Murder mystery is a genre often criticised for being repetitive. How many reasons to kill someone can there be? Despite this, an apparent public appetite for blood keeps books selling, drove Agatha Christie to writing 66 detective novels and maintains The Mousetrap as London’s longest running play. Perhaps we all find satisfaction in seeing a villain brought to justice, or enjoy living out the dream of being a detective, or need something to satiate a hidden murderous streak. As crime fiction perpetuates, writers have endeavoured to escape the clichés and stereotypes of detective fiction and regain some literary respect for the genre with big twists, modern “CSI” methods and increasingly grand murder plots.
Some say you should write about what you know, and Martinez certainly stuck to this. Like the author, the protagonist is a mathematician who moves from Argentina to study in Oxford and explore the field of mathematical logic. Martinez’s mathematical knowledge woven into his series of murders is a valiant attempt to add a unique layer of intellectual intrigue and was his audience as well informed and interested in mathematical logic, it would be an engaging addition to their quest to find the murderer. However, the vast majority of us who aren’t familiar with obscure mathematical cults and the sequence of Pythagorean numbers are left feeling alienated during Martinez’s chapter long maths lectures. The murder plot centres on a series of symbols which accompany murders and the endeavours of two mathematical academics to rise to the murderer’s challenge to guess who’s next. Engaging tension is maintained throughout as the reader and heroes repeatedly hope to prevent the next murder, while the excitement of a new murder and a new symbol is almost as desirable as a conclusion.
The fluidity of Martinez’s writing really reaches its peak as the, entirely superfluous, romantic subplot sweeps the narrator into his tennis partner’s bedroom. A good balance is struck throughout the novel between demonstrative exposition and the narrator simply telling the audience what facts they must accept, and Martinez’s sentence structure provides a controlled manipulation of pace. Even when the content becomes stodgy, Martinez’s style makes his writing fairly light and easy reading. With the exception of those which centre on explaining mathematical logic, he succeeds also in giving each chapter a sense of purpose in the progression of the story and leaving the reader feeling a step closer to understanding the killer’s system of victim selection.
Call me a traditionalist but, I find the greatest pleasure of reading a murder novel is the challenge to beat the detective to the solution, or at least to keep up with them. Without wanting to spoil the ending for others, the solution to the Oxford Murders left me quite unsatisfied. In murder mystery, the murderer who wasn’t a suspect in the first place has grown from a novelty to a cliché and Martinez’s reader is given no clues with which to predict or justify the conclusion. It would appear that piecing together evidence to prove suspects’ innocence or guilt is too old hand for Guillermo Martinez and we must instead be satisfied with having a solution handed to us. We are even denied the satisfaction of a Poirot style explanation to enlighten our failed investigative efforts.
It would be archaic of me to criticise the author for letting his culprit get away, but as they quietly confess to the narrator and slip away, I find myself unwilling to extend the sympathy they seek as the character hasn’t been shown to be at all pitiable through the rest of the novel and the reader has been given little chance to engage with them emotionally. Character depth clearly isn’t one of Martinez’s main aims as many of his characters seem to be mere means for conveying the plot whose revealed characteristics are all tools of the investigation.
The reader of The Oxford Murders is denied the chance to solve the murder themselves, denied the satisfaction of a villain punished and denied attachment to the characters. While Martinez withholds the traditional hooks of a murder mystery, he does succeed in writing in an engaging style, educating us in mathematical logic and subverting our expectations of detective fiction. However, its rejection of the pleasing closure of a classic evidential solution is perhaps why the 2008 film adaptation of this novel met with a disappointed audience and harsh criticism.
Calum Roy
An interesting account of the novel, Calum. The assessment of the style ('Martinez’s sentence structure provides a controlled manipulation of pace' 'Martinez’s style makes his writing fairly light' and so on) would have had more point if you'd actually quoted some of his writing; and you don't go very far in terms of situating the novel in the larger context of 'whodunit' writing, other than a couple of asides about Christie. There's more to 'crime fiction', and even 'puzzle whodunits' than her, after all.
ReplyDelete"Murder mystery is a genre often criticised for being repetitive." I think you mean 'formulaic', rather than 'repetitive'.
"An apparent public appetite for blood keeps books selling, drove Agatha Christie to writing 66 detective novels and maintains The Mousetrap as London’s longest running play." Rather random list of things; why isolate Christie, here (hardly up to date); the appetite is surely more than 'apparently' present; and '...to writing...' isn't idiomatic.
"...and was his audience as well informed and interested in mathematical logic..." Aha! This should be 'and were his audience as well informed and interested in mathematical logic...' Subjunctive!
"demonstrative exposition" I'm not sure I know what this is.
"It would be archaic of me to criticise the author for letting his culprit get away." I don't follow: why 'archaic'?