Litro #123 Mystery Teaser

Poland 123

MYSTERY Featuring Mazin Saleem . Thomas Binns Anniken Blomberg . Oli Belas Elishia Heiden . Helen Jukes

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 44

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Book now ‘A super seductive art world enigma’ The Guardian

Mariko Mori Rebir th 13 December 2012– 17 February 2013 www.royalacademy.org.uk Mariko Mori, Tom Na H-Iu II (detail), 2006.

Glass, stainless steel, LED, real time control system, 450 x 156.3 x 74.23cm. Courtesy of: Mariko Mori Studio Inc. © Mariko Mori. Photo: Richard Learoyd

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Litro Magazine Mystery

EDITORIAL I have a friend who loves mystery movies. For her, and I suspect many other fans of the genre, the appeal lies in the challenge—working out whodunit, whytheydunnit, and sometimes even whattheydun in the first place—as quickly as they can. And, evidently, letting me know at the first possible opportunity.

Personally, I’ve never really been a subscriber to this strategy. I’m fairly content to let my sleuths grind through the motives and the alibis and come to an eventual, inevitable conclusion on my behalf. I respect the process.* Of course, it might be that I’m just lazy, but I think what appeals to me about mysteries is not so much the solutions as the questions, the gaps in our knowledge, the state of uncertainty. Mysteries are quantum events, occurring but only existing for a time, until they are resolved and disappear. Those gaps appear literally, too, as dark spaces—shadowy alleyways between buildings, secret gardens, misfiring amygdalae in amnesia victims.

They are where mystery thrives—in novels, films, plays, and online, too, in mystery’s paranoid, internet-friendly offspring, conspiracy.

It’s these gaps that we celebrate in this month’s Mystery-themed issue of Litro. There’s the fantastically sinister tooth that appears in Mazin Saleem’s Meaningless Number, “tilted as though it belonged in the mouth of someone yawning or screaming,” just an ordinary tooth, but missing the mouth, head and body that we would otherwise expect to exist around it; there are a series of mundanely out of place objects in Working Techniques of the Amateur Detective by Thomas Binns, though the narrator is preoccupied throughout by a much more significant absence in his life; Across the Border by Anniken Blomberg contemplates not just a journey into one of those gaps, but the things you return with; Somebody Else’s Second Chance by Elishia Heiden deals with a frustrating gap of memory, and the stories that others are compelled to fill it with; and The Land & The Sea by Helen Jukes, which features a man caught not on one nor in the other, but somewhere between the two. Finally, Oli Belas, in his essay The Enduring Appeal of the Mystery Story, focuses on the figure of the detective—the character who steps into the shadowy spaces of the narrative, the character we willingly follow, some of us alongside, some of us behind.

Either way, we’re on the case. Care to join us?

Andrew Lloyd-Jones Editor March 2013 *Columbo would be a notable exception to this rule, since he always seems to know right from the start who’s responsible. It’s like he’s passively lording his superiority over us for the best part of each episode. I’m not a fan.

CONTENTS Events

04

Mazin Saleem

07

MEANINGLESS NUMBER

Thomas Binns WORKING TECHNIQUES OF THE AMATEUR DETECTIVE

Anniken Blomberg ACROSS THE BORDER

Oli Belas THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE MYSTERY STORY

Elishia Heiden SOMEBODY ELSE’S SECOND CHANCE

Helen Jukes THE LAND & THE SEA

14 19 27 31 38

EVENTS THIS MONTH BOOKS Murder in the Library British Library 96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DB Sun Feb 24 – Sun May 12 A chance to immerse yourself in the history of the whodunnit as the British Library takes a quirky look at crime fiction. Featuring familiar and loved writers, such as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, alongside the unknown and unexpected, this exhibition showcases manuscripts, books, rare audio recordings, artworks and intriguing artefacts from the library's British and North American collections.

Alchemy Science Museum Exhibition Rd, SW7 2DD Mon Feb 25 – Tue Apr 30 A display of 20 rare books and two illustrated manuscripts relating to alchemy from the museum’s library and archives, on show alongside objects from the Wellcome and Chemistry collections including an alchemical scroll.

5x15 Bush Theatre Old Shepherd’s Bush Library, 7 Uxbridge Rd, W12 8LJ, Wed Mar 13 This month’s ever-enjoyable 5x15 event, in which five speakers each speak for 15 minutes on a chosen topics, is co-presented with Notting Hill Editions. The line-up features author Deborah Levy responding to George Orwell, and poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw.

