Teresa’s Book Review: The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

I’m not a rabid fan of Golden Age mysteries although I have read my fair share. There are those people who not only read all of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, and the like but go on to read the more obscure writers from that time period.

I am not one of those people. Nonetheless, I do know something about Golden Age mysteries and the writing styles and tics used in that time period. My dear husband (that would be Bill) is a huge mystery fan and annotates classic mysteries to explain to a modern audience what an audience in 1921 knew automatically. I’m his first reader (the traditional job of a long-suffering spouse) as well as his first editor so I have to plow through pages of this stuff in order for us to publish our books.

It’s a complex relationship.

Why is this important? I read a wide variety of books for a wide variety of reasons. They are written over a wide range of time, going back to the 19th century. Contemporary books — that is, books written in the present day for the present audience (at whatever era this is; don’t forget Jane Austen wrote contemporaries) as opposed to science-fiction, fantasy, or historicals — are relics of their time. When that time passes, the audience’s knowledge passes along with it. If you have ever had to explain to a young’un why Superman changed into his super-suit in a phone booth or where the flash drive goes in a typewriter, you know how things can change.

Styles of writing change too. Nineteenth century novelists assumed their books would be read aloud to a variety of people of various ages. One person would read in the evening to entertain everyone else keeping their hands busy with knitting, mending, or other such needed tasks. Nineteenth century novelists also had to assume that their audience had never seen elephants or pyramids along the Nile or exotic Japanese kimonos. Thus, a classic novel such as one by Dickens has pages of description of people, places, and things because Dickens could not assume his audience automatically knew what such people, places, and things looked like. He had a genuine reason, as important as the one of being paid by the word. Never forget that our age is awash in visual imagery of every possible variety, including varieties we would all be better off not seeing.

What classic novelists did not do was wallow in the pornography of violence, nor did they go skinny-dipping into the bayou of smut, coming up smeared with bodily fluids. Police brutality may have been alluded to in veiled terms but it wasn’t out there and in your face. Nor were unnatural acts described in detail. People knew about them, but they didn’t discuss them in print.

This is why Charles Dickens — who wrote for adults — can be read by fifth graders today, assuming they have the ability to focus for more than thirty seconds at a time. All kinds of dreadful things happen to his characters and they are realer than real, but he doesn’t swim in filth to make himself “relevant.”

And so we arrive at Alex Pavesi’s first novel, The Eighth Detective.

I came across the description of his novel in BookPage, one of those “what to read today” magazines my library hands out to all comers. It sounded interesting and it fit with so many of our interests here at Peschel Press.

A revisit to the Golden Age mysteries of yore!

A mystery within a mystery!

The mathematical underpinnings of mysteries!

Wow. The breathless ad-copy bespelled me and I put the book on hold at the library and waited for my number to come up. Eventually it did and I began the novel with breathless enthusiasm for this new, marvelous, exciting literary sensation.

Well. I didn’t remain breathless for long, probably a good thing since I’d be in the hospital otherwise.

The book is a literary conceit using the classic method of stories told within a larger framework. Thus, the novel opens with the first story set in Spain in 1930. Then, in chapter two, we discover that the first story is going to be dissected by two people; Julia the rediscoverer and would-be editor and Grant, the writer and mathematician who wrote those stories so long ago.

Supposedly he wrote those stories back in 1939 or so and had them privately printed. Julia is here to bring them back to an eager public, largely because of their unusual mathematical underpinnings that explain and define the elements necessary for a mystery. To do this, she has to interview Grant in his cottage located on some island in the Mediterranean.

The novel alternates chapters between the seven stories and Julia and Grant discussing the stories. Eventually, we discover the true reason that Julia is doing this tedious and expensive research which anyone who knows anything about the writing business would recognize as overkill. No publisher is going to spend big bucks to send an editor on a working vacation to some island in the Mediterranean to interview some has-been mathematician/writer who privately published one book that promptly sank into obscurity. Not when writers are banging on the doors and windows begging to be published with new and exciting books for the modern era.

Despite his amazing mystery-writing chops, Grant the writer does not recognize how unlikely this all is. We are given a reason for this, by the way. Eventually. Many, many, many, many tedious pages later.

This is where I come back to true Golden Age mysteries and how they were written. We are told the stories within the novel were published in late 1940 or so as The White Murders.

No one writing in 1940 (or earlier) would refer to a woman on the stage or in the movies as an ‘actor’. That’s a modern affectation. Women on stage were actresses. That’s what they called themselves and so did everyone else. There are a whole slew of similar gendered words, some of which have gone by the wayside. Poetess. Authoress. Comedienne. Waitress. Seamstress. Landlady. They disappear if they aren’t useful.

Stories written in that time frame did not wallow in violence. They did not go into gory detail about beatings, drownings, suffocations, being brained by hammers, or any other details of death. When Dorothy Sayers in Whose Body wrote the Grand Guignol scene involving identifying a body via an autopsy after it was buried and exhumed, she managed to be discreet. Not Mr. Pavesi. He revels in gruesome detail.

I just couldn’t accept what I was being told about these stories being from this time period. It all felt intensely contemporary in vocabulary, settings, characterizations, and attitudes. Mr. Pavesi needs to spend a great deal more time reading Ngaio Marsh or Mary Roberts Rinehart to develop a feel for the time period. For that matter, the framing chapters took place about thirty years after the original seven stories were written. Do the math and the framing story took place in the late ’60’s to ’70’s. It doesn’t “read” correctly either.

I didn’t like the framing story at all. Both Julia and Grant were so bloodless and uninteresting. I didn’t care one bit about either of them and the big reveals at the very end did not make me care more. People claim Agatha Christie was a passionless writer but her books seethe with passion and emotion. The framing story was about as interesting as watching engineers use their slide rules and logarithmic tables to design a highway overpass in 1966.

The mathematical formulas being discussed were sort of interesting but they got tedious too. If it’s a good story, who cares? And if the story is boring and tedious, then all the mathematical formulations in the world will not improve it. It’s a conceit in the literary genre that glittering, jewellike prose will overcome a tedious story. It doesn’t, which is why low-brow authors whose story engines go vroom, vroom, vroom outsell by millions high-brow authors who can write better but can’t tell a story to save their lives.

Highfalutin Literature

I looked up Mr. Pavesi. This is his first novel. I was not surprised to discover he is a software engineer with a PhD in mathematics. It shows. Boy oh boy does it show. He jettisoned humanity in all its complexity and passion in favor of equations and making colorless paper dolls interact on a two-dimensional stage.

If you’re looking for Golden Age mysteries, don’t bother with The Eighth Detective. Reread Dame Agatha or Dorothy L. Sayers or any one of hundreds of other authors of their time period. They will all be better than this novel.

I’m not sure who The Eighth Detective is written for. I have to suppose it is for readers with a strong taste for highfalutin literature that can be bragged about during dinner parties as a status symbol demonstrating their correct taste and class.

The rest of us can reread Rex Stout and have a much better time.

If, after all this, you still feel like devoting a few hours to The Eighth Detective, visit your library. Your tax dollars paid for it so you might as well take advantage of their collection.

Mr. Pavesi does not own a website so you cannot follow his adventures in higher mathematics and literature. He does, however, have a twitter feed.