Mysteries of Winterthurn

"Let us say, Xavier, that you have proved,—that is, you believe you have proved—that my client is guilty of the crime with which he has been charged. No, let us go a step further, for the sake of argument, and grant that you, with all your detectively skills, have proved his guilt; and that he is, indeed, guilty. Why, then, how can you not know,—you, who are a Kilgarvan, and a nephw of old Erasmus—that the challenge, for me, rises almost exclusively from that predicament?—which is to say, not the prosecutions's 'proof' of guilt, but 'guilt' itself. Were the defendant innocent, and a verdict of not guilty naught but his just desert, how should I, Angus Peregrine, be allowed any margin for genuine triumph? In such meager soil, what meager plants might grow? Nay, mere 'justice' no more excites me as a worthy goal than a game of poker in which all players possess equal skills, and identical cards . . . ."

. . . Xavier said: "But then, is not your life criminal too? Is it not predicated upon lies, hypocracy, and subterfuge of every sort? For, by your own accknowledgment, you prefer guilty clients; you are most comfortable with crime; and derive your energies from it. How would you defend your life, erected upon such a foundation?"

Whereupon Angus Peregrine said, after a moment's unclouded reflection: "My life, Xavier, and my professional career, must not be confused. For the one has not invariabley to do with the other; I hope I have the wit to keep them distinctly separate—! And you—?"

Xavier winced at this frendly querry, as if it gave him pain; and replied, in a singularly slow, halting, benumbed voice: "My life and my professional career are, —are—one and the same." So saying, he drained the champagne from his glass without tasting it; as if the knowledge of his unique doom had struck him only at that moment. "One and the same."

Epigraph

"Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
—SAMUEL JOHNSON

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1983, p1221
• Publisher's Weekly, December 23, 1983, p49
• Library Journal, January 1984, p111
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 8, 1984, p1
• Christian Science Monitor, February 1, 1984, p19
• Newsweek, February 6, 1984, p79
• New York Times, February 10, 1984, 3:25
• New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1984, p7
• Maclean's, February 20, 1984, p60
• New Yorker, February 27, 1984, p133
• Best Sellers, March 1984, p440
• Observer, June 24, 1984, p21
• Listener, July 12, 1984, p28
• Spectator, July 14, 1984, p29
• Times Literary Supplement, July 20, 1984, p801
• National Catholic Reporter, November 16, 1984, p12
• World Literature Today, Winter 1985, p103
  

Series

Mysteries of Winterthurn is the third in the series unofficially referred to as "The Gothic Quintet."

1. Bellefleur
2. A Bloodsmoor Romance
3. Mysteries of Winterthurn
4. The Crosswicks Horror
5. My Heart Laid Bare

Awards

New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Other Editions

Mysteries of Winterthurn is the third in a quintet of experimental novels that deal, in genre form, with 19th-century and early 20th-century America. A family saga (Bellefleur, 1980), a romance (A Bloodsmoor Romance, 1982), a detective-mystery (Mysteries of Winterthurn, 1984), a Gothic horror set in turn-of-the-century Princeton (The Crosswicks Horror, forthcoming) and a "family memoir" ("My Heart Laid Bare," in progress)—the novels, thematically linked, might be described as post-modernist in conception but thoroughly serious in execution. Primarily, each novel tells an independent story I consider uniquely American and of our time. The characters of the quintet are both our ancestors and ourselves.