How to Write Successfully for Children & Young Adults Bloomsbury Publishing 50 Bedford Square, WC1B 3DP Sat Mar 2 Authors Nick Lake, Nicholas Allan and Jon Mayhew take on this all-dayer to help workshop your writing, divided by the age groups you want to appeal to, from 0-7, 8-12 and 13+.

The Big Write Festival of Children’s Literature Discover Children’s Story Centre 383-387 High St, E15 4QZ Sat Mar 9 – Sun Mar 17, Day tickets £7, children £6.50, concs £6.

Children, Festivals, Things to do, Kids’ activities, Children’s books. Discover’s 5th annual festival of children’s literature has a packed programme of story sessions, workshops, book signings and other events. The closing weekend sees a range of events and activities with illustrators and authors such as Polly Dunbar.

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THEATRE, FILM AND COMEDY Playing Cards 1 – Spades Roundhouse Chalk Farm Rd, NW1 8EH Mon Feb 25 – Sat Mar 2, £15-£45 The great Canadian physical practitioner Robert Lepage returns to London with the first in a projected series of four plays based around the suits on a deck of cards.

The Double R Club Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club 42-46 Pollard Row, E2 6NB, Thu Mar 21 This evening of mystery and nightmares inspired by the films of David Lynch is a dark and twisted treat, often groping into territory where other cabaret nights fear to tread. The reliably sinister Benjamin Louche presides over a mix of comedy and crooning.

War Child Comedy Night 2013 O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Shepherd’s Bush Green, W12 8TT, Fri Mar 8 The very first annual comedy benefit gig for War Child has a very impressive line-up. The bill includes comedy god Stewart Lee, crazed Canadian Tony Law, observationalist Seann Walsh, Aisling Bea, Alistair Barrie, and Hal Cruttenden.

Chris Addison – The Time Is Now, Again Southbank Centre Belvedere Rd, SE1 8XX Thu Mar 28 Chris Addison, star of 'The Thick of It', 'In the Loop' and 'Lab Rats' is a superb stand-up comedian with one of the sharpest comedy minds around. Addison is seen as the thinking man's comic, with sharp observations and a scholarly approach to his varied subject matter. However, this erudition never halts the flow of laughter. He's bringing his 'The Time is Now, Again' tour back to the capital for its final London date.

Hot Tub Cinema Factory 7 7-11 Hearn St, off Curtain Rd, EC2A 3LS Wed Feb 27 – Tue Mar 5, £220 per tub (up to eight people) The latest outdoor cinema experience invites viewers to watch a film while sitting back in hot tubs, with waiter service, on the Netil House rooftop. Tubs, which hold up to eight people, must be booked in advance. like a sweet afternoon tea pick-me-up with a glass of champagne or a lavish pudding, the Winter Club Sandwich is a new alternative to traditional London afternoon teas.

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 5

EXHIBITIONS Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy Science Museum Exhibition Rd, SW7 2DD Mon Feb 25 – Sun Jun 2 An exhibition to mark the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing (1912-1954). The show looks at the achievements of the man whose wartime codebreaking helped to shorten WWII by years and whose influence on computer science is still felt today. On display are artefacts including machines devised by Turing, such as the Pilot ACE computer (the fastest computer of its time), along with the electromechanical 'bombe' machines which were used to crack codes during the war.

Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men Museum of London 150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN Sun Feb 24 – Sun Apr 14 ‘I have only got a leg and thigh,’ wrote a disgruntled William Hamilton in 1878, referring to his difficulty in finding enough material to complete his surgical training. Hamilton was relatively lucky.

Amongst Heroes: The Artist in Working Cornwall 2 Temple Place, London, WC2R 3BD Until Sun Apr 14 Two Temple Place stages its second winter exhibition with a major survey of work by Cornish artists. Created in partnership with the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, the show continues Two Temple Place’s aim to showcase collections from outside central London while providing opportunities for emerging curatorial talent – this year’s show has been curated by Courtauld Institute student Roo Gunzi, who is completing a PHD on Newlyn painter Stanhope Forbes A Room for London Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London, SE1 8XX Perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with a commanding view of the river, this wonderfully whimsical temporary hotel room was designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with artist Fiona Banner in response to a competition organised

by Living Architecture.

The Huguenot Legacy Bank of England Museum, Threadneedle St (entrance in Bartholomew Lane), London, EC2R 8AH, Until Fri May 10 The achievements and legacy of the Huguenots, the French protestant refugees who came to Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are celebrated in this exhibition, which takes a look at Huguenot contributions to British culture –including banking. Figures explored include the first Governor of the Bank of England, Sir John Houblon, who was the grandson of the Huguenot refugee. Nearby Spitalfields is the ideal place to continue an exploration of Huguenot London.

