Detection + Drowning
"Omens change. Signs shift. Nothing is permanent."
To start the new year, let’s focus on beginnings. In many cosmic mysteries, the existential scope of the mystery is a surprise to the reader and a revelation to its characters. Less common is the cosmic mystery that tells you exactly what you’re getting into.
The first chapter of Sara Gran’s 2011 novel Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (first in a trilogy) is one of my favorite mystery beginnings. It tells you what the mystery is, what kind of private eye Claire is, how solving the mystery will change her, and a glimpse at the solution, all without giving anything away.
It starts with a phone call. A potential client’s uncle went missing during Hurricane Katrina. He’s dead, probably due to the storm or the aftermath. While on the phone, Claire looks to her surroundings, her attention falling on the birds, but she shrugs off traditional interpretations of blue jays and crows. “Omens change. Signs shift. Nothing is permanent.” She finishes the call without taking the case.
Most of the first chapter is given to Claire’s dreams. She has history with New Orleans, but when she dreams of it, she’s on a rooftop at night, above the recent floods. She sees a gentleman scowling at her. He is Jacques Silette, the legendary French detective and author of the infamously impenetrable book, Détection, which guides Claire’s investigations.
In this dream, he speaks his writings to her: “If life gave you answers outright, they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself.”
In the dream-night, on the water, she sees a lantern on a rowboat with nobody inside. “No one will save you,” Silette continues. “You are alone in your search.” As he fades, he tells her, “All I can do is leave you clues… choose carefully the clues you leave behind... The mysteries you leave will last for lifetimes after you are gone. Remember: you are the only hope for those who come after you.”
In the morning, Claire shares her dream with her doctor, and then takes the case. Spoilers ahead.
Each sentence in the opening chapter is a thumbnail of a larger aspect of the novel, but I want to talk about five major elements:
1. The case of the missing uncle
2. Claire’s history in New Orleans
3. Claire’s investigative methodology, including the teachings of Jacques Silette
4. The way Claire interacts with the world
5. The vision of the rowboat with nobody inside
The opening promises a mystery that is as much about Claire DeWitt as the missing person, the appropriately named defense attorney Vic Willing. Claire doesn’t just rely on expected investigative techniques. Claire follows methods that allow the world to tell her the truth: intuition, folklore, I Ching, dream messages, and Jacques Silette’s isolating guide-slash-philosophy, which she occasionally describes as an inevitability that seized her, rather than something she chose for herself.
In this way, she’s the hard-worn counterpart to Twin Peaks’ Special Agent Dale Cooper, and a predecessor to Disco Elysium’s Harry Du Bois. There is no promise that the clues Claire follows will make sense to anyone but her. (There are hints that we don’t even see portions of her investigation, because her dreams and memories have a greater stake in the solution.)
This is not a mystery that the reader should expect to figure it out before, or even alongside, the detective. That’s not the pleasure of the book.
When her client presents the case, she asks, bluntly, “So what’s the mystery?” The first time I read this, I couldn’t help but think: the mystery is clearly if the missing uncle is dead or not, and if so, did Hurricane Katrina kill him, or something/one else?
To her, that’s not so easy a distinction. She knows New Orleans. Her friend Mick remarks that the city’s impoverished young gang members are “like people who went through a war. It’s not just the storm. That’s far from the worst thing that’s happened to most of them.” The missing uncle, Vic Willing, crossed paths with many of these boys in his work as a defense attorney.
This snippy question—“So what’s the mystery?” is also the first glimpse of the way Claire interacts with other people. She is manipulative, selfish, condescending, often under the influence of some substance or another—and capable of great compassion and vulnerability that bridges many social divides.
She does what she needs to in order to solve the case, something we let all detectives do, because it’s interesting to see them get away with it. At times, Gran obscures and omits trains of thought and other logical issues. So when the reader doesn’t understand Claire’s methodology, they run ragged after her, shouting, ‘This is a bad idea!’ as Claire leads somewhere deeper into the mystery, even if the reader isn’t exactly wrong.
Is Claire a train wreck because of the mysteries she’s solved, or is Claire just a train wreck, and solving mysteries is the best way she’s found to burn that chaotic energy?
