(no subject)

[skygiants]

I had various plans for what I was going to write up next, but then yesterday I read C.M. Waggoner's The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society and it straight jumped the queue, both because I enjoyed it and also because towards the end I got really annoyed at it ...

So this book is basically a full-length joke on Murder, She Wrote and it does absolutely fulfill the brief of Being A Murder, She Wrote Style Mystery About A Nice Older Lady Who Solves Crimes while Commenting On The Genre Of Murder, She Wrote Style Mysteries About Nice Older Ladies Who Solve Crimes. Our heroine Sherry Pinkwhistle can't quite keep track of how many times she's helped her local sheriff's department crack the case of the latest dead body in Winesap, New York, but it's never anybody she particularly likes or cares about, so it's never really been a concern! She's got a job she likes that never gets in the way of detective work, a bevy of supportive sidekick pals that she can vent to about cases, and a cast of interesting red herring-type figures constantly rotating through, such as the implausibly hot young priest with a secular identical twin who's just come to preside over the local church and is probably defrauding parishioners or some such. Life is good.

But alas, the latest dead body is someone she cared about, and when she attempts to withdraw from Investigating to actually be in her feelings about it a little, her friends and acquaintances keep turning up at her house to shriek INVESTIGATE! in ominous voices. Also her cat, Lord Thomas Cromwell, has started speaking like he is actually Lord Thomas Cromwell. So now -- with the help of her various sidekicks -- Sherry has to both solve the murder, solve the Supernatural Situations underlying the murder, and perhaps crack the case of her own personal issues that keep compelling her, Sherry, a librarian with no particular qualifications, to solve murder after murder ....

This is all exactly as much fun as it sounds and I do also really appreciate the point that Murders Probably Ought To Matter -- I am always saying this! it's my biggest problem with cozy mystery as a genre! -- so if you think you like this you probably will, it goes down very enjoyably and frothily in about a day. However, when the book does have any substance, it's to do with Sherry's Personal Issues

So Sherry's backstory -- the thing that haunts her -- is that she had a glamorous and fascinating best friend growing up, Caroline. Then Caroline killed her abusive husband, and Sherry helped her get away, later coming to realize that Caroline was a frequent liar and exaggerator and spinner of dramatic tales for her own benefit and that the abuse may or may not have been real but the murder definitely was. We learn that everyone who met this Caroline who'd only known her through Sherry's descriptions was shocked to find her so normal looking because in Sherry's description she was always the world's most beautiful and fascinating and dangerously glamorous woman, and how some refracted form of Caroline -- the abuse victim, the lying murderess, the abuse victim who's also a murderess -- shows up in every single one of these murder cases ....

So even aside from the Women Fascinated By Women of it all -- and look, I've loved both Waggoner's previous books, I know she likes lesbians and queer relationships of various sorts -- this is an interestingly ambiguous setup that provides a lot of play to question Sherry's POV and assumptions. It also gives her a genuinely meaningful and complex relationship to provide some heft against all of the Quirky Sidekicks that the Supernatural Jessica Fletcher Field has set up for her, and I was enjoyably looking forward to the moment when The Caroline Thread would take center stage.

Alas! when the Caroline Thread takes center stage, and Sherry finally manages to have a direct conversation with her on the phone, it's only so that Sherry can use her Detective Skills to figure out from context clues where she's hiding out and then

call up the cops

and fully rat her out?!?! and pat herself on the back for getting Over It and making it Someone Else's Problem so she can absolve her personal guilt and never think about Caroline again??

Like, I shouldn't actually have been surprised -- there are actually several times in this book that Sherry bonds with a suspect and is like "wow that must have been really difficult" and then immediately calls up the cops about it -- and I flinched every time, but I thought maybe breaking out of the genre was, perhaps, going to allow us to push back on that a little? But no! We Are Doubling Down. And this COULD be an interesting choice in the middle of the book where it can be appropriately complicated but IMO it is an AWFUL choice for very near the end. Good for Sherry! She's shoved all the complexity of the aftermath and What Justice Looks Like onto Law Enforcement Just Offscreen so she can put the whole case out of her mind, just like the end of every Jessica Fletcher or Miss Fisher episode. The Case is Solved and that's the only thing that matters.

