![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThe Requip has gone from making the RLS worse to helping. Sort of. I still have to take oxycodone to sleep, and I'm not getting any more fond of it the longer I take it.
Started physical therapy Monday. The therapist was very encouraging and helpful: my ankle's mobility is already improved, although there's still a long way to go. And I've met an old friend: one of the exercises he has me doing is the towel crunches![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thecoughlin had recommended for my tendinitis--which, the therapist tells me, is likely to make a comeback when I start walking normally again. Something to look forward to, you betcha.
On the plus side, as I discovered out of idle curiosity, I can now do the tree pose to the left--it's not a fantastic tree, but it's pretty solid, compared to what I could manage before. So there are benefits to being unable to put any weight on your right foot for six weeks. Really.
I'm reading and re-reading and re-reading Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails, and I'm not quite sure why. It's a very peculiar book; I don't know of any other book quite like it.
On the one side, it's part of the sequence with Ten Days' Wonder where Dannay and Lee (EQ the author) are taking a baseball bat to the god-complex of EQ the character, which I find fascinating on the meta/genre theory level. Ellery Queen starts out his career, in The Roman Hat Mystery as an almost unbearably precieux character, with the pince-nez and the obscure classical quotations and the shibboleth of strict logic, yadda yadda yadda. (I understand from things I've read that he was based heavily on Philo Vance.) And the books themselves were also very self-conscious and coy, not only with the Challenge to the Reader (which I don't actually mind, as it's only making explicit what's implicit in all Golden Age detective fiction), but the forewords by Ellery's Watson-like friend and the elaborate pretense that Ellery is writing these books in a villa in Italy and the long lavish descriptions of the Queens' New York apartment (which, nauseatingly, J. J. McC. tells us has been turned into a museum by the Queens' friends), and Djuna the gypsy house-boy (who, aside from making my teeth grind, makes me very uncomfortable: where the heck is Djuna's social worker and what about the child labor laws and so on?). I still enjoy early EQ, but you have to read past a lot of clutter.
And then something weird happens. Dannay and Lee (and those names are themselves pseudonyms) get fed up with Ellery as they have written him. And they change him. It's a little like what happens after Strong Poison in Dorothy Sayers' books, where she realizes she has to make Peter a real human being and in the process she goes (imho) from writing excellent mystery novels to writing brilliant novels with mysteries in them. This is not to denigrate mystery novels, but to distinguish between what Sayers does and what Dannay & Lee do--because they never make the transition from writing mystery novels to writing novels with mysteries in them. They're writing mystery novels first to last. There's never a sense, as there is especially in Gaudy Night, of something larger than the neat careful clockwork of the mystery. But they really get their teeth into that clockwork. They take it apart, they turn it on its head, and they remake their sleuth.
I can't do the full rundown, because some of the books that chart this process are currently where I can't get at them, but Dannay and Lee essentially drag Ellery Queen down to earth. J.J. McC. disappears, and we never hear anything more either of the villa in Italy or Ellery's alleged wife. Ellery becomes a working writer (and some of my favorite bits especially in Ten Days' Wonder and Cat of Many Tails are the bits where Ellery's writing career and his detective career intersect); he's assumed to be turning out novels regularly, making his living the way his creators do (and they use details about the working life of a writer to good effect). The unironic narrative admiration of Ellery in early novels becomes very ironic--affectionate, but ironic. Djuna mercifully disappears, and the apartment descends from Mount Olympus to become plausible: Cat of Many Tails mentions an ongoing dispute with the landlord about the "lunar topography" of Ellery's study's ceiling, which is entirely unimaginable in the context of the apartment as we first meet it. And, most importantly and subversively, Ellery becomes fallible.
The elaborate nature of crimes and solutions in Ellery Queen novels meant from the beginning that Ellery could entertain incorrect hypotheses. They even have him led up the garden path by the murderer in one of the early books, The Greek Coffin Mystery (complete with remarkably defensive footnotes about Ellery's habit in earlier books of never revealing his solution until he's 100% sure he's right), but that's always part of the process. When the police make an arrest on Ellery's recommendation, that's the end of it. Until Ten Days' Wonder, in which Ellery is so completely bamboozled by Diedrich van Horn that it's a full YEAR after the arrest and suicide of the innocent Howard van Horn that Ellery figures out his mistake--in one of the best pieces of extended exposition I think I've ever read. "You've destroyed me," Ellery tells Diedrich van Horn, and he intends never to meddle in another investigation again.
