Volume 12, No. 2, Summer 1996
One of my favorite spots in New Orleans is the
neighborhood around Mystery Street, where it deadends into the
Fairgrounds, near some good restaurants and the city's only decent
natural foods store.
This is in the area called Mid-City, a 20-minute bus ride from the
French Quarter. Walking the cracked sidewalks of Mystery Street and
closest neighbors, I like to study the comfortable little houses that
have been reclaimed by upwardly mobile couples (gay and straight) or
allowed to settle into a genteel old age by their aging, widowed
residents, the blue-haired ladies I see conferring over their garden
fences. Some of the houses are clearly rentals, given over to jockeys
and trainers and other racing life gypsies who come to the
Fairgrounds for the thoroughbred racing season every year. Farther
down the street, in the downtown direction, the neighborhood quickly
gets poorer and dangerous. In New Orleans, the urban jungle changes
block by block, not neighborhood by neighborhood as in most American
cities.
I've often wondered why there isn't a New Orleans detective story
called "Mystery Street." The name is irresistible but so is the
street, with its range of people and backgrounds and possibilities.
Lately, it has occurred to me that the Mystery Street mystery is the
New Orleans mystery writ large. Where are all the New Orleans
mysteries?
***
That may seem a strange question to ask in an issue of the Journal devoted to New Orleans, but a question, I think, that needs some
attention. While there are several highly regarded New Orleans
mystery writers at work today (Julie Smith, Christine Wiltz, Tony
Dunbar, Jean Redmann come immediately to mind) and others who have
made important contributions (Bill and Joyce Corrington) it seems to
me that of all the genuinely exciting American cities, New Orleans is
the least exploited as a mystery setting. Compared to the number of
published stories set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San
Francisco, New Orleans is a desert for mysteries.
In looking for an answer to this puzzle, I can't claim to have
done the kind of earth-turning, tireless research that is not unusual
among many MRI members (the late Bill Critchfield comes to mind), but
I have made a serious, concentrated effort to put together an
overview of New Orleans mystery writing and have been most impressed
by its scarcity. After gathering books of the city's contemporary
writers, I set out to look through the past. Was there a Mr. and Mrs.
North of St. Charles Avenue, I wondered? Perhaps a series from the
1940s featuring a plump chef detective a la Nero Wolfe? A Gypsy Rose
Lee whodunit set in a Bourbon Street strip club? Maybe a period
detective who crosses paths with the famous names linked with New
Orleans: Gen. Andrew Jackson, the pirate Jean Lafitte, Mark Twain,
Kate Chopin, John James Audubon, voodoo queen Marie Laveau.
A careful reading of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery
Writers (2nd Edition, 1985, St. Martin's Press) yielded two
mentions of New Orleans: Elmore Leonard was born here (11 October
1925) and New Orleans Knockout, a 1974 action thriller, wedged
between Detroit Deathwatch and Firebase Seattle in the
Don Pendleton Executioner series.
Art Bourgeau's The Mystery Lover's Companion (Crown, 1986)
and A Catalogue of Crime by Jacques Barzun & Wendell
Hertig Taylor (Harper & Row, 1989) were equally unhelpful.
At New Orleans bookstores, I asked about mysteries by local
writers and/or with New Orleans settings and was almost always
pointed to Julie Smith and Tony Dunbar books. Chris Wiltz and James
Lee Burke were occasionally mentioned, but I didn't run across a
mystery fanatic behind the counter as one often finds in San
Francisco Bay Area stores and any mystery bookstore (alas, there's no
mystery specialty store in the New Orleans area). I considered
interviewing book buyers at the bookshops with good mystery sections
(particularly Beaucoup Books on Magazine Street and Maple Street
Bookstore) but decided to keep my quest low-key and general. I would
work with what's available to the average man (or woman).
In the end, the only pre-1960 local-writer-local-setting mystery I
turned up was Frances Parkinson Keyes' Dinner at Antoine's.
Actually, I'm taking that on faith as it was a last minute tip from a
friend. I've never made it through any of Keyes' turgid romances but
I'm told that Dinner involves a classic murder mystery plot. But what of my search for a St. Charlesian Nick & Nora? A Creole Agatha
Christie? A forgotten hardboiled classic to rival The Maltese Falcon?
If they're out there, I couldn't find them after combing second-hand
bookstores and studying mystery genre guidebooks. I'm sure there are
mystery scholars and specialists who do know the entire New Orleans
ouevre and will find my exploration of "the New Orleans mystery,
history & development" inadequate. But I think I have a better
explanation of the paucity of a New Orleans genre: New Orleans,
despite appearances, is NOT a mystery city.
