Friday 14 December 2007

Murder-Mystery Mystery

A fabulous thought secreted by the thought processes labelled 'mine': to write a book describing itself( insofar as a book is capable of self-description) as a murder-mystery; but unexpectedly, and perhaps uniquely for a murder-mystery, the mystery lying in the total absence of a murder within the book. Perhaps the characters- for what is a work of fiction without characters- could lounge around some hotel of the upper-crust type, sunning themselves, making louche comments(whatever they might be), and becoming gradually more confused at the absence of dynamism within the structure of their pleasant but dull existences in the form of the lack of a murder which they all seem to have expected as a matter of course, and which they seem to feel to be( by a matter of oblique and subtle inference) the ultimate reason for their presence in such a collective environment. And what is a murder-mystery without a murder? Such intellectual refinement.
"A hotbed of taut, but excruciatingly delightful paranoia." "A parable for our times" will proclaim some esteemed reviews. I think I'll call it Guilty by Omission.

An after-thought: that through the accumulation of unbearable, unjustified tension and mistrust, where each character is utterly doubtful of his own future- whether he is to be kill or be killed, be a guilty accomplice, a comparative innocent but who will have a guilty secret revealed, etc... that one of these people breaks under the tension and so as to release the unbearableness of this unbearable tension actually does commit a murder, perhaps for reasons he could hardly elucidate, but ultimately to bring a degree of certainty to a life from which is lapsing into formless chaos: as is well known, fear of self-annihilation within formless chaos is the source of all ego-sustaining action. And so the murder-mystery without a murder wherein lies the mystery becomes a murder-mystery with a murder wherein perhaps lies a deeper mystery.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Crime and Punishment, or ~Taxi Driver - a man lives a meaningless life and kills in order to give it shape.

Anonymous said...

You culd argue that, though it could also be put regarding C&P anyway- a man kills in order to see if life is meaningless, and sees that it isn't.