Volume 15, No. 1, Spring 1999
Mystery, even in its most elemental form, i.e., the
locked room mystery, is not entirely confined to the mechanics of
the puzzle. The resolution is always linked to desires, conflicts,
superstition, history, rooted in the world outside that room. For
a film director, those extrinsic influences are compounded with
the options of lighting, music, color, special effects, camera
angles, editing, components that abet the transformation of a
"pure" mystery into a mystery that is crossbred with fantasy,
romance, supernatural, suspense, history.
It is no coincidence that many great film directors were
directors of great mystery films; perhaps because those with
facility in different categories of film understood mystery's
natural rapport with other genres. We see how fluidly directors
who worked in a variety of genres adapted to classic mysteries and
incorporated sex, romance, humor, psychology and social commentary
into the riddle-and-resolution formula: Billy Wilder (Double
Indemnity), Otto Preminger (Laura), Orson Welles
(Touch of Evil), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon),
Henry Hathaway (Kiss of Death). These directors understood
that crime and resolution could not be neatly plucked from a
larger human tapestry.
Director Fritz Lang, said it best: "It would be too easy if
death settled everything." Though the most well-known film of his
silent career was the futuristic drama Metropolis, the
character that absorbed much his career was novelist Norbert
Jacques' archvillain Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse was the focus of Lang's
two-part thriller, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922). These
films, Der Grosse Spieler and Inferno, render Mabuse
as a criminal mastermind who is the orchestrator of gambling,
financial duplicity, abduction, murder. Unlike Conan Doyle's arch
criminal Moriarty, however, Mabuse, the "man of a thousand masks,"
is not defined by his extraordinary intellect but by the
supernatural influence he wields over his minions.
This blend of crime drama with more fantastic or romantic
elements also characterized Lang's earlier two-film thriller
Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919). The films -- The Golden
Lake and The Diamond Ship -- pit a playboy/adventurer
against a criminal society (The Spiders) and throw in romance,
lost treasure, clairvoyance. (Think Indiana Jones). Some years
later, when Lang was persuaded to revive Mabuse in Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, 1933),
he again blends the political notion of world domination with the
supernatural notion of mind control; Mabuse dies midway through
the film and his spirit takes over the mind of an asylum's
director, who becomes the conduit between Mabuse and the
underworld.
Lang's vision of a society controlled by a madman would recur
throughout his films. Other recurrent themes were uncharacteristic
villains, the fickleness of the justice system, and a social order
that can be reduced to chaos by a simple incident (not always a
crime, sometimes a mere misunderstanding). These became as much
Lang signatures as his use of light and shadow to enhance mood,
his crafty editing, and his meticulous preparation.
All of these merged in Lang's first sound film, a
thinly-disguised account of the Dusseldorf serial murders of the
1920s. M (1931) concerns a city so terrorized by a child
killer that the operation of the criminal underworld is stymied,
prompting the criminals to vie with law enforcement for the
apprehension of the killer so that both can return to business as
usual. Lang's camera bypasses the murders and catches their
aftermath: an empty chair, a ball rolling from the bushes, a
floating balloon.
Left to our imagination, the crimes become monstrous, but when
the monster appears, he is singularly unimposing. Lang ingeniously
cast against type; Peter Lorre, as the pedophile-killer Beckert,
is no Mabuse-like archvillain, he is squat, hapless, timid, in the
throes of uncontrollable madness. ("I can't help myself. I haven't
any control over this evil thing inside me ... Who knows what it
feels like to be me?") Society is at the mercy of a killer and the
killer is at the mercy of his mania.
Offered the opportunity to direct in the United States, Lang
found a project that expressed his view of a precarious social
order. Fury (1936) based upon Norman Krasnal's Oscar award
winning story "Mob Rule," is a study in the erosion of middle
class principles. An innocent man is arrested for a kidnapping. A
lynch mob storms the jail and burns it to the ground. The accused
man escapes, is presumed dead and members of the lynch mob are
tried for his murder. The accused must decide whether he will
allow them to be convicted or will exonerate his "killers." A
lynch mob offered Lang an image of social disintegration that was
identifiably American (the story was based on a 1933 lynching in
San Jose) and yet symbolic of what was occurring in Germany. It
also allowed him, once again, to renovate the image of the
villain: not a telepathic mastermind, not a hapless psychotic, but
the common man.