Why "genre," one might ask? Does a serious writer dare concern herself with "genre"? Why, in imagining a quintet of novels to encompass some eight decades of American history (beginning in the turbulent 1850s in Bloodsmoor, ending in 1932 with the election of FDR in "My Heart Laid Bare" ), and to require some 2600 pages of prose—why choose such severe restraints, such deliberately confining structures? But the formal discipline of "genre"—that it forces us inevitably to a radical re-visioning of the world and of the craft of fiction—was the reason I found the project so intriguing. To choose idiosyncratic but not distracting "narrators" to recite the histories; to organize the voluminous materials in patterns alien to my customary way of thinking and writing; to "see" the world in terms of heredity and family destiny and the vicissitudes of Time (for all five novels are secretly fables of the American family); to explore historically authentic crimes against women, children, and the poor; to create, and to identify with, heroes and heroines whose existence would be problematic in the clinical, unkind, and one might almost say, fluorescent-lit atmosphere of present-day fiction—these factors proved irresistible. The opportunity might not be granted me again, I thought, to create a highly complex structure in which individual novels (themselves complex in design, made up of "books") functioned as chapters or units in an immense design: America as viewed through the prismatic lens of its most popular genres. The sequence begins with a quotation attributed to Heraclitus ("Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child") as an epigraph to Bellefleur and ends with the defeat of a demonic father at the conclusion of "My Heart Laid Bare." But the novels, in any case, are wholly independent of one another as stories.

The three cases that constitute Mysteries of Winterthurn are variations on the enigma of mystery itself. In "The Virgin in the Rose-Bower," the detective seeks to discover who has committed the murders, and why; in "Devil's Half-Acre" the identity of the probable murderer is less uncertain than whether, granted the prejudices of his society, he can be brought to justice. The special puzzle of "The Bloodstained Bridal Gown" has to do with the detective's inability to solve the crime when various clues and motives will strike the attentive reader as self-evident. In the laconic words of Poe's Monsieur Dupin "Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing that puts you at fault."

Xavier Kilgarvan as idealist and lover is the quintessence of the late 19th-century sensibility. From boyhood onward he is fascinated by the prospect of mystery and its "solution" or exorcism; his imagination is inflamed by the obdurate nature of certain puzzles: Why? Where? Who? With what consequences? He is thoroughly American in his zeal to make a distinguished name for himself, and the buoyant optimism to which he confesses ("crime, if not the criminal heart itself, might someday be eradicated by the intellectual, pragmatic, and systematic unification of the numerous forces for Good") is in the spirit of mid- and late 19th-century dreams of progress.

Xavier comes of age and begins his rather glamorous professional career in those decades in which a passionate belief in evolution (in society and morals no less than in Nature) was widely shared by men and women of education, intelligence, and sensitivity. He withdraws from his career—for mysterious but privately logical reasons—not long before the collapse of these dreams with the outbreak of the Great War. So far as Xavier's personal story is concerned, it might be seen to end happily, or tragically, or ironically, or, indeed, wisely, depending upon one's point of view.

Aficionados of classic American murder cases will recognize here, in transmogrified and modulated forms, certain old favorites about which I dare not be more specific, for fear of revealing too much. The fictional cases are meant to bear a sort of dreamlike (or nightmare-like) relationship to the originals, one or two of which have never been satisfactorily solved; but they have been chosen because they deal with ongoing themes of the quartet [sic]—the wrongs perpetrated against women, for instance, and the vicious class and race warfare that has constituted much of America's domestic history. Xavier Kilgarvan is a fictitious person, but in many ways he follows the pattern of the 19th-century "amateur" detective, tireless in his research into the latest forensic discoveries, pioneering in a new and undefined and thoroughly exciting profession. (It is quite likely, for instance, that a promising young man with Xavier's ambition would visit the Paris Surete and speak with the famous Alphonse Bertillon, and that he would be treated kindly by Scotland Yard—men with a penchant for detective work, whether associated with police forces or not, constituted an informal brotherhood within a great sea of ignorance, incompetence, and corruption.)

Yet Xavier's temperament is also that of an artist. His cases are, perhaps, stories, parables, "mysteries" that yield their meaning only after much frustration and mental anguish . . . the meaning being the very pattern of the work of art, its voice, its tone, its spirit. Hence my feeling of intense identification with him, and my sense that, at this time at least, Mysteries of Winterthurn is my favorite among my own novels.

—Joyce Carol Oates
15 January 1985