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MEANINGLESS NUMBER What happens when an impossible object meets a disbelieving public?

by Mazin Saleem The second to notice were the paramedics because the cyclist’s blood stood out on the enamel; at her speed, she must have felt like she’d ridden face-first into a nail. Others stopping to help or watch also noticed and entered history. It was a cold, wet morning on a quieter side of Victoria Park.

Even so there was soon a crowd too large to be explained by just that ambulance. Black cabs started pulling over en masse. Dog-walkers were ignoring their dogs. Above the unconscious woman, in mid-air, was what looked like a tooth—an upper incisor, tilted as though it belonged in the mouth of someone yawning, or screaming.

Most people’s reaction was to squint then laugh, rubbing their jaws.

But against expectations, no TV pranksters or illusionists came out of their hiding places. Ignoring the gasps, a paramedic moved closer to it with an eyebrow raised. When he chopped his hand above and below, the second eyebrow joined the first, and he squirmed a little where he stood. Flicking it produced a familiar tap. He next tried wobbling it, and when he finally removed his aching and briefly warped fingers everybody could see that it hadn’t moved an inch.

Within minutes, photos and videos had spread around the country and—thanks to a couple of tourists—around the world. The media assumed that all the emails and phone calls were part of some ad campaign. It was only towards late afternoon that the first news vans arrived, playing chicken with one another at the gates. By then, several of the original crowd were staring into the distance or had left, heads shaking, as if someone had told a joke in bad taste.

The police arrived next, though not as some excitedly thought because of a cover-up—they were there to disperse the crowd (it heaved back and forth but always with a held-back clearing in the middle; now and then a child would break free, jump up to try get a touch, then run back giggling, as if having narrowly avoided being bitten). In fact, the police were just as confused as everyone else. A drunk was swearing and making threats, pushing others down to get closer. People started shouting that they couldn’t move or breathe.

The police had to call for help to pacify the situation. The military arrived, imposing a no-fly zone to ground the news helicopters and putting up tents that could be seen from all the nearby tower blocks.

This did not help dispel people’s suspicions.

All they were left with were photos and videos, most too shaky or taken from too far away—but everyone’s reactions looked real enough; and Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 7

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 13

WORKING TECHNIQUES OF THE AMATEUR DETECTIVE He’s the detective we deserve. But not the one we need.

by Thomas Binns 30th November 2001 Back of a mobile phone found in the gutter on Crossleigh Street.

Mugging gone wrong? Half mile radius searched for any further items, handbag, purse, searched bushes in Crompton park, nothing found. Serious damage identified to some of the lower branches in brambles, vandals no doubt. Will be making regular trips to hedges to monitor situation.

3rd December 2001 Spoke to Lizzy Cooper. Reports of a single foot print in the snow in the middle of her lawn. Lizzy is confused and frankly, so am I. Had lengthy discussion about possible solutions, Lizzy suggested a one legged Tigger type of garden hopper, conversation lasted three cups of tea, became fatigued, went home, tried to explain to Mother, she was busy pulling hairs from the bath, not much time for me.

NB—One large ginger hair found in Bath. No ginger haired people

known to use that Bath. Investigation to follow.

4th December 2001 Busy day today. A new Missing Dog poster in 34 locations. Dog is a Mastiff, much loved family pet. Spent the first five hours door knocking asking to check garages and Sheds, was chased by Neil Grampton’s son, fell on a Rabbit Hutch in the Garden of 32 Trinade Street, Rabbit escaped, lost two hours chasing it. Rabbit found. Day light Lost.

5th December 2001 Auntie May called me to look at a single black glove she found underneath her living room window, she’s quite shaken. The glove appears to belong to a male, medium size hand, palm worn out. I went to Tesco to pick her up some Calms. Removed the glove, placed it in a sandwich bag and stored it in my filing cabinet underneath ‘Single Black Glove Found Underneath Aunty May’s Window’.

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ACROSS THE BORDER A logger discovers there’s more to the forest than will ever be made clear.

by Anniken Blomberg 1.

At dawn the light trickled between the trees, seeped into the dark like a milky liquid. The hues and shapes that appeared in its wake were always the same. Black-green branches, grey moss curled up like old women’s hair, blood-red lichen clinging to grey boulders.

The strangeness of the landscape comforted him. Every morning he felt relief to see it emerge into its separate components. At night it was as if it united with itself, contracted and expanded at the same time, became a thing; breathing and waiting for him outside the thin walls of the logger’s cabin.

