Mystery

MYSTERY

The Dark Room
By Minette Watters
G.P. Putnam's Sons
381 pages, $23.95
Reviewed by Jamie Agnew
Owner of Aunt Agatha's

There's a kind of mystery that over the years has been unjustly derided and dismissed, and(not surprisingly) most of them were written by women. Even the mystery aficionado establishment devalues them, lumping a great mass of good writters and good books under the catchall diminutive the "had-l-but-known" mystery. Mary Roberts Rlnehart pioneered this kind of suspense novel, in which an average woman is thrust into a dangerous situation, buffeted by the intrigues of powerful, mysterious forces that "had-she-but-known" she would have avoided altogether.

This basic formula was embroidered in darker tones with great psychologial subtlety by later writers like Mignon Eberhart, Cella Fremlin, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding and Mabel Seeley. They all tell stories of contemporary women in everyday domestic settings who are forced to confront hidden malevolence, often to the point where they question their own sanity- or have It questioned for them by authority figures. Beneath the melodrama is an unspoken but devastating critique of the male power structure. Holding's "The Blank Wall (1947) presents a heroine in war time, her husband's absent and her mobility restricted, who finds herself unable to escape the censorious and patronizing gaze of her own children as she tries to untangle a skein of blackmail and murder not of her own making. A decade later Fremtin's "The Hours Before Dawn" flnds the position of a housewife not much improved, especially when she is saddled with several children, a newborn baby, intrusive neighbors, an unsympathetic husband, and a cunning, invisible enemy.

If attention Is given to older woman writers, it's to those who have a series protagonist who seeks crime, either a man like Sayer 's Lord Peter Wimsey, or a reassuringly sexless spinster like Christie's Miss Marple. The neglect of the "had-l-but-known" authors in favor of the "trouble is my business" ones is simply sexist, although those most equipped to use the word, the feminists, seem to distrust them as well because the central characters are seen as weak and passive.

The meteoric rise of American authors like Grafton and Paretsky and their acceptance by a mass audience represents a different kind of female protagonist, one who seems to have subsumed the familiar boiled male private eye fantasies of potency, violence and independence. Attractive as that equality is (and as excellent as many of these books are), the fact remains that most women's lives are still more i likely to be bounded by family responsibilities and pressures, and any violence Is far more likely to be directed at them than by them.

The recurrent vision of the older novels is one that must still be only too familiar to many women - a life circumscribed by the watchfulness, desires and expectations of societal groups in general and one's own family in particular, with resulting feelings of powerlessness, paranoia and self-recrimination.

Minette Watters puts the dilemma succinctly in her new book The Dark Room" when she describes the heroine's "combination of incisive intellect and physical weakness." "The Dark Room" begins with a situatkxi metodramatic enough f or any of her "hadl-but-known" predecessors. Jinx Kingsley wakes up fearful In an unfamiliar dark room, recovering from an apparent sutckte attempt with no idea of how she got friere, a big chunk of her recent Hfe missing due to amnesia, and murder and terror bovering in the shadows. The sokrtion to the mystery les in her discovering her own Menttty and htetory, which are Inaccessible even to her. Jinx is a photographer and Itke in her professional darkroom the negatlve develops inthtedark hospital room, the return of her mamory not entire(y wetcome as It seems to suggest complclty In severa! gruesomemurders. Warters keeps the suspense taut, wtth new revelaüons that shift the perspective on the f acts coming Nkecbckwork. The book 's constant stimulation resultsfromdeepening, sustanedpsychoiogical tensión rather than the usual successkxi of siam-bang, cHff-hangers. The heroine's joumey is interior and immersive, a perlkxjs descent kito the bittemess, vfotence, deceptkxi, and hate that can fester at the foundation of the "hallowed" Instttution.thefamiry. There's (ots of conversaMon and reftectJon but no car chases or snoot outs - even the murders are commltted in a gruesomery BQOKS BCRlf EEáHfcSOiB R(f# I L W S