Red Mist (Conclusion)

So, how many mystery stories are solved based on the old, “Aha-she-had-an-identical-twin!”  premise?  Well, this is one of them.  Actually, I can’t help but wonder if we really needed it here, if we needed it to explain motive, misidentification or anything else.  Cornwell does a good job of camouflaging all the clues and sudden insights with a “red mist” of irrelevant or only partially relevant information.  It still isn’t clear to me to what degree Kay might have expected to find the murderer living at the mansion where the old murder had taken place.  I suspect not at all, and the murderer’s resemblance to her twin sister, whom Kay had seen before, might have been what tipped her off; but another, more sophisticated and less trite happenstance might have served the purpose just as well. 

Despite all the earlier implications that Kay was involved somehow in the murders, it doesn’t seem to have been a factor in slowing down her own investigations or causing her problems with higher authorities.  Is this simply a matter of misdirection, of distracting us from what the real storyline is so that we are challenged just that much more to solve the riddle of the mystery ourselves?  That would appear to be the reason for including such a twist, along with other more subtle ones.  But I also wonder if, going back over this section, I would begin to see a much more tightly orchestrated plot than I realized on the first read.  Or not. 

Our protagonist isn’t one that is given to starry-eyed philosophizing, preferring to remain coldly pragmatic even in the face of the irrational guilt she’s feeling about Jaime’s death.  The closest Kay gets to considering the big picture is this:  “While I understand the concept of fundamental randomness, the favored theory of physicists that the universe exists because of a Big Bang roll of the dice, and therefore we can expect a mindless messiness to rule our everyday lives, I don’t accept it.  I honestly don’t believe it.”  A Big Bang roll of the dice?  This metaphor seems to me to display a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory.  And the phrase “I honestly don’t believe it” seems to commit the classic error of reversing cause and effect in the form of belief and truth, as if the stronger you believe something, the more likely it is to be true.  (I hope I’m not stepping on any toes here!)  She continues, “Nature has its symmetries and laws, even if they are beyond the limits of our understanding, and there are no accidents, not really, only labels and definitions that we resort to for lack of any other way to make sense of certain events…”  There are so many kinks in this attempt at reasoning that I’m just going to let it go. 

The passages of conversation between Kay and her husband Benton are very convincing.  People do speak to their spouses in a totally different way than they do anyone else, and there is a richly developed juxtaposition of personalities here, possibly mimicking the author’s own relationship with her husband, if she is or was married.  Her daughter Lucy has a very compelling presence as well, reminding me that these characters have all appeared in a number of novels before in the same relationships.  It’s easy to see why Cornwell’s readership would want more of this.

 

If the climax seems a little too easy, with the heroes stumbling onto the solution almost by accident, we should remember that many good mysteries are concluded this way, and that in real life things happen this way as well.  We’ve all experienced it; the “Aha!” experience often just hits us in the face, when we’re least prepared for it.  It’s just that we don’t find ourselves in potentially life-or-death situations the way many of our favorite fictional characters do!



Starting next weekend, October’s book of the month is “Frankenstein,” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  The first week's section is up to chapter 4.

“Frankenstein”; or, “The Modern Prometheus” is the original 1818 'Uncensored' Edition of Frankenstein as first published anonymously in 1818. This original version is much more true to the spirit of the author's original intentions than the heavily revised 1831 edition, edited by Shelley, in part, because of pressure to make the story more conservative. Many scholars prefer the 1818 text to the more common 1831 edition.  Shelley started writing the story when she was nineteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823.
Shelley had travelled in the region of Geneva, where much of the story takes place, and the topics of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband, Percy Shelley. The storyline emerged from a dream. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made. She then wrote Frankenstein.