Gospel of V

Author H.M. Faust (AKA DWaM) declares his main goal in the About the Author section: …to push the limits of the mystery genre, merging bizarre storylines and modern narrative techniques with the tropes of the Golden Age period of detective fiction. He also likes impossible crimes which is the real reason I read his work.

The narrative techiniques of his novel Gospel of V are not necessarily modern, but they are experimental. The storyline is suitably bizarre though bizarreness is a rather common element of mystery fiction. Those tropes of the Golden Age show up and I enjoyed them a great deal. There are also some murders in locked rooms.

It’s a fractured story, essentially featuring two pieces of evidence–a murder mystery manuscript and a journal, both of which were written by Virgil Hesse. From these two “fictional” pieces, a pair of editors/detectives attempt to solve some very real murders.

In the first half, we alternate between the manuscript and the editors’ commentary. It was frustrating because I quite liked the manuscript but I was never sure I was supposed to like it. I’ll try and explain. The story within the story is about a family of artists named Cosmigrove. The introduction to the characters is superb. We get a lot of bang for our buck. By that, I mean Faust is able to give us a clear picture of the personalities within the telling of the story. Economical intros are always a pleasure to read. The Cosmigroves remind me vaguely of the Glass family from Salinger, philosphical and egotistical in equal measure. The patriarch is dying and (trope alert) there is much talk of the will and the children’s position of the totem pole. We also get the requisite narrative surprises. A skeleton is found in the garden and later there’s a locked room murder–a man stabbed in an empty room.

This is a wonderful set-up for a murder mystery with an interesting group of characters. But Faust is not interested in playing out this scenario. Perhaps he reasons that it isn’t worth his time to write the 112,000th family murder mystery. The story of the Cosmigroves is itself a piece of evidence. If one were to read between the lines, the author’s message will reveal itself. While this may be a clever idea, it make the actual storyline almost moot. And like I said, I was interested. The scenes of the editors “reacting” to the manuscript are not particuarly illuminating and they are far less entertaining that what happens in that house. When I learned that investing myself in the story was pointless…let’s just say I wasn’t enthused.

It turns out, the real Cosmigroves (similar to the ones in Hesse’s story with a few key differences) were murdered in almost exactly the same way as in the book. The scene of their bodies being discovered by film scouts is fantastic. With the recovery of Hesse’s journal, the editors begin to separate fact from fiction, eventually piecing together the solution of the manuscript and the real murders.

The locked-room solution is good. It plays a bit with architecture the way the author did in his short story The Tower of Babel. Of course, that’s what mystery authors do, develop obsessions and proceed to find endless permutations of them. The investigation of the editors gets better as the novel goes on, but I’m still not convinced this is an investigation to which the reader is truly encouraged to play along. The real-life murder is only alluded to in third-hand accounts and the evidence provided by the manuscript is less of the a-ha variety and more of the oh variety. What if the book had started with that real murder, developed it and then the manuscript was discovered? I think it would have been more satisfying.

As it stands, this is a fun, clever mystery that (in my opinion of course) might have been better had the author couched the mystery wholly within the story or changed the order of events. That scene with the film scouts would have been a killer opening and the eventual reveal about one of those scouts could have been set up in a far more satisfying way.

This is the author’s first commercially-available book, but he’s got a lot of other stuff for free which you can find here. I’d recommend starting with Hear the Devil Sing and A Eulogy of Reason. And I’d recommend picking up Gospel of V. It’s an interesting attempt at fracturing the narrative of a mystery while still playing the game.