Eight Different Detective Writers Explain the Disappearance of Your Neighbor’s Cat

Agatha Christie

It is frightful indeed when such a disturbance strikes a pleasant village like St. Mary Mead! So make a pot of English Breakfast and fetch your favorite shawl as you prepare to discover a feline corpse that will not disturb you in the least, dear reader. In fact, you’ll feel downright cozy as you watch the neighborhood go into a tizzy and await the arrival of a dear elderly lady who will explain everything without looking up from her knitting.

Dorothy Sayers

By Jove, I do say the cat’s got herself into a spot of trouble, what? But fear not, and don’t let our detective’s jolly manner or attention to his top hat fool you: he is first-rate. We may come to the diverting if gruesome conclusion that some unlikely and inanimate object is responsible for your cat’s untimely demise, or we may call upon Harriet and take this opportunity for an extended meditation on love and feminism on our way to finding her safe and sound. Either way, you can be assured that the mystery will be solved. Now Bunter, if you would just fetch our coats, there’s a good chap.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Ah, you see that speck of dust on your potted plant? That particular type of limestone is only found at the specific quarry located 2.4 miles to the southwest of here. We can thus assume that the cat has been wandering to the quarry and back, and you will surely find her there. Elementary!

Wilkie Collins

The cat had a secret, you see. Six hundred pages and three major plot twists later, you will face the cat’s secret husband in the family catacombs in front of the empty tomb of Patches, where he will reveal that Whiskers actually had no legitimate claim to the baronetcy.

Robert Galbraith

It’s likely the cat has met a grizzly end, but it will take us about 250 more pages than necessary to find out, because I’m J. K. Rowling and no editor is going to tell me what to do. In the meantime, this case will provide ample opportunity for private detective Cormoran Strike to grapple with his sexual and romantic feelings for his beautiful and clever assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Tana French

Don’t worry, we will solve this mystery, and its solution will be satisfactorily horrifying or gruesome. But for now, let’s focus on you, narrator. How’s your past? Any absent parents who could turn up at the wrong time? Childhood sweethearts you’ve lost touch with who may or may not be dead? Cold cases that still haunt you? You may think your personal life has fuckall to do with this case, but that’s where you’re wrong. Buckle in, baby, cause this shite’s about to get traumatic.

Louise Penny

Come for the relatively painless and wholesome mystery, and stay for the French Canadian detective with a British accent and the whole quirky gang at Three Pines. The cat is probably fine.

Gillian Flynn

The cat has been brutally murdered by a charming and stunningly beautiful female psychopath. That’s right, women and hot girls can be psychopathic killers, too! #LeanIn

Pride and Prejudice by Raymond Chandler

A mash-up of literary homages containing a mixture of direct quotations and my own imitations of the authors in question. Enjoy.

Pride and Prejudice by Raymond Chandler

Our mother looked Jane straight in the eye and put out a cigarette in her empty teacup. “Look, buster. I don’t know who he is and I don’t care, but I’ll tell you one thing, see: A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Jane met her gaze coolly, then rose. “So long, punks. I got a carriage to catch and a ball to attend.”

Jane walked into that ball with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch. She stopped in front of a gentleman with a tailcoat you could have used as a tablecloth. He was a blond, a blond that could have made a bishop’s wife kick a hole through a stained-glass window.

“You are Mr. Bingley, of Netherfield Park, are you not?” she said.

“Check.”

They danced. Everyone danced, but me and a man I saw standing by the door. He had eyes like strange sins and he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a boiled potato.

“The name’s Bennet,” I said. “Elizabeth Bennet.”

“Fitzwilliam Darcy,” he said in a tone as pleasant as splinter.

“Tall, aren’t you?” I remarked.

“I didn’t mean to be,” he said.

I didn’t expect what happened next. Without warning, he proceeded to aggressively not ask me to dance.

War and Peace by Haruki Murakami

At the entrance to the Arbát Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the Prechístenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812—the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. Pierre watched its journey across the sky, then paused as its luminous tail passed close to the moon, which was small and red next to its white brilliance. But wait, he thought. That couldn’t be the moon. If it was, then what was the glowing white orb just above it and to the left? There couldn’t be, or were there, two moons? He rubbed his eyes.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” an unfamiliar woman’s voice said behind him.

Pierre opened his eyes and spun around. The woman standing in front of him was attractive and well-dressed except for a strange red vinyl hat. She wore a neat, peach-colored pencil dress that fell below her knees with a crisp white blazer and matching high heels.

“Don’t be alarmed, Count Bezukhov,” she said, approaching him with slow but confident steps. “I can see them, too. Both of them. You’re not dreaming.”

He stared at her, bewildered. “Have we met?” he finally asked.

“No,” she said, her tone neutral. “But we can discuss it tomorrow. Meet me at ten o’clock, in the tea room of the hotel across from Shinjuku station. Here’s my card.”

