Mystery by Peter Straub

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Peter Straub's Mystery.

The Short of It

Plot: The best detective out there - a misanthropic bookworm - tackles corruption and violence in his own backyard.

Page Count: 548

Award: Sequel to Koko. No awards of its own. Published 1990.

Worth a read: Yes
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character) 
Bechdel Test: Pass.
Technobabble: None. 
Review: A delightful if surprisingly dark mystery/adventure. Elevated above comparable stories by compelling protagonists and a clear love of books woven throughout. As is the case with many mysteries, some jumps are a bit contrived - but the suspense elements deliver, and Straub's writing shines. Excellent character work.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

There's a minor but obvious spoiler here: that the protagonist does not die at the very start of the book. This is also spoiled by the blurb, so we're just going to accept that.

Through the transparent medium of books, he left behind his body and his useless anger and roamed through forests and cities in close company with men and women who plotted for money, love, and revenge, who murdered and stole and saved England from foreign conspiracies, who embarked on great journeys and followed their doubles like shadows through foggy nineteenth-century London. He hated his body and his wheelchair, though his arms and shoulders grew as muscular as a weightlifters’s, and when he was put on his crutches, he loathed their awkwardness and the hobbled imitation of walking they represented: real life, his real life, was between the covers of several hundred novels. Everything else was horror and monstrosity—falling down, moving like an insect with his six limbs, screaming at his irritated tutors, dreaming at night of seas of blood, of a smashed and mutilated body.

A superb depiction of how great books are, the freedom they offer us, the distances we can roam with literature. Similar passages appear throughout, and what weaves together some characters is their passion for reading. Perhaps this is a silly reason to enjoy a book so much, but reading this is our current context, where travel has been limited for a couple years now, resonated.

Probably worth actually discussing the book.

This is the second book in the Blue Rose Trilogy, but it is only vaguely tied to Koko. Tim Underwood, a fictional author from Koko, wrote some of the books that Tom Passmore, our hero for Mystery, enjoys. That is not a good sentence, but I'm leaving it. Too many ambiguous referential statements. There are no fantastical elements here, just a mystery that turns progressively darker and grittier as it progresses.

The plot here works. It's a mystery, so there are surprise reveals and shocking connections and all of the like - cornerstones of any suspense story. While the core questions that our sleuths wish to solve are not all that impactful, their investment in it is believable, and enough happens to keep pacing brisk. To rephrase slightly: I did not much care what the resolution of the mystery was, but I did care enough about Tom, and Tom cared - so I was on board. This is not to say that the mystery-solving itself is not enjoyable: after a bit of a slow start the pace ratchets up with new information and leads, keeping things engaging.

Straub's writing is excellent and often in unexpected ways. He adjective selection is evocative and avoids clichés, and the details upon which he focuses set the scene well. A few examples from random parts of the book:

Tom said goodbye, and the Shadow waved a dark blue glove, nearly invisible in the crystalline moonlight.

Houses he had seen and known all his life presented blank, lifeless façades; sprinklers whirred above grass that seemed to be made of spun sugar.

He sat in the empty dining room with an unread, unopened book next to his ketchup-smeared plate. 

 Just a lot of excellent writing. The contrast between Koko and Mystery is clearest here: it is the sprinkling of details that make characters and scenes here so compelling, as opposed to shoehorning in extraneous scenes. A major part of Tom as a character is that he is extremely observant and highly literate. So too is the prose.

There is not much to be said on world-building here. Mill Walk is a fictional island, but it is a skewed version of reality. It is not meant to be much more than that: it serves as a good "lock-in" setting for a mystery. It's not science fiction or fantasy - the point is not to explore a new concept of a could-have-been or might-still-be world.

As is clear by now, characters are, across the board, excellent. They have clear motivations for doing whatever they do, they have voices that are distinct enough that dialogue works without names, and they act consistently throughout. This is true of bit players and major characters.

...with the noticeable exception of women. There are a couple of stronger female characters here, but the vast majority are quite flat. Especially the romantic interest. It's easy enough to give it a pass here - Tom is a teen, so sure, he's into her, but I cannot recall any actual character traits.

It has been a long while since I've read a simple, straightforward mystery. And I enjoyed it greatly. Do you need to read either of the other books in the Blue Rose Trilogy? Not at all. But this one is worth it for the prose alone.

If this is a mystery that you'd like to solve, consider using the link below! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you!
A Mysterious Link

The Long of It
Spoilers Ahead!

Perhaps one should expect an author who frequently collaborates with Stephen King to end up writing some pretty dark and violent stuff.

