What makes for a satisfying detective story? In an often-reprinted essay from the May 1948 Harper's, W. H. Auden answered this question by referring to "the Aristotelian description of tragedy" where "there is Concealment . . . and Manifestation. . . . There is also peripeteia, in this case not a reversal of fortune but a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt." Auden was characteristically perceptive, but most of us who share an addiction (Auden's word) for the genre can put it in simpler terms--clever plot, a solid sense of place, interesting characters, and a compelling moral universe.

Two recent efforts--one by a veteran of the historical mystery and the other by a promising neophyte in her first shot at detection--offer a nice contrast in strengths and weaknesses. By so doing they clarify what it is that brings many of us back for more and more of the type.

Anne Perry's Ashworth Hall is her seventeenth historical novel featuring Thomas Pitt, a member of London's finest, and his well-born wife, Charlotte, who usually figures prominently in setting atmosphere and solving the crime. Perry has been widely praised for bringing Victorian England to life, and this latest effort shows why.

Ashworth Hall is set on the country estate of a rising member of Parliament who came into his land by marrying a widowed patrician. She happens to be Charlotte Pitt's sister. The time is November 1890; the task at hand is a conference between Irish Catholic nationalists and leading figures of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. The convener of the conference, Ainsley Greville, is a high-placed mover and shaker in the Foreign Office who hopes that face-to-face negotiating might solve "the Irish Problem." Even as the suspicious antagonists gather for their face-to-face deliberations, the divorce trial of Katherine O'Shea, charged by her husband for adultery with Charles Parnell, parliamentary leader of the Irish nationalists, moves toward a verdict. At Ashworth Hall things turn nasty with the untimely murder of Ainsley Greville, whom Superintendent Pitt had been assigned to protect. Pitt's efforts at unraveling the crime lead him to unpleasant discoveries about Greville's sex life; to an attempt (by dynamite) on Pitt's brother-in-law; and through a series of unexpected twists and turns to the resolution of the case.

Perry's reputation for loving attention to the details of Victorian life should be preserved with this novel. To be sure, there is a problem with telephones, since she has her characters calling freely around London and from London to the countryside at a time (1890) when far less than 1 percent of British homes were equipped with these modern conveniences. By contrast, her touch is sure with household duties for parlor maid, scullery maid, cook, footmen, valet, and other servants; with the logistics of tending a dozen guests and several times that number of underlings at a weekend in the country; and with the varieties of Victorian class distinctions, class resentments, and class expectations. Expert handling of scenes makes this a welcome addition to the series.

Whether it also makes for a fully satisfying mystery is another question. For one thing, some of the novel's hackneyed sentiments--as when Charlotte comments on the need of star-crossed lovers to find refuge in America, "It will be hard enough for them. They will leave everything they know behind them and take only their love, their courage and their guilt"--cannot be mistaken for anything but mind-numbing filler.

The sense conveyed of Irish problems also points to difficulties in the moral universe of the story. Too much of the time we are offered simplistic, black-and-white distinctions between a senseless thirst for vindication and reasonable moves toward peace; all it takes for Charlotte to puncture a legend that has loomed large in the plot is a quick dash to the British Museum; and the Catholic nationalists are as predictably romantic in their Celtic fascinations as the Anglo-Irish Protestants are sulfurous in their hard-bitten antipapalism. Of course, it could be suggested in Perry's defense that the sad course of events in Ireland has fed on myths even more woodenly constructed and more militantly promoted than those portrayed in the book. And it certainly is a clever stroke to situate an imagined peace conference at the very moment of Charles Parnell's fall. Nonetheless, the profusion of stereotypes for characters, motives, and myths means that the Irish bits of the plot function more as local color than as an integral contribution to the story.

Ashworth Hall should not disappoint Anne Perry's numerous fans. But its strengths are skills in plotting and full knowledge of daily Victoriana much more than in depth of moral vision. The book moves right along, but it is not as fully formed as, for example, at least some of Peter Lovesey's Victorian mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb of Scotland Yard.

Betty Smartt Carter's The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave is not as effective on the level of story as the first attempts by some of the masters of the mystery genre, whether Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body? from 1923, Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance from 1934, or P. D. James's Cover Her Face from 1966. Nor does Carter--whose first novel, I Read It in the Wordless Book, published last fall, was not a mystery--deploy the machinery of plotting and scene with the aplomb of Anne Perry. Yet with her protagonist, Virginia Falls, Carter has created a character whose debut is nearly as impressive as that of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Stout's Nero Wolfe, or James's Adam Dalgleish. If Carter's protagonist lacks the flamboyant idiosyncrasies of the Golden Age detectives, she is nonetheless palpably present to the reader.

The setting of The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave is the campus of a midwestern evangelical college where Virginia Falls has stayed after graduation to work as a literary assistant for a renowned theologian, apologist Milton Katharde. The time is Christmas vacation in the indeterminate present. The plot features the kidnapping of the theology department's secretary, whose divorced husband (formerly a member of the department) has recently returned from a long sojourn in Africa and immediately becomes the prime suspect. Virginia and her not-quite-boy-friend, Stephen Holc, are pulled into the investigation when the kidnapper (as they assume) roughs them up on the night of the crime. A great deal of huffing and puffing follows. Some of it is due to the strenuous efforts required for climbing four flights of stairs to the theology offices in McIlwain Hall, the ancient Old Main at the center of campus. But some is caused by the excessive complexity with which Carter has constructed both her central architectural prop (McIlwain is thick with stairwells, attics, tunnels, secret hiding places, and display cases of missionary memorabilia, not to speak of classrooms, storage closets, and the rest) and also her plot (which careens at a nonstop pace). In addition, many of the key characters are only partially realized, especially the members of the theology department. All of them sound like pious phonies, so when one turns out to be the hypocritical villain, it is hard to know why it should be that one and not one of the others.

What saves the book is the main character. Virginia, it turns out, has lost her faith, but she has done so in such a winsome, open, nonvindictive way that she is far more interesting than the book's figures of cardboard piety. Moreover, while it would be tragic in real life, for the novel it is a virtue that Virginia remains in her newfound lack of faith straight to the end. The result is a story with a weightier moral universe than is to be found in Ashworth Hall, despite Anne Perry's superior craft. Perry's opinions on the wellsprings of Irish conflict are sound as far as they go--for example, "You can't get freedom for people by murdering other people just because you think they stand in your way"--but they remain platitudes, merely a window dressing of moralism for the main business of the book.

The climax of Carter's story contains far more. When Virginia finally discovers and confronts the kidnapper, he can use only well-worn theological jargon to justify himself and his deeds. Virginia, by contrast, insists on knowing what happened in plain words. Then, in an effort to keep the villain from doing himself in, she discovers fresh energy in the language of an evangelical piety in which she professes no longer to believe. It is a fine moment--and all the better for the story that she fails.

Few authors of detective fiction who introduce explicitly religious themes merit a second look. With the exception of some of the Father Brown stories by G. K. Chesterton; the parts of Ralph McInerny's Father Dowling novels featuring the priest's ruminations on sin and grace; and the Talmudic exercises of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi David Small, most such stories are good for a quick read and little more.

Betty Carter's The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave cannot be classed with the best efforts of Chesterton, McInerney, and Kemelman. But the levels of religious meaning at work in this story suggest that such comparisons are not fanciful--especially if, in books to come, Carter adds lessons from Anne Perry on plot and setting to the complex moral vision she unquestionably possesses already.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 33

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