“Коротко говоря, обязательное различие между боевиком и романом, такое, которое, как мне кажется, всегда должно создавать различие – это вопрос о - соответствующем - мотиве. Если мотив “мистериозен” [the motive is “mystery”], то история (саспенс, конечно) становится в центр повествования, и налицо боевик. Если же мотив иной, то история (и неважно, насколько она кровава) не занимает центрального места, она всего лишь средство, и это не боевик”.
Цитаты даны в переводе А.А.Брусова
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Hillary Waugh
The mystery versus the novel
Hillary Waugh writes because, in his own words, he cannot not write. Though he aspired to make a career of art (cartooning) and music (popular songs), M r. Waugh first tried his hand at mystery writing while flying in World War II as a Navy pilot. His first effort sold, and Mr. Waugh was hooked on writing. Since then, he has published some thirty-four novels in the United States and abroad, most of them in the crime and mystery fields. One of his novels, LAST SEEN WEARING . . . , was chosen by the London times as one of the one-hundred best mysteries ever written.
Mr. Waugh writes under his own name and two pseudonyms: Hairy Walker and H. Baldwin Taylor. He is a pioneer in the field of police procedurals, and a past president of the Mystery Writers of America.
There is an awareness on the part of most readers that the mystery per se is something separate and distinct from the novel itself. This fact of fiction is acknowledged both by the devotees of the mystery form and by its detractors; the term “mystery” is applied to a specific type of novel to set it apart from the so-called “straight” or “serious” novel.
There is a difference, that is true, but the degree of difference depends upon how we define the term “mystery”. Time was when “mystery story” meant “detective story”; then the tale was a puzzle and little else. More and more, however, the parameters of the genre have broadened and where they now lie is more a matter of personal viewpoint than of any objective line of demarcation. Nowadays suspense stories have come under the umbrella of mystery fiction so that Harper & Row even labels each book in its mystery line as “A Harper Novel of Suspense.” Spy stories are called mysteries; chase and adventure yarns come under the heading. Gothics, those tales of romance and suspense, are a part of the field, and even some ghost stories can be included. Anything that involves crime or the threat of crime is eligible. So is anything that pits the forces of good against evil — and evil can mean anything from Count Dracula to Hitler’s minions.
This covers, we might note, a rather broad area. In fact, not much is left over for the field of straight fiction. Mystery writers induct into the fraternity not only the likes of Edgar Allan Рое, but also Dostoevski (Crime and Punishment), Shakespeare (any tragedy with the possible exception of Lear), Victor Hugo (Les Miserables), and anyone else who has produced a work of fiction involving criminous activity.
Quite obviously, if we are going to use this broad type of criterion, then we will have to say that the only difference between mystery fiction and straight fiction is that the former involves criminal wrongdoing and the latter doesn’t — a distinction too meaningless to acknowledge.
Yet there is a difference, and everyone knows it. Shakespeare wrote about crime, but he was not a mystery writer in the sense that Agatha Christie was a mystery writer. Inasmuch as the mystery novel, especially in America, has traditionally been regarded as second-class fiction and its top practitioners as less worthy of note than the most hapless of straight novelists, the insistence of mystery writers in embracing the literary giants of history as kissing kin may well be nothing more than an attempt to overcome an ill-begotten inferiority complex.
If we are to separate the mystery from the novel and recognize the similarities and the differences, we must more adequately define our terms. We must find the areas of distinction that identify one and not the other. We must construct a discriminatory sieve that will firmly hold the likes of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan Carries On in the mystery genre and turn loose such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
Is it a matter of length? Mysteries, in all their recognized forms, are pretty standard in this regard. Generally speaking, the range is from 185-225 pages, or 60,000 to 70,000 words. Gothics are longer and a reader expects closer to 300 pages or 110,000 words in that form. The moment a book gets into the 350-pages-and-up range, even if it deals with crime, it will be accepted by editors and public alike as “more than a mystery”.
Length, though indicative, is not a valid measure; quite obviously length does not determine greatness and we must, not pretend that extra pages are a hallmark of distinction. There are too many gems of classic fiction — The Red Badge of Courage for one — that deliver their message in beautiful brevity.