We know he's doomed, of course, because he's a wildly popular series detective, but Dannay and Lee have figured out something else, and it's that things have consequences. They can't carry through very far--Ellery Queen, like other Golden Age detectives, makes his bread and butter off the every-episode-is-an-entry-point series model, but Cat of Many Tails, among many other things, is a direct sequel to Ten Days' Wonder, in which Ellery is dragged against his will into an investigation, and in which he's once again fallible and wrong, and even has a sort of very low-key nervous breakdown (which is astonishing evidence of humanity in a detective of the type he originally was). And comes out the other side ready to go back to work, having come to terms with the fact that he is not God, nor even a god.
On the other side, it's a serial killer novel written in 1949. As far as I know, it is the only Golden Age mystery written about a serial killer (as opposed to the dozens, if not hundreds, of Golden Age mystery novels written about villains who commit serial murders), and it is a very strange hybrid. Because it's still an Ellery Queen novel, with the elaborate logical structure, hypothesis and counter-hypothesis and all the artificial trappings of the form, but it's also aware, as Ellery Queen novels sometimes aren't, of the human cost--even just in fictional lives--of its existence. The victims in Cat of Many Tails, even though we meet none of them until after their deaths, are very vividly presented, as is the grief of the survivors. There's a sense of them as real people quite contrary to the usual attitude of Golden Age detective fiction, which tends to treat its characters as chess pieces. (Possibly there is a sly remark on this habit in the fact that the first victim is a complete and utter cipher, so complete that the police can't quite believe it.) Dannay & Lee love their genre, that's very clear, but this novel is one where they're also exploring its limitations.
It's also a novel about New York City--and in that sense may be a partial exception to my claim that Dannay & Lee did not write novels with mysteries in them. Because the novel is very interested in New York and in New York's reaction to the serial killer called The Cat. This novel is very conscious of its setting and very aware of that setting as a character, as it signals from the opening lines:
There's a sort of triangular relationship in this novel between detective, murderer, and setting, and it's handled with the affectionate irony characteristic of later Queen. I'd still say it's a mystery novel rather than a novel with a mystery in it, but it's a very large mystery novel (spiritually, if that's the word I want), a generous one. Dannay & Lee have gotten through their pretentious phase; they're confident enough that they don't need to call attention to their craftsmanship. Which means that this is a profoundly readable novel.
Hence, I suppose, the fact that I am rereading it obsessively, despite the fact that I do not like serial killer stories.
It's dated, of course, particularly in the very Freudian nature of its psychology, but I don't even mind that. There's something about it that hits the sweet spot in my brain, something about the story-telling and the use of Ellery Queen as a character and a detective, and particularly as a character who is well established as a detective, and . . . I don't know. I suppose if I could figure it out, I wouldn't be on my sixth or seventh chain rereading.
The book also has my current favorite example of implied stage directions in dialogue. Ellery and his father (Inspector Richard Queen, NYPD) have just found out something vital, their first real clue:
That cigaret won't draw, Ellery, because you haven't lit it. I love this sentence. I love the throwaway nature of it, sandwiched in the middle of a discussion of ways and means. I love all the work it does, everything it tells you--everything the narrative is not telling you--about Ellery's state of mind, and everything it incidentally tells you about the two characters involved. (The relationship between Ellery and his father is something else, previously in the series rather implausible and irritating, that this book deals with very well.) It's beautifully done and it's barely even noticeable. For me, the whole book, even the clunky bits, is like that. It has a sense of grace.
This is a funny place to find grace, but I'll take it.
Started physical therapy Monday. The therapist was very encouraging and helpful: my ankle's mobility is already improved, although there's still a long way to go. And I've met an old friend: one of the exercises he has me doing is the towel crunches
thecoughlin had recommended for my tendinitis--which, the therapist tells me, is likely to make a comeback when I start walking normally again. Something to look forward to, you betcha.On the plus side, as I discovered out of idle curiosity, I can now do the tree pose to the left--it's not a fantastic tree, but it's pretty solid, compared to what I could manage before. So there are benefits to being unable to put any weight on your right foot for six weeks. Really.
