"I'm no detective. I'm a psychoanalyst. But this whole case depends on psychological patterns. If they can be figured out we may know the right answer."
.jpg)
The Murder of Eleanor Pope was published in 1956, and is the first of four detective novels starring San Francisco habitue Michael Gray. You can get a copy for like 15 bucks online, or if you are a cheapo like me you can read an electronic copy via the hoopla system available through many public libraries. I am still signed up to hoopla through a library I patronized in Columbus, Ohio some years ago.
I've told you a hundred times that Kuttner was very interested in psychology, so you won't be too surprised to learn that Michael Gray is a psychoanalyst and this novel is practically a pro-psychoanalysis propaganda piece. Kuttner in this novel teaches us all about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, presenting this material as if it is all undisputed fact. Sentences like "only in the psychoanalyst's office could Dunne find strength enough to find and understand his own deepest terrors" and descriptions of the selflessness and generosity of psychoanalysts promote the message that psychoanalysis is not only awesome but essential to our society. Allied to this is the idea, presented directly and indirectly, that we shouldn't be so quick to punish criminals--the people we consider criminals are just ill, and psychoanalysts can cure them, and throwing them in the clink so they can't get their mitts on decent people and decent people's property will just make them worse. Alas, despite how self-evidently wonderful psychoanalysis is, "there still weren't enough therapists to go around." Did Kuttner hope to inspire readers to study psychoanalysis? (One of the odd little wrinkles of The Murder of Eleanor Pope is that Gray is not a doctor, but a "lay analyst." Wikipedia is telling me Freud wrote a whole book defending the idea of people practicing psychoanalysis without any kind of medical degree.)
It is normal for fiction to advance some agenda, or to depict characters who are spokesmen for some philosophy or theory, but satisfying arguments require evidence, and compelling fiction requires conflict, and instead of coming up with evidence for the value of psychoanalysis, or examining psychoanalysis from various angles by having different characters offer conflicting opinions, Kuttner just takes it for granted that psychoanalysis works and its foundational concepts are the truth and presents the topic to the reader in a simplistic, credulous way that is sort of annoying; at times reading The Murder of Eleanor Pope feels like reading a textbook for children or a pamphlet given out by a therapist to a new patient. Now, maybe I should cut Kuttner some slack, because by 2024 we've all experienced a mountain of genre fiction and popular nonfiction that exploits or explains psychological concepts, and perhaps in 1956 ordinary people who read paperback detective novels with a pretty girl's face on the cover hadn't been exposed to much of this stuff yet.
The Murder of Eleanor Pope consists of 28 short chapters. The first depicts the title character getting murdered on a foggy street near a park by an unidentified assailant. Then we meet Michael Gray, self-sacrificing shrink, and his latest patient, Howard Dunne, and over the course of like a dozen chapters follow the progress of Dunne's treatment. We get all the scenes we expect--Gray asking about Dunne's feelings, lots of talk about Dunne's dreams, Dunne having a tearful breakthrough after digging up the suppressed memory of the thing he did in the past he feels guilty over, repeated assertions that psychotherapy is just like real medicine like setting a broken bone or sterilizing a wound.
Dunne is a womanizing advertising guy, an Army Air Force veteran of World War II. He's a passionate man who needs to "blow off steam" regularly, a man for whom one woman isn't enough. In the service Dunne met a dude older than himself, Sam Pope, and they became fast friends. Dunne doesn't have much family, and his mother died while he was off fighting the Hun, so Dunne moved to Pope's home town of San Fransicko when he got out of the Air Force; Pope owns a chain of restaurants and became one of Dunne's biggest clients when he went into the advertising game. Pope married some chick much younger than himself, Eleanor, and Eleanor made it her practice to cheat on Sam. Dunne married Sam Pope's sister, Mary, who is Dunne's age. Mary and Howard Dunne are also always cheating on each other, Mary currently with some slacker guy Arnold Farragut.
All this soap opera jazz is connected to the crime at the center of the story, the murder of Eleanor Pope five months ago. Gray has a buddy who is a cop, Captain Zucker, and in his role as psychoanalyst he summons to his office or visits the homes and offices of people like Mary Dunne, Sam Pope, Arnold Farragut, and Pope's business manager Maurice Hoyle to ask them to help him with Dunne's therapy--it takes a village to cure a neurotic, I guess. Talking to all these people allows Gray to learn all sorts of details about the murder of Mrs. Pope and those suspected of bashing her cabeza in with that rock.
The police consider Farragut a suspect, as well as casino owner Carol Webster and the organized crime thug who hangs out at her casino all the time, either working for her or manipulating her, Bruce Oliver; Eleanor Pope was killed right after she left the casino, and Farragut, Webster and Oliver were all at the casino that night. We readers of course consider Pope and Dunne suspects as well, and Dunne does feel guilty over Eleanor Pope's death--he was supposed to take her out that fateful night (he was banging her, of course) but he had had to work, so she went to the casino alone and was walking the mean streets of SF all by herself after she left.
