Unputdownable

A good friend says she has no trouble finishing books. "Well, if you read fast," she says, "it's not that hard." Infuriating... I'm forever starting a book, getting pulled away by another book that seems juicier, then getting pulled away by a third, and so on, until I end up with a talus heap of unfinished reading to trip over when I get out of bed.

But there's one author whose books I can count on finishing. I've always been a little hazy about what "suspense novel" means (as opposed to "mystery novel" or "crime fiction" or "novel with murder"). Sometimes it seems to mean that the villain's identity is obvious and the only question is how to thwart him or her; sometimes it seems to mean lots of cheesy atmosphere and improbable action. But if it means simply a book that compels you to keep reading, sleep and social commitments be damned, then the English writer Robert Goddard is the king of suspense.

For some unfathomable reason he's not wildly popular in the U.S. A lot of his books are out of print here, though in the past year or two Random House has been making commendable efforts on his behalf. They've reprinted some of the best of his backlist (including my personal favorite, Into the Blue)and are issuing his new titles only an eon or so after their English publication (I have to count on my fast-reading friend to get them for me from Canada).

It's a little hard to say just what makes Goddard so unputdownable. In many of the books, there's a two-track structure: a mystery in the more or less distant past somehow leads to intrigue and violence in the present. Nothing particularly unique about that, though; maybe it's just that he's particularly deft in intertwining the two lines. Sometimes there's a whiff of the supernatural in his books, but just a
whiff--and you seldom know until the end whether the supernatural element is real or faux.

Maybe that's his real strength--the ability to write, not just about a crime that needs solving or a danger that has to be overcome, but about mystery in the deepest sense, mystery so powerful that it makes us question the very nature of reality. Something happens that makes no logical sense--a woman disappears into thin air, a scholar is summoned to a meeting and instead witnesses a kidnapping, a man kills himself at a wedding reception--and it's the start of a long convoluted path that leads first to confusion and more mystery, but ultimately to resolution. And you know you'll get there; you just can't imagine how.

That, to me, is what the mystery novel, and maybe all storytelling, is about: the revelation of unforeseen connections, the explanation of the inexplicable.