Mystery Seasons

            Two winters ago, I set myself the task of reading every Agatha Christie book my small constellation of Long Island libraries could provide. Buying the books was out of the question, because then there would be the signs of my disgrace, stuffed in next to The Portable Nietzsche and the endless books on how to write well. But more importantly, I was already committed to hundreds of dollars of book purchases for graduate school in creative writing.
            One of my teachers told me, outright, that Literary Fiction is written only for other writers. And we are honor bound to buy each other’s books and ogle the masterful uses of language and structure that a brilliant mind can produce. Pshaw. The reading exhausted me. The basic fact that these authors had no interest in entertaining me rankled. I needed an escape and Agatha Christie offered me a reading list I could appreciate.
            I am not by nature anti-intellectual. I was a philosophy major in college. It’s difficult to get more abstruse and pointlessly intellectual than that. There is something shockingly clean and reductive about being a philosophy major. Most people see it as an artsy fartsy thing to do, lots of coeds in black turtlenecks debating the meaning of life. And yes, I did have some classmates who favored black, and did not wash, and said things like, “There is no such thing as an original idea.” But I also had teachers who begged us to see clearly through all of the schmaltz. Kant repeats himself and speaks in muddled elusive complexities. Your job is to take three pages of Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason and spit it back to me in three sentences. Go.
            Find the flaw in the logic of Descartes’ proof of the existence of God.
            Be, in the best way possible, a living, breathing bullshit detector.
            I can’t quote one philosopher to you now. But I can remember the satisfaction I felt each time I found the wholly idiosyncratic basis on which they built their objective or universal truths.

            Hercule Poirot, Christie’s spectacularly egotistical and always right detective is not struggling with his world view. He knows he is right. He knows what’s true, in the end. He is conclusive and certain.
I crave that certainty.
            I spend a lot of my time queasy with uncertainty and confusion, but, or so, I am drawn to people who, like Poirot, are certain and confident. There is value in doubt. It keeps you questioning other people’s certainties and allows you to see past accepted truths to something that may be hidden in plain sight. But it is damn uncomfortable.
            The relief I feel when Agatha Christie sets out a mystery that will be solved, and creates a detective who is smarter than me and will lead me to the right conclusions, is addictive. I can sit back and trust Miss Marple to get me through the trouble ahead. I don’t have to know the name of every gun ever made, or be able to read the body language of the inscrutable lothario. I mean, I’ll try, no question I’ll give it my best effort, but the world will not shatter if I can’t figure out that the murder weapon was the pin stuck in the grandmother’s hat. I can test myself in a safe environment instead of with tax forms that I will surely misconstrue, earning the ire of IRS agents waiting to beat their fists through my glass front door.
            With Agatha Christie, there is always a detective organizing the world for me, telling me what to look at, guiding me away from the tangents. She doesn’t spend a chapter aimlessly examining the shrubbery for philosophical content. If she has a philosophical or psychological point, she makes it. She doesn’t drop feather-light bread crumbs; she drops bowling balls. If only real life were like this. I picture Agatha in a comfortable chair next to my bed, narrating. Today, Rachel is in her usual panic about her work on the novel. She is trying to decide whether or not to take a nap. This usually goes on for a while. Let us skip ahead.

            I love white space. I have loved it ever since I realized that it’s during the white space breaks that characters get a chance to pee. And I don’t have to sit there with them with my bare feet on the cold linoleum, listening to the urine hit the water in a Morse code type fashion. And I don’t have to sit through Hercule Poirot’s latest haircut or the endless hours he must spend polishing his shoes. Agatha knows what she needs me to know to get her story told. For the most part. There was one wrong turn, about espionage and neo-nazi groups where she clearly lost the thread. But I forgave her.
            The danger of an Agatha Christie book is that, because she has done the work of figuring out the mystery for me, I am left feeling superfluous. She answered all of the questions, not only about who did it and why, but about fatalism and God and morality. She knows every truth about the world she has created and I’m left feeling just as unenlightened about my own world as ever. Because the people I know don’t fit into the types she has created. And they don’t spill their secrets or articulate them even to themselves, for the most part. Agatha has given me no more tools than I had before I opened the book – and yet as I was reading I thought she was figuring it all out for me – making sense of good and evil, organizing human behavior into manageable categories, making the world safe for someone with a brain as chaotic as mine. But it was all an illusion. When I close the book and try to reacclimate to the world I really live in, panic returns.

            My obsession with mysteries continued through the summer and fall. I collected Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels from every library within driving distance. I even, though it surprised me, bought a few un-gettable books from used booksellers online; 99 cents for the book, $3.50 for shipping. I could have gone to Barnes & Noble and paid seven bucks without all of the waiting – but I chose to believe they did not have the books I needed. (And they certainly didn’t have them when I was up and restless at two a.m.)
I needed those books, like I needed cereal for breakfast – something safe and bland that would reassure me that I am a reliable person on a schedule – rather than what I am – a writer with a bad case of the deep darks and a craving for isolation that leads to the kind of loneliness felt only by those babies in Romanian orphanages who are never picked up or held and forget to cry for succor.
            There is no warmth in a Nero Wolfe book – no comfort of the inspirational, motherly sort. Food is plentiful but gourmet in a way that does not include spaghetti and meatballs or cookie dough ice cream. There was one book that centered on shipments of fresh corn, roasted in their husks once a week – but even that, even the thought of the crisp sweetness of the corn was waylaid by Nero’s endless need for perfection in his food, throwing out the ears of corn that were a moment too fresh or a moment too stale.
What these books provide most of all is a sense of time never moving forward. Archie Goodwin, Nero’s loyal assistant, is forever in his early thirties, Nero Wolfe’s obesity never leads to disease or death, a case never goes unsolved. Time has stopped on West Thirty-Fifth street and no matter what references are made to events from the 50’s or 70’s it is 1930 something perpetually and the city is full of dapper young men and beautiful women in dresses and hats. Hardly anyone watches TV. They go to the theatre instead of the movies. The meaning of life never has to be discovered because life is endless.
            This fits me because my clock has stopped. It keeps stopping. My most desperate wish as a little girl was that time would stop; and during the time out all of the wrongs in the world would be righted, so that when life started again, things would be perfect. I keep stopping the clock when the next step I am supposed to take feels impossible. Nero Wolfe can lead me through a reassuring day of orchid tending and book reading and gourmet meals and occasional detective work done safely from home. He lets me believe that I don’t have to move forward if I don’t want to. I can stay here – at least until I run out of his books. And then it will be over. Time will begin again with or without me.

Rachel Mankowitz is a novelist and sometime essayist. She lives on Long Island with her Cockapoo puppy, Cricket, who has graciously allowed this break in the scratching schedule (which will now resume).