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On Mysteries

 Elmore Leonard said that interesting writing is dialogue. If your book isn't mostly dialogue, then you're in trouble.


The crime writer Janice Hallett has taken this advice to extremes; Hallett's novels are just transcripts from email exchanges, text exchanges, voice mail recordings. So--in a way--the writing is *all* dialogue. There are always two parts of a message: the content of the message *and* the style of delivery. Hallett has fun with passive aggression, terseness, crazy effusiveness, sloppiness, neediness.

Hallett generally has two or three investigators working through a bundle of documents. The documents contain a mystery. We, the readers, see the documents, but we also see the exchanges between the investigators as they do their interpretive work. The documents need to support the investigators' conclusions. But the documents also need to seem to tell a different story--a *wrong* story--so we can understand why the investigators were needed in the first place.

In "The Silent Appeal," a particular member of a community theater seems to have committed murder. But there is more to the story--"commit" is a tricky verb. Other forms of dysfunction are on display. There is professional jealousy, an apparent affair, an attempt at sabotage, a financial crime, a tenuous restraining order. Also, there is something as simple as the matter of casting. People in the community want to seem "open-minded" about the roles they might play in Agatha Christie's "The Hollow"--but, at the same time, they want to advance their own agendas. The subtext is always there, and it's pretty funny.

Someone recently compared the novelist Tim Sullivan to PD James--but I actually think that Janice Hallett is the new PD James. Hallett doesn't have all of James's gifts--but she does have James's clear-eyed understanding of workplace chaos. That's not a small talent.

I enjoyed myself with "The Silent Appeal."
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