Much of this behavior aligns with the writings of Jacques Silette, the man who speaks the most in the opening chapter, via Claire’s dream. In many chapters, Jacques Silette gets the final word. Claire was young when she stumbled upon his book, Détection, and she began her career as one of a trio of teenage sleuths running wild in New York, committing as many crimes as they solved.
After one of that trio went missing and the surviving two failed to solve the mystery, Claire ended up in New Orleans. There, she became the student of the detective Constance Darling, Darling a protégée of Silette himself—until Darling was gunned down in an act of poverty-motivated violence.
Claire’s internal world is given so much weight in the opening chapter because her past is the key to the mystery. Not literally, in the way that some stories have dual timelines that feed directly into the mystery. Instead, Claire’s memories of her own impoverished childhood, and the friends she made and lost, allow her to establish common ground with the boys who know what happened to Vic Willing. This is how she solves the case.
In a way, though, she knows the solution from her dream, too. There, in the nighttime floodwaters, away from the rooftop upon which Silette sits, she sees a rowboat with a lantern and nobody inside.
She trusts her dreams, and this is the clue she follows. In her initial interview with the client, she asks him if Vic Willing is the kind of man to go out and rescue people during the flood. Her client says no, even though his uncle is a good man. Much of the mystery lies in figuring out what a man like Vic Willing is capable of doing to and for other people.
Despite everything Claire uncovers, she discovers that he was indeed out there rescuing people at night, and that is when he was killed. Only then does her dream of the solution make sense.
Why make the first chapter a dreamy representation of the book to come? For me, it works for two reasons.
First, I think there’s a lot to be said for letting people know that this is an atypical mystery (a cosmic mystery, even). Procedurals and cozys and other flavors of crime fiction have signs early in the text that confirm to the reader, Yes, this is what you thought you were getting when you picked up this book.
In cosmic mysteries like this, such signs may include dreams, unusual investigators, idiosyncratic interiority, and a sense of unknowable weight pressing down on the characters. In more fantastical cosmic mysteries, there may also be obvious elements of science fiction or fantasy.
Most importantly, I think, is that this approach to the opening chapter serves what the book has to say about mystery fiction. In the ever-present words of Jacques Silette:
“‘The detective and the client, the victim and the criminal—all already know the solution to the mystery. They need only to remember it, and recognize it when it appears.’”
There is one element of the opening chapter I haven’t discussed: the weighty implication that Claire will leave as many mysteries as she solves, as if she acts, consciously or not, by the laws of some greater equilibrium. But as for those mysteries, and the clues she scatters for those who are compelled to solve them, I think those are better uncovered by the reader.
One of the first notes I made when I was putting together this newsletter was for this book: ‘this is a cosmic mystery because Claire’s methods work.’ The cosmic forces Claire faces are disaster, systemic poverty, and the maelstrom of her own mind. There are no otherworldly intrusions or shattered boundaries of reality. Instead, reality is refracted through prisms of perspective and introspection, so that we may clearly see its cosmic underpinnings.
Our personal experiences are small, and the forces that determine those experiences are often bigger than we can grasp. That tension is what cosmic mysteries are all about.
CLUBHOUSEKEEPING
Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.
Some time ago I put together a Goodreads list of cosmic mystery books I’ve read for the sake of this project. (I let it go for a bit because I banned myself from reading novel-length fiction while I wrapped up a novel draft. The Goodreads list is more or less updated now, and I’m currently working through some of your recommendations.)
Recently I made a list for video games over on Backloggd, which you can find here. I’m eager to add new titles to everything, so please let me know in the comments what cosmic mysteries you’ve read/played/watched recently.
NEXT MONTH
I chose to start the year off with Claire DeWitt, in part, because I’m looking forward to Sara Gran’s upcoming collection, Little Mysteries. Expect more Sara Gran at some point beyond February.
In early 2024, I was in an abyssal movie-watching slump. I’d settled into a job in the extended film industry-verse and I had no energy for movies in my free time, either in a theater or at home. The I Saw the TV Glow trailer rekindled my appetite, in part because I knew immediately it was a cosmic mystery. After an improbable succession of waylaid plans to see it with friends, etc, I finally just sat down and watched it in December.
Typically, cosmic mysteries are dangerous for their characters because of the existential risks of pursuing the mystery. I Saw the TV Glow is about the deeply personal, deeply cosmic danger that awaits if you don’t seek the truth. See you then.