I'm reading and re-reading and re-reading Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails, and I'm not quite sure why. It's a very peculiar book; I don't know of any other book quite like it.
On the one side, it's part of the sequence with Ten Days' Wonder where Dannay and Lee (EQ the author) are taking a baseball bat to the god-complex of EQ the character, which I find fascinating on the meta/genre theory level. Ellery Queen starts out his career, in The Roman Hat Mystery as an almost unbearably precieux character, with the pince-nez and the obscure classical quotations and the shibboleth of strict logic, yadda yadda yadda. (I understand from things I've read that he was based heavily on Philo Vance.) And the books themselves were also very self-conscious and coy, not only with the Challenge to the Reader (which I don't actually mind, as it's only making explicit what's implicit in all Golden Age detective fiction), but the forewords by Ellery's Watson-like friend and the elaborate pretense that Ellery is writing these books in a villa in Italy and the long lavish descriptions of the Queens' New York apartment (which, nauseatingly, J. J. McC. tells us has been turned into a museum by the Queens' friends), and Djuna the gypsy house-boy (who, aside from making my teeth grind, makes me very uncomfortable: where the heck is Djuna's social worker and what about the child labor laws and so on?). I still enjoy early EQ, but you have to read past a lot of clutter.
And then something weird happens. Dannay and Lee (and those names are themselves pseudonyms) get fed up with Ellery as they have written him. And they change him. It's a little like what happens after Strong Poison in Dorothy Sayers' books, where she realizes she has to make Peter a real human being and in the process she goes (imho) from writing excellent mystery novels to writing brilliant novels with mysteries in them. This is not to denigrate mystery novels, but to distinguish between what Sayers does and what Dannay & Lee do--because they never make the transition from writing mystery novels to writing novels with mysteries in them. They're writing mystery novels first to last. There's never a sense, as there is especially in Gaudy Night, of something larger than the neat careful clockwork of the mystery. But they really get their teeth into that clockwork. They take it apart, they turn it on its head, and they remake their sleuth.
I can't do the full rundown, because some of the books that chart this process are currently where I can't get at them, but Dannay and Lee essentially drag Ellery Queen down to earth. J.J. McC. disappears, and we never hear anything more either of the villa in Italy or Ellery's alleged wife. Ellery becomes a working writer (and some of my favorite bits especially in Ten Days' Wonder and Cat of Many Tails are the bits where Ellery's writing career and his detective career intersect); he's assumed to be turning out novels regularly, making his living the way his creators do (and they use details about the working life of a writer to good effect). The unironic narrative admiration of Ellery in early novels becomes very ironic--affectionate, but ironic. Djuna mercifully disappears, and the apartment descends from Mount Olympus to become plausible: Cat of Many Tails mentions an ongoing dispute with the landlord about the "lunar topography" of Ellery's study's ceiling, which is entirely unimaginable in the context of the apartment as we first meet it. And, most importantly and subversively, Ellery becomes fallible.
The elaborate nature of crimes and solutions in Ellery Queen novels meant from the beginning that Ellery could entertain incorrect hypotheses. They even have him led up the garden path by the murderer in one of the early books, The Greek Coffin Mystery (complete with remarkably defensive footnotes about Ellery's habit in earlier books of never revealing his solution until he's 100% sure he's right), but that's always part of the process. When the police make an arrest on Ellery's recommendation, that's the end of it. Until Ten Days' Wonder, in which Ellery is so completely bamboozled by Diedrich van Horn that it's a full YEAR after the arrest and suicide of the innocent Howard van Horn that Ellery figures out his mistake--in one of the best pieces of extended exposition I think I've ever read. "You've destroyed me," Ellery tells Diedrich van Horn, and he intends never to meddle in another investigation again.
We know he's doomed, of course, because he's a wildly popular series detective, but Dannay and Lee have figured out something else, and it's that things have consequences. They can't carry through very far--Ellery Queen, like other Golden Age detectives, makes his bread and butter off the every-episode-is-an-entry-point series model, but Cat of Many Tails, among many other things, is a direct sequel to Ten Days' Wonder, in which Ellery is dragged against his will into an investigation, and in which he's once again fallible and wrong, and even has a sort of very low-key nervous breakdown (which is astonishing evidence of humanity in a detective of the type he originally was). And comes out the other side ready to go back to work, having come to terms with the fact that he is not God, nor even a god.
