[For this year’s
installment in my
annual Beach Reads
series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously
blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one
of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read
suggestions in comments, please!]
On two ways to
AmericanStudy the talented and popular Irish mystery novelist.
Although Tana French was apparently born in Vermont (a
fact I only learned while researching this post, for the record) and retains
her American citizenship (ditto), I’m not going to pretend that her series of six (to date) bestselling mystery
novels set in and around her longtime home city of Dublin isn’t deeply and
crucially Irish. As virtually every post in this week’s series has reflected,
mystery novels are almost always as much about their settings as their plots: Ross
MacDonald’s Southern California, Tony Hillerman’s Southwest, and Attica Locke’s
Houston are all central and crucial presences in their mysteries (as of course
are Dupin’s Paris, Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, and many more). Moreover, one
of Tana French’s most important and ingenious formal choices—to rotate the
first-person narration of her books between different detectives in Dublin’s Murder
Squad, introducing such detectives in earlier books and then shifting the
narration to them in later ones—has allowed her novels to trace the distinct
Irish backgrounds and situations, experiences and heritages, lives and identities,
of her six detective-narrators just as fully as those of her murder victims and
their worlds. I’m no IrishStudier (obviously), but I’d be hard-pressed to
imagine that any writer has captured 21st century Ireland with more breadth
and depth than has French in her stunning series.
Yet French’s
novels can and do still speak to us AmericanStudiers, and here I’ll highlight one
thematic and one formal such transatlantic connection. Each of the six novels
has dealt with different central themes; while all of them could be productively
linked to American contexts, I would argue that that’s particularly the case
with her best novel to date, Broken
Harbour (2012). Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the crimes and
mysteries of Broken Harbour (including
those involving the detective-narrator as well, as always with French) unfold
in a family, home, and community economically and psychologically devastated by
the mortgage
and financial crises of 2008. One of French’s greatest skills is her
ability to take such social and cultural issues and connect them to universal
human questions and themes, and Broken
links that post-2008 historical moment to a layered and powerful examination of
both the ideals and the limits (and of course the dangers) of home and family. I
would link all those aspects of French’s amazing novel to a parallel but more
distinctly American text, Karl Taro
Greenfeld’s psychological and horror thriller short story “Horned
Men” (2012). [Greenfeld’s 2015 novel The Subprimes seems to mine the same
vein, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.] On their own, but even more
as a pairing, French’s and Greenfeld’s stories present and plumb the very human
horrors in these recent histories.
French’s formal
use of the rotating first-person narrators can also be interestingly connected
to American contexts and mysteries. As I wrote in the post on Lethem and O’Brien,
first-person narration is always a tricky element of mystery fiction, and
French’s novels largely sidestep the questions I raised in that post; I don’t
believe we’re supposed to see these narrators as writing their stories, but
they’re clearly remembering them from some unspecified future point (they consistently,
purposefully use foreshadowing, for example). But what I’m particularly interested
in is the way that French uses her first-person narrations to explore the personal
and psychological sides to these police detectives. As always, feel free to
correct me, dear readers, but my sense of mystery novels is that they tend more
often to present police protagonists with third-person narration (as does
Hillerman), and other protagonists (whether private detectives like Lew Archer
or sidekicks like Dr.Watson) with first-person narration. If that is indeed the
case, it would seem to me that it might relate to our sense of police officers
as public figures, ones whose roles are less tied to their private or personal identities
than might be those of private detectives or others. Whereas French’s narrators
and novels make clear that the lines between private and public, personal and
professional, are as blurry and ambiguous for police detectives as they are for
all of us.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise,
you’d share?
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