Murder in Space

In his introduction to Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. suggests that literature works as a kind of mapping, "offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space, and providing points of reference by which they can orient themselves" (2). He goes on to point out that the opposite is also true, that "to draw a map is also to tell a story" (4). This week I'm thinking about how these two things, the story-as-map and the map-as-story play out in a series of detective novels that I've really enjoyed.  

In a recent talk during a book launch (for Death Sets Sail, which I’ll discuss later) the author Robin Stevens described travelling to Egypt, the setting of the book, and taking copious notes on such matters as the exact position of the sun at particular points in the day, in relation to a ship heading South on the Nile, as these could all affect the events of the plot. Stevens writes children’s murder mysteries, which are heavily inspired by the golden age crime fiction of authors like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers. In the mystery story, a sense of how the space works, and what the characters’ relationship with it is, is necessary in order that the reader have a sense of what is possible. This is crucial in a genre whose appeal is partly based on the fact that it’s a shared game; the reader (as long as Fair Play is being observed) has access to all that they need to solve the crime, and quite often is in competition with the fictional detective to see who gets there first.

As Kristel Autencio demonstrates in this BookRiot post, many writers in the classic mystery genre use maps and floor plans to help the reader visualise the possibilities and challenge them to come up with a solution.  I’m interested in how Stevens uses maps and floorplans differently in different settings to aid the reader in following the crime through space.

In Murder Most Unladylike (2014), the first book in the series, the murder takes place in an elite girls’ boarding school, and we begin with (see above) a floor plan of the school itself (divided across two floors), which in addition to showing the layout of the building shows its location in relation to the campus as a whole. Nothing on this illustration refers to the actual murder that has occurred; its purpose is primarily to give the reader a strong sense of how the spaces mentioned in the narrative relate to one another, giving us a better chance of plotting out our own theories. The same map resurfaces in Jolly Foul Play (2016), set a year or so later, with only minor changes to indicate the passing of time. However, this time it’s also accompanied by a map of the playing fields which makes direct reference to the circumstances of the murder, including the locations of specific people (and the corpse). This isn’t just an abstract map of a space, but something more specific: a map of a crime scene.

First Class Murder (2015) is set on a train, and begins with plans of the sleeper and dining cars. This book is a partial tribute to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and its plan of the sleeping car is quite similar to the one used by Christie (included in Autencio’s post, linked above): the layout simply lists the locations of the passengers and leaves it up to the reader to work out how each of them might have accessed the berth where the murder victim was sleeping. But more important than the space are the people—the floorplan acts to circumscribe (quite literally) our list of suspects. In the real world it might be possible for a complete stranger to sneak in, commit the crime and leave, but the fair play conventions of the genre, and the “map” itself, both impose a kind of order and regularity on the world of the story. The reader is reassured that this is all there is; we have access to all the information we need; nothing beyond the edges of the map needs to exist. We’re in control of the space.

Which brings us to Death Sets Sail, published earlier this month. Modelled partly after Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937), this book is set on a cruise along the river Nile. The reader is given two depictions of the space; a general plan of of the cabins on the saloon deck, and a plan of the victim's room after the murder has been committed. 

The first picture does very much the same sort of work as the plan in First Class Murder, in that it serves to limit the field of suspects to those on the ship. Within the text, we are eventually informed that no one can have used the stairs to get to the Saloon Deck (they had been booby-trapped by a child passenger), so that this plan of the cabins must contain our murderer unless there's some outlandish and unfair explanation (a murderer who could fly?). The second picture, however, calls back to the map of the playing fields in Jolly Foul Play: it's a map of a crime scene, with all clues (and the position of the body) clearly marked. There are probably other objects in the room, but they are not depicted or labelled, and this serves to tell us exactly which objects will be important to the plot. To go back to Tally's terms, then, we could think of the first map in relation to the idea that literature's a kind of map. The text of the novel gives us the setting for the action and the characters who will be important, and it allows us to orient ourselves, and the plan of the Saloon Deck is a visualisation of this information. The plan of Theodora's cabin is the map-as-story; within the image itself are contained the mystery plot and the process by which it will be solved.