F E AT U R E
Finally, sometimes the best thing an author can do is accept that a story is indeed a mystery, but understand that the genre does not have to be a limitation. Kris Bertin—recent winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his collection Bad Things Happen—fully embraces the tropes of the genre while at the same time subverting the reader’s expectations throughout, in his masterfully weird The Case of the Missing Men. A graphic novel (vividly illustrated by Alexander Forbes), the story outwardly resembles a classic young-adult mystery à la Nancy Drew, following as it does the adventures of an arguably-toocurious teenage girl. Acting as the de facto leader of a team of high school student detectives (closely resembling Scooby-Doo’s mystery team sans talking Great Dane), she and her friends discover themselves embroiled within a true mystery as they try to solve, like the title screams, the case of the missing men. Where the previous authors have employed mystery tropes to outwardly straightforward tales, Bertin and Forbes gleefully manhandle the archetypal form of the mystery novel to their own ends, wickedly twisting the expected into something altogether other. Much of the dialogue is deceptively simple, echoing the exposition-heavy method of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys novels (“This whole thing started cause I saw a weird guy. Well
guess what? I saw another one! And he was even weirder!”). The minimalism of the dialogue is a perfect match to Forbes’s stark pen-and-ink drawings, evoking the sensibilities of classic noir and horror films. The whole story resembles the cinematic works of David Lynch, wherein a clean-cut façade masks an underbelly of seething, incomprehensible evil. Bertin delivers a story that is at once a stereotypical mystery and a dissection of what we expect a mystery to be. While there is indeed a resolution, it is ambiguous, open-ended; a conclusion only life (and, apparently, Literature) allows. It’s far from simple, this obscure partition that delineates (for some) the difference between entertainment and Literature. Perhaps it would be more correct to classify books as good and bad, but that’s also a matter of subjectivity. Or perhaps we could do away with differentiation altogether and agree that literature is as open-ended a concept as truth itself. ■ Corey Redekop is a writer and editor living in Fredericton, NB. His novels include the award-winning Shelf Monkey and the award-nominated Husk.
Further Reading For more examples of the literary mystery, check these forthcoming titles:
Last Lullaby Alice Walsh Nimbus Publishing
Cod Only Knows Hilary MacLeod Acorn Press
Death at the Harbourview Cafe Fred Humber Flanker Press
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