Lang's follow-up film, You Only Live Once (1937), took
the crime drama in another direction, a lovers-on-the-lam
predecessor to outlaw romances like Sugarland Express and
Bonnie and Clyde. The plot is deceptively simple-an ex-con
tries to go straight, is wrongly accused and imprisoned, and
escapes shortly before his execution. He makes a run for the
border with his wife and both are gunned down. Lang's disordered
society is compelled to be one in which justice is wayward, the
innocent perish, and even the lawless struggle for dignity and
order.
In Fury and You Only Live Once, Lang exploits the
most profoundly sympathetic protagonist: the unjustly accused
innocent. In the forties, Lang converted this to the corrupted
innocent by adding sexuality to the mix, initiating his transition
toward noir. His companion films Woman in the Window (1944)
and Scarlet Street (1945), are variations on the classic
noir set-up: the loose woman who lures a law-abiding man to his
destruction. (Lang's first film, The Half Breed, 1919, was
about a harlot of mixed race who ruins two men; one winds up in an
asylum, one in prison). Woman in the Window is really a
bleak comedy (an earlier attempt at a gangster/musical comedy,
You and Me, 1938, was "lousy," according to Lang.) A humble
professor meets the woman whose portrait he had admired, and an
innocent drink leads to a darkly absurd succession of murder,
guilt, attempted suicide-until he wakes from what was all a
nightmare. In Scarlet Street, the duped innocent is a
henpecked clerk conned by a prostitute, whom he murders when her
duplicity is revealed. Her pimp is convicted of the murder; the
remorseful clerk, unable to persuade the authorities of his guilt,
goes mad.
In Lang's crossbreeding of genres, the dual personality was a
significant tie. The Mabuse films are supernatural thrillers
because Mabuse is a criminal-telepath; the hero of the organized
crime-romantic melodrama The Spiders is a
playboy-adventurer. The clerk in Scarlet Street is an
accountant-artist, the hero in the espionage-thriller Cloak
and Dagger is a professor-secret agent, the lovers in the
gangster-musical You and Me are shop clerks-ex-cons.
Lang's last film of the forties was a neo-Gothic that may have
been inspired by Hitchcock's Suspicion and Rebecca.
Secret Beyond the Door (1948) involves a vacationing
heiress who meets and marries a charming stranger; they return to
his mansion, in which each room has been decorated identically to
the site of a famous murder. A follow-up film, House by the
River (1950), concerns a writer who murders a servant girl.
There was a lot thrown into the mix-sexuality, ghosts, square
dancing (!) -- and homicidal frenzy triggered by perfume. (In
Secret Beyond the Door the killer scent was lilac.) Though
the film was reckoned a failure, it did offer a villain Lang would
return to again, the corrupt writer.
In the fifties, Lang became -- depending upon one's viewpoint -- just another European expatriate/hack or a significant architect of
film noir. Noir milieu was compatible to Lang's moody visuals and
noir text endorsed and refined his recurrent themes of the
parallels between good and evil, innocence and corruption, honor
and vengeance.
The Blue Gardenia (1953) was as conventional a whodunit
as Lang ever directed. A jilted girl is picked up in a bar by
another Lang hyphenate, a fashion designer-calendar artist. At
his apartment, she becomes intoxicated, fights off his sexual
advances, loses consciousness. The following morning, she wakes
with no memory of the preceding night, and learns that the man has
been murdered. (If the plot seems familiar, you may be thinking of
The Morning After, 1987, with Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges.)
She is targeted by an aggressive reporter who offers to help her
learn the truth. The film shifts to mystery-romance, but it is
noir romance, infected with suspicion. Does he really love her, or
is he after a headline?
The best film of this era, a noir classic, was The Big
Heat (1953). Mob boss Mike Lagana takes on an almost
Mabuse-like omnipotence; the corrupt cops, fickle legal system,
dual personalities were standard Lang. But Lang captures that
distinctive cross between classic man-against-the-system heroism
and contemporary the-system-can't-be-beat cynicism, the ubiquitous
corruption that drives the hero into a sort of moral exile, which
epitomize great noir films. Screenwriter Sidney Boehm won an Edgar
for his impressive screenplay.
