more hard-boiled and less cozyish than those after she resumed writing the series in 1986
Marilyn Stasio, longtime crime fiction reviewer for The New York Times, said the cozy appeals because it recalls a simpler sweeter time. Meaning the contemporary cozy is a nostalgic literary movement. To understand the impossibility of nostalgia, even as it draws our longing, think Disneyland’s Main Street, designed to evoke a Midwestern town around the turn of the century, that idyllic hypothesized moment between robber baron excesses and the devastation of World War I. The cozy nostalgically hearkens back to the Golden Age of detective fiction, to mysteries which maintained decorum and restored order and civility. The contemporary cozy imagines a present as reassuring as Disneyland Main Street
Contrast that to noir’s realist focus on corruption and you have a pair of value opposites. Noir depicts urban dirt: cozies explore clean small towns. Noir heroes are physical and violent: cozy sleuths are wise and judicious about human relationships. Noir leaves us with an unredeemable fallen world: cozies offer hope that an average person can find solutions to problems and heal social and community relations.
So why is Sam Spade cooler than Rachel Murdock? The rough-and-tumble action of a noir protagonist in some sense justifies the violence and brutality of institutions, creating endless conflict. Cozies offer the prospect of individuals restoring peace and community. Do our cultural standards lead us to prefer pessimism and violence? Is the fundamental decency of the cozy sleuth less interesting than the torments of the hard-boiled hero? Or is it realism that gets praised, so talking cats and murderers willing to confess and go quietly are disdained?
Author Bill Pronzini described one of Hitchens’ two Jim Sader noirs, Sleep with Slander, as one of the best male private eye novels written by a woman—so not bad but would have been better if only a male author had been available to imbue the book with that violent cynicism men understand best. Hitchens apparently felt more comfortable with cat-owning older women. Could that be one reason she is little read today?
“A promising new voice.” – Sandi Ault, Mary Higgins Clark and Willa Award-Winning author of The WILD MYSTERY SERIES