Mysteries and Fantasies: Mountains Wild & Djinn Patrol

All fiction takes place in a fantasy world, determined in part by what gets on the page and the worldview of the story. You can see this in game design. "Noir," for examples, describes a style and a focus when used in fiction. However, in video and board games, "noir" has come to mean a marketing shorthand and a geographic setting—L.A., or at least the 1920s—perhaps because it's hard (though not impossible! Good games do this! Don't be mad at me!) to build a game simply around mood without limiting the locale.

I love mysteries. But I also acknowledge that mysteries often take place in a fantasy setting—or at least a secondary setting, a bent version of our reality. There's good reason that Se7en takes place only in an unnamed "city" that seems at once to be an eastern metropolis and yet is also minutes away from the unbroken, golden fields of the movie's climax.

The best mysteries, I think, can use this to their advantage.

I've read two wonderful mysteries this last month: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara and The Moutains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor. I've also started the sequel to Taylor's book, A Distant Grave. It's a good book, but it also got me thinking about the space that mysteries and police procedurals occupy.

Where are they set? Certainly not in our world.

[Spoilers mostly avoided, but I really recommend the books above. If you really want to avoid any hint of what happens, even, just go read em!]

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I think back to a Twitter exchange (forgive me) between the wonderful science fiction author Nedki Okorafor and a fan when she said she was binge watching the show Brooklyn 99. Anyone familiar with the show knows that it's wacky comedy, refreshingly wholesome, with great representation. The humor rarely traffics in the mean-spirited, and there's a warm romance at the show's heart. The police chief has a corgi.

Yet a fan challenged Okorafor for her taste. How could she watch a cop show, given all the police violence in the U.S.? Isn't that just free PR for the police? Okorafor, a Black woman, pointed out that as a fiction writer she is very capable of separating fantasy from reality. It's a demand of the genre, just like believing while you read a fantasy story that wizards are real.

But the thing is that Brooklyn 99 is clear about its genre and its relationship to the real world. You can't miss that it's a half hour sitcom. Perhaps with written fiction, it's actually harder to make it clear where a story is set…

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Let me say a lot of good things about Taylor's The Mountains Wild first. One of my reading apps recommended it to me, I think, because Tana French is among my favorite authors, and both French and Taylor's stories are set largely in Ireland.

But that's where the similarities end. Whereas French's prose is often inward, reflective, and elegiac, Taylor manages to have beautiful and insightful writing that moves at a much faster pace, scenes that sometimes read like a stage play. She's closer to early Dennis Lehane than Tana French.

Part of this is partly because Taylor's protagonist, New York police detective Maggie D'arcy, is second-generation Irish American. Her relationship to Ireland is part fantasy in and of itself, the way it is for many Americans. She is a forty-something divorcee with a teenage daughter, and Taylor is one of the few writers to engage with a character and really sell me on the teenager, Lilly, who seems a real character rather than a cardboard cutout.

The Mountains Wild sees Maggie returning to Ireland to help with an investigation that could be linked to the disappearance of her Erin in 1993. The current investigation takes place in 2016. Chapters swap between three timelines, a conceit I often find frustrating but that Taylor makes compelling: 1993 and Erin's disappearance, the current 2016 investigation, and Maggie's memories of her cousin's childhood. Over the course of the novel, Maggie uncovers crimes of murder and crimes of rape. She reckons with the way that sexual violence is often perpetrated by people we know, maybe even people we love. Though she is a clear-eyed and sometimes cynical narrator, she is still able to feel shocked and betrayed. Taylor's writing is admirably frank about these issues, avoiding sensationalizing the topic while still working to reveal something insidious and true about the difficulties that women face when seeking justice in issues of sexual assault. It's harrowing, and something that feels real and immediate…especially when it's been only a week, as of this writing, since serial rapist Bill Cosby was released from jail.

Full disclosure: I listened to this book as an audiobook narrated by Marisa Calin, who imbued the characters with real feeling and pathos, and whose use of distinguishing accents was muted and well-done.

The story wraps these together to reveal layers of Maggie's motivations, her shame, her love for her cousin and her family, her views of Ireland as a mystical place that holds something of her blood in the land—a cultural myth embraces by many Americans, whose population has more folks identifying as "Irish American" than there are currently citizens in Ireland itself. In Taylor's work, Ireland is not a real place, the way it is for French's characters, who often find parts of their country frustrating even, at times, worthy of disdain. For Maggie and her cousin Erin, it is a fantasy land, a place where redemption is near at hand. It is at once closer to God and closer to the fey, the wild, a place where people can be remade, and romance rekindled. It's a place where the dead lie, but for a time they can come back to life.  

