Post # 10 DEEPEST FRANCE: Anti-Mystery as Ante-Mystery

Somewhere along the evolution from Edgar A. Poe's esteemed detective Auguste Dupin to the contemporary cinema in which Sherlock Holmes and the 'Iron Man' have become one inasmuch as both are played by Robert Downey, Jr., literature of mystery and detection seems to have lost its way. The wit and imagination of Dupin and Doyle's original Holmes have given way to the violence of Downey's Holmes and the even greater violence and noise of the other Hollywood special- effects mystery-solvers who rely upon car crashes and weapons of nearly mass destruction more than upon their brains.

For such reasons, the first novel in the Paired Mysteries: DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS is, in many ways, an 'Anti-Mystery' inasmuch as it attempts to raise serious questions about the simple-mindedness of many contemporary mysteries that appear interested in little more than finding and incarcerating or blowing away whoever dun'it. Although faux villains are sometimes tangled before the reader or viewer as a tease, once the 'true' prep has been identified and disposed of, a curtain of something like righteous stolidity descends over the events and there seems to be little room left for reasonable doubts and no purpose left for second guessing.

Joe Friday in the popular "Dragnet" programs of the mid-twentieth century certainly contributed greatly to this sort of stolidity with his incessant refrain, "All I want is the facts, ma'am. Just the facts." But some of this single-minded authority already existed in the self-satisfaction with which both Dupin and Holmes would announce their solutions as smug triumphs over the dull police officers they had outwitted. Indeed, this sort of one-dimensional belief in the use of facts in solving problems, solutions worked out in an almost mathematical or scholarly way, fitted perfectly with the positivistic assumptions about men and nature that marked the intellect of the late nineteenth century.

Mystery stories still offer readers comfort because they preserve a simpler nineteenth century sense of reality with their predictable forms and conclusions. In the twentieth century, however, many other fields moved beyond a positivist, objectivist notion of what exists and how we know it. The interior, subjective realms have grown increasingly important through the contributions of Freud and Jung and their many followers. In fact, one can argue that the subjective universe has become almost the equal of the objective inasmuch as all phenomena are filtered through one's perceptions. Finally, the subjective and the objective become one in the "SelfObjects" so important in the helpful Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut.

Consequently, even the size and age of the universe itself as become relative to the ability of our minds aided by new instruments like the Hubble telescope to grasp it. And still the mystery fictions, placing old comforts above knowledge, trudge along content with the 'facts' and iron-fisted final solutions.

Strange to say, we are more likely to encounter wit, reasonable doubts, and the free play of imagination when the contemporary 'Holmes' (pronounced 'homes') a.k.a. 'Dr. House' of television fame (think of the many parallels) ticks off diagnosis after diagnosis, rejecting and revising his guesses as he goes, until he finds a solution that may or may not work. With Dr. House we are far more likely to come across imaginative detection than in the movies starring Robert Downey as the kick-and-punch version of the original Holmes.

To correct the stunted nature of so many recent mystery stories, Milt Walters in DEEPEST FRANCE raises questions about the ways we construct knowledge in the contemporary world, fragmented as it is by the varied media with their raucous voices competing for attention and power. Walters attempts to bring imagination back to mysteries by self-consciously foregrounding his acts of invention when he boldly moves, in the 'Pop Ups,' from his own point of view into the minds of the French characters, Little Charles, Philip and Christine Plantard, as well as those of Little Jeanne and the adult Charles Plantard. Each shift in point of view overtly takes us into another world, although at base each world is invented by Milt Walters (a new 'Walter Mitty'), who has the audacity to cross all the boundaries in the novel. Lacking aid from the Greek muses, Walters admits that for him this Imagination consists of powers such as Selection, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Projection, Interpretation.

Finally, caught in his own inventions, Walters feels he may have made a horrendous blunder. The worlds he invents are no more perfect than those dreamed up by all writers who have come before him from Homer and the Gilgamesh poet through this morning's news report. But his imaginings seem not to have been pointless ones since he, assisted by his daughter, appear to have discovered the murderer(s) of Little Charles.

Through interrogating the conventions of contemporary mysteries, DEEPEST FRANCE becomes an Ante-Mystery that clears the way for a less naive (but simpler) mystery in the second novel, MYSTERIOUS DAYS. But even here there is some ambiguity regarding its author because Milt Walters, no longer an ineffective Mitty (not after his encounter with the Dark Madonna of Limoux) nudges his own daughter toward becoming the imaginative author of the events described in the novel. This maneuver raises a question regarding the fictive nature of all our seemingly real constructions of our world, constructions that are our most vital Self-Objects.

