The Literary Lady by Ernest J. Abeytia a Creative Project
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Case 99: The Literary Lady by Ernest J. Abeytia A creative project submitted to Sonoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English Committee Members: Prof. Stefan Kiesbye Dr. Scott Miller 04 May 2018 i Copyright 2018 By Ernest J. Abeytia ii Authorization for Reproduction of Master's Project Permission to reproduce this project in part or in entirety must be obtained from me. 04 May 2018 Ernest J. Abeytia iii Case 99: The Literary Lady By Ernest J. Abeytia ABSTRACT This is a crime fiction novel. It is a confluence of the styles, settings, plot lines, and character development of such luminaries of detective storytelling as Raymond Chandler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Elmore Leonard, but it is not a hard copy or “cover” of anything they wrote. Bob Derby is a homicide detective in the Gardena, California police department. Gardena is one of 88 cities or towns in the County of Los Angeles. He has made an arrest in, or “cleared,” 98 of 101 homicide cases as the story begins, but he has never actually solved any of them. Somebody else always beats him to it and he then applies the police procedure that closes the case. The murder of Emma Williams is to be no different. iv Table of Contents Critical Introduction ........................................................................................................ vi Bibliography ................................................................................................................... xix Case 99: The Literary Lady ................................................................................................1 v Case 99: The Literary Lady By Ernest J. Abeytia A Critical Introduction The most famous detective in history is a fictional character. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes off a cliff overlooking the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893), more than 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand magazine, nearly putting the publication under. Doyle was also a talented author of historical novels, science fiction, horror stories, and adventure tales as well as a pioneer of the detective story. But very few readers responded to his creation of alternative characters, like Professor Challenger, and most of his non-Sherlock works remain obscure to this day. Faced with this public outcry and a general boycott of his other works, Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901, set as a case that occurred before Holmes fell to his death. The response was huge and Doyle had no choice but to write a complete resurrection of Holmes, which he did in 1903 (“The Adventure of the Empty House). Holmes then lived on into the late 1920’s; the last story written by Doyle was “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place.” Doyle stands as the first of two giants of crime fiction that dominate my love for the genre. I had read all of the Sherlock stories and had seen all of the Basil Rathbone movie versions by the time I was sixteen. I reread the stories yearly. They have never gone out of print. It was Doyle who first moved the detective character from beleaguered (Dupin, Lecoq, Tulkinghorn) to beloved (Holmes, Poirot). The Baker Street Journal featured an article in vi the 1940’s which asked “What Is It that We Love in Sherlock Holmes?” (Edgar W. Smith) Here are the words that resonate most with this work: But there is more than time and space and the yearning for things gone by to account for what we feel toward Sherlock Holmes. Not only the there and then, but here and now, he stands before us as a symbol—a symbol, if you please, of all that we are not, but ever would be. His figure is sufficiently remote to make our secret aspirations for transference seem unshameful, yet close enough to give them plausibility. We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set right the wrongs with which the world is plagued. He is Galahad and Socrates, bringing high adventure to our dull existences and calm, judicial logic to our biased minds. He is the success of all our failures; the bold escape from our imprisonment. Escape is the operative word here. It is often used as a motif by the main giant of crime fiction that influences my work, Raymond Chandler, my favorite author. Philip Marlowe, his erstwhile detective, consistently escapes the reality of his existence with alcohol (much like Chandler). We learn this in Chandler’s breakout novel, The Big Sleep. General Sternwood is trying to escape his failures as a parent and his isolation as a millionaire, his son-in-law is trying to escape a loveless marriage to his daughter by running off with a gangster’s wife (also trying to escape), and his youngest daughter is desperately trying to escape becoming an adult. Yes, Marlowe drinks a lot, but his behavior belies the prosaic label of drunkard. Throughout these tales, Marlowe conforms to the image set forth by Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder,” an essay written in defense of the crime fiction genre for The Atlantic: vii But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in. (6) Doyle and Chandler have a very similar model for the detective: male, cosmopolitan urban dweller, autodidactic, isolated, cynical, and misogynist (“Women are never to be entirely trusted Watson, not the best of them.” The Sign of Four). It has been left to other writers to break from this heuristic. Christie has given us Miss Marple, Grafton has given us Kinsey Milhone, Leonard has given us Raylan Givens, for example. These writers, among many others, have influenced my work by releasing me from the notion of detectives as modern-day knights. Bob Derby, the detective in this text, does have high professional standards and a dedication to justice for his victims. But his viii integrity is reasonable, not rigid; he bends rules. A professor asked me once if Marlowe is a “good guy.” My answer? “He wants to be.” This also applies to Derby. Critical Theory In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Dorothy Sayers, a twentieth century British crime writer, is quoted as follows: "It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement…it is a literature of escape, not a literature of expression” (3) Chandler offers a rebuttal to this statement: “I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers.” (3) This dissonance is an example of the enduring debate regarding whether or not crime fiction can ever be regarded as great literature. This paper will neither explore that debate nor take a position. Instead, it will discuss the genre in terms of theory: there is hardly a category of critical theory that can’t be applied to the text of crime fiction (using my own as a model): • Psychoanalytic: There are psychological desires, needs, and conflicts, Brenda’s need for control conflicts with her husband’s need for control, for example. • Marxist: There is representation of both capitalism and classism, Money is the motivation for characters of varying socioeconomic classes. • Feminist: Patriarchal norms and values are present. Most of the bosses are male. • New Criticism: there is organic unity and a theme of universal significance. All of the characters are part of one social ecosystem; their actions intersect. The universal theme of this work is greed. ix • Stucturalist: There is an underlying narratological structure. Derby’s quest is the vehicle, but Brenda’s talents provide the impetus. • Deconstructive: There is undecidability and ideology at work here. Amoral characters like Emma are likeable, for example, and greed is the primary ideology. • Cultural: There is representation of both elite and working-class norms and the tension between them throughout. Brenda is a member of the elite while Derby is a member of the proletariat, for example. But the critical theory category that most applies to the crime fiction genre, and to this work specifically, is reader-response, here described by Lois Tyson: Reader-response theories share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.