It is mysterious, yes, perhaps the most mysterious, enigmatic city
in North America, but New Orleans is not a place, a state of mind, an
attitude, that fits with the idea of literary mystery. A mystery, to
be successful and satisfying, must have plot, movement, resolution.
An intriguing question must be posed and answered. New Orleans, with
its Latin-Caribbean-mystic-Third World languor and self-absorbed
vanity isn't interested in answers and only barely acknowledges
questions. The inexorable forward movement of investigation is alien
to the unreflective, unchanging nature of New Orleans. When William
Faulkner (briefly a New Orleans resident in his youth) said, "The
past isn't dead, it isn't even past," he was probably thinking of the
city as much as his native Mississippi. The mysteriousness of New
Orleans -- as opposed to its mystery -- has been brilliantly captured
by Anne Rice, the city's most famous and successful writer. Her lush,
vivid novels of vampires and love are the perfect marriage of New
Orleans's sensual landscape and bent for emotional excess.
Rice and her husband, poet Stan Rice, moved back to New Orleans in
1988 after 25 years in San Francisco. Since then, she's become a kind
of one-woman industry in New Orleans. Her books sell in the millions
and her admirers don't stop at reading. They come to New Orleans in
droves, especially at Halloween. Rice has bought and redone six
buildings in New Orleans, including her childhood home. She lives in
a gorgeous antebellum house in the Garden District at First and
Chestnut streets (everybody knows the house and points it out). She
has another mansion on St. Charles that is used for parties and
business. St. Elizabeth's Orphanage, a handsome Second Empire
compound on Napoleon Avenue that the Rices have restored, houses
Anne's massive doll collection and is the site of the annual
Halloween Coven Party that attracts fans from all over the world.
Combined with the enduring fame of Tennessee Williams, Rice has
kept the idea of New Orleans as a literary city in the forefront of
the public imagination. Unlike many popular assumptions, this one is
absolutely true. New Orleans has been hometown, adopted home and
spiritual incubator to two centuries of first-class writers. Mark
Twain, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable and O.
Henry had strong ties to the city in the 19th century. More recently,
New Orleans has been central to the lives and work of Walker Percy,
Shirley Ann Grau, John Kennedy Toole, William Faulkner, Ellen
Gilchrist, Lillian Hellman, Truman Capote, Robert Olen Butler (winner
of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize) and Richard Ford (winner of this year's
Pulitzer).
A new generation of mystery writers has staked a claim on New
Orleans and in many ways are succeeding in blending the mystery
format with the city's personality. Through some kind of collective
unconsciousness, they have realized that the magic of New Orleans can
only be effective if used carefully and sparingly. Like spicy
Louisiana peppers, a little can make a dish and a lot can ruin it.
Julie Smith is unquestionably the most successful New Orleans
mystery writer at work today. After some modest successes with
mysteries set in San Francisco, Smith scored a breakthrough with her
first Skip Langdon book, New Orleans Mourning (Ivy Books,
1990). It won the Edgar for Best Novel, making Smith the first
American woman to win that category (and it is the big prize) since
1956. Smith, who grew up in the South, worked as a reporter for the
New Orleans Times Picayune then spent a couple of decades in the San
Francisco Bay Area, once told an audience at the Tennessee Williams
New Orleans Literary Festival that part of the genesis of her
character was Smith's own confusion about what it meant to be "a
Southern woman."
Skip Langdon is that confusion made flesh, an overly tall, underly
delicate Garden District product who becomes a New Orleans police
officer instead of a Junior League member. Smith's emphasis is on
character, the yin and yang of Langdon's family struggle and Skip's
personal difficulties in learning and mastering her job. New Orleans
supplies interesting characters and alluring settings but Smith
eschews the heavy-handed "only in New Orleans" subtext that
unbalances many New Orleans stories. In The Axeman's Jazz
(Ivy, 1994) Smith makes ingenious use of the proliferation of 12-Step
programs. Her killer stalks victims through the groups that provide
intimacy and anonymity: the killer selects a victim through close
observation but is cloaked by the AA pact of silence. Axeman has an
undeniable New Orleans flavor but Smith has given her situations and
characters a universality that makes them instantly familiar and
understandable.
Tony Dunbar hasn't achieved Smith's name recognition and output,
but his Tubby Dubonnet series shows great promise of becoming a New
Orleans standard. Tubby is a lawyer more interested in a good time
than his practice, making for a graceful fusion of the accidental
detective with the New Orleans milieu. Dunbar is a attorney himself
who has written several important nonfiction books about Southern
history and culture (Delta Time, Against the Grain:
Southern Radicals and Prophets, etc.). Dunbar's civil rights
background makes his light, sure touch with the Tubby mysteries all
the more interesting. Dunbar's mysteries are genuine entertainments,
not agitprop whodunits with a barely concealed political agenda.
