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.
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