Another totem that is supposed to identify the mystery is that it is read for “entertainment”. The mystery is supposed to be light reading, something that doesn’t require serious involvement; a piece to be ingested for relaxation, for fun, for pleasure.
But what does this tell us? Are we to conclude that books of merit are literary spinach: (“You won’t like it, but it’s good for you”)? That argument won’t wash. Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Hardy — the list is long — were, and are, enormously popular. Dull novels are bad novels and will not sell, but dull mysteries won’t sell either. So it is not a matter of bad writing versus good writing, or fun reading versus dull reading, short books versus long books, or crime stories versus non-crime stories. The subgenre of the mystery is isolated from the rest of fiction by other criteria.
To make the distinction, we need to dig deeper and realize that the mystery has been, growing and expanding, maturing, and almost leaving its old self behind. In fact, the more the mystery probes into character and issues and the makeup of the human animal — and it is doing this — the more it is departing from its original format and outgrowing its original aims. If the spy is no longer fighting the forces of evil to rescue the kidnapped scientist, but is, instead, coping with the cynicism of his trade and his own expandability, or learning to live with the realization that his life is a cipher, then we are leaving what used to be the mystery form and entering into the field of the straight novel. Even if the spy is rescuing the scientist while he’s having his self-doubts, we are dealing with a different kind of book. The original essence of the mystery is becoming hidden beneath additional layers of what would be called “serious” writing. (How serious the writing actually is, of course, depends upon the talent and insight of the author.)
To lay bare the bones of the mystery itself, we should turn back in time to the point of greatest separation, to the period when the distinction between a mystery story and a novel was the most unmistakable. We must return to the era of the puzzle story, to the fantasyland of mystery — before Hammett and Chandler moved murder out of the prim neatness of the drawing room and into the blood and guts of the back alley, which more closely approximates where actual murders occur and what they are like. We must get away from the subsequent approachment toward “realism” that led to the private-eye and the gangsters cum nightclub, which gave way to the later world of the detective squad and the police procedural. We should return to the artificial world of Hercule Poirot and Philo Vance, of Charlie Chan and Ellery Queen, to the heyday of the intellectual detective when every murder was compound-complex and ratiocination was all.
We use for our model those long-ago stories and their never-never world because those tales, for all time, represent the essence of the mvstery. They were tales from which everything else had been distilled. Here lay, for all to view, the artifacts of the pure mystery, the articulated skeleton of the whole art form. Whatever has since happened to the mystery — and much has — is overlay. Flesh, nervous systems, muscles, blood, and clothing of various kinds have been added, but the true mystery today still has the same old skeleton deep down underneath. It’s just a little harder to find and therein lies a tale — but there are several tales to be told about this particular skeleton.
In those bygone days of the classical detective story, when the skeleton first stirred itself in permanent form, the puzzle was the thing. The reader was presented with a crime, a handful of clues, a cast of suspects, and a detective against whom to match wits. The object of the game was to beat the detective to the solution. Quite obviously, under those conditions, the difference between reading a mystery story — “detective” story in that context — and a straight novel was equivalent to the difference between doing a newspaper crossword puzzle and reading the columnists. Yet, despite the obviousness of the difference, there is more kinship here — as we shall shortly discover — than meets the eye. It is this kinship that has enabled the mystery to develop to the point where it successfully challenges straight fiction on the best-seller lists and enjoys an everbroadening base of popularity. Let us examine these bones, then, and determine why this form of literature, the mystery story, is to the novel what the sonnet is to poetry.
Let it be recognized first that the skeleton that structures the classical puzzle story is nothing more or less than a series of ironclad rules. These rules became essential in order to present the puzzle properly and also in the interests of fair play. The book, remember, was a battleground between author and reader — with the reader trying to outguess the detective and beat him to the criminal, and the author trying to waylay, bemuse, and trick the reader so the detective would get there first. Since the author was in control, his efforts to win had to be restricted to make sure that the reader had an equal chance.
The first and most obvious rule of fair play was the requirement that every clue discovered by the detective had to be made available to the reader. The author could try to discount it as a clue, misconstrue its meaning, or hide it amid a lot of inconsequential garbage — but he had to show it. It had to be there so that at the end of the book, when the detective revealed its true nature, the reader would be able to say, “You beat me that time”, but he could not say, “You left out a piece of the puzzle”.
