YOU don't have to know the history of detective fiction to enjoy Australian writer Michael Robotham's vibrant and utterly contemporary new mystery, "The Night Ferry," which is how it should be.
On the other hand, Robotham is a writer who plays so knowingly and enthusiastically with the genre's conventions that a bit of appreciation for his bravura display of craft definitely enhances the experience of this third in what can only be called a "semi-series" of novels.
Stories of detection are one of the 19th century's enduring contributions to literary entertainment. All of today's detective protagonists are, in some sense, the descendants of Edgar Allan Poe's private investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, of Emile Gaboriau's policeman, Monsieur Lecoq, and, of course, of Charles Dickens' Inspector Burkett and Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff. However, the creative DNA that most decisively sets the shape of contemporary detective fiction is that of Arthur Conan Doyle's incomparable Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Their stories decisively established the paradox that has remained at the center of mystery writing ever since: While a successful mystery story ought to be all about plot, those that readers love best are all about character.
They're also about the character's storytelling voice. No less an authority than John le Carre made that point in his elegant introduction to Leslie S. Klinger's magisterial 2005 annotated edition of the complete Holmes.
"No amount of academic study, thank Heaven, no earnest dissertations from the literary bureaucracy, will ever explain why we love one writer's voice above another's," George Smiley's creator wrote. "Partly it has to do with trust, partly with the good or bad manners of the narrator, partly with his authority or lack of it. And a little also with beauty, though not as much as we might like to think. As a reader, I insist on being beguiled early or not at all, which is why a lot of the books on my shelves remain mysteriously unread after page 20. But once I submit to the author's thrall, he can do me no wrong."
There's probably no better description of the pull that a particular fictional detective's stories have exerted on readers, volume after volume, down to the present day. Le Carre goes on to locate Conan Doyle's particular genius in his authorial decision to tell Holmes' stories in Watson's voice, one that "talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy across a glowing fire. His voice has no barriers or affectations."
