"It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a detective!" by Sarah D'Almeida (a.k.a. Sarah A. Hoyt)
Above are the first four Three Musketeers mysteries by Sarah D'Almeida. A fifth, Dying By the Sword, is forthcoming in December. It's fabulous to see the inseparables together again, even (or maybe especially) because trouble, of course, ensues. And don't just take my word for it! Forbes says, "In the capable hands of Sarah D'Almeida - nom de plume of Sarah Hoyt - the improbably plausible springs to fast-paced, adventurous life.... The original creator of the Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, would give D'Almeida a thumbs up - and probably ask for a cut of the royalties, which the author would be wise enough to hand over lest a duel ensue."
It should be noted here that mystery week will continue on Monday and beyond (so week is a bit of a misnomer) with a fantastic article called "CS...I Don't Think So" by Lee Lofland of the wonderfully informative blog The Graveyard Shift and the non-fiction book Police Procedure and Investigation, A Guide for Writers, from Writers Digest Books.
And now, without further ado, I give you:
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a detective! by Sarah D'Almeida (a.k.a. Sarah A. Hoyt)
Now those of you who read my title are wondering either if I took leave of what little sanity I ever had, or if, perhaps, I’ve been confused all these years when I thought that I was reading mystery.
After all - I’ve been assured at several occasions - mystery is for sensible people: people who don’t want to trouble their heads with Celtic myths, Roman legends and the like. Oh, yes, sure, mystery readers will tolerate a bit of the supernatural, now and then. But superheros? Come on!
I confess that while in college, when they attempted to inflict on me a basic knowledge of literature and literary analysis (it was already too late. By the age of eleven I’d sold my heart to mystery and my soul to science fiction), I dozed through several classes that insisted that mystery was the direct descendant of the medieval morality play, where the world is set to rights after an evil disruption.
As much as I hate to admit it - and you have no idea how much I hate to admit it - some of my professors might - don’t push it, I’m willing to settle for might - have been right. And if that were the case, the detective - at least in some mysteries - is the deus ex machina who arrives at the end to set it all right.
These were the first mysteries I read.
Here I must take an excursion into my background. As some of you know, but most probably don’t, I was born and raised in Porto, Portugal and didn’t learn English till I was about fourteen. This means my first experience of mystery was in Portuguese. It waited until I was ten or eleven simply because - I have no idea why - Portuguese publishers at the time seemed to equate mystery with horror. So mystery imprints had such charming names as ghoul, blood and - the one my dad read - vampire.
By that time I’d gone through everything in the house that could even remotely be considered reading material - from my mom’s couple of books of fairytales to my dad’s books on economics and philosophy, to history textbooks, to my grandfather’s childhood books (for some inexplicable reason kept in the potato cellar) about pirates and warfare - but I’d not touched those scary books with black covers and vampire on the spine, because I was sure they were nothing more than explicit horror.
Though I can’t remember the date exactly, I remember the afternoon as if it were yesterday: a hot August afternoon of the sort where there’s no shade anywhere and the book room which faced east and was, furthermore, shaded by having a balcony right above it, was the only place in the house where one could be in relative comfort. I was bored. (I still bore easily.) And there was nothing on that bookshelf that I hadn’t read before... except, on the bottom shelf, a neat row of black paperbacks with vampire on the spine. I picked the book more or less at random, without quite looking at it, and opened it half expecting to scream in horror and put it back.
I was lucky. My dad’s library included every title that this imprint put out, and I might have come across one of the hard boiled police procedurals that my dad loved. Instead, that first mystery book, against which all mystery books since then are judged, was Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout. I think I was captured within moments by Nero Wolfe’s massive girth, his erudition, his tulips, his reasoning, heck, even his pfui.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I liked Archie Goodwin - how could I not? Young, I might have been, but I was still female - but the character who hooked me and caused me to come back again and again was Nero Wolfe.
I’ve read that other mystery readers are captured by the puzzles, or perhaps by the gritty aspects of the story. I’m not one of those. Mind you, the puzzle better be good. I don’t mind if I can solve it two thirds into the book, but a writer who can’t fool me past the second chapter has already lost me. However, the reason I’m irked by that is that I want the detective to be smarter than I. Take Nero Wolfe (even if you might need a winch.) Rex Stout builds him up as an amazing man, capable of solving everything. His very eccentricity sets him apart from common humanity but it’s allowable because he’s above common humanity. If he is fooled for longer than poor little me, then he’s not quite the hero he should be, and I won’t be interested.
This is also probably why I prefer cozies or private investigator books to police procedurals. After all, procedurals are inhabited by professionals who are supposed to solve crimes by virtue of their training. They are not extraordinary for doing what they can do, any more than I’m extraordinary because I can write novels. I trained for it. And they trained for their work.
Also possibly, this is the reason - Sarah looks up above, to make sure that she’s not about to be fulminated by a ray from the cloudless sky - that I always preferred Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to Poirot. Miss Marple strikes me as superhuman while Poirot strikes me as phony. This is because Agatha Christie played too perfectly into the “superman myth.” It’s almost as if she built him by the book: an anal-retentive passion for order, an exotic origin (though I can never think of that without hearing her bemoan in her auto-biography why did I make him Belgian?), a dose of eccentricity. He feels not like a superhero but like a robot acting according to programming. Miss Marple, OTOH, with her pink knitting, her gentle titter, her antiquated attire feels all too human. She could be anyone’s old maiden aunt. But as she sits there, she’s employing her superpower, which is her ability to foil criminals. The pink knitting and the fluffy personality are no more than Superman’s phone-booth: a semi-transparent disguise for the extraordinary person within.
I see many of you are still looking skeptical. I see you raising your eyebrows. Yes, you, there, in the back row, with the chewing gum. I challenge you to go and look at your favorite books featuring amateur detectives and see if I’m not right. Some of them, you can marginally, almost, sort of, imagine as making sense as crime-solvers. I’m thinking here of Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael. Yes, of course his knowledge of herbology helps with poisoning cases. Then there’s Gordianus the Finder in Steven Saylor’s books. Though he’s a private investigator he becomes so because he has an amazing ability to solve puzzles. In fact a - cough - superhuman ability. And then we go into more obvious territory. Look at Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. Come on, how come she - bounty hunter or not - who spends her days immersed in doughnuts and mascara, can solve crimes? Even more so, how can she avoid getting killed in the first five minutes of consorting with criminals and mafiosi? Right. Because she’s a superhero. The bullets glance right off her super push-up-bra, while her erratic shooting - or explosion - finds its mark.
And if you still doubt that this thesis is in fact accurate, look at Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who mysteries and tell me if you can imagine your own siamese, no matter how smart, solving murders. The two siamese are CATS. It pains me to point this out, but there it is. If they were not also super heros, they would never be able to solve more than the mystery of the moved food dish. (And that, judging by my own lot, with varying degrees of difficulty.)
Of course, in my own mystery series, I used the three musketeers whom Dumas already made something of superheros, or, at least, of superhuman incarnations of archetypes. Cunning Aramis, noble Athos, clever D’Artagnan and loyal Porthos, as he describes them in The Man In the Iron Mask. In my books, they are perhaps less archetypal but definitely as endowed with superpowers. Aramis can charm any woman. Athos incarnates the virtues of noblesse oblige. D’Artagnan can scheme his way out of any difficulty and Porthos... Porthos is ever willing to protect the others.
When Athos fights with a broken ankle and severe concussion - in Musketeer’s Seamstress - he’s only doing what a Lord does, protecting his people. And when Aramis works his way into the palace - in Dying by the Sword - by charming every woman in sight, he’s only using his superpower. When D’Artagnan pretends to be what he is not - in pretty much all five books - he’s only using his superhuman wit. And when Porthos risks his life for a lost boy who was under his protection, he’s only being superhumanly loyal.
So, next time you read a mystery, look very hard at the detective at the moment of denouement. If you squint, you’ll see the cape he’s tucked under his everyday garments. And you’ll know the world is right again. There are superheros watching over us.