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is also interested in fantasy. Set in an Indian slum, it follows three children as they search for a missing classmate. Though there are many narrators, our main guide through the mystery is a 9-year-old named Jai. He is an easily distracted student, well-meaning but selfish in a hundred simple ways, addicted to police procedural TV shows. But Anappara shows us the interior world of many children in the neighborhood.

The story begins and ends with stories of various spirits that live in and around the slum. We learn that the children—ignored by adults and, they assume, most gods—offer gifts to local spirits and good djinn, who they hope will help them. The novel slowly reveals that many of these tales are being told to one of our main protagonists, Faiz. Faiz is a Muslim child; and as more crimes are committed in the neighborhood, he and his family fall under scrutiny thanks to racial and religious prejudice. In a hostile world that seems set against him, it makes sense that one would seek refuge in the supernatural.

Anappara says in her afterward that she wrote Djinn Patrol in part because so much writing about missing children in India discusses the statistics but ignores their humanity, their spirit, their humor. It is true that over 170 children go missing in India daily, and it's hard to get one's brain to move beyond that sheer, terrifying statistic. But Anappara does so, and admirably. Jai and his friends, Pari and Faiz, feel like real people, in no small part because of their dreams, their fantasies. There is true pathos in Jai's desire to solve the mystery, his selfishness, his petty fears, his jealousy of his sister, his regret when he speaks from anger.

The book has weight and heft. It is ironic without being cruel, and we cannot help but mourn not just for the missing children but for the brutal disconnect between what Jai sees as possible and what we know is coming. He imagines himself as a great detective. He imagines justice being done. Meanwhile, his parents and others imagine the constant threat of their slum being "bulldozed" by the police.

Without giving much away, Anaparra manages to fulfill the demands of a mystery while staying true to the reality she has built. Jai's fantasies are not met, though at the end of the novel his own imagination is no less wild. His family is hurt mightily in the social strife that befalls the neighborhood due to the string of child kidnappings. And in a masterful trick of the novel, Anaparra leaves us imagining what is possible for these children—especially for Jai's sister Runu, who aspires to be a track star, and whose aspirations are tragically derailed because of her parents' cocktail of genuine concern and ingrained misogyny.

Djinn Patrol is a beautiful book and a terrific mystery. Its power comes from its grounded-ness in the real world; which is to say, its relationship with the fantasies that make up our lives.

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A Distant Grave is the sequel to Mountains Wild, out in June of this year. Maggie remains a great narrator. The novel shines in the scenic. Individual interactions between Maggie, her boyfriend Conor, and Maggie's daughter Lilly are breezy but suffused with real drama and concern. Often, police procedurals fail to integrate family drama into the broader mystery in a way I find organic and engaging, but Taylor does that rare thing that mystery fans desire above all else: she surprises us.

Without giving much away, there is a scene in which Maggie is visiting Conor's family in Ireland and stumbles on some of the going-ons of the farm. Suspense gives way to relief, which gives way to a beautiful moment of connection between two families. Taylor is at her best when she is concerned with the things that tie families together, over decades and in brief, fleeting moments. It's something many writers aspire to, but few can pull off. It's a minor miracle of skillful writing that Taylor makes moments like these genuine and heartful rather than cheesy.

Okay, I hope it's clear I like the book.

Now for something totally different.

Remember how I said that most mysteries take place in a fantasy world? Part of that has to do with the way politics are presented in mysteries. The hardboiled works of Raymond Chandler and even more contemporary classics like Sue Grafton's Alphabet Series tend to use fictional politicians and stand-ins for corruption, partly to avoid reckoning with the demands of realism, I think, but partly because there is more artistic freedom in such a decision. You can still critique politics systems without "naming names." Only some authors seek to really deal with real politicians in the mystery genre, and few do it successfully. James Elroy manages it by writing historical mysteries that feel far removed, settled, distant in time—or at least a little distant, as is the case in his Underworld USA Trilogy.

But A Distant Grave is set in our world. Specifically, it's set during the Trump presidency.

At one point, Conor and Maggie discuss the happenings in the USA, the social unrest. Conor expresses a feeling of "schadenfreude" for the USA, saying that Ireland used to "look up to" America but now feels a kind of "pity." Maggie doesn't really respond…

And here is where the fantasy breaks. Maggie never mentions Trump by name, though the book is set in 2017. The novel seeks to acknowledge that 2017 was a moment of political change, but it seeks to play both sides of the political aisle. We never know how Maggie voted. She makes a note that people were "surprised" how Long Island "voted" in the election. She mentions an uptick in police focus on MS-13, while noting that Latino members of the police force are uncomfortable with the resurgence of open racism in the NY police. Yet we never know her feelings about it, personally.

The novel wants to have it both ways: it wants to be grounded in time, while having a narrator and a narration that is above and removed from matters of politics.