Even aside from the fact that it's extremely emotionally unsatisfying to have Sherry write off the one relationship that clearly meant anything to her so she can have a cheerful ending picnic with her Quirky Side Character Pals, if you're going to critique the cozy mystery genre -- and for all its fluff I do think the book is meant as affectionate critique -- you can't stop at 'murders matter,' IMO. You have to go further than that. Murders matter, but questioning the carceral justice system also matters, and thinking about what's going to happen in real life to the people who have been caught up in it matters too. There is even a character in this book who has been wrongfully imprisoned for several years! he's a suspect in the murder! and he's just fine. He's not mad. He's got a new family and his life is better now than it ever was, there are no long term consequences to any of that. I realize I'm shaking my fist at the cloudy unconscious assumptions of a whole much-beloved genre, but come on, we couldn't think a little bit harder about this?

Comments

[shipperslist]

That sounded so good until...

[skygiants]

It was really fun and I wanted it to be good also! but alas I do think it falls short

[genarti]

Yeah! I didn't mind so much that Caroline didn't come onscreen -- I was satisfied by Sherry sort of letting go of the hold that the weight of her guilty/starstruck memories of Caroline had by engaging with the reality of her as a human being -- but wow did that moment of moving on fall flat for me. And the attitude to carceral justice in general, which is admittedly sort of hard to square with the cozy mystery genre's underpinnings, but surely we could have gone a BIT further about it?

Generally, a fun fluffy time mostly but definitely the shallowest of C.M. Waggoner's books. I mostly had a good time! But I don't think I'm particularly likely to reread.

[skygiants]

Surely we could have gone a bit further! There were several moments that I was sure were being set up for critique and then we just ... never did?

[sophia_sol]

ooof, yeah what a disappointing way to tie those threads up! how unfortunate

[skygiants]

It's such an interesting setup and way to engage with the archetype of The Nice Older Lady Detective! and then, alas

[aella_irene]

There is a New Zealand TV show called The Brokenwood Mysteries which I feel is also engaged with this, in that at first glance, it is a Midsomer Murders style story, in which every week another member of this small rural community is murdered! Except that they also have a cast of recurring characters, so as time goes on, sometimes you are familiar with the murderers, or the victims, or the survivors of a previous mystery turn up, and it is clear that these people are often fucked up by the murders. The child of a victim from season one turns up multiple times, and it is clear that her life is worse. (There is also a recurring hotelier who never wants to see the detectives again, eventually moves to the other end of the country, and encounters...) I sort of want to read this book, despite the awfulness, and see how it interacts...

[skygiants]

oh, this sounds so interesting! I would definitely love to hear your thoughts on the book and how it intersects with other/existing commentary on this particular sort of cozy-mystery genre

[evewithanapple]

The only Waggoner I've read was The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry, and while it was entirely charming and inoffensive, there also just wasn't a lot of there there. Their forte as an author seems to be gentle, low-stakes genre spoofs, which is fine! But it doesn't lend itself to thoughtful critique of the attitudes embedded in those genres.

[sovay]

Their forte as an author seems to be gentle, low-stakes genre spoofs, which is fine! But it doesn't lend itself to thoughtful critique of the attitudes embedded in those genres.

I have still only read Unnatural Magic and while half the plot was a disposably enjoyable riff on magical school stories and the author's formative DWJ, the other half could have been legitimately nominated for the Otherwise for its handling of gender including being non-conforming within an invented system, so I was hoping the author would go more in that direction with their later books and less uncritical spoof!

[skygiants]

yeah, me too! I loved the half of Unnatural Magic that had meat in it so much, and I really hope Waggoner decides to lean into that mode again at some point -- she's clearly having fun with her later stuff, and I'm glad she's enjoying herself, but I know there could be there there if she chose to deploy it!

[skygiants]

The first book of Waggoner's I read was Unnatural Magic, which IMO was much messier but also more interesting than either of the two that followed -- there's real bite in that book, and while I enjoyed The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry a and thought it hung together better on a structural technical level than Unnatural Magic, it also was missing some of the substance that made that first book compelling. But I'm absolutely going to keep reading Waggoner's books in the hope that eventually she manages to land both the substance and the structure, I do definitely think she's got it in her.

[minutia_r]

I do think that if Dorothy Sayer in 1926 could be writing about how actually maybe the amateur detective bears some responsibility for for what happens after they solve the case, and how maybe turning someone in to the cops is not always going to result in the best outcome, contemporary writers really don't have any excuse.

(Heck, even Sherlock Holmes sometimes reached the conclusion "the cops don't need to know about this one.")

[hilarita]

Yes - it's a classic of the golden age of detective stories (and indeed throughout the whole history of detective stories) that you don't always tell the cops whodunnit. Obviously this is rarer when the detective is a cop, but the whole point of having non-cops investigating is that occasionally you can let the guilty party take the loaded gun to the library, or you can decide that actually, you can walk away.

So it feels very odd that this is the choice being made every time here, and there's no character growth here.

[sovay]

So it feels very odd that this is the choice being made every time here, and there's no character growth here.

Thirded.

[mneme]

Yeah, this. Early Detective fiction has some real complexity to it, from Holmes to Poirot. Too often, more modern takes have simplified takes that can fall flat (and, of course, something like actual Fletcher has the issue that TV of its era did, that you can't have character progression between episodes (seasons, maybe, but not in this case) because the episodes won't be shown in order).

I do like Fisher (both original and extra crispy, TV only because I've not read the books) quite a bit, but yeah, they don't really look at what happens after the culprit is identified and presumably arrested. Neither do the Thin Man movies, although also the Thin Man movies usually have a quasi-action scene where the killer tries to do something terrible after they're unmasked, which tends to reduce any sympathy we might otherwise have for them (and also, Hammet tended to be pretty hard boiled overall even if the Thin Man movies are fluffier even with his involvement in, IIRC, the first 4 of them).

[skygiants]

Sayers really profoundly ruined me for later detective fiction, tbh. I am always expecting a detective to worry at least a little about what they are doing! If you're not worrying about it then what are we doing here!

[sovay]

We learn that everyone who met this Caroline who'd only known her through Sherry's descriptions was shocked to find her so normal looking because in Sherry's description she was always the world's most beautiful and fascinating and dangerously glamorous woman, and how some refracted form of Caroline -- the abuse victim, the lying murderess, the abuse victim who's also a murderess -- shows up in every single one of these murder cases ....

There's so much to be done with the concept of being a cheerful dispenser of well-understood justice slowly recognizing that your first stab at amateur avenging may have been plain old aiding and abetting after all that I can't believe the novel just drops it and moves on! Agatha Christie would have done something weird with that pattern! Anyone in Sayers would have at least thought about having a breakdown! Also it reminds me slightly of the backstory of Tey's To Love and Be Wise (1950), but in a way that suggests that no lessons were learned. What a weird narrative collapse.

[hippogriff13]

And then there's Tey's "Miss Pym Disposes," in which the protagonist decides not to turn the presumed culprit in to the police because she thinks she has a better idea regarding how to resolve matters--only to belatedly discover that she got the whole thing horribly wrong. Which I guess could be seen as implicitly arguing that at least the criminal justice system theoretically provides its personnel with more training and experience in handling guilt and punishment appropriately than the average amateur detective has.

[sovay]

And then there's Tey's "Miss Pym Disposes," in which the protagonist decides not to turn the presumed culprit in to the police because she thinks she has a better idea regarding how to resolve matters--only to belatedly discover that she got the whole thing horribly wrong.

I've actually never read that particular Tey because it has always sounded so excruciating, which means I never think of it in these kinds of discussions, but your point that in 1946 writers were already dismantling the tropes and expectations of amateur detecting totally stands!

[skygiants]

"the way I resolve this internally is to hand it over to the proper authorities and move on" even if you acknowledge that the Proper Authorities are well-equipped to handle the matter of abstract justice -- which obviously I do not believe, but, fine, it's certainly something that someone could reasonably have incorporated into their worldview -- it's so internally unsatisfying! you're a protagonist! do some protagonist-ing! (And it's not even like the character arc is about learning to Not Meddle or Not Take Responsibility For The World's Problems, there's a sequel hook where she and her little gang are considering going to New Orleans to fight vampires!!)

[sovay]

(And it's not even like the character arc is about learning to Not Meddle or Not Take Responsibility For The World's Problems, there's sequel hook where she and her little gang are considering going to New Orleans to fight vampires!!)

That's deeply frustrating! Also, if a series, why set up this big deal from the past in the first book and then never actually resolve it!

[alias_sqbr]

Oh this sounds like such an interesting setup with such a disappointing ending.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I had a good time with it, but I really wish it had allowed itself to have more there there.

