What Keeps You Coming Back?

Hi all. Gabi here.

Last week, I was meeting with a group of crime writers and somehow we ended up on the topic of the subconscious. So stick with me. We are going to go deep today.

When I told my Abuelita, who is now 96, that my first story was going to be published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, she told me about how, when she was little, Tita Tey (my great-grandmother), would send her to pick up copies of that very same publication at the library in the small and dusty town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. She remembered her mother reading them, with her hair tinted red and a gin cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Mysteries are in your blood,” she said, a touch dramatically because that is how she rolls, but also with a certainty that 96 years of living allows for.

Any maybe there is something to this idea. My Abuelita remembers her grandfather, which would be my great-great grandfather, reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins in a dusty library in Mexico in the 1920s.

The love of crime fiction goes back five generations which somehow seems significant. That is more than a hundred years of mystery loving.

Why?

***

I have three very distinct formative memories of my love of reading mysteries.

In one, I am sitting on the wrap-around porch of the family farm in Somerset, PA. It is a summer night. It is raining. There is a bug zapper and a porch light and I’m sitting in a rocking chair with a small bowl of salted peanuts reading an Agatha Christie that somebody else left behind.

In another, I am in the bath tub reading a somewhat water-logged Elizabeth Peters that my aunt gave me. It’s sometime near Christmas. I read until the water goes cold and I am young enough for the romantic subplot to feel vaguely subversive.

And in the third, I’m bed at my grandparent’s house. In this memory, it’s a dog-eared copy of a Perry Mason that I smuggled upstairs and am reading with a book light under the covers. Downstairs my grandparents are in their recliners watching Matlock. My cousin is in the other room, already asleep.

Since then and now, the family farm has been sold, my aunt is living with Alzheimer’s, and my grandparents are buried next to each other in the Presbyterian cemetery in Greensburg.

I myself am a very different person than I was 30 years ago, carrying a knapsack filled with all sorts of both good and bad things.

***

In Black Cherry Blues (1989) by James Lee Burke, there is an especially moving passage that goes: “That night I dreamed of South Louisiana, of blue herons standing among flooded cypress tress, fields of sugarcane beaten with purple and gold light in the fall, the smell of smoldering hickory and pork dripping into the ash of our smokehouse, the way billows of fog rolled out of the swamp in the morning, so thick and white that sound — a bass flopping, a bullfrog falling off a log into the water — came to you inside a wet bubble, pelicans sailing out of the sun over the breakers out to the Gulf, the palm trees ragged and tree and clacking in the salt breeze, and the crab and crawfish boils and fish fries that went on year-round, as though there were no end to a season and death had no sway in our lives, and finally the song that always broke my heart, ‘La Jolie Blonde,’ which in a moment made the year 1945.”

The narrator, Dave Robicheax, meanders through a childhood memory that is so rich with details that I am thinking of my brothers and my sisters, of the neighborhood kids that I grew up with and will probably never see again, of the house that raised me with a blue barn and never-ending list of projects. It makes me think about all the things we hold on to as we age, and all the things we lose.

In this instance, Burke’s stream of conscious, poetic meditation is woven into well-developed plot with a narrator who is reluctant to involve himself in the business of others, but does so when he’s backed into a wall. (There are very few things I love more, it turns out, than a reluctant, imperfect hero.) Of course, there is a murder. There are clues. There are subsequent murders. There are buried bodies. There are more clues. There is a ticking clock. There are sympathetic but deeply flawed secondary characters. There is another body. There is a villain.

So perhaps part of why I love crime fiction is the form itself. The guideposts and guardrails of the genre: the red herrings and the smoking guns and the pursuit of justice.

But, perhaps even more so, there is a sense of returning to people and places and moments and discovering them anew. Maybe when I pick up a mystery, a piece of me feels the way I did when I was reading under the covers in the green room at my grandparent’s house. Maybe some part of my subconscious recalls the Klondike bars after dinner and the smell of chlorine from swimming at the Boyton’s pool and playing table tennis with my cousin in the basement. Maybe, the tropes and beats integrated into crime fiction trip these formative experiences, a thread pulling the me of the past to the me of now, allowing for a more fully integrated self.

***

I have taken to reading with my children, piled into one bed with Jack, our rescue lab. I know there is a finite amount of time for this sort of thing. These days seem long now, but I get that the years are short.

I wonder if one day, when I’m older and maybe far away, if they’ll pick up a book for a class or on an airplane or maybe with their own children and think about this sort of thing.

The brain works in mysterious ways, after all.

***

I’m wondering what you think. What are your formative crime-reading memories? What drew you to the genre? What keeps you here?

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In other news:

I’m hosting a Noir at the Bar on April 30 @ Novel in Portland with some other amazing local writers. Join us for a drink and some moral ambiguity. Event starts at 7:30 and is free.

I’m going to be interviewed on 5/1 on WABI 5 Bangor for the Book Club segment.

Gabi

www.gabrielastiteler.com