This is where the novel wants to trade one fantasy for another. The idea here is that Maggie, the lens through which we see this world, is somehow outside of petty political concerns, somehow righteously reasonable and moderate. She is too reasonable, too focused on her job. The world seems crazy, but she is not. Politics are complicated, but she is not.

This is a common enough fantasy. Many Americans pride themselves on being "moderate," on seeing violence on "both sides."

Yet it is a fantasy that only benefits the worst actors—to be frank, the far right and the violent extremism that they have made a major part of their political strategy. The ACLU has tracked the rise of extremist violence in the USA, and the numbers are clear. Both the ACLU and the FBI have noted that far right terrorism, especially white supremacist violence, is the worst domestic terror threat to the US by an order of magnitude. During the January 6th terrorist attack on our capital, far right terrorists tried to overthrow the government and kill the vice president. This is not to mention the way the far right has sought to deny climate science even as wildfires rage across the United States. This is not to mention how members of CPAC applauded the US's failure to reach 70% vaccination against the Covid-19 pandemic, literally cheering for a virus. If we are at war with the virus, with an incarnation of death itself, conservatives in this country have declared themselves on the side of death.

Any claim that "both sides" have become more extreme only excuses and facilitates such attacks. Any claim of neutrality or political removal is the same neutrality of Neville Chamberlain—not neutrality at all, not peace at all, but an abrogation of duty. An ostrich with its head in the sand. A way of walking away from the table to let somebody else foot the bill.

Any acknowledgement of this reality strips away the fantasy of police as an uncomplicated force for good. The idea of Maggie working with other detectives motivated by a desire to close cases, the idea that the police force is mostly engaged in solving violent crimes…these are fantasies. The police in the US solve about 2% of major crimes. The New York Times reports that about 4% of police work is involved with violent crimes, at all and so the mystery genre as a whole traffics in part in a fantasy of selection; nobody wants to read about a police officer chasing down kids for jaywalking; or if they do, then that is a crime drama, not a mystery.

Again, I'm a mystery fan. I am willing to suspend my disbelief and can do so easily. Dragons fly and breath fire. Wizards shoot lightning from their fingertips. Police detectives just want to get their man before he kills again. Etc.

But it is one thing to ask your reader to suspend disbelief, and another to ask them to hold onto two incompatible fantasies. In some small, subtle ways, A Distant Grave demands that readers accept a world in which our broken politics are fuzzy, complicated, and Trump is a mere cipher, ever-present but not to be named, rather than a fascist who came very close to destroying American democracy itself and seems bent on that task still. At the same time, it demands us to believe the police are on our side, existing in the same world as Trump but unconnected to him, above all that. That they are, in short, uncomplicatedly heroic.

I'm trafficking in a bit of hyperbole here. Taylor tries. She introduces a subplot that tries to reflect some of the political side of police work, where there is drama between Maggie and the DA, Long Island politics getting its fingers into her police work and her private life.

But there is an incompatibility here. Either the police are the good guys and Trump is not real in the world of the novel; or 2016 happened in the book as it did in real life, and we have had to awake to the reality that the police are not here for our protection (from NYT again, 2005: "The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.") and are engaged with an active campaign to jail, murder, and maim Black and brown people. Taylor asks too much of the reader, I think, when she tries to play it coy.

But I don't know if this is a critique of the book so much as it is an observation about fascism itself, and how much it demands of us, how much it demands of its adherents. Umberto Eco has noted that fascism's first demand is for people to accept untruths and false logic—to accept that the fascist state is at once immortal and invincible, and yet open to deadly attack from a minority. It asks people to accept, in other words, a fantasy. It is difficult for any writer, regardless of genre, to engage with that system, and so perhaps Taylor is not to blame.

I am still enjoying the book. I'll read the next book Taylor writes too, probably!

But my point is this: both Taylor's mysteries and Anaparra's Djinn Patrol are concerned with the imagination, with the fantasies and falsehoods and dreams that make up our world.

But the former accepts one dangerous lie, wraps itself in the dream that anyone can be free from the intrusion of fascism into our daily life, that it is possible to be righteously neutral in a world where our brothers and sisters are being daily slain by police, who we pay to do that deadly work. It refuses to ask how many of Maggie's partners drive home with a "Back the Blue" bumper sticker—indistinguishable from a swastika, in effect. As Roger Ebert wrote: " The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?"

Djinn Patrol is more ambitious, and more honest. By engaging with the fantasies that children adopt to make sense of a violent and uncaring world, it challenges the fantasy that defines so much of our self-interested lives: that we are innocent of these crimes, that we could not stop them if only we had the courage not to look away.  

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You can donate to RAINN, which helps survivors of sexual assault, here: https://donate.rainn.org/donate?_ga=2.79727838.83801093.1626961500-1552082214.1626961500