mystery

Roger Rosenblatt wrote, in an essay in NY Times:
"Since 9-year-olds didn't wear suit jackets, I had to carry my revolver in a jury-rigged shoulder holster under my polo shirt. The look was that of a kid who had just snitched a mango from a fruit stand, and was unsuccessfully trying to conceal it. The cap gun was cold against my chest, yet I maintained a grim, professional demeanor, lest my suspects spot any weakness and get the upper hand....I trailed them at short distances..."
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I could relate to that -- from third grade to fifth grade I read all the Nancy Drew books and other mysteries, too -- Christine Noble Govan and Emmy West wrote some of my favorites. And once, inspired, I created advertising (writing on pieces of paper) offering to solve any mysteries that people might have, and including my name and phone number. Sort of -- going into business. I went around the neighborhood (in little town in Ohio about 10 miles from Kent) and left my paper flyers in people's front doors.

Responses rather desultory: At school in Band Class over in the high school, a high school girl spoke to me (ooooh, an honor): (cheerfully) -- "I've got a mystery for ya -- find my band hat!"

And on arriving home from school my father came to ask me something. He looked baffled and amused at same time: baff-mused. He asked me about my mystery-solving service, and I said, "Yes!" and told him I made up flyers and took them around. And he said, "Well, a lady called here and ..." A little uncomfortable, somehow. I knew something was up but didn't know what.
"Well, she just -- she's -- well -- er, she -- didn't-think-that-was-very-funny!"

(?)
"It wasn't sposta be funny."
Now I was baffled.
I never knew any more about that.
(Come to think of it, THAT is the only "mystery" which my enterprise yielded -- and I still haven't solved it! Unless -- "no matter what you do, somebody's ALWAYS bitching" is the Solution to the Mystery...!? ...maybe...

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It occurred to me a few years ago that all stories are essentially "mysteries" even if they aren't categorized that way by publishers and booksellers. Every story is -- find out what happens...Any Jane Austen novel: Whom will the central character marry? is the mystery...

And Roger Rosenblatt said that in his nytimes essay, too! -- "All writers are mystery writers."

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[excerpt, Rosenblatt essay]: Since 9-year-olds didn't wear suit jackets, I had to carry my revolver in a jury-rigged shoulder holster under my polo shirt. The look was that of a kid who had just snitched a mango from a fruit stand, and was unsuccessfully trying to conceal it. The cap gun was cold against my chest, yet I maintained a grim, professional demeanor, lest my suspects spot any weakness and get the upper hand. I trailed them among the secret stores and wholesale houses of New York's East 20s, a neither-here-nor-there area north of Gramercy park, where I lived. The place looked innocuous enough, but was clearly teeming with crime. The businessmen I shadowed also looked harmless, to anyone but me. I trailed them at short distances....I saw myself as acting simultaneously in real time and in a film noir, so I was both tracking my quarry and watching myself do it. For his part, the killer, sensing danger, would turn around from time to time, confused and annoyed at being pursued by a kid with a mango in his shirt.

My reasons for taking up the detective business were the usual ones. I was bored by my parents, my school, my respectable neighborhood, and by childhood....The more fundamental reason, however, was that I loved living in a mystery. Thus, though I hardly knew it at the time, I was becoming a writer, or to be more accurate, I was thinking and feeling like a writer. E.L. Doctorow likens his writing process to driving at night, when you can see only as far as the headlights illuminate (a film noir image if ever there was one). This method will take you only so far, since at some point in the act of writing, the ending will crook its siren finger and beckon you to leap into the light. Yet it is the darkness where the thrills occur, and the lurid pictures, and the base thoughts, and the strange words to describe them, and you giddily are lost among unseen and unheard-of things. Writers answer questions no one asks. Others tell what they know. Writers imagine what they know.

...As a writer, you create characters who act differently than you ever supposed, circumstances that change shape and direction, sentences that seem to emerge from a trance. Ideas occur to you that you never knew you had, opinions you never knew you held. Only reluctantly do you concede that the mystery must eventually get hold of itself, and come to order.

...All writers are mystery writers....We muck about in a world studded with clues, neck-deep in motives.

...I was still in the detective business, though my office had shifted location to a desk and a soft chair, and I wore a legal pad, not a cap gun, near my chest. Here I remain for as long as I am allowed, as the cloud-ghosts shroud the skull of the sky, and the air trembles, and the figure of a man, huge and obscure, turns to face ridiculous me. -----------------------
[end excerpt]
"The Writer as Detective." NY Times.com. July 8, 2011

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