He was able to separate the unease from the man who prepared his supper from the contents of tins and bags of foil, smoked his cigarettes, slept for seven hours every night, put on his work clothes in the morning and walked along the path to the logging site. The man who operated with confidence and skill amongst whining, humming machinery and the hard-soft swoosh of falling trees.

The last bit of forest fringing the path to the logger’s cabin had been left to maintain itself. Young pale trees pushed up at random next to black tree stumps that looked as if they had blown over in some primeval storm.

They had offered him the logger’s cabin when it emerged that he slept in his car the nights he didn’t sleep with Bodil, which was more than half the nights of the week. Since he moved in, he’d confined his stays in her house to the weekends.

He carried with him a not-quite-acknowledged feeling that something or someone was lurking at the edge of his shadow. Something that would keep still as long as he was in motion, but start moving in once he settled for too long.

But after the Change and the Ravage there was less space in the world to move around in. This new world didn’t really suit people like him.

One day he would find himself held in a pocket of activity he couldn’t leave so quickly.

And here he was. Caught, held. Filling the hole after another’s absence.

He had just completed a short contract in another logging area nearby when the request came. Someone had disappeared and they were under pressure to clear that particular area of forest within two months. Would he be willing to step in and help?

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 19

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 25

THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE MYSTERY STORY Just why do readers find mystery and detective stories so popular?

by Oli Belas The critic Tzvetan Todorov once suggested that the trick to writing a successful detective story was being sure not to innovate. The great genre work is that which best and most closely follows the “rules” of its genre; to refine the genre, he cautioned, would be “to write 'literature'” rather than a mystery. But surely this is wrong-headed; a nonsense—logically, let alone critically—to separate Literature and detective fiction, as if they constitute mutually exclusive genres. For there is no “the” in “the mystery story.” Use of the definite article here is a cheap yet time-honoured trick: a red herring. “The” mystery story is as rich a tradition—or, rather, set of entwined traditions—as any other in the literary network. To paraphrase and doctor the Law, or Revelation, of the great science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon: if much mystery and crime writing is “crud,” then this is only because ninety percent of everything is; what matters is mystery writing's other ten percent, and its enduring appeal. It matters, amongst other reasons, because such consideration as we can afford this ten percent may help us to keep broad and alive our sense of what counts as “literature” and “the literary.” To do this at a time when the political model being handed down to educators offers an ever narrower conception of art and culture—well, perhaps it would be a modest achievement, but not an unimportant one.

Before we move any further, though, let me make it clear that I do not intend to use these opening comments as a way into defending “the” mystery story as Art. So tired is the question “but is it art?” that it barely seems worth the asking these days—though it would make a fine and willing corpse in a crime story. “But is it art?” is always dead on arrival, having been fully exsanguinated, and there is little hope of finding the truly guilty party, for so many have and so many others will continue to execute it: death by utterance. *** Why do mystery stories and other branches of crime fiction continue to engage us? Were we to trace the roots of crime writing to the popular Newgate Calendar—from which we get the so-called “Newgate novel"—of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one might be tempted to suggest that crime writing's success records nothing more nor less than our inveterate fascination with violence and antinomy. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once defended crime fiction for sharply presenting society's endless cycles of Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 27

SOMEBODY ELSE’S SECOND CHANCE A granddaughter attempts to understand the choices that lead to a death in the family—one that leaves a terrible legacy.

by Elishia Heiden I died before I was born.

My slate wasn’t clean but marred with half-erased sentences and distorted images. I’ve tried to smooth the etchings, but it’s difficult to repair a damaged surface. All I know for certain is that my grandmother chose to date a serial killer who eventually murdered her. And that’s not the kind of event a family gets over.

It’s difficult being the only daughter of a man who lost his mother to poor choices he wishes he could’ve controlled. All I know is it’s difficult to be someone’s second chance—to feel like a symbol of all that ever went wrong.

As a child, I tried to imagine it all—the murder—in my mind. I still do.

I look for any semblance of a resolution, so I can avoid a similar outcome.

I picture myself at the crime scene. I find her body in the midnight blue dress with the crimson piping that drips around the edges of her neck. That's what she wears in the picture on my parents’ piano.

A single bobby pin holds her dark brown hair back on one side of her skull like in the picture, but she doesn't pose for pictures in my imagination. Instead, her body lies limply in the backseat of her vintage Volkswagen van. Sometimes, I see her in the van on the abandoned mountain road in the middle of the summer. I scuff my feet along the gravel, and the man with the horse waves at me to walk faster.