[conuly]

Way to not stick the landing.

[skygiants]

A landing is a difficult thing to stick!

[delphi]

Huh. Yes, that would have annoyed me too.

[skygiants]

I really did enjoy most of it, but I hit this beat and then had to go immediately complain about it.

[chestnut_pod]

There's a new Waggoner and I missed it?! Zounds! Thank you for letting me know!

…oh, and now coming to the cut. Hm. Well, I think I might still give this a try.

[skygiants]

You should, I'll be very curious about your thoughts on it!

[whimsyful]

Omg everything with Caroline sounded so interesting and more nuanced than the usual cozy mystery tropes...and then it did that with it??? That's disappointing. I agree with others saying that multiple Golden Age authors (Sayers, Christie, Christianna Brand...) would have leaned into the potential pathos there instead of just skittering away. What a pity.

[skygiants]

Sometimes it really is hard to stand on the shoulders of the greats!

[lirazel]

Wow, I'm glad you told us about it because if I'd read it myself without being prepared I would have been just as upset as you! Yikes!

[skygiants]

There's a lot that's very fun about it! But I slammed into this scene like a brick wall.

[mneme]

Having not read it, I'm curious as to what would have been a more satisfying ending. Where I thought it was going was Caroline being a root cause for -why- our heroine kept running into murders (which is a plot twist that would likely not have ended well for at least one of them, but is at least more interesting), but I could see a few other takes...and yet, given the core premise of "Caroline's justified murder probably wasn't justified and our protagonist's taking it at face value was an artifact of Caroline's magnetism/our heroine's love or infatuation," it seems likely that either this should end with either corruption (heroine decides that her love is more important than justice and doubles down on protecting Caroline), or heroic growth (heroine realizes that as much as it hurts her, she has to stop Caroline).

But while an ideal execution of the second one would I think end similarly to where the book's subplot does, I think it would actually address the conflict more thoroughly? And maybe even have a period where the reader is lead to believe she will follow the path of corruption before a moment of dramatic growth and loss?

[skygiants]

The thing that's frustrating to me is that it really does seem for a while like the book is going to leave it ambiguous, which IMO would be a more interesting ending than either of these -- it's impossible to know how much of what Caroline told Sherry was truth or lies, and thus impossible to know what 'justice' in that situation would have looked like -- only to immediately close that down in a way that feels both simplistic and vindictive. We've seen absolutely no consequences to Caroline's crime or grievers requesting justice for the murder, so what's the value in turning her over to the cops? What purpose does that serve? And if you can't answer these questions -- if you're not even engaging with these questions -- then what are we doing?

[sovay]

We've seen absolutely no consequences to Caroline's crime or grievers requesting justice for the murder, so what's the value in turning her over to the cops? What purpose does that serve?

Wait, that's worse.

[thefinal_pam]

ok i think you should read the station eternity by mur lafferty because along with it being a scifi with mental and emotional bonds between most alien species, it critiques some of the things here particularly defense 'murders' and the like in a way i think you would enjoy. it was a fun read.

[skygiants]

ooh I've seen that in stores and been intrigued but not gotten around to it yet, thank you for the rec!

[lokifan]

aaaaarrrggghhhhhh

why do critique and not critique!

[skygiants]

WHY DO CRITIQUE AND NOT CRITIQUE

[glitteryv]

OTOH, this sounds v. RTMI cuz I've been a fan of MSW for literal decades (though I've never been interested in novelizations or even fic for that show. ANYWAYS) and I'm always up for reading a good mystery.

OTOH, I totes appreciate this heads up vis a vis this: I realize I'm shaking my fist at the cloudy unconscious assumptions of a whole much-beloved genre, but come on, we couldn't think a little bit harder about this?

since that's something I've had to acknowledge, accept, and make a compromise when it comes to MSW. In any case, my best guess is that part of the "cozy" angle is exactly the avoidance of a deeper dive into things THAT SHOULD BE EXPLORED and yet many cozy mystery authors totally sidestep those things. Which is obvs enraging. :| IME, if an author does take a closer look, then the book is no longer considered a cozy. I just... *deep inchale and exhale*.

FWIW, I did ended up adding the book my library TBR. Here's hoping I remember this review of yours whenever it is that I get around reading it so that I can brace myself for that lack of self-awareness genrewise.