Little Mysteries

I love the three books that make up Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt series. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, and The Infinite Blacktop all pretty much hit a reading sweet spot of mine, being beautifully constructed noirish private detective stories written with a self-aware sensibility that comments on, critiques, and just delights in the whole concept of narrative as investigation. The books are meditative, spacey, humorous, and suspenseful all at once. And her troubled main character, Claire, holding all the plot lines and philosophical strands together, is fascinating. Claire ruminates continually about life and the idea of "mystery" from all sorts of angles, yet the books never become pretentious or turgid. They are thought-provoking but light, even charming, and Gran never forgets that at the core of a good detective story there should be a compelling plot. Or plots. Her ability to weave her plots threads together and bring each book to a satisfying close is topnotch.

All her strengths are on display in her newest book (released in February), Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight. The title describes things perfectly: it's a volume composed of tales of varying length (the shortest being of something like flash fiction length), and in them, Gran continues her explorations of what the word "mystery" even means. What is it about detective stories that they more than any other kind of fiction can provide a kind of balm for the questing soul? And do all mysteries even have solutions? They may or may not, and even when they do, the solution may not be one that fully resolves the problem at hand. The stories, as Sara Gran's novels do, set up interesting conundrums, and they often exemplify an idea that reminds me of words I once heard the author Dennis Potter speak when talking about his own work (like The Singing Detective) -- how life itself, more often than not, is a mystery chock full of clues and questions but lacking many definitive solutions.

Above all, these stories are fun. Gran plays around with form as always and has stories that emulate and parody and twist around particular types of mystery tales all fans of the genre will recognize. "The Mystery of Killington Manor", set in 1949, hearkens back to the classic manor house murder mystery, down to the cast of characters list that kicks off the story. In "The Case of the Jewel in the Lotus or The Mystery You Will Never Quite Solve, But If You're Lucky, Will Come A Little Closer to Every Day Until Death", Claire Dewitt describes a case (or is it two cases?) that goes on for years, indeed decades, that does reach closure but only of a partial sort. Not many writers could keep things as grounded as Sara Gran does while indulging in such metaphysics, but she does it time and again in these stories, and in the most succinct way. I should mention too that these stories are full of teen detectives and brilliant girl detectives, not to mention one or two arch fiends these detectives have to deal with, so it's no surprise to see written at the end of the book a note of gratitude to "Donald J. Sobol, R.A. Montgomery, and the many writers known as Carolyn Keene".

As she did in her Claire DeWitt novels, Sara Gran has taken her inspirations and molded them into something entirely her own in the most captivating way. Little Mysteries provides smarts, style, food for thought, and a great deal of pleasure.