He hops off his horse and looks through the window and yells, “Oh, no. Get over here.”

I pick up my pace, and as I start to get closer to the van, an odor of baked fleshed overtakes me. The man looks at me. He wears a plaid button-up flannel like the one my father wore in the seventies. I saw the shirt in pictures, and my mind puts all the pieces together—tries to make a seamless narrative to explain this all away.

The horse swishes its tail from side-to-side, the way my real pony used to.

He says to me, “Look in here.” I lean closer into the backseat window with my hands around my eyes and jerk back when my bare skin barely touches the car. The summer heat is almost unbearable to me, so I look at the man. He says, “No, go ahead, look.”

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 31

THE LAND & THE SEA There’s a place that exists between land and sea, though you won’t find it on any charts.

by Helen Jukes In the mornings the fishing boats collect. In the grey-blue mist of the nearly-light they arrive at the harbour mouth, their decks heaped (or not) with last night’s catch. Here the fishermen’s voices practice themselves again, calling out a ‘hey-ho’ or a ‘bring ‘er in’ in the dry-throated singsong of men who live and breathe with the sea.

As the mist disperses the boats become distinguishable from each other.

New and old, poor and less so. There is the difference between a highheaped good catch and a meagre one, and some of this is down to luck.

There are the telltale marks written upon the boats by the fishermen: patches repainted, storms smoothed over, boards fixed. Inside the boats there are magazine pages and old photos taped to walls. There are tin plates, paintbrushes and woolen clothes stowed into cupboards where a storm won’t pull them away.

And as the grey-blue light gathers a green to it, lets in a yellow just appearing over the flat-out waters, the men are throwing ropes to the shouts and jumps of harbour workers who are peeling from their houses, pulling on their overalls, swigging dregs of coffee and stamping down their boots.

Gulls lift with a caw-caw, and smoke whispers up from the chimneys of houses as the hot smell of toast is forgotten with the incoming stench and promise of the sea.

And upon the heavy stones of the harbour wall the men of the sea exchange fish and a few words with the villagers. News is passed on, necessary repairs are made. And before long the fishermen’s eyes begin to wander. They will notice the hardness and stillness of the stone, and listen to the lapping and teasing of the water at the wall, and soon they will return to their boats, pausing again at the harbour mouth before dipping and nodding their way on.

This is how it is and how it has always been in places where landpeople live with the constant crash of wind and waves, the comings and goings of the seafolk and the rhythm of the tides. In these places the villagers look out not with longing but foreboding, and the tides (and so perhaps the fishermen) are a mystery few have the time or inclination to understand. Interested only in what the ocean brings and takes with it, they are dependent upon it, and fearful of how it shakes them. So there is always an air of restraint, a guardedness to the exchanges between the fishermen and the villagers along the hard stonewalls where land and sea collide.

But this was the morning that—among the ropes and the dry throats and the caw-caws—a fisherman stepped down from his boat, 38 | Litro Magazine

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief: Eric Akoto eric.akoto@litro.co.uk Magazine Short Fiction Editor: Andrew Lloyd-Jones andrew.lloydjones@litro.co.uk Online Short Fiction Editor: Katy Darby katy.darby@litro.co.uk Contributing Editor: Sophie Lewis Contributing Editor & Web Designer: Emily Ding emily.ding@litro.co.uk General Online Editor : Emily Cleaver litrolab@litro.co.uk Book Reviews & Interviews Editor: David Whelan david.whelan@litro.co.uk Magazine Layout & Design: Laura Hannum Film & Arts Editor: Becky Ayre becky.ayre@litro.co.uk Sales & Marketing: Angelina Wangsha

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Litro Magazine is a little lit mag with a big worldview, pocket-sized so you can bring it anywhere. Our mission: to discover new and emerging writers and publish them alongside stalwarts of the literary scene.

We also publish regular features on literature, arts and culture online at www.litro.co.uk. Please keep this copy of Litro safe or pass it on to someone else to enjoy—we like to think of Litro as a small, free book.

LITRO | 123 Mystery There was soon a crowd too large to be explained by just the ambulance. Black cabs started pulling over en masse. Dogwalkers were ignoring their dogs. Above the unconscious woman, in mid-air, was what looked like a tooth—an upper incisor, tilted as though it belonged in the mouth of someone yawning. Or screaming.

Meaningless Number by Mazin Saleem Cover Art: RenĂŠ Daigle www.litro.co.uk ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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