Quick question: How distracted to you have to be in order to be unable to focus on even a murder mystery?
Answer: Pretty damn distracted.
Murder mysteries are literary junk food, the go-to when under stress and pressure when something more shall we say challenging, like a proper novel, is way beyond the brain cells. But, here's the thing -- my eyes run over the pages and I turn them at intervals but I have no idea what I'm reading.
I'm currently wading through The Lighthouse, NOT by Woolf who wrote something about a lighthouse but PD James. You can't get more of a warm bath of a book than a PD James can you? And yet here I am on page 75 and I have no idea whatsovever as to who is dead or why I care or who is talking just now. Maybe the murder hasn't happened yet. No, can't be that, the police and Dalgliesh are in attendance. Ok, so, the choice is to start over or give it up.
I had similar issues with the apparently very good Hakan Nesser. He is part of a trend among publishers to find hugely popular mystery authors from countries that don't publish in English, buy up the rights and issue to us. A trend started by the "discovery" of Henning Mankell, also a million best seller in his native land who is a newby here.
I don't know much about the Nesser book but I CAN tell you that his author photo shows a very handsome man who lives in Sweden and New York. No mention of "Lives with his wife and two daughters" so this is good news....have I mentioned he's very handsome? I wonder which bars he goes to in New York, and I wonder how tall he is maybe I can google him or perhaps would he possibly by some fluke be on facebook let me check that out...
See? It goes nowhere, I finished the book and again, I can't tell you who is dead but the mystery of Borkmann's Point is solved no later than the last page and as I recall some of the sentences (not of the jail kind) were very good. I do remember that.
OK so this is becoming a desperate situation, I really love to read. So, I've tried magazines, the default of defaults and generally speaking I read them, well, Vogue anyway, as a book, starting at the first page and reading every word because if Anna Wintour thought the story is important, it is. Alas I've found myself turning pages without absorbing much except that Kate Moss can look a little hippy in straight leg jeans and flats, how interesting even a supermodel can look like she has a big back yard how interesting hmmm best never try that look myself remember to always wear heels yup good idea.
See? I've gone pathetic.
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Are you sure you weren't reading Ulysses?
One could make a quite reasonable argument that you are approaching this from the wrong end. That the best books to take one's mind off of, well, one's mind are not the fluff of mysteries, but works of real heft, gravitas and depth. The theory being that the lighter stuff lacks the substance to hold one's attention. That it takes something truly compelling to keep you engaged.
But if you buy that argument then where would that leave your latest dispatch? Exactly.
If it is bubble gum for the brain you want then it is BBGFTB you shall get.
If you are determined to stay in the P.D. James ouevre try her Children of Men, which was made into arguably the best film of 2006.
For my money, however, the finest mystery writer ever is the literary, dark, exquisitely gritty, and now dead Derek Raymond, a little known master of the genre. A Brit who wrote under the Raymond nom de plume. You'll find his work at the Sleuth bookstore on Bayview Avenue in Leaside. Well worth the jaunt. (Or I can lend you a couple.)
Two other superb mystery thrillers I have enjoyed are Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, and Charles MacLean's The Watcher. Not for the faint of heart, but shouldn't be too harmful for the brokenhearted.
Elmore Leonard, of course, just for the dialogue.
What else for the fevered, unfocused mind? Most poetry. Short stories by Chekhov. Big coffee table books of photography -- Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, all do the trick I find.
Interestingly, when my mind is a torrent of everything else, I find reading the scripts of stage plays is something I can stay with: forget Beckett, but Stoppard and Pinter and Albee.
Back issues of Mad magazine? Why not.
The greatest panacea for when you just cannot seem to take anything in, of course, is to change gears and start putting it out. Pick up the pen, wield that brush, write a song, grab your camera, create something. You'll feel better about yourself, too.
With apologies to Kate Moss and Anna Wintour, when dealing with the junk in one's trunk it is not the height of your heels but the depth of one's lunges.
As I said depth trumps superficiality everytime.
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