Harry Potter's Bookshelf (3 page)

From Poe to Chandler, the characters and action of mysteries are largely the same. We are given a disturbing, seemingly insoluble situation, usually involving a murder, preferably in a closed room in which the murderer could not have entered or exited. The essential players are the detective, the individual who needs his help (often but not always the one accused of the crime or not satisfied with the official explanation of it), the victim, and the criminal, with a supporting cast of Dr. Watsons and incompetent, empiricist gendarmes. The insoluble problem is set, the narrator presents the clues, the detective resolves the mystery, the criminal is confronted in a dramatic denouement, and the moral order returns to one degree or another.
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The essential part of this formula with respect to its ability to keep us turning pages, however, doesn’t involve the players or the murder. It is our confusion. We are engaged first and foremost by the
mystery
involved, the insoluble puzzle confronting us. Our desire to learn what we don’t understand, how what couldn’t have happened did in fact actually happen, not to mention why it happened, all but drags us headlong into and through the story—from beginning to resolution.

Harry Potter’s adventures do not feature a private detective like Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, or Poe’s Auguste Dupin. Every year at Hogwarts, though, a puzzle or mystery unfolds that Harry, Ron, and Hermione team up to solve. One by one:

Harry, as we’ll see in chapter two, is anything but the razor-sharp incarnation of deduction and induction that we look for in heroic detectives or even sad sacks like Columbo. For the most part, as earnest as he is in the search for clues and answers with Ron and Hermione, our boy hero is at least as clueless as the mystery formula’s affable sidekick-narrator and as often as not is the suspect of the crime or the aggrieved party seeking relief—hence Ms. Rowling’s assertion that
Harry
is “not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes,” as well as her mention of Dorothy Sayers and her belief that her stories differ from detective novels in being character driven. The detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers is the mystery model for Ms. Rowling’s work precisely because of the depth of the development of her characters.

Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey have fallen out of popular taste today, but during her lifetime she was famous for her detective fiction. Her Peter Wimsey work includes fourteen volumes of novels and short stories, but Sayers was also known for her work with the Detection Club. The detective writers’ equivalent of the more celebrated Inklings, the Detection Club had members who were the brighter lights of the age, including G. K. Chesterton, the club’s first president, and Agatha Christie, president for nearly twenty years. Sayers was a founding member and a club president, too, from 1949 to 1958, and it was in this role that Ms. Rowling probably thinks of her as a detection rule maker.

The Detection Club’s rules are the definition of the classical formula. They prohibit any concealing of essential clues, any servant murderers, or unimaginative mystery clichés like an unknown evil twin, the dog who does not bark, and “the bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.”
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The Detection Club’s idea of the detective fiction puzzle is essentially that it must be a fair puzzle and just about the puzzle. Hence:

Sayers, however, thinks there can be more to good mystery writing and that the formula as proposed by the Detection Club is ultimately limiting.

Which, of course, means “no romance.” As Wright requires in Rule #3:

Sayers, however, thinks that Collins is the model for good mystery writing and that the formula as proposed by Wright is ultimately “a literature without bowels”
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and the last thing she wanted to be writing. She prefaced her Wimsey play,
Busman’s Honeymoon
, consequently, with this apology for its romantic interest:

Ms. Rowling is correct in saying that Dorothy Sayers breaks the “no romance in detective fiction” rule but not in saying that she “broke her own rule”; it was Wright’s rule and the Detection Club’s, not hers. And this is no small thing because J. K. Rowling breaks the strict rules of mystery fiction for precisely the same reason as Sayers did: for the sake of full-blooded characters rather than cardboard cutouts or Clue board game figurines. Sayers is known, in fact, as a “character-driven” mystery writer and this is what distinguishes her from the more formulaic whodunit writers of the Golden Age, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.

J. K. Rowling shares the outlook and much of the experience of Sayers. For starters, both had a classical education with modern language studies at university, a spell of single motherhood, and remarkable if not proselytizing Christian faith. To that mix add, as I’ll argue in later chapters for Rowling, a taste for Dante, hermetic writing, and a penchant for delivering layers of meaning in stories that on the surface are light reads for diversion. At least half the narrative drive in the
Harry Potter
novels comes from the mystery Harry, Ron, and Hermione are trying to solve. Ms. Rowling follows Ms. Sayers’s lead in using the genre and its formulas only until such obedience to literary convention makes it harder to deliver the story’s intended meaning.