Tubby is introduced in Crooked Man (G.P. Putnam, 1994) as a
New Orleans semi-insider always on the lookout for the Main Chance,
provided there's not too much work involved. Unhappily divorced, fond
of his three daughters, always ready for a good meal, Tubby worries
about his family, his non-love life, his erratic finances, but none
of it too much. He wouldn't be out of place as a minor character in a
Walker Percy novel, the easy-going former fraternity brother of one
Percy's trademark angst-ridden Southern gentlemen, brought out for a
humorous turn and to diffuse the tension that builds up in a Percy
story.
City of Beads (G.P. Putnam, 1996) is the second Tubby
mystery, and falters a bit. Unlike Crooked Man which neatly tied up
all the loose strands of a gym bag with $1 million in cash, a corrupt
deputy, a popular but dead drug dealer and his live, spunky
girlfriend, City of Beads has a few too many strands to be
efficiently dispatched. But Tubby's affable, ultimately honorable
personality rises above plot problems to hold the reader's attention.
In many people's minds James Lee Burke is a New Orleans writer,
but I disagree. I think Burke and his detective, sometimes policeman
Dave Robicheaux, are firmly rooted in the soil of southwest
Louisiana. New Iberia, the setting for most of Burke's books, is the
center of Cajun country and Robicheaux is emblematic of that culture.
In his first book, The Neon Rain, Robicheaux is a New Orleans
policeman, still dealing with his demons from Vietnam. By the end of
the book, however, he's through with New Orleans, ready to be healed
by the family ties and bayou life of New Iberia. Robicheaux
periodically returns to New Orleans (Dixie City Jam, A Morning for
Flamingos) but I don't think Burke's heart is really in it. In an
odd way, this summer's dud movie based on Burke's work (Heaven's
Prisoners with Alec Baldwin) seemed to me a confirmation of the
writer's distance from New Orleans. The filmmakers set much of the
movie in the city, making a complete hash of geography and
sensibilities.
Jean Redmann, who writes as J.M. Redmann, has added a strong gay
character to the New Orleans scene with her P.I. Micky Knight, a
volatile lesbian with an busy love life. In the second Micky Knight
book, The Intersection of Law and Desire (W.W. Norton, 1995),
the main subject is child pornography. Micky, a prickly loner who was
sexually abused by an older cousin, risks everything to uncover the
workings of a kiddie porn business that operates in New Orleans.
Redmann is heavily influenced by the Raymond Chandler
P.I.-as-white-knight tradition which seems to me to inhibit the
character and the stories. Micky is obsessed with money. She dislikes
and even hates rich people on sight. She won't let her girlfriend, a
well-off doctor, even buy her dinner. Micky's code is not so much
unfashionable as unbalanced.
Micky Knight, a mostly intriguing character, illustrates the
difficulties of placing a hard-boiled mystery in New Orleans. It is
like foreign matter in the eye; the body rejects it. The hard-boiled
with its requirements of exacting justice and harsh definitions of
evil and good is the antithesis of the slow-moving, careless temper
of New Orleans. The easy accommodation of Tubby Dubonnet is absent in
Micky Knight as well as the protagonists of Chris Wiltz, James
Sallis, Bill and Joyce Corrington, James Colvert, John Dillman and
O'Neil DeNoux.
Which isn't to say that these novels don't sometimes succeed on
their own terms. Wiltz in particular has constructed a solid,
readable series with her scrapegrace Irish Channel P.I., Neal
Rafferty.
An interesting footnote to the hard-boiled/noir books connected
with New Orleans is the work of iconclastic Barry Gifford. He lives
in the Bay Area, but has spent extended periods in New Orleans.
Gifford's glancing, elliptical style has a resonance with New Orleans
but the impersonal ruthlessness of his characters is completely at
odds with the deeply personal passions that motivate most New Orleans
drama.
***
I look forward to seeing more New Orleans mysteries of any kind.
More writers, more books, more stories increase quality and fuel the
imagination. I think it will be wonderful to walk into New Orleans
bookstores and see special showcases set aside for not just "Local
Writers" but "Local MYSTERY Writers." Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye
on Mystery Street to see if any new stories develop. And what about
that street, you may ask, where DID that name come from?
For the answer, I turned to the bible of New Orleans street lore,
John Churchill Chase's charming Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children
and Other Streets of New Orleans (Macmillan, 1949).
Of the origin of Mystery Street's name, Chase says, it "properly
enough, is something of a mystery."
Of course.
Harriet Swift moved back to her native South last year after
14 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a veteran of daily
newspapers including the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Examiner. Now a freelance writer in New Orleans, she is also the author of The Woman's Guide to San Francisco (Virago, Book Passage Press).