The journalist-mystery, with the compromised writer replacing
the compromised cops of Lang's earlier films, was a subject Lang
returned to twice more in the fifties. While The City
Sleeps (1956) is less about the series of sex murders that
launch the plot than their effect on the ambitious journalists
who -- again, shades of Mabuse -- are driven to an almost criminal
frenzy by their powerful boss. In Beyond A Reasonable Doubt
(1956), a writer enlists his future father-in-law, a publisher, in
a scheme to expose the inequities of the death penalty by framing
himself for a murder, then having his accomplice reveal the
exonerating evidence. The publisher dies before he can deliver the
evidence and the plot shifts into a series of twists that reveals
the hoax to be only one facet of a larger conspiracy.
The remainder of Lang's career was undistinguished. He returned
to Europe to make a pair of costume dramas and revived Mabuse in
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). His final film work
was not as a director, but playing a director in Francois
Truffaut's Le Mepris (Contempt, 1963).
Patrick McGilligan, in his biography of Lang, Fritz Lang:
The Nature of the Beast, mentions that Lang had wanted a
moniker akin to Alfred Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense." It would
be difficult to settle on a nickname from Lang's filmography,
which included romantic adventures, costume dramas, science
fiction/ fantasy, Westerns, espionage thrillers, psychological
suspense, film noir. "Jack of All Genres," perhaps, and master of
more than most.
Jane Rubino is the author of the Cat Austen/Victor Cardenas series.
I'm not sure that cross-genre writing is quite
respectable. It's probably a little like cross-dressing: something
it's OK to do in the privacy of your own home, but you wouldn't
want the neighbors to know about it. Nevertheless, I'll admit that
I've done it. The question is, why? Here's the answer:
Many years ago, a lot more years than I like to think about
these days, 'way back when I began my serious reading of crime and
mystery fiction, I noticed that a number of the writers whose work
I enjoyed also wrote western novels. Some these writers were
Donald Hamilton, Harry Whittington, Richard Wormser, Elmore
Leonard, Richard Jessup, Marvin H. Albert, William R. Cox, Loren
Estleman, Jack Ehrlich. Most of these people are pretty much
forgotten now, which is too bad, but that's a topic for a
different article. What's relevant is that the westerns I picked
up were just as well written and just as entertaining as the crime
and mystery novels I'd been reading. And nearly all of them had
well-constructed plots that could just as easily have been updated
and used as the plots of those crime and mystery novels as well.
So it was probably inevitable that when I began writing
mysteries, I'd eventually turn my hand to a western. And it was
probably just as inevitable that some of my westerns would have
plots that involved crime and mystery. (My current western,
Outrage at Blanco from Dell, certainly includes plenty of
crime elements, including bank robbery, though it's not a
mystery.)
My first western was called Ryan Rides Back (M. Evans
hardcover; Ballantine reprint). It's a sort of revenge novel about
a man who returns to his hometown (where he's anything but
welcome) to find out who murdered his sister. There's someone
already in jail and about to hang for the crime, but Ryan doesn't
think the authorities have the right man. If that's not a mystery
plot, I don't know what is. Later I wrote a book called A Time
for Hanging (M. Evans), in which a girl is murdered and once
again the wrong person is arrested. No revenge involved in this
one. It's more of a straightforward whodunit, with the wrong
people being accused right and left. I did a couple of other
westerns for M. Evans, Galveston Gunman and Medicine
Show, both of which also have mystery elements.
And I wrote Colorado Special, a paperback original that
was part of a series done under the house name of William Grant.
It was published by Lynx Books, and probably no one ever read it
because the publisher folded almost as soon as the series got
started. In fact, I did a second William Grant novel that was
never published. The whole series was made up of mystery novels
set in the old west, all of them involving crimes solved by
employees of a detective agency specializing in railroad crimes.
It's probably not revealing any secrets to say that James
Reasoner, author of many cross-genre novels, wrote the first novel
in the series.