Pierre took the card, and the mysterious woman turned on her neat high heel and walked away. As she faded into the darkness, Pierre heard orchestral music in the distance. It sounded like the work of a composer he knew but couldn’t place. Finally he looked down at the card in his hand. It was blank.

Little Women by George R. R. Martin

Amy March had never seen such lovely limes. She couldn’t wait until she got to school before opening the brown paper parcel to taste one of her treasures. She knew from the first dainty bite at the pickled rind that she was lost. It was flawless, the best she’d tasted. The tartness of the citrus and the saltiness of the brine didn’t mask the sweet floral of the juice beneath, but rather the flavors blossomed together like different petals of the same, exotically and extravagantly beautiful flower. As she cast aside restraint and hungrily devoured the rest of the first lime, she imagined it as the final course in the kind of extravagant meal she would one day order prepared for her when she was a fine lady.

First the bread, a crusty brown loaf that would be soft and white inside, with warmth escaping when she cracked it open, served with [food description continues for three (3) pages].

It was not without regret that she remembered her words to Meg: “I’ve had ever so many limes but haven’t returned them, and I ought, for they are debts of honor, you know.” Debts of honor must be paid, especially by a daughter of House March. She closed the parcel with heroic restraint and stored it in her desk.

Word spread like wildfire through the girls that Amy had the limes to pay her debts and then some, and when the bastard and traitor Jenny Snow whispered in Mr. Davis’s ear that Amy March had two dozen perfect pickled limes tucked away in her desk, the other girls were roused with indignation.

Amy moved to obey the cruel man’s command to throw the full feast of the twenty-four remaining limes out the window. As the first pair hit the snow, she heard a barely muffled gasp behind her. At the second pair, two or three cries of indignation. At the third pair, she heard the scraping of chairs against floorboards and turned to see Mary Kingsley and Katy Brown storming towards the front of the room, sharpened pencils in hand. Mr. Davis’s eyes widened as Mary reached him, and he grasped her wrist. Mary had only one hand, but that was quick. She twisted free of the old man's grasp, shoved the pencil into Davis's belly, and yanked it out again, all red. And then the world went mad.

Gothic Novel Title Generator

Yes, new post due on Friday, but here's something extra in the meantime, just for fun. Inspired recently by a discussion of Louisa May Alcott's lesser-known novels, but more generally by my longtime love of Gothic fiction.

“Here pause: pause at once”

Well, folks, here it is. For at least a year or so I’ve threatened to start a literary blog, so now I’m making good on that, in the year of our lord 2020, no less, when no one is actually reading blogs anymore. Sources close to the author who are much more “extremely online” than I am advised me against it. These days, they said even podcasts are on their way out: it’s youtube or bust. I defy them! Well, for now. We’ll see how this goes.

I don’t know yet what shape this blog will take, but it is born of my love of talking books far and wide: in person, on social media, with friends, with acquaintances, with strangers. I foresee sarcastic listicles and short-form parody in some posts, but decided to start on a more serious note for this one.

Recently I was reflecting on lines of literature that have stuck with me, and I circled back again and again to a deceptively simple one: Charlotte Brontë’s “Here pause: pause at once” from the final page of her final novel, Villette. It’s a short sentence, but one that both left me devastated and taught me much of what I love about good literature.

[Spoiler warning: yeah, I’m gonna talk about a line from the last page of the novel, so that, um, will involve the ending.]

I first read this book around 16, slipping the dense but compact paperback into my school bag and reading it slowly everywhere: between classes, before my after-school activities, at the bus stop, in my room at home. It took me months, as I remember, and adult me is mildly surprised that teen me made it through at all. Its 474 pages describe few events; rather, they examine the psyche of the deeply lonely protagonist and narrator Lucy Snowe, an Englishwoman who flees personal tragedy at home—a personal tragedy that is described only in vague and metaphorical terms—and becomes an English teacher at a girls’ boarding school in the (fictional) French town of Villette. Much of the dialogue moves in and out of French, a language I did not read at the time, though I do now.

Well, 16-year-old me must have been determined, because finish it I did, and promptly proclaimed it my favorite book. But I want to be perfectly clear on one point: I did not relate to the heroine. I often hear much made of the importance of teens identifying with the authors and characters they read. No doubt this is often a motivating factor, but to assume that teens will only find interest in books that speak to their personal experience is to underestimate them. No, I had little in common with Lucy Snowe. Lucy is an orphan with no relations; I had two loving parents at home and a doting extended family. Lucy draws deeply into herself at every new pain she feels or anticipates; I was just developing into the nerdy extrovert I am today. Lucy finds, resists, embraces, and then loses the great romantic love of her life; I had known only school-girl crushes. Lucy is, in a sense, an exile, existing uncomfortably as a foreigner in Villette; I had never spent more than a short vacation away from my hometown. I had no personal reason at all to care what became of Lucy. Except that I did care, deeply. Brontë had made me care.

I realized just how much I cared when I read that fateful final chapter. You see, that same tragically lonely Lucy Snowe finally finds companionship in M. Paul Emanuel, another teacher at the school that employs her. She didn’t expect this; once she found his wiry and angular appearance and abrupt manners off-putting, but they have now found love, a union of both minds and souls. After hundreds of pages of agony, Miss Lucy and M. Paul begin to plan their future together. The two of them will open and run and new school, just as soon as M. Paul completes one necessary voyage. I will skip the details, but up until the very last page, the final chapter shows us a radiant Lucy we have never seen before, a Lucy whose happiness, now finally realized, we have suffered and agonized and hoped for. Her hard-won happiness transforms her as she opens her school and prepares busily for her beloved’s return.

Until the LAST. DAMN. PAGE. And then—well, I’ll let you read Brontë’s own words as you turn that last page:

And now the three years are past: M. Emanuel's return is fixed. It is Autumn; he is to be with me ere the mists of November come. My school flourishes, my house is ready: I have made him a little library, filled its shelves with the books he left in my care: I have cultivated out of love for him (I was naturally no florist) the plants he preferred, and some of them are yet in bloom. I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own.

The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—he is coming.

Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming.

The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God watch that sail! Oh! guard it!

The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—"keening" at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. That storm roared frenzied, for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm.

Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!

I gripped that paperback and read this page in pure disbelief. Brontë could not possibly have made Lucy—have made ME—work so hard for this happy ending, only to wrench it away on the LAST. FUCKING. PAGE.

But now what? We haven’t heard about M. Paul yet. It seems unlikely that his ship, of all of them, survived, but surely we can at least mourn with Lucy. That last page still has two paragraphs left. That can’t be enough, but surely all will be explained somehow?

That’s when Brontë drops the line:

Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.

It’s a refusal, a refusal to let us back into Lucy’s pain, the pain we’ve shared with her for the last 473 pages. She’s given us enough, and we’ll have to be content. She even has the audacity to invite us to imagine a joyful reunion, the consummation of the happy ending she has promised us and then withdrawn. Do what you like with my ending, she tells us, but leave me in peace.

Except we can’t do what we like with that ending. She’s spelled it out for us as clearly as she could without writing it. M. Paul is dead. Lucy is heartbroken--again. No rational imagination, no matter how “sunny”, could possibly conclude otherwise. So why not tell us?

And that, friends, is why I’ve reread page 474 of this book over and over again in the intervening years (I have since also re-read the novel in full—it holds up to my adolescent admiration). No literary ending has ever bowled me over the way this one did, and the reason gets at one of my favorite things about literature: the power of what is not written.

To use that power requires an immense amount of trust in the reader. I understand this even better now that, like Lucy, I teach a foreign language (Italian). Let’s say a student asks me a basic grammatical question: “gli amici o i amici”? Which of these two definite articles is correct? If my lesson is running behind schedule, if three other students have their hands up, if I’m just tired, I might simply answer and move on: “gli amici.” But that requires no leap of faith in the student, the student who clearly knew enough to ask the question to begin with. What I should do instead is turn the question back to them. Make them guess, even if they’re wrong, and say why. Maybe nudge them in the right direction with another question. Any good teacher will tell you this is a far more effective response, one that is certain to stick with the student longer. But to do that, first you have to trust them, and that requires its own kind of work.

Charlotte Brontë trusts us with the ending of Villette, and she does so knowing we are not going to “conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror.” It’s not truly an ambiguous ending of the kind beloved by more modern authors. But it does rely on the unwritten, on our own imaginations filling in the blanks, and it is all the more powerful for that.

The same concept lies at the bottom of, oddly enough, all my favorite horror novels. We fear the unknown, so an effective horror writer has to know when to stop, lest the mysterious become ridiculous. The presence in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House disturbs us precisely because it remains unexplained.

Passionate love scenes similarly can work best when they leave a stylized veil between our own real or imagined intimate experiences and those of the fictional lovers. Umberto Eco’s Adso of Melk sublimates his first encounter with erotic bliss into bible verses in The Name of the Rose, leaving little to make a schoolboy giggle but much for an adult to ponder with fresh eyes (of course, Eco had his own special preoccupation with the “already said,” but we can go there another time). In these cases and many others, the authors knew what not to write, and to know that, they had to trust us.

Brontë trusts us to write M. Paul’s ending in that short sentence. Sixteen-year-old me stumbled over those words, reread them with ebbing disbelief and a tightening chest, and fell into the chasm between them, awash with another woman’s grief. And I’ve done so over and over again.

Well, now that we’ve cried together (or not? I mean, did we? That was awkward), I hope I can make you laugh next time. New posts every other Friday. We’ll see how this goes.