bath and a book

It's finally turned cold here. I think about one of my friends from graduate school who used to talk about getting "winter stomach" when it got cold (meaning the real or imagined increase in appetite). I don't get winter stomach, but instead I get...I'm not quite sure what to call it? winter bedhead maybe?

Several times over the past couple of days I have been seized with an ardent desire - briefly, but it is a strong feeling - to be at home, in bed, reading a book.

Or, last night, as the youth group kids started running around the Fellowship Hall for the fifth time after I told them, "If you're going to run, you need to go OUTSIDE," I was seized with the desire to be at home, in a hot bath, with a book.

To me, a hot bath and a good book - preferably a good mystery novel - is one of the most pleasant things in the world. Part of it is the lack-of-reachability: if the phone rings, I just let it ring. If someone "needed" me for something, I say, "Oh, sorry, I was in the bath."

But part of it is the slightly naughty feeling of taking a book in the tub - what if you drop it in the water? - which is why I mainly read cheap paperback mysteries in there. I feel like, if I drop the book or get it wet, it's no great loss and it can be replaced.

I have a deep fondness for mystery novels. I have since - well, I guess since college. I was never one of those girls who spent seventh and eighth grade reading Agatha Christie (there was a minor fad at my junior high - the "bad" girls read V.C. Andrews, the "good-but-popular" girls read Christie.). I am not a huge fan of Christie even now - I like her Poirot books but that's mainly because I liked the television series with David Suchet and I can envision him in the stories. (I saw an older version of Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney as Poirot - it seemed jarring and wrong to me, this man with his shoulders hunched up to his hears, screaming adenoidally. It was almost like Poirot playing Hitler as played by Charlie Chaplin...)

Anyway. I didn't start reading mysteries until college. One day, I was in a large bookstore near campus, wandering through the sections, and I saw a paperback mystery with an orchid on the cover. And suddenly, I was transported.

I remembered, as a kid, in the late 70s, watching a television series that featured a fat-man detective, who had a passion for orchids, and lived in a New York Brownstone. I had forgotten it for years (and apparently had forgotten much of the detail; recently when TV Land ran the old Nero Wolfe series it was all but unrecognizable to me). I know the "serious" Wolfe fans despise that series (some of the "serious" fans even despise the wonderful A and E movies made of several of the books back around 2002).

But anyway - it felt like a piece of my childhood rediscovered, so I bought the book. And I read it. And I was hooked.

First on Nero Wolfe. I think part of the reason I love Wolfe is the sheer wish-fulfillment quality of his life: he never leaves the house on business. He sets aside several hours a day to read, and several more for his hobby (orchids). He has long leisurely meals where business is forbidden from being discussed. He has people at his beck and call. He even has a live-in chef.

To me - who often eats her lunch hunched up at her desk, trying not to drip apple juice on the papers I am grading, that seems like a wonderful dream.

But Wolfe was just a gateway drug - I began seeking out other mysteries to read, including the Christie I had spurned before. I've read P.D. James, and Van Dine, and some of the Charlie Chan mysteries, and the Van der Valk books, the Peter McGarr mysteries, and most recently, my love has been Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn mysteries.

I think I like the genre for several reasons: first, intelligence is celebrated. Most all of the detectives have some kind of intellectual skill - either an outstanding memory, or a great ability to put information together, or (like Alleyn) a keen understanding of human psychology and an ability to put people at ease and get them to talk. (Although I have to admit? My real love of the Marsh novels is not the aristocratic Alleyn but the working-class Fox [who, oddly, never seems to have his first name given in the books]. Fox, who blushes easily, who has a particular skill at talking with domestics, who bumbles a bit and tries to improve himself).

In a society where intelligence is sometimes viewed as suspect or the gateway to nerdiness (and therefore unacceptability), it's nice to see a book where intelligence is celebrated. And where it's used for good.

I also enjoy the characters. Most mystery novels I've read are series - meaning you get to re-meet characters again and again. I like that. I like the constancy of it. (However, I do not like it when the author kills off their detective. Oh, I know, it's realism. But there is one particular Christie mystery I will never read, and the first Van der Valk book I read - disappointingly - was the one where he got killed off). But in the "ongoing" series - you see the same characters again and again. Maybe somewhere through the series the lead gets married, or has a child, or something. But it's kind of comforting, sort of like looking in on old neighbors and seeing that they are still the same as they ever were.

The main reason though, I think, is that the novels present the possibility of a world righted. By that, I mean this: a crime is committed and someone is killed. However, through the actions of a Good Man (or, less frequently in my reading, a Good Woman), the offender is found out and punished. The world is put right again (Well, except for the family of the victim, but most Golden Age mysteries - which are my favorites - don't dwell overmuch on that fact). In the "real" world, criminals are so often NOT caught - they so often get away with what they did. There often seems to be chaos. And so, I find in comforting to read novels where that chaos is resolved into a pattern, the flaw in the pattern (the murderer) found, and the flaw corrected. And most of the Golden Age mysteries end - the Nero Wolfe mysteries are typical of this - with some kind of humorous or mildly touching denouement, where you can sit back and sigh and feel like the world had been put right again.

I think mystery novels, for me, feed a psychological need that I have. I joke about having some "Rain Man" tendencies, and the jokes are kind of true. I hate change. Loathe, despise change. Especially change that feels unnecessary. I don't like having my plans interrupted. And so, mystery novels - by their very nature - show plans interrupted, but then the one causing the interruption being caught and punished, and the world going back largely to how it was Before. (Again - there's that glossing over of how the victim's family copes. But these are fantasies, not true-crime novels.)

So anyway - a hot bath, with either bubbles or nice aromatic bath salts, a good mystery novel, and I'm happy. Sometimes, it doesn't take much to please me.