Chapter 9 "Singing Sand" - the last song

"The Singing Sand" is the last novel of Josephine Tey, and our reading of her has come to an end-"until the fat lady sings", everything is in line with this old Western saying, Except that there is no fat lady, but the eccentric singing Sha, and the loyal Inspector Grant who is not eccentric at all. Here we take a look back at Inspector Grant, my personal favorite character, in Farewell. Compared to all the masters in the history of reasoning who have one or more great detectives with historical ranks, Tie Yi, the inspector of Scotland Yard, seems quite humble.He does not have the interesting priesthood status of Father Brown, the old man in the corner without the unknown name and the endlessly knotted ropes in his hands, the drugs and other eccentricities of Sherlock Holmes and his own set of case-handling philosophies and methods, and the egg-headed tip of Poirot Strange beard shapes and adages full of human insight power, there is no surprise when Aunt Marple collides with the vicious and sinister world, there is no Dr. Sondike's scientific miracle and a suitcase of technological props, Sir West's noble aristocratic status and hobbies, without Quinn's love and case-handling style, without Marlowe's poverty and iron fist of justice, without Dr. Fell's single-eating animal focus who specializes in secret rooms, and there are no unknown mainland agents and criminals The indiscriminate heart of stone.

Even Matthew Scudder in New York, who has the most similar breath with him, has a colorful crime city as the background, surrounded by a large tank of wizards and supernatural friends from all over the world, even if he is sick, he is far worse than him. There's drama and metaphorical tension to the deadly problem of alcoholism, rather than the banal fall of a broken leg like Grant's, or the claustrophobia of "Singing Sands." Among the eight criminal attacks in Tie Yi's life, he played the role of five and a half times. At that time, it was probably not convenient for him to enter the girls' school where boys were not allowed. The hot-hearted unmarried lawyer in a small town won him a beautiful woman.

Grant is a very normal person, with normal happiness and troubles, rational and irrational feelings and thinking of normal people at the same time, and a perfectly normal police identity. Such normality makes him transparent and easy to integrate into what we see In the normal world and the vast crowd, it looks like a leaf of normal color grows in the woods. As far as Grant has any supernatural powers, I think it's probably only his unusual sensitivity and memory for people's appearance, but this has not been further dramatized and stylized, just like some personality traits and hobbies that ