The Art of Pretentiousness

Every once in a while, a book comes along and changes everything. A book that forces you to look at the world in a new way and to question everything you felt you knew. It’s a book that can define a generation, and change the course of history. Paul Auster’s City of Glass is such a book. It dares you to ask “Who am I?” and “What the hell am I doing reading this?” Truly, this book represents the very epitome of Literary Art. No other book has affected me as much as City of Glass this year. This masterpiece, this tour de force par excellence, has forced me to look over my previous blog posts and wonder what I was thinking. The word “pretentious” does not mean what I thought it meant. And so I would like to begin by apologising to Raymond Chandler for using the adjective to describe his work.

Paul Auster’s City of Glass is Book 1 of “The New York Trilogy”, and it was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. I’m glad to see that the Edgar committee has some sense. Finally, R E A L   L i t e r a t u r e  is nominated in the category. And believe you me, literature can’t get more real than this. See, the entire story revolves around Daniel Quinn, a fellow who – get this –  writes detective stories! Jolly good jumping jelly beans, what a delightful reference to the genre! Anyhow, one night, he gets a telephone call, asking not for Daniel Quinn but for… wait for it… Paul Auster! Say what? Yes, indeed, the author himself is asked for at the telephone. Or is he? For Auster appears as a character as well as being credited as the author, but it is Quinn who is the protagonist, and yet a third person altogether who writes the whole thing!!! Isn’t this whole thing delightful? So very metaphysical, in an almost Miltonian sense, though it never quite approaches the fluid poetry of Keats.

I, The Jury

My lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to put Gilbert Adair on trial for several counts of high treason, attempted intellectual murder, constantly beating his few funny jokes to death, being generally mean-spirited, and above all, this court is to determine a legal precedent: whether Adair’s book The Act of Roger Murgatroyd should be considered a crime in itself.

To determine this, it is best to review the evidence. The Act of Roger Murgatroyd was marketed as a hilarious send-up of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries. It contains a locked-room puzzle, when Raymond Gentry, a foul-mouthed gossip columnist, is shot to death inside a locked room, with the door locked, the windows barred, etc. This all takes place at the snowed-in country house of Colonel and Mrs. ffoulkes, who send for a retired Scotland Yard man to help solve the crime.

Young and Innocent Psycho Climbing the Thirty Nine Steps in a Frenzy

Patrick: I would like to welcome readers to this special edition of At the Scene of the Crime! This blog was started when I wanted to vent my fury over the abysmal book by George Baxt, The Affair at Royalties. I had written an online rant about the book’s failings and was so furious about them, I sat down and created a video thoroughly bashing it. (I still attend group therapy and hope to get over it someday.) Needless to say, I come across as rather “shouty” and I consider the video far from my finest review. However, I got relatively positive feedback, and soon enough, I had created this blog and was posting in it regularly. Things were going well and I had just about forgotten about George Baxt...

Until, for his “Q” entry for the Alphabet of Crime Fiction, Sergio (from Tipping My Fedora) wrote about Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death. Not only did he praise the novel, he gave it five fedora tips! I was stunned to even see a positive take on Baxt, and it was so well-written I wrote the following in my comment: “The book I read was atrocious in every way- you have now successfully made me doubt my conclusion that Baxt had no talent.” The disagreement was an interesting one which immediately guaranteed my readership of Sergio’s blog.

And then I had an idea: as we saw Baxt’s work from two different vantage points, why not read a book of his together and collaborate on a crossover review? I asked Sergio to contact me, pitched the idea (which he liked), and we selected a book: The Alfred Hitchcock Murder Case.

Now what motivation could I possibly have had for returning to the work of an author whose book I thoroughly despised? Quite simply: curiosity. I was curious what people like Sergio or William DeAndrea saw in Baxt to give him such positive appraisals. After all, it’s quite possible The Affair at Royalties was his The Hungry Goblin or Elephants Can Remember. So I decided to give Baxt another shot, trying to cast aside the prejudices of my experience reading The Affair at Royalties. And who knew? Perhaps I’d enjoy it…

Thanks for joining me today, Sergio!

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Sergio: Buon giorno Patrick,

it's great to be here and thanks very much for having me on your splendid blog - despite my fondness for Baxt! This was a great suggestion of yours and between us we should be able to debate the pros and cons of the author's approach to life, the movies, literary crime and crimes against literature (not necessarily in that order). We've deliberately chosen to stay away from A QUEER KIND OF DEATH and its sequels as it seemed more profitable (and more fun) to pick one that neither of us had read before. THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK MURDER CASE certainly fits the bill - it's the second of Baxt's 'celebrity sleuth' series which combine actors, writers and filmmakers with fictional crimes. The approach is not too dissimilar from Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters series except that the real person becomes the actual detective. And Alfred Hitchcock, the self-styled 'master of suspense' seems a likely candidate for this kind of fictional treatment given his love of thrillers about an innocent man on the run (and personal publicity). 

The book begins in Germany in 1925 where 'Hitch' and his fiancée Alma are working on THE PLEASURE GARDEN, his directorial debut. The tight production schedule gets interrupted however when the script girl is found dead in the shower, knifed to death ... hmmm, sounds familiar ...