It's clear that I'm addicted to cross-genre writing. Do you
think I could get on "The Jerry Springer Show"?
by Martha C. Lawrence (Escondido, California)
"If the phrase 'psychic investigator' makes you want to
roll your eyes, you're not alone. I cringe just about every time I
hear it."
So says Elizabeth Chase in the opening line of Aquarius
Descending (St. Martin's Press, 1999), and she might as well
be speaking for me. For although I write a series about a psychic
private eye, I have a gag reflex to the term "paranormal," which
conjures visions of Speilbergesque poltergeists and tawdry psychic
hotlines. For years my fear of being lumped in with the paranormal
fringe kept me from admitting to a lifetime of clairvoyant
experiences. I grew up in a haunted house. Kept quiet about that.
I saw auras. Kept quiet about those. I even heard voices on
occasion. Definitely shut up about them.
I was intensely curious about the paranormal but had a hard
time identifying with the so-called psychics I encountered in
novels and on the silver screen. These characters were invariably
over-the-top, blessed with phenomenal, fail-proof powers that
looked nothing like my imperfect psychic ability. This bugged me
so much that it inspired me to create a character I could relate
to, one that defied the woo-woo stereotype. Enter Dr. Elizabeth
Chase, Stanford educated but down-to-earth, a gifted psychic who
can't always control or correctly interpret her extrasensory
perceptions. I gave her a P.I. license so that she could fall back
on old-fashioned detective skills when her psychic ability failed
her. Contrary to popular assumption, psychics can't simply put
their fingers to their temples and know for certain who killed the
victim and where the murder weapon was hidden. But that we could.
I drove myself nuts trying to tune in on where O.J. put that damn
knife.
Mind you, I didn't think the publishing world would actually
buy the idea of a psychic detective. For one thing, it broke the
rules. In my days as an editor with Simon & Schuster and later
with Harcourt Brace, I'd learned that using a psychic to solve a
crime was "cheating" by the rules of detective fiction. The
assumption was that the psychic would automatically know who
committed the crime -- one of the very misconceptions I was
determined to smash. Braced for rejection, I sent off three
chapters to three agents with a cover letter asking if anyone had
any interest. To my delighted surprise, all three responded with
enthusiasm. My first novel, Murder In Scorpio (St. Martin's
Press), went on to be nominated for an Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony
award for Best First Novel in 1996. Clearly a sea change was in
the air.
Reviewers typically commend me for seducing them into
suspending their disbelief. "A gripping, believable story...
that even those skeptical of psychics will enjoy," says Publishers
Weekly. "Readers who think a series featuring a psychic
investigator must necessarily be corny will be surprised," chimes
in Booklist. "Acceptable and appealing to the somewhat or
completely skeptical reader," says Julie Kaufmann of the San Jose
Mercury News. I don't blame them for their initial doubts. Until
enough writers produce enough valid material to counterbalance the
ridiculous stereotypes, there's bound to be skepticism.
Many authors have pulled me aside and secretly whispered in my
ear how brave they think I am for writing a woo-woo mystery
series. While I appreciate their praise, I must confess that I'm
being more autobiographical than brave. The truth is, I perceive
the world through psychic eyes. When Elizabeth sees an aura or has
a precognitive dream, I'm writing what I know. This authenticity
may be the key to why the Elizabeth Chase series works.
Although I've probably had more heightened experiences than
most, I believe the paranormal is in fact quite normal and that it
belongs to everybody, not just the gifted few. I would guess that
the so-called unseen realm isn't so much unseen as it is
dismissed. We jump out of bed and into our lives, ignoring our
dreams. We dismiss everyday synchronicities as unimportant. We
tend to look on the surface of things -- for example, the clothes a
person wears, instead of the energy the person gives off. And if
the feedback I get from readers is any indication, most of us have
at least one or two bona fide psychic experiences in our closets.
A 74-year-old doctor told me recently that he was surprised how
much he liked my books, given that he was a "complete skeptic"
who'd never had a paranormal experience. "Except," he added as an
afterthought, "that one time."
"What time was that?" I asked.
"Three days after my father died, he came back to visit me."
"Oh," I said, intrigued. "Your father came to you in a dream?"
"No," he insisted, "this wasn't any dream. It was real."
Skeptics. You gotta love 'em.
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Cross-Genre Mysteries