On the other side, it's a serial killer novel written in 1949. As far as I know, it is the only Golden Age mystery written about a serial killer (as opposed to the dozens, if not hundreds, of Golden Age mystery novels written about villains who commit serial murders), and it is a very strange hybrid. Because it's still an Ellery Queen novel, with the elaborate logical structure, hypothesis and counter-hypothesis and all the artificial trappings of the form, but it's also aware, as Ellery Queen novels sometimes aren't, of the human cost--even just in fictional lives--of its existence. The victims in Cat of Many Tails, even though we meet none of them until after their deaths, are very vividly presented, as is the grief of the survivors. There's a sense of them as real people quite contrary to the usual attitude of Golden Age detective fiction, which tends to treat its characters as chess pieces. (Possibly there is a sly remark on this habit in the fact that the first victim is a complete and utter cipher, so complete that the police can't quite believe it.) Dannay & Lee love their genre, that's very clear, but this novel is one where they're also exploring its limitations.
It's also a novel about New York City--and in that sense may be a partial exception to my claim that Dannay & Lee did not write novels with mysteries in them. Because the novel is very interested in New York and in New York's reaction to the serial killer called The Cat. This novel is very conscious of its setting and very aware of that setting as a character, as it signals from the opening lines:
The strangling of Archibald Dudley Abernethy was the first scene in a nine-act tragedy whose locale was the City of New York.
Which misbehaved.
There's a sort of triangular relationship in this novel between detective, murderer, and setting, and it's handled with the affectionate irony characteristic of later Queen. I'd still say it's a mystery novel rather than a novel with a mystery in it, but it's a very large mystery novel (spiritually, if that's the word I want), a generous one. Dannay & Lee have gotten through their pretentious phase; they're confident enough that they don't need to call attention to their craftsmanship. Which means that this is a profoundly readable novel.
Hence, I suppose, the fact that I am rereading it obsessively, despite the fact that I do not like serial killer stories.
It's dated, of course, particularly in the very Freudian nature of its psychology, but I don't even mind that. There's something about it that hits the sweet spot in my brain, something about the story-telling and the use of Ellery Queen as a character and a detective, and particularly as a character who is well established as a detective, and . . . I don't know. I suppose if I could figure it out, I wouldn't be on my sixth or seventh chain rereading.
The book also has my current favorite example of implied stage directions in dialogue. Ellery and his father (Inspector Richard Queen, NYPD) have just found out something vital, their first real clue:
"We've got to have the run of that apartment for a few hours." Ellery took out a cigaret.
"Without a warrant?"
"And tip him off?"
The Inspector frowned.
"Getting rid of the maid ought to present no problem. Pick her day off. No, this is Friday and the chances are she won't be off till the middle of next week. I can't wait that long. Does she sleep in?"
"I don't know."
"I want to get in there over the weekend, if possible. Do they go to church?"
"How should I know? That cigaret won't draw, Ellery, because you haven't lit it. Hand me the phone."
That cigaret won't draw, Ellery, because you haven't lit it. I love this sentence. I love the throwaway nature of it, sandwiched in the middle of a discussion of ways and means. I love all the work it does, everything it tells you--everything the narrative is not telling you--about Ellery's state of mind, and everything it incidentally tells you about the two characters involved. (The relationship between Ellery and his father is something else, previously in the series rather implausible and irritating, that this book deals with very well.) It's beautifully done and it's barely even noticeable. For me, the whole book, even the clunky bits, is like that. It has a sense of grace.
This is a funny place to find grace, but I'll take it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 12:16 am (UTC)This is the sort of thing I love in Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels. So much of the action, the emotion, the worldbuilding, and the characterization are provided via this sort of offhand remark.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 02:00 am (UTC)The only other EQ I like as much is the one with the square and the siblings and the letters from God.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 07:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-01 05:50 pm (UTC)Ten Days' Wonder
Date: 2010-11-25 06:46 pm (UTC)I've read widely in detective fiction over many years, always hoping to find something that would approach Queen's masterpiece but never even getting close.