Draft Chapter
This was an argument Brandy had to win. It had been going on for about 40 minutes.
“Like I said honey, the real mystery about detective novels is why people find them interesting at all. They’re sooooo predictable…in a way….you know?”
“You’ve been reading lots of them behind my back now?” challenged Jodie, turning her head away from the road ahead and looking sideways at her mother from the passenger seat. “I never knew that. I wish you’d told me.” She could feel her daughter’s penetrating blue eyes boring into her cheek.
Brandy did not return her look, but kept her hands on the wheel of the VW bus she was driving and her eyes front. Jodie turned back, without showing any particular pleasure at her successful quip and continued gazing out the windscreen at the country road in Brittany ahead.
Brandy ignored the remark and proceeded with her argument, adopting a weary, droning tone for persuasive effect. “I mean, the murder happens right? Of course it does. That’s the first thing. Thenn seconnnnd… nobody, of course, has a clue whodunnit, as they say, right?” They whizzed past a junction at 40 mph.
“Shit! What did that sign say? I missed it,” asked Brandy.
Getting involved in the argument with Jodie was distracting her from the task of navigation. She was looking for a right.
“Stop swearing. And I have no idea. You won’t let me map-read and” said Jodie glumly, now glowering at the glovebox in front of her. “I was lost in thought considering your strong argument for giving up on one of the best-selling novels of all time — Murder on the Orient Express—recently released as a major motion picture with an all-star cast, which you’ve never seen.”
“OK. Never mind. It was probably wrong anyway,” said Brandy, but unsure of herself. She thought it probably was the wrong turn but slowed down a little in any case so she didn’t miss another. They had time to reach the gites before dark and it was more important to win the argument. Another hour in bed in the clutches of Agatha was unthinkable.
“Sooo… nobody knows whodunit right?” she continued, persuasively, she hoped.
“Well I guess the novel wouldn’t work if the murderer was caught red-handed mother and immediately dragged off to jail, would it?” responded Jodie, who then looked up at the ceiling of the bus and began to indulge in sarcastic wonderment:
“Whoddunit?”
“Him! That guy with the knife.”
“Oh.”
The End.
“I guess that wouldn’t even work as a short story, come to think of it, would it now?” concluded Jodie, shaking her head despondently, showing no sign of enjoying her victory in argument.
Brandy was now annoyed. But she carried on, albeit less confidently.
“So then…because nobody knows whodunnit…the fuckiiiiing deteeectiiiiive…,” drawled Brandy.
“Stop swearing. We’re both giving up on that, remember?”
Brandy persisted, “is summoned or…” She raised her voice to evidence the weakness of the novel’s plotting, “happens CONVEEENIENTLY to be taking the same GODDAMN TRAIN JOURNEY on which the MURDER OCCURS…” She paused a while for effect. Then glancing across at her daughter and back to the road she shouted: “HA!” Jodie stared stubbornly and expressionlessly out of the windscreen ahead of her, in reply. Brandy thought she had drawn some blood.
“HA!” she said again for further effect. “What about that for a cheesy coincidence?”
From the girl’s ensuing reply it was clear she had not lost her wherewithal; she had just been thinking of a response. The twelve year old actress was convinced she must be right.
“You forgive unrealistic coincidences in lots of books and you don’t condemn the books because of it,” she said carefully. “Lots of great books will have coincidences in them. Second…” The girl was thinking of something else.
Jesus, this is a nightmare, thought Brandy.
“Other than that one convenient bit of plot, all you are really doing is saying that the book is an example of a genre. It’s a formula. OK. Conceded.” Jodie paused again, to make sure each building block of her argument was secure. And truthful. She continued. “Its plot resembles other books in its…category or which use that…formula. Maybe it is not high Art then, whatever that is, but that does not make it or the category bad, let alone worthless. It just makes it recognisable.” She hesitated. “To its fans.” She paused again and then continued,
“And thirdly…” She searched the front of the VW bus’s glove box for an answer to her doubts. Then expressed them, “What you say just doesn’t make sense to me. Nor would it to anyone else.”
Despite herself, Brandy was impressed and, against her will, drawn in a little by her daughter’s impeccable thinking. “Why not?” she asked, though still with some trepidation at the thought of more Agatha and regret that she had taught her daughter to be such a free-thinker.
“Because you are saying all such novels are basically predictable and yet the whole enormously successful, popular genre of whodunit? fiction is built on suspense, which means the novels in it must be inherently unpredictable.” Jodie paused, considering this seriously. “The opposite of what you are saying then must be true.” She looked across at her mother, but without glee or mockery and then back to the glove box that had seemed mysteriously to provide her with answers.
“Unpredictability is in fact essential to the formula’s attraction. The formula is the same formula, or similar each time: OK, fine. Each narrative example of it, cannot be the same or only in that very basic sense you’ve outlined, the bare bones that make it clearly an example of that formula in action, which promises….which delivers, what?”
She thought.
“Apart from anything else, suspense.” She paused.
“So you’re confusing two different things. And trying to confuse me. The bare bones or basic ingredients of those books are the same, it’s like you’re saying… this is an example of a stew. But ask yourself how many different kinds of stew there are in the whole category of stews?” She twisted in her seat towards her mother in the throes of her gathering enthusiasm. “There’s Boeuf Bourgignon, for example – simple but delicious. We love that. There’s Irish stew. Then there are all the different curries from India, with different strengths and so on.” Jodie turned back.
Then she said, as if to herself, “In fact, the possibilities are almost infinite.” She went quiet and then murmured the words, as if to herself, “almost infinite.”
“Honey?” said Brandy gently, not wanting to interrupt one of her daughter’s now rather common and mildly worrying spiritual reveries. There was no response. Again, she asked, a little louder this time,
“Honey?!” Her daughter flinched.
“What?” said Jodie, looking across at her.
“I fucking HATE the damn novel, OK?”
Jodie Foster and the Super 8 