Posting #9 Origins of DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS

DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS: Paired Novels
Copied from the Official Blog of Julius Raper, FirstPosted on August 11, 2011
The two novels in DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS came to me in very different ways, but each was exciting to write. After the research for the first novel, DEEPEST FRANCE, I had to wait for each of the characters to come to life for me. The French family, Christine, Philip, and little Charles Plantard, were there from the start, but others were several years in arriving.

For MYSTERIOUS DAYS the dramatic ending came to me first—loud and clear. I arrived at the other chapters like a man walking in a dark tunnel, not knowing where his next step would take him but knowing that each day he would find what he needed to keep him on his way to that ending.

DEEPEST FRANCE opens with a gruesome 1984 news report, then jumps to a message the American Milt Walters sends from Virginia to Anthi, his adult daughter living in Paris :

Rennes-les-Bains—A four-year-old boy missing since last Thursday from his

home in Rennes-les-Bains, Deepest France, was found this morning in the

Salz River just below this charming little village of fewer than a thousand

inhabitants. Local officials have identified the boy as Charles Plantard, son

of Philip Plantard, the maire (mayor) of this small resort known chiefly for its

thermal baths and historical importance.



Officials added that the body was discovered, with arms and ankles bound

in rope and drawn tightly against the torso, lodged under a low footbridge

over the Salz within 100 meters of the village. Preliminary indications, they

continued, are that death occurred before the boy entered the river inasmuch as the body bore upward of a dozen wounds probably inflicted by a long knife or other sharp instrument.



Young Plantard was still wearing the blue trousers and shirt and purple coat

he had on when his mother, Christine Plantard, twenty-five, also of Rennes-lesBains, sent him to the baker’s for bread and, according to official reports, kissed him good-bye for the last time.

Investigations are continuing.

•••

Since you asked, dear Anthi, this is the story that gripped the heart of the French nation that spring we spent in France, the drama that millions of French men and women rushed each morning to their newsstands and televisions to follow, as layer after appalling layer revealed itself to them, like the proverbial onion of truth peeled before their eyes.

MYSTERIOUS DAYS , in contrast, begins with ”Day Seven,” the final day of the story:

At least his cell was a modern one, by the standards of Hurricane Pointe back in Virginia. The bed hung from heavy chains and folded up to give Milt room to move about now that it was almost day again. The mattress, grey vinyl, was not soft but still thick enough to rest his depleted body. A metal toilet and washstand protruded from the rear wall. Aside from the sting of disinfectant, the odor seemed almost bearable. Walls on three sides were solid metal or stone, so he had a modicum of privacy despite the fourth wall of bars. Since no cell opened directly across from his, he didn’t have to worry about eyes except when a jailer came along the walk between the compartments.
What worried him most was the accusation the gendarmes, who he now realized were an arm of the French military, planned to lodge against him. During the night of interrogation, they failed to explain his rights under French law and refused to detail charges. These could include kidnapping and assault—even murder if Shanti didn’t make it. He hoped they wouldn’t dream up some phony child abuse claim, the way Christine, psychotherapist that she was, feared they might. And there was no way, was there, that they could go back and try to pin a rap on him for colluding in the death of Claud Plantard twenty years ago. He no longer considered it possible that the cops would suspect he’d played a part in the worst of recent crimes in this part of their nation, since it was ridiculous to imagine they had even read Deepest France, his novel about the brutal murder nearby of little Charles.
His best defense, he told himself, would be to get his story straight and trust that it would agree with whatever statements his wife Christine, daughter Anthi, and Gloria might give. To that end he had spent his solitary hours of the night in a disturbed reverie sorting events of the past six days. He intended to do the same until the gendarmes came for him again.

DEEPEST FRANCE is a good deal more complex than MYSTERIOUS DAYS. Some readers may elect to read the second story first and then go back to the first to fill in gaps in the histories of “little Charles,” the Plantard family, and the murders of the region. The “Paired Novels” format of this book facilitates a back-and-forth reading. My hope is that you have as much fun reading the two mysteries as I did writing them.

- Julius Raper -


Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Black Madonna, Copy-cat murder, descendents of Jesus, Eccentric Fiction, elderly heroics, family crimes, fiction as knowledge, French Grail mysteries, French Pyrenees, general literature, Grail quest, Mary Magdalena, murder mystery, murdered children, Rennes-le-Chateau, rescue | Leave a reply

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