Murder, They Write--A Gathering of the Genre

It was a room full of murderous thoughts, but you’d never have known it to look about you. The auditorium at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Manhattan’s West Side contained some 200 present and future writers of crime fiction, come to hear a symposium on physical evidence. To a person, they were making furious notes that will undoubtedly shape the creation of tomorrow’s vile deeds.

The witness included author William Caunitz (“Black Sand”), who before he took up writing was for 29 years a high-ranking New York Police Department officer; Lt. Frank Bunting, a 20-year narcotics detective with the department; and Lawrence Kobilinsky, who is an expert on DNA “fingerprinting.” The DNA work, already the subject of a book by Joseph Wambaugh, is the hot news in forensic medicine. Judging from all the note-taking and question-asking, it will be soon be harder to escape in crime fiction than red herrings.

The symposium was a feature of the annual gathering of the 2,500-member Mystery Writers of America, who met this time in an atmosphere of ebullient satisfaction. Measured by sales of both new and reprinted works (the mystery past is being ransacked), and by other symptoms, like the popularity of “Murder, She Wrote,” there seems clearly a resurgence of interest in the form, which has never quite been out of fashion but rarely been chic.

The late eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote a snarling essay called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” a slighting reference to one of Dame Agatha Christie’s earliest and most controversial works, about whose denouement cries of “Dirty pool!” are still heard. But the equally eminent poet W. H. Auden countered with a celebration of the mystery form called “The Guilty Vicarage,” evening the score so to speak.

The danger facing the form at the moment may not be overt hostility but a smothering and dissecting interest from the academic community, which is subjecting crime fiction to various forms of analysis, from Marxist to semiotics.

But the mystery writers go about their work rather serenely indifferent to these academic flurries. Possibly inspired by the model of Dame Agatha herself, a sturdy grandmother figure surely more at home among primroses than police procedures, the writers are as benevolent-looking a group as you could hope to find this side of the Chelsea Flower Show. (Given the ruthless competition amongst hybridizers, possibly even more benevolent.)

On the evidence of the turnout for the group’s annual Edgar Awards dinner Thursday night--the awards named, naturally, for Edgar Allan Poe, the acknowledged procreator of the modern detective story--the mysterians are predominantly female, in their early to middle years.

Why the writers, except for the occasional sporty and raffish exception, should appear so uniformly kindly, men and women alike, is good question. It may be because they are able to exorcise their lethal angers and frustrations by putting them down on paper. The rages that others harbor, gnawing at their innards like concealed foxes, the crime-writers can assign to the bad guys or the good persons (who are able to vent their spleens in ways denied to lesser humans).

One says good persons these days, because there is a rising trend toward female operatives, not just the amateur sleuths in the folksy tradition of Jane Marples, but private eyes, like Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshinsky, who can take a punch as well as Lew Archer ever could, and unmask and unhand the villain with equal knightly flair.

The appeal of crime fiction is, as ever, primarily escapist--an antidote to insomnia, worldly cares and the tedium of travel. But, as the work of this year’s Edgar winners suggests, the field is not easy to summarize. It ranges form the traditional “cozies” (set in small towns with a tight cast of suspects) to more exotic situations.

Present stories offer moral ambiguities and sexual and linguistic candor eschewed in classic crime fiction. The best writing offers a background of well-observed social history that in decades to come will give accurate clues to the way we lived now.

This year’s top winner, appropriate to a year of glasnost, was Stuart M. Kaminsky’s “A Cold Red Sunrise,” one of his series featuring a Moscow policeman. It was chosen from more than 200 entries.

The eagerly sought and career-launching Edgar for the best first mystery by an American writer went to “Caroline Skeletons” by David Stout. The best paperback original was Timothy Findley’s “The Telling of Lies.” There were 93 entries in the category, a measure of activity in the field.

Winner for the best factual book on crime was “In Broad Daylight” by Harry Mclean, about the murder of an unpopular man in a Missouri town, a crime that has gone unpublished because none of the four dozen eyewitnesses would testify.

The Edgar for best biographical or critical study went to Francis M. Nevins Jr. for his exhaustive book, “Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die.” An Edgar for best movie went to Errol Morris for his documentary, “The Thin Blue Line,” which was instrumental in the freeing of an unjustly convicted man after he had spent more than a dozen years in prison.

The television honors went to a feature, “Man Against the Mob,” written by David J. Kinghorn and shown on NBC, and to “The Devil’s Foot,” an episode from the PBS Mystery! series, “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.”

A special Ellery Queen Award went to the partnership of William Link and the late Richard Levinson for their body of work, which included the creation of “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

The Mystery Writers highest honor, the Grandmaster Award, went to the veteran Hillary Waugh, whose classic thriller, “Last Seen Wearing . . .” has twice been included on lists of the 100 best crime novels of all time.

As banquets go, Thursday night’s could have used more mystery and suspense and somewhat better plotting. But it was congenial and, above all, benevolent.