Remora

Murder

Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:


"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.

"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."

Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.

And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.

Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.

"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.

"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."

There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:


"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"

Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.

It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.

Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?

"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "

If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.