Early one morning, a couple of years back, my
houseguest from Pennsylvania walked out on my front porch and was
astounded to see William Friedkin down on the sidewalk directing Nick
Nolte and Shaquille O'Neal in a movie scene. When he brought me this
news, I didn't bother to get out of bed.
"There're always filming around here," I told him. "This is New
Orleans."
Our city is increasingly popular with film-makers because they
know they don't need set-builders here. Any way they point a camera,
they'll find something historic, artistic, or exciting.
New Orleans is even more popular among us novelists because the
city itself becomes a character, with its own intriguing personality.
And anything that can happen anywhere else can happen here.
Every stratum of humanity is represented here, from the most
privileged to the least. I can write about the insular society in the
grand manses of St. Charles Avenue where debutante balls are still
taken seriously, or visit low-income projects where an eight-year old
may be supporting his household as a look-out for a drug dealer. (I
would visit these only on paper. I wouldn't venture inside one, even
in the company of an armed guard and in broad daylight.)
We have criminals for all genres: gangsters, "gangstas" and
gonifs. And if you're looking for a plot about political corruption,
just pick up the daily newspaper for fifty cents. Our public
officials not only get impeached; they do time!
Descriptions practically write themselves. We have sights:
architecture from all periods of U.S. history, great art in the
museum, small art on the fence in Jackson Square, dance ranging from
ballet at the Theater Of The Performing Arts to tap-dancing for coins
on the street corners. Sounds: good music from the symphony to jazz,
and bad non-music, streetcars clanging, foghorns blowing, and shots
firing.
Any tale about high finance and white-collar crime can be set in
our Central Business District wherein you'll find as many sky
scrapers, brokerage firms and corporate lawyers per square block as
on Wall Street.
I'm planning a back-stage mystery set here in town and I have my
choice among opera, classical dance, Shakespeare in the Park,
contemporary dramas or musicals, TV talk shows, and concerts in
venues as big as the Superdome or as small as the back bar at the
Café Brazil.
I am now at work on a mystery set on a cruise ship and I didn't
have to travel to the ocean for my model. I found one just three
blocks from my house, a luxuriously outfitted riverboat on the
Mississippi.
Horror and fantasy writers have a rich store to draw from in New
Orleans with our reputation for black magic rituals and the tales
woven around the life of Marie Laveau. A notorious Voodoo Queen,
Madame Laveau, was the most powerful woman on the delta during the
mid-nineteenth century. In my forthcoming mystery, 1 (900)
D-E-A-D, I drew on the Laveau legend with a purported
great-granddaughter who uses her ancestor's same trickery with the
same effect on her believing public.
Every local household has a history that's fodder for fiction. My
husband, Richard Catoire, traced his genealogy back to his
six-times-great-grandfather, Antoine Catoire, who came to the New
World as a French soldier in the early seventeen hundreds. (Richard
has copies of a deed and other papers he signed in the 1750's.) It
was easy to give Richard's ancestors to my protagonist, Matt
Sinclair, and so take my readers through the periods of French,
Spanish, Union and Confederate rule of our state.
Ours is certainly the most international city in the south, in the
areas of culture and cuisine. We have a French Quarter, an Italian
Plaza, a Greek Festival, a German Coast, a Norwegian Church, and
restaurants from every part of the Asian continent.
My best friend in town is an 82-year-old Swiss former baroness (I
call her "Gaby" in my books.) who reads all my mysteries in German
and assures me that the translations are excellent.
Richard grew up speaking Cajun French and later learned standard
French and Spanish in Europe, so he is my resident linguist. While
writing dialogue for a character based on a certain Cajun governor, I
asked Richard to "Give me a greeting in bad French and a reply in
*worse* French." And he supplied the lines, as he does for
conversation in Spanish.
But in writing 1 (900) D-E-A-D, I needed dialogue in
grammatical Ireland, so where is one to find a native speaker in a
small city in the southern United States? I called the local Irish
Cultural Society and was steered down to O'Flaherty's Pub where I met
two young troubadours from Connemara for whom Gaelic was their mother
tongue.
While I'm developing a book, I like to walk through all the scenes
of action: a sergeant's office at the police station, the Moon Walk
along the river, the French restaurants, the Bourbon Street nudie
clubs, and the live-oak-flanked neutral ground on the north border
of the Vieux Carre.
When a German TV producer came to town to interview me, I was able
to take him and his camera man on a tour through most of the
locations mentioned in my books and even pointed out the big house on
Esplanade Avenue where "Matt Sinclair" lives.
"But don't tell the people inside," I warned. "They don't know it
yet."
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New Orleans Mysteries