The Mysterious Situation Is Explained

A young married couple move from the flatlands of the San
Fernando Valley to the Hollywood Hills and find their new
home much to their liking. Especially pleasant are the new
neighbors, all of whom seem friendly to an almost suspicious
degree. The young couple give a party for their old friends
from the flatlands. It's a miserable failure. Then they give
a party for their new friends, with great success. The patent
difference in the sodality of these two sets of friends puzzles
the young couple until they acquire a pair of binoculars.
With them, they find they can see into their neighbors' homes.
Recently the couple had been additionally mystified by unexpected
help received from the family in the house on a
nearby hill. They could not understand how the neighbor
knew of their predicament. Now the reason is clear. Everyone
in the hills uses binoculars to see what is going on inside
their neighbors' households; and when men and women are
aware of each other's difficulties, they sympathize. Only ignorance
of one's neighbors makes one callous and uncaring.
On the flatlands, people could not see into their neighbors'
homes.
The "mysterious-situation" tale is more or less unique
within the field of popular fiction in that there is little
or no progress, no change effected on the characters or
their situation; there is only the revelation. The fact that
there is comparatively little dramatic movement makes
this type of story both easy and difficult to write. On the
one hand, little trouble need be taken to whip up reader
interest in a hero's troubles, derelictions, ambitions, passions—
the suspense is obtained through the mystery of the
mysterious situation. In this respect, the story has the intellectual
puzzle quality of the who-dun-it. Genuine emotions
—or what is so often fashioned to pass for them in popular
fiction—have little place in the mysterious-situation stories;
they can actually constitute a liability. The reader will be
perfectly content to be mystified for 2000 or 3000 words
and then slightly titillated by the writer's explanation of
the affair.
But, just as with the "inexplicable-vice" puzzle, the
reader must remain in genuine doubt until the very close.
He can guess and guess again about the solution—even
perhaps guess correctly—as long as at no point he feels
certain he has the answer. If, at the story's close, the reader
can honestly say he knew it was going to come out in such
and such a manner, he will be displeased.
The narrator of a certain story is an investment counselor.
A potential client calls him up for help. The investment man
drives to the client's apartment house and is surprised, somewhat
let down, to see that the building is obviously tenanted
by low-income families. He suspects the client will ask him
to invest two or three hundred dollars of savings—hardly
worth the cab fare for the investment man. His suspicions
are confirmed when he is shown into the client's apartment .
It is patently a poor man's home, the wife a poor man' s
drudgery-broken mate. The counselor, nonetheless, decides
not to be cruel, to see the fiasco through. The client takes him
into the bedroom and shows him securities worth over a
hundred thousand dollars.
The counselor is astounded. Why is this wealthy man living
in poverty? He questions the man about his habits and
history, and finds that he holds a menial clerical job in the
day and works at a restaurant three nights a week, just to
earn the bare necessities for himself and his wife. Later, the
counselor learns from the wife who knows nothing of the
securities that the client's father was an irresponsible psychopath
who cared for nothing but jazz music, maltreated his
wife, and led a generally uncertain and nomadic existence.
There's the problem. Why is the client living as he is?
The question is unfair, of course. Sufficient clues simply
have not been given for a reader to explain the mystery.
The possible explanations are infinite. But that is unimportant.
This is not a classic who-dun-it. There is no need
for the writer to be on the up-and-up with his reader. The
only requirements are that the reader be interested in
the mystery (which implies his not being able to explain
it) and that he be finally satisfied with the writer 's explanation.
The answer to this particular puzzle will probably not
seem satisfying here, because, in summarizing, the story
was stripped of all its tone and tricks. At any rate, the client
was a "character," in the slang sense, and like his father
pathologically obsessed with playing jazz piano. If his puritanical
wife were to know that he was wealthy, he would
lose his excuse for holding down that night job in the
restaurant. It is there that he plays his low-down, honkytonk
jive.
That' s it. Of course, the counselor isn ' t handed the
explanation. He discovers it dramatically by visiting the
restaurant one evening. All told, it is an unlikely tale—
and coming from any but an old hand at the slick game
would undoubtedly be open to all sorts of criticisms by
editors. Old hand or not, though, the requirements had
to be satisfied.
That the mystery is sufficiently compelling is beyond
question. The other requirement, that the writer 's answer
to the mystery satisfies, has been fulfilled in this story by
an interesting combination of tricks which it might be well
to discuss.
Foremost is the device of narrating the story in the first
person. If the writer has an improbable or even impossible
tale to tell, first-person narration is his best bet. One can
argue that first-person telling adds an aura of authenticity
to an otherwise unbelievable tale, but there is no need for
explanation on an esthetic level. First-person success with
this type of story is a simple matter or usage, of what has
been called " tacit writer-reader communication. "
It is of the highest importance that a reader be informed
at the beginning of a piece just what kind of a story he is
getting into. When the reader runs through the first few
sentences of a tale he will unconsciously recognize a "style."
Should he see the familiar "I," it is usually a sign to him
that the writer is attempting an off-beat story. Also, the use
of the "I" restricts the viewpoint of the piece: the reader
cannot in fairness ask for more information than the narrator
claims to have, information that he would have
obtained in the natural course of events.
The case is quite different when an omniscient author
assumes the task of telling the story. For the "I" character
within the fictional framework, it 's a matter of, "This is
what I saw happen. I'm telling you every last damn thing
I know about it. If it's weird to you, it's just as weird
to me."
Another trick or compensating strong point in the jazzplayer
story is the fact that the characters (their personalities
and occupations) are relatively original as far as slick
material goes. There is no sentimentalizing. The talk and
the sets are treated naturalistically. And naturalism, of
course, is a rare wild bird in the tame slick world. The
essential weakness of the story cried out for just such camouflage,
and got it.
Much more common and consequently much safer is
the flatlands-hill kind of piece. Consider this one. It is
somewhat similar.
An old man, a patient in a hospital ward, is being treated
for a kidney ailment. The other patients soon notice that the
old man goes off to the closet each morning at precisely ten
o'clock and stays there for exactly five minutes. This mystifies
both his fellow patients and the reader. When the old man is
to leave for further treatment at another hospital, one of the
patients asks the old man's granddaughter if she can explain
his strange habit. Yes, it seems that the old man has always
prayed to God every day at exactly ten o'clock; and, the girl
adds, the old man always gets what he asks God for. And that
explains why every patient in the ward except the old man is
on the mend. The snapper is that the old man, in his unselfish.
ness, has asked God to cure the others, but forgotten about
himself.
Because, as stressed before, there is no real movement or
change in this type of story, outside the solving of the mystery
itself, the writer does well to throw in a premium at
the close. Most often this extra reward is the expression of
some laudable sentiment or generous observation about
human nature. The mystery is solved by showing that most
people are unexpectedly good at heart, as in the flatland
story; that the most ordinary individual can be rather
saintly underneath, as in the old-man piece.
Almost never—and this point cannot be overemphasized—
will the writer of popular fiction go wrong by accenting
the good qualities either in individual characters or in
human kind. The converse is also true, with the qualifying
word italicized: always will the writer go wrong by
unnecessarily pointing up the bad attributes of his people.
category:plot lines
Category:information