THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504060430
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
I LOVE a mystery, always have, always will.
But I remain ever Watson, not Sherlock Holmes - the admiring chorus, not the star performer; like the good doctor, I see, but I do not observe.
I'm a guy who likes the back of the book, and here comes a book that is all back - Mystery & Crime: The New York Public Library Book of Answers by Jay Pearsall (Simon & Schuster, 175 pp., $11). If you love a mystery as I do, you'll find this brisk volume as irresistible as a disappearing corpse. If you don't, it should at least provide you with diverting places to look for one.
Question: What's the most unusual murder weapon used in a mystery?
Answer: ``In Roald Dahl's `Lamb to the Slaughter,' a woman kills her husband by striking him with a frozen leg of lamb - and then cooks it and serves it to investigators who worked late and missed their dinner hour.''
The New York Public Library, famous for its capacious collection, marble corridors and massy stone lions at the Fifth Avenue entrance, has been sponsoring thinking person's cribs for some time. There have been The Book of Answers: The NYPL Telephone Reference Service's Most Unusual and Entertaining Questions, Literature: The NYPL Book of Answers and American History: The NYPL Book of Answers. Now this venerable institution has gotten down, literally, to cases.
Here is the definitive place to look when you find yourself wondering about the way Hercule Poirot preferred his toast (in neat little squares) or the precise color of Sam Spade's unfooled eyes (yellow-green).
Question: Where did the term ``red herring'' come from?
Answer: ``A red herring is a false clue meant to distract from the real culprit, and the term has its origins in 17th-century England. It seems that certain troublemakers with an acute sense of mischief would buy herrings and smoke them, thereby giving them a reddish color, and then drag them through the woods just before a fox hunt. The fishy scent would confuse the hounds, allowing the fox to escape.''
Pearsall is the perfect person to put together such an arcane compendium. He is an expert on mystery and suspense fiction and the owner of the New York bookstore Murder Ink. He approaches the literature of ingenuity with a scholar's attention to detail - and a wag's distance from it.
Pearsall reports, ``After years of looking things up or listening to the bookstore owner's greatest resource - other knowledgeable customers just waiting to show off - you learn a thing or two, and eventually you have a brain full of interesting (you hope) and useful (you pray) information.''
Interesting: In 21 books by John D. McDonald, Travis McGee slept with 53 women, including a schoolteacher, an Avon lady and a hostess at Beef 'n It.
Useful (well, also interesting): Sgt. Friday's badge number on the TV series ``Dragnet'' was 714; Jack Webb chose it because it was the number of home runs hit by Babe Ruth.
Grand master Rex Stout, who created dietetically incorrect detective Nero Wolfe, had a theory that people who didn't like mysteries were anarchists. Such people don't appreciate order. In mystery stories, there is an insistence on order - even, by contrast to much of today's unsprung fiction, a reliance upon plot.
Mystery writers and readers are always trying to make perfect sense out of the impossible.
Question: What is the most clever method of disposing of a body in crime fiction?
Answer: ``There are many good ones, but our favorite appears in Jack Finney's Time and Again. Some folks may cry `Foul play!' because of the element of science fiction in the book, but we like it anyway. The hero is able to travel through time and go back far enough to prevent his enemy's parents from ever meeting, thus getting rid of the body by uncreating it.''
How's that for Oedipus, Rex? MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College.
ILLUSTRATION: Peter De Seve photo
A mystery aficionado's view of the Fifth Avenue entrance of the New
York Public Library/ by CNB