Rule two was: Early introduction of the murderer.
Obviously it would be unfair for the author to introduce a totally new character on page 214 and name him as the murderer on page 215. All suspects must be prominent throughout — known if not shown.
Rule three: The crime must be significant.
To elicit reader involvement, the problem in question had to be of sufficient seriousness for the reader to want to see it solved — to want to solve it himself. Since murder is the most serious crime of all, most mystery stories are murder mysteries. By choosing murder as the crime, the mystery writer automatically fulfills that requirement.
Rule four: There must be detection.
The crime in a detective story doesn’t solve itself, nor does it go away. An effort must be made to solve the crime. In fact, the raison d’etre of these early detective stories is the solving of the crime.
Rule five: The number of suspects must be known and the murderer must be among them.
This is the fair-play element again and the method generally adopted in obeying this injunction was the construction of an enclosed universe inhabited solely by victims, suspects, murderer, and detective. One of the commonest such universes was the mansion full of guests, cut off from the outside world by a storm or other expedient, thus insuring that when the murder occurs, the killer must be among those present.
So far these requirements, while restrictive, do not seem onerous. But lastly there comes the one that does draw the binding tight. Since the story is a puzzle and a contest of wits between author and reader, the reader, as part of the game of fair play, has the right to expect that nothing will be included in the book that does not relate to or in some way bear upon the puzzle.
This is, incontrovertibly, a logical request and one that cannot be denied. It is, however, a crushing liability to the author. It is demanded of him that there be nothing extraneous in his story. All scenes, all events, all effects (and this includes red herrings) are to relate to and bear upon the puzzle — the creation and solution of which is the story.
The author is not allowed to rhapsodize over Renaissance art or the poetry of Keats — if that be his fancy. He is not to go into irrelevant detail on the workings of the Palomar telescope or the Gatun locks. Relevant details, yes, but not irrelevant.
It is a brutal blow. The author of the highly disciplined detective story is tightly fenced, his limitations severe. Admittedly, to the writer who has the wit and the relish, the strictures offer challenge. First, he must learn how to work within these disciplines and, thereafter, when he has mastered that art, how to maximize whatever opportunities he is afforded. Finally, he must learn to make the disciplines work for him.
Nevertheless, the boundaries are narrow. The mystery writer does not have the freedom to digress into his philosophy of life while the action stands still. This does not mean philosophy is not permitted, nor does it mean that Renaissance art or Keats cannot be evaluated, nor that background cannot be given on 200-inch telescopes or canal locks. It only means that he must create plots and story lines of such nature that they will be furthered and developed through such discussion.
It is a harsh stricture. But all of the requirements of the detective story are harsh strictures. Certainly, the writer of a mystery novel is working under a much tighter rein than the straight novelist who can roam pretty much at will — or at least he thinks he can — over the whole landscape of his intellect.
These, then, are the emblems which identify the mystery novel and set it apart from the rest of fiction. Times have changed, of course, and the mystery has changed with them. No longer is it deemed sufficient to present the puzzle in a vacuum. No longer are characters made of cardboard, distinguishable from each other only by name and by sex. No longer do they serve merely as tokens to be moved on the puzzle board. Background can, without betraying the nature of the genre, add spice and purpose to the tale. The stories can come out of their closed universe and take place in the real world. Schools of the mystery can develop: the hard-boiled school, the private-eye school, the cute young couple, the blood and sex, and the police procedural. These things can happen. All kinds of flesh can be laid upon the bones.
Many variations of the theme can also be played: Whodunit? Howdunit? Howcatchem? Stories can be told backwards and sideways. Yet, through it all, the same distinguishing bones lie underneath, only slightly modified over the years — and then only in response to the changing view of the readership. If the disciplines are not as rigidly restrictive as they used to be, it’s because the reader is no longer being approached as nothing more than a puzzle-solver. Today’s aficionado is more interested in being entertained than puzzled — perhaps he always was — and a little relaxation of the codes is permitted to serve the aim of entertainment. But the codes are all still in force and a mystery novelist who sits down to plot a book today automatically obeys the rules.