Mystery – Peter Straub

Part of the pleasure of books is the hunt. Or maybe ‘the find’ would be a more apt description. Searching for the books that you want is satisfying. But finding something that you didn’t know that you wanted is a joy. It’s why bibliophiles haunt charity shops, bookfairs and seek out the few remaining bookshops.

We could buy exactly what we wanted online. But where’s the fun in that?

So I recently found myself in Spain, on holiday with the family. I’d taken my kindle and had a bit of an idea of what I’d be reading that week. Then we spotted a little newsagent in the resort that had a couple of shelves of English language books. Presumably they were just the titles donated by departing tourists.

There was probably less than 50 books, so it was a pleasant surprise to find HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Willian Hope Hodgson there. And that was just the weird tales. There were also newer writers like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The problem, if you can call it that, was that I’d pretty much read it all. In the case of Lovecraft and Hope Hodgson, often more than once. But I looked at every single spine.

What I found was a couple of Peter Straub titles. I’d previously read a collaboration of his with King and also his award winning ghost story, called er…Ghost Story. They’d both been very good. Slow, complex and ambitious. Certainly an author I’d like to explore further. So I picked up a book called Mystery.

I found out that it’s a novel from his middle period and apparently part of a loosely connected trilogy. The copy I picked up was a battered paperback with an illustration of a hummingbird on the cover, which seems to be entirely unrelated to the actual story.

Set on a tiny Caribbean island among a very rich American expat community the book follows, from his childhood, Tom Pasmore – a grandson of one of the islands richest and most influential residents.

The story begins in the late 1950’s and a large chunk of the early story recounts the consequences of a young Tom going to one of the rougher areas of the island where he’s chased by some local kids armed with knives. It’s not obvious why they mean to do him serious harm and during his attempt to escape he runs into traffic and is subsequently run over. His lengthy hospital stay instills in him a passion for literature and introduces him to the hospital staff who feature later in the story. Most importantly he receives a visit from Lamont von Heilitz, a reclusive older neighbour who it turns out was previously a celebrity amateur sleuth responsible for solving a number of high profile crimes.

We pick up the story five years later as Tom begins to take an interest in the islands crimes, in particular a recent murder. During his investigations Tom begins a friendship with Lamont who then becomes something of a mentor – there’s a suspicion that this has been the old man’s long term aim. The book begins to get interesting when the older man introduces Tom to his obsession, the 1925 killing of Jeanine Thielman at Eagle Lake, a resort that the richest residents in Tom’s community holiday at each summer.

This is the meat of the mystery. Lamont has been following the lives of all those at Eagle Lake that year, and he slowly educates Tom on the specifics of the case and the more general mindset of the amateur detective. Tom decides to vacation at the resort himself that summer.

What follows is a rather sedate tale as Tom is drawn into the complex and competing loyalties of the rival families, the corruption of both the islands and Eagle Lakes authorities and his own personal struggle as he becomes romantically involved with a girl already betrothed to one of the communities most eligible bachelors.

It’s slow moving, fairly free of violence, and like the other Straub novels I’ve read, you can easily read a hundred pages without feeling like you’ve spent much time on it. Or for that matter, that the story has moved on much. But it works really well. It’s just a slow drip of conversations, additional details and occasional big reveals that gradually allows Tom and the reader to see the bigger picture.

We see the rich corrupted by power, money and lust, as well as the more brazen criminality of their employees and sycophants. Tom again meets the knife wielding children of his youth, now adults, as well as the former nurses who looked after him as a child. In such an incestous community everyone has a secret or divided loyalties.

Only one thing seems certain – very few people want Tom to solve the murder of Jeanine Thielman. It’s clear that any questioning of the official narrative threatens to reveal the Islands darkest secrets. All the while there’s a love story playing out as Tom and his childhood sweetheart Sarah try to navigate around her impending marriage of convenience.

It’s definitely one of those rare little gems that I regularly stumble across when I’m out and about browsing books with an open mind.