What sort of meaning was Sayers smuggling into her stories? A sacramental worldview, certainly, from her upbringing and education as an Oxford Platonist and “an existence on a totally different plane,” a non-local eternity within mundane reality but invisible to Muggles:
Remember “the seeing eye” and the Oxford Platonists; we’ll be running into them repeatedly as we work through Rowling’s greater influences to get to the many “seeing eyes” in
Deathly Hallows
. It is the heart of the subversive attack of Romantic writers in English literature on the soulless scientism of the modern era.

As mentioned above, the mystery element is “at least half ” of the narrative drive of the
Harry Potter
novels. Ms. Rowling gives us the clue we need to find the missing half that powers her literary conveyor belt. She points to it in her claim that Harry’s adventures are less mystery than “character-driven books.” What is it about the lead character that keeps us reading through books that are up to eight hundred pages long? It cannot be romance; Harry’s romantic life doesn’t begin in earnest until
Phoenix
, the fifth book, and
Half-Blood Prince
, the sixth book.

It’s not anything Harry says, has, or does; it’s what Harry
is
. An orphan.

When I first got out of college, I taught Latin at a small prep school in western North Carolina called the Asheville School. I think it was there I first heard a teacher say, “They won’t care how much you know ’til they know how much you care.” It’s true in the classroom and on the playing field with high-school age students, certainly, but it also is something of a guideline for writers. Until the reader cares about the characters in the story, really identifies with them, drops the disbelief, and experiences the story as if he or she had passed through the looking glass into Wonderland, nothing else matters.

Write majestic prose like Philip Pullman or J. R. R. Tolkien. Baptize the imagination like Bunyan, Spencer, and Lewis. Create locked-door and chilling mysteries like John Dickson Carr and Edgar Allan Poe. If the reader doesn’t care for the character involved like he or she would for a dear family member in need (assuming the reader isn’t at war with his or her family . . . ), it won’t matter. No one will read the book to its finish.

Beyond believability, then, an author has to do whatever is possible to get the reader on board with the characters. There are tricks that can be done with narratological voice. As we’ll see in the next chapter, choosing to tell the story in the “third person limited omniscient” view—sitting on a character’s shoulder and sharing his or her perspective—fosters sympathy. Another way to grab the reader by the heart is to trigger the trip wire tied to the reader’s sense of fairness or justice. This is the “gotcha” of mystery writing, truth be told. When presented with a crime and a messy set of clues, not to mention the stray corpse or two, our conscience flashes a red light, especially if there is someone unjustly accused or a murderer escaping without punishment. I don’t know if we are hardwired this way (I suspect we are) or if this is a conditioned response from childhood training. Whatever the cause, it’s a rare reader who doesn’t want to have the pieces to the puzzle assembled and justice served for the innocent and the guilty. Who won’t read to the very end to learn the solution and hear the confession of the bad guy?

Take this one step further and you have Rocky (the boxer, not the squirrel). Readers love the underdog, the nobody who fights all odds and comes out on top. The traction of this kind of story is in our immediate sympathy for the little guy, the disadvantaged person, the poor, the minority, and the disenfranchised. Unless the marginalized protagonist is a real loser, just the fact that he or she lives on the periphery, outside of an in crowd, means the reader will wave pom-poms on the sidelines of the playing field.

No one gets this better than Ms. Rowling: All of her good guys are misfits. Hermione is a Mudblood. Ron and the Weasleys are dirt poor and blood traitors. Hagrid is a half-giant. Sirius is an escaped prisoner and convicted murderer looking at a Dementor’s Kiss first thing if he is caught. Remus? Werewolf. Tonks? Metamorphmagus. Firenze is a friendly centaur who might as well have a red shiny nose like Rudolph. Mad-Eye has gone round the twist with “constant vigilance.” Mundungus is a thief and coward. Severus . . . well, where do you start with the Potions Master? Dumbledore seemed the only Boy Scout in his army but we learn in
Deathly Hallows
he has a Machiavellian streak as big as the Room of Requirement.