Category Archives: Stories and Writing

Whodunits and the Untidiness of Real Life

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I like mysteries, both novels and television shows. I am particularly fond of mysteries with a strong “whodunit” element. This isn’t surprising. I love all sorts of puzzles. So naturally when I read a mystery, I want a chance to figure out what happened before the detective does.
Some fictional detectives are particularly good at deducing facts from the crime scene or from the way that suspects present themselves. Sherlock Holmes is famous for his deductions. Even detectives less sharp than Sherlock often draw clever conclusions from little clues–the unfinished cup of tea, the jar of pens on the left side of the desk, the two dirty glasses in the sink.
It’s particularly fun when the fictional detective suddenly realizes the importance of a clue seen earlier, and the reader sees what triggered his realization, without being told what he has finally figured out. In one episode of “Death In Paradise,” for example, Detective Richard Poole opens the blinds onto a sunny Caribbean day and … Aha! It’s time to gather the suspects. And time for the audience to figure out what the detective has just realized.
But there is something that troubles me slightly when it comes to making deductions from the scene of the crime. In real life, there are all sorts of reasons why objects may be left or arranged the way they are—reasons that no outsider could possibly guess.
Consider this photo.
 

Desk, partially tidied up.

What might a detective make of it? The computer mouse is on the left, but the pencil jar is on the right, as are most of the loose pens. Here are a few possibilities:
  1. The victim is right-handed, but the left-handed murderer stopped to check a file on the victim’s computer, moving the mouse to the left side for convenience.
  2. The victim is left-handed, and the murderer has moved the pencil jar—though it’s harder to explain this answer. Was he searching all the items on the desk for something? Or just trying to find a pen that works?
  3. The victim is right-handed but uses her mouse with her left.
  4. The victim is left-handed but rarely uses pens, so pushed them all out of the way (but then why aren’t they all neatly in the jar?)
The answer is (3). I started mousing with my left when I was having problems with my right wrist. By the time my wrist was better, I had gotten good at it. When I tried putting the mouse back on the right, I discovered something interesting. Since the number pad is on the right of the keyboard, if I put the mouse on the right while centering the letters in front of me, I am forced to extend my arm further out to the side to use the mouse than if I give the job to my left hand. So most of the time, I mouse left-handed.
(What else can you deduce from this photo? I’m curious.)
When detectives make their clever deductions from the scene, they do so against a background of expectations. They assume the victim would not carry around someone else’s lost earring in her pocket and accidentally drop it on the rug. They assume a person doesn’t make herself a pot of tea and then leave it undrunk simply because she had a sudden (but otherwise meaningless) attack of heartburn. If medicine is on the bathroom counter, they would assume the victim had used or planned to use it, rather than that she was making a half-hearted attempt to clean out the medicine cabinet. (People in mysteries are much tidier than I am.)
I love to read mysteries with clever deductions, and I love to guess at what the clues mean, just as the detective in the novel does. But I must admit that when we do so, we are both assuming a world without people’s quirks and particular histories. I wonder if someone has written a mystery that acknowledges this fact?
(On an unrelated note, it is annoying when an author gets his facts wrong. Ellery Queen mysteries are great at letting the reader try to puzzle things out, but in one, there is a colorblind valet. The valet’s master knows this, so he writes “red tie” on the list of what he is wearing that week when he wants the valet to pick out a green one, and vice versa. This not only misunderstands colorblindness—red and green would both have looked vaguely beige-y, I think—but it doesn’t even make sense. If the valet could reliably distinguish red from green–no matter how his subjective experience of them differed from other people’s–he would have learned to label “red” those things that other people called “red” and so on. Fortunately, the solution did not turn out to depend on this.)
Till next post.

"A Little Princess"–self-discipline, kindness, and imagination…and a bit of moral luck

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Even if you have already read the book A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it is well worth re-reading. I picked it up again this past week to check a quotation and kept finding more and more to like in it.

 For starters, the book is full of lively descriptions. Sara’s wardrobe is enviable, with dancing frocks of rose gauze, petticoats with lace frills, and “velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs.” (14) There are comfortable rooms, with pleasant fires in the grate and soft chairs in which to sit, furnished with books and pictures and “curious things from India”. Later, we find ourselves in rooms in the bare and unwelcoming attic, with hard beds and whitewash flaking off the walls–but such a view of the sky and roofs! Sara herself provides lavishly imagined scenes through her story-telling–laughing merbabies with stars in their hair, fields full of fragrant lilies in heaven, and a sumptuous (though imaginary) feast.

But a story needs more than description, and A Little Princess has more. It has its heroine, Sara Crewe. When the story begins, Sara has just arrived in London from India, the only child of a doting and very rich father. But she is very far from the stereotype of a spoiled rich brat. She is well-mannered, kind-hearted, and very much in control of herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a particular point of the importance of self-control, and we see how Sara manages to restrain herself from unkind or ill-mannered responses, even when she has been much provoked. We admire her for it, and are delighted at how infuriated Lavinia or Miss Minchin is at being faced with such composure and steadfast good manners.

The restraint is not some magical innate goodness, but an effort that Sara makes–sometimes quite a difficult effort.

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage […] It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things very rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.” (59-61)

Sara reminds herself that she is pretending to be a princess.

“If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages.” (62) 

Her imagination helps her with the difficult work of self-control.

