Vic Socotra

23 September 2009

The American Mystery

(Country Auction, by Aldro Thompson Hibbard)

I ran across an American Mystery last weekend that struck me hard. It seemed to convey the impact of the passing of the season and more. It made me think as I unpacked the mesh carry-bag from the pool from the last time.

iPod, sunglasses, spare lighter, pool pass. The first two went to other bags and the last went to the trash. The summer reading I did not get to in the summer lay on the dining table accusing me.

There is a stack of magazines, dog eared and wrinkled like the tips of my fingers after paddling around for an hour. The fingers come back, but I don’t have much hope for The Economist or Vanity Fair or The New Yorkers.

I didn’t even get to look at all the sly cartoons about people who have problems that only the rich can have. Maybe I will spend a morning someday soon and look at them all. Maybe the magazines that arrive in the meantime will be up to my knees.

The one I am going to spend some time on- I swear- is a thick trade paperback. I am going to take it down to the Farm and hope there is time for some Fall reading on the back deck.

I like a good mystery, and since there are so many real and frightening ones these days, I prefer to have one I can put down on the bedside talbe, or put back on the shelf as my choice.

This particular book was recommended by the Invisible Girlfriend. It is called "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," by a Swedish author named Steig Larsson.

I was a little reluctant- when I find a guy who spins a nice mystery I wind up hooked, and the series (Spenser, Travis McGee, whoever) always winds up with the reader investing more time in the annual-pay-the-bills outing than the author does and a vague resentment about it.

The American Mystery has declined in stature since the great days of Raymond Chandler and the other Masters of the pulps, and seem mostly to be exercises in self-parody.

What amazed me was that Larsen's canon is limited to three- he died in 2004. His books, as best I can determine, are a marriage of English author Dorothy Sayers’ carefully-crafted locked-room procedural mysteries combined with the stark brutality of the modern world she never lived to see.

God, she was good- I have her complete works in hard-cover. Anyway, since Steig Larsson wrote the originals in Swedish, the English translations reflect an interesting twist on the Anglo-Saxon tradition, since they don’t owe a great deal to it.

I was anxious to get to the Farm last Saturday. The UPS tracking system on the Internet said they had left the new bed in the garage with the feral cats, but who knows. It takes a leap of faith to assume that anything works properly on autopilot.

I rounded the narrow curve in the Bluesmobile and was surprised to see several gigantic pick-up trucks parked along the right side of the road, gigantic tires down in the ditch in order to leave space to squeeze by.

I was briefly afraid that the owners were all down on my property, maybe the volunteer fire department, and then I saw that the house on the property across the lane from me had been emptied out, and all the contents of the house and outbuildings were lined up on the field next to the little bungalow.

“Auction Today,” read the sign. There were people moving slowly down the line of household goods, and a knot of men looking at tools stacked on a flat-bed trailer.

I parked the car safely on my property and retrieved the junk flyers from the mailbox.

I knew the guy that lived there was dead, and it had happened in the late Spring when the new vegetation was bright green with promise.

I learned that from the widow- or girlfriend or daughter- when I stopped the car and rolled down the window to introduce myself as a new neighbor. There was a little boy revving the throttle on an All-terrain vehicle right after I signed the papers. The noise was already getting on my nerves.

“He’s dead,” she said simply, looking past me. “Last time for the boy to play with the toys. Caint afford it now,” she said, gesturing at the house. “Nice to meetcha.”

The exchange left me at a loss for words, which is a rarity as you might imagine.

She didn’t say what killed him and I was too stunned to ask. I don’t think it was a murder, but mischance. The Realtor said that the guy who built my place had died, too.

I poured a cup of coffee from the thermos on the bench seat next to me.

I thought maybe this was a good opportunity to find out if there was something going on around the neighborhood I should know about

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