Nonetheless, there is a pretty striking tonal pivot in the final third (or so) of the book. I would argue that this is an unnecessarily brutal turn: a lot of blood, death, and violence. At points it feel gratuitous. In particular, the death of von Heilitz is a tough one to stomach.

In the middle of the floor, a pool of blood sent out rays and streamers extending beneath the mattress and toward the closet doors. Red footprints and red dots and splashes covered the carpet. Another impatient handprint blared from a white closet door. Tom felt the shimmer of violence all about him, and moved across the slippery floor to the closet. He pulled it open, and his father’s body fell out into his arms.

Don't get me wrong - Straub did an excellent job of making me care about von Heilitz as a character and about his relationship with Tom. His death is impactful. It's just emblematic of a shift: for the first half it feels like stakes are staying low. Most of the questions are about corruption or deception, not a gore-fest. I actually enjoyed the lower stakes: characters were more important than the mystery itself. It seems Straub decided that this was not a powerful enough story, and that there had to be more going on.

While this may be a shot in the dark, it would seem that partway into the process of writing a much smaller story, Straub decided that there was too little on the line, and escalated things. Mill Walk provides a perfect justification for a lock-in mystery: everyone is stuck where they are, which excuses every character we meet being somehow involved in the mystery. And then Tom hops on a place and portions of the second half of the book take place in a vacation town, away from Mill Walk island. Most of the characters remain the same, because the Mill Walk[ians?][ites?] own most of the property. But more elements, people, and information are thrown into the mix. If one is doing a closed-room mystery, it makes no sense to hide crucial evidence outside of the room. If that is not the case, there is no reason to start with the smaller scale.

Or maybe I just wanted Tom to be able to spend time with his father after finding him so late in life, and I'm aiming for literary justification for my emotional response to a fictional character kicking the bucket.

The Extra of It

Non-plot spoiler for The Throat, the third book of the Blue Rose Trilogy, ahead.

To quote a wise me:

Also, don't know how to fit this in, but the end suggests that this whole story was made up by one of the characters in the book, who is an author. That's a bit of a middle finger to those who just read it. We know it's fictional... but somehow it's much worse to suggest that even in-universe it's fictional.

The following is taken from the preface of The Throat, from the perspective of its narrator, fictional author Tim Underhill:

About a year after I straightened out, I came back to America and wound up writing a couple of books with a novelist named Peter Straub. These were called Koko and Mystery, and maybe you read them...  Koko described certain things that happened to members of my old platoon in and after the war, and Mystery was about the long-delayed aftermath of an old murder in a Wisconsin resort. Because we liked the idea, we set the novel on a Caribbean island, but the main character, Tom Pasmore—who will turn up later in these pages—was someone I knew back in Millhaven.

Wait.
What?
So the whole thing is one of Tim Underhill's stories? But Peter Straub exists in this world? And there is not Mill Walk? It's all Millhaven?
It gets worse. This is from Straub's FAQ:

I google'd "Millhaven, Illinois" and got a lot of stuff about your books, but nothing about the city itself. What gives?

You idiot, Millhaven isn’t a real city! Well, I should modify that. It’s real, but it’s real only in fiction. I invented this place as a stand-in for Milwaukee, WI, so that I could take enormous liberties with the city of Milwaukee without offending anybody who actually lives there. A lot of the Milwaukee landscape can be found in beautiful little Millhaven. However, Millhaven has been home to a great many more serial killers than Milwaukee was ever blessed with. I like Millhaven, though, and in my mind I often stroll down its leafy streets, wondering where all those groans of agony are coming from.

Which means, of course, that the main setting for Mystery is Tim Underhill and Bizarro Peter Straub's version of Millhaven, which is Peter Straub's version of Milwaukee. Just... why? What do we gain by having these nested levels of in-world fiction? For my own enjoyment of this book, I've opted to ignore these notes from The Throat, and prefer to take the story of Mystery as the reality of its world. It is a less frustrating resolution. Also, Straub, my dude, was there a reason to make yourself a character in your own world? I know Stephen King did it too (14 years later, I believe) but it's still silly. I'll save the rest of this lament for The Throat's review tomorrow, I guess...

Anyway!

Don't write yourself into a corner, Stranger.

And don't forget to read a book!

Also, if you're one of the people who is reading these reviews, thanks! I know it's been a while since I've posted, but I'm aiming to do one of these a day to plow through the pile of notes I have sitting around. Just tough to balance this comically colossal project against effectively hunting for a job. But silence is the blog killer, and it's time to kick this up a notch!