Sara’s imagination makes her an appealing heroine because she uses it to tell stories to herself and to others. It draws the other children to her (in a world without videos or internet, a storyteller is much valued). Her imagination also helps her through hardships, as she can imagine more pleasant surroundings for herself–or if that is just too hard, she can pretend she is part of some dramatic and romantic story. Rather than living in a dreary attic, she is a prisoner in the Bastille, with Becky as the prisoner in the next cell.

Because Sara is so good at imagining how things might be different, she is also struck by the role of luck in her life. As she speaks with Becky the scullery-maid, she says,

“Why… we are just the same–I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!” (53)

At another point, she tells her friend Ermengarde,

“Things happen to people by accident.[…] A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. it just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? […] Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.” (36)

Of course, when her trials do come, she acquits herself admirably, but we can still puzzle over the role of luck (especially moral luck) in nature and in nurture, and wonder how one person comes to be so patient and determined, while another is self-centered and spiteful.

Sara’s strength and imagination would not make her nearly so appealing if they were not accompanied by great kindness. Sara is kind to the younger children and sympathetic to anyone who is suffering, whether they are suffering from hunger or from humiliation. We want Sara to flourish and be happy–she so deserves it.

I have two last remarks about this book. First, the movie they made of it some while back (set in America) makes a complete mess of it. It mistakes the crucial point. It is not the case that “all little girls are princesses”, as I believe Sara is made to say in the movie. It is true that being a princess is not a matter of wealth or birth or beauty, but Lavinia, for example, is clearly not a princess because she does not behave like a princess. She is neither kind nor well-mannered when things don’t go her way.

The second remark is that this is an old book, and while Sara’s kindness extends to all beings, the book still reflects to some extent some of the attitudes of its time and place. It is worth keeping in mind, but should not stop anyone from reading it.

Reflecting on "Howl's Moving Castle" (the book, not the movie)–cleaning, fictional characters, and scented steam

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Yesterday my daughter was writing quotations from Howl’s Moving Castle (the book, not the movie) to post on the pantry quotation wall. She told me that thinking about Sophie, the main character, inspired her to clean her room. That, in turn, inspired meto think of many things: cleaning, the touches of everyday life in books, and the way fictional characters motivate us to imitate them.
Howl's Moving Castle paperback

Sophie Hatter certainly does do a lot of cleaning in this book. She cleans remorselessly. (I love that phrase.) The dirt and spiderwebs don’t stand a chance. Nor does Michael.
“I wish you’d stop,” said Michael, sitting on the stairs out of her way. (p.43)
She doesn’t necessarily do her cleaning in the right order, however.
[Calcifer] crackled with mean laughter when Sophie discovered that soot had got all over the room and she had to clean it all again. That was Sophie’s trouble. She was remorseless, but she lacked method. But there was this method to her remorselessness: she calculated that she could not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Howl’s hidden hoard… (p.44)

Cleaning is a way of poking around without being obvious about it. It’s also a good way to tell whether you’ve searched someplace already, as I’ve discovered in the Great C&C Easter Egg Hunt. Diana Wynne Jones’s books often have some wonderful detail that makes me think, “Yes, exactly!” and this is one of them.

The word “method” also reminds me of a story my mother tells, about my grandmere coming to visit us in Geneva when I was a toddler and being disturbed by my mother’s housekeeping. “You have no method!” she complained. Apparently I inherited this lack and so have something in common with Sophie.
There are other lovely details in the book, like the description of the bathroom before Sophie gets to cleaning.
 
Sophie winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. (p.33)                                                                                 
This is one of the few areas in which I must say the movie did a good job. They really made that bathroom look terrible. Some years ago I commented on Facebook that M had gotten face paints for her birthday, and our bathroom sink looked like it belonged in Howl’s Moving Castle. I wish very much that I had taken a photo, but apparently I didn’t.
The bathroom is important, given Howl’s vanity. Every time I pass our bathroom right after M takes a shower, I think of Howl emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of hyacinth-scented steam. Of course, in our house it’s more likely to be lavender, or frankincense-citrus, or some other really interesting Zum soap combination.
I said earlier that I was thinking about the way fictional characters inspire imitation. It’s obvious with kids and cartoon heroes, but does it stop there? When I was taking t’ai chi classes, I sometimes imagined myself as a movie ninja, to feel that state of relaxed alertness that movie ninjas display. I want to deduce like Sherlock Holmes, read tracks like Jim Chee, maybe even quote poetry like Inspector Gamache. I’d like to sing like Aza of Fairest, or recite epics like Meryl of The Two Princesses of Bamarre. And I mean not just that I’d like to be good at it, the way they are, but that when I read those books, singing with others and reciting poetry suddenly seem like appealing activities. Even if I’m not particularly good at them.
I can’t conclude a post about Howl’s Moving Castle without a word about the movie. The movie is totally unlike the book. It is visually amazing and having Sophie’s appearance continually change is clever, but the characters are very different and so is the plot. Whether you liked the movie or not, consider reading Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. Just remember—the castle doesn’t look anything like the mechanical contrivance of the movie.
Side note: when did the English start saying “different to” instead of “different from”? I’m sure the British-authored books I read when I was young didn’t do this. I meant to look for an example in this book while I was re-reading it, but I got too caught up in the story.
Second side note: I have included quotations, which I think counts as Fair Use since this is sort of a review of the book and sort of educational (if you stretch the point a bit.) And everyone quotes little bits of this and that on the internet—not that that really proves anything.