Murder Yet To Come

"This is what initially got me into writing this book in the first place—Isabella Briggs Myers and the fact that she was a writer of mystery novels . I read her novels and one of the things I was struck by was their deviance from the character setup of traditional detective fiction, where you have the detective and his sidekick. The detective is the brilliantly perceptive one—the person who can look at you and see immediately that the right side of your cheek is shaved a little less well than the left side of your cheek, which means the window in your bathroom is West-facing instead of East-facing, and the slight limp in your left leg suggests you’ve recently returned from war. The detective can deduce all sorts of things about you from the tiniest details. He’s a virtuosic reader of people and has an incredible hermeneutic capability. The sidekick is the person who narrates the detective’s adventures. That dyad always seemed to me to work fabulously as a narrative device, but what was so interesting to me, reading Isabel Briggs Myers’s detective fiction, was that they featured trios or quartets of detectives. That seemed like too many cooks in the kitchen until I realized that for her, the detective story was an occasion to model the rational organization of labor according to the language of type that she inherited from her mother. One detective is able to perceive things that others can’t; the other is able to communicate tactfully with different witnesses; the third is able to make really effective decisions. In her hands, solving a mystery becomes a group effort—a precursor to a show like CSI or Law & Order , which institutionalize the pursuit of justice, rather than the vigilante detective who’s going behind the back of Scotland Yard because he’s such a genius and institutional rules and hierarchies only cramp his style. Isabel Briggs Myers’s detectives function as a well-oiled machine; each of them has a different part to play, and only through cooperation can they solve the case. It exemplifies a certain bureaucratic heroism premised on the logic of type. “Solving a mystery becomes a group effort—a precursor to a show like CSI or Law & Order ” But Murder Yet To Come is also a genuinely good murder mystery. It’s well-written, it’s entertaining, rapidly-moving, and propulsive. In 1928, it won the largest award ever for a murder mystery, beating out a young Ellery Queen. There’s also just the pleasure of recovering a book that has basically been lost but that was once a huge bestseller in its time—it went through seven or eight printings, and made Isabel a tremendous amount of money which she lost in the depression. The novel does teach you how to think typologically, so I don’t think you need the specific language of Myers Briggs in order to enjoy it. You can enjoy it based upon the mystery of it alone. But I think it’s very interesting that CAPT wants to make the novel into an occasion for the language of type to invade fiction. Right. One way to relate this to my first book Paraliterary is to think of reading typologically as a form of bad reading: it’s a way of refusing individuality and always reading for typicality. CAPT is trying to use the novel to teach a form of bad reading, and the novel is perfectly poised to do that."