It is with some relief that halfway through the novel we find Captain Zucker calling Gray up to tell the shrink that Dunne is dead. No more chapters detailing Dunne's therapy! Dunne died of cyanide poisoning, and the question is who put the poison in his drink--did he commit suicide, or was he murdered? Maybe Sam Pope is the killer? But three days later Pope dies of cyanide poisoning himself, and the cops begin to think the killer of all three was Mary Dunne. But Michael Gray begs to differ! He figures Mary Dunne is innocent, and becomes determined to get her out of jail--to do that he has to find the killer himself!
So in Chapters 19 and most of those following, Gray does the stuff we expect the main character in a detective story to do, going from place to place in the town, talking to people, looking for clues, being threatened by people (in Gray's case Carol Webster and Bruce Oliver) who want him to stop pursuing the case, and so forth. Gray psychoanalyzes people, including dead people based on others' descriptions of them, figuring out why they did everything they did--it was subconscious reasons, of course, often guilt that generated a desire to be punished. For example, Sam Hope treated people the way he did because he felt a subconscious need to excel and then actually "become" his father, and Eleanor Hope was a rule-breaking slut and a compulsive gambler because she was raised by strict religious parents. Kuttner gives us the idea that the human mind is so well-understood that a shrink can figure out the behavior of a person he never met by just consulting one or two secondary sources.
Feelings of responsibility and guilt are a major theme of The Murder of Eleanor Pope. Howard Dunne feels responsible for the death of his sister-in-law Eleanor Pope and for that of others--he even calls himself "a proximity fuse," his metaphor for how everyone he gets close to finds themselves in trouble. Mary Dunne feels responsible for her husband's and her brother's deaths. These feelings of guilt are generally portrayed as irrational and unhealthy, something to be cured by the psychoanalyst. Gray himself is far from exempt from these feelings--he feels responsible for the death of his wife during the war, even though she was in the European theatre and he was in the Pacific, and this is what makes him feel a heavy responsibility for his patients and even his patients' relatives and associates, what is driving him to work to get the innocent Mary Dunne out of jail. And when she is released because the cops now think Maurice Hoyle is the killer, Gray works to get him sprung because his analysis of Hoyle indicates to him that Hoyle too is innocent.
Gray's greatest feat of posthumous psychoanalysis is when he discovers that Howard Dunne was a homosexual who didn't realize he was a homosexual! Dunne was banging all those chicks in an effort to prove to himself the masculinity that he subconsciously doubted! Gray knows that it must have been Dunne who murdered Eleanor, Sam Pope, and himself, but he doesn't have the kind of hard evidence the DA likes, just the evidence of psychoanalysis! Gray puts on his thinking cap, psychoanalyses himself and then does his damnedest to get into the head of Howard Dunne, and realizes where Dunne must have hidden his confession letter. With the letter the cops are convinced, and Maurice Hoyle is off the hook.
(Nothing comes of the spectres of Carol Webster and Bruce Oliver.)
When Dunne died I thought we might get some suspense scenes and I'd be able to grade this novel "acceptable," but instead we got even more outlandish psychoanalysis--second hand psychoanalysis of people already dead. So I'm going to have to give The Murder of Eleanor Pope a thumbs down.
One of the problems of The Murder of Eleanor Pope is the pervasive idea that people do things because of subconscious forces that they themselves are not even aware of, and pursue things they, consciously, seek to avoid, like punishment and even death. Now, maybe this is actually the way real life works, maybe we are all like pinballs or billiard balls, bounced around by the flippers and cues that are our subconscious fears and desires. But characters who act this way don't make for good fiction--in compelling fiction the characters pursue goals with determination and try to overcome obstacles by making decisions and taking advantage of their resources and abilities. And a world in which nobody has any real responsibility for what they do and in which punishment is pointless is a world in which morality makes no sense and there is no opportunity for the reader to enjoy any sense of relief or triumph when the killer is revealed, foiled or punished, and Kuttner in this novel stays true to this theory, short circuiting any chance for the authorities or the protagonist to rescue a potential murder victim or punish a malefactor by having the murderer commit suicide before he is even a suspect. Gray's successful efforts to clear adulterous wife Mary Dunne and bland milquetoast Maurice Hoyle are weak sauce and do not offer the reader the catharsis he seeks in genre fiction because these characters have had little screen time and are not particularly likable or interesting.
In theory, a novel with a weak plot and boring characters and a poorly handled theme might be saved by fancy writing or laugh-out-loud jokes, like if maybe Jack Vance or P. G. Wodehouse or Tanith Lee was writing it, but Kuttner's style is merely adequate and there are no jokes.
I didn't enjoy it, but if you have an interest in the career and thought of Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore, or in depictions of psychoanalysis and/or homosexuality in post-war American popular fiction, maybe reading The Murder of Eleanor Pope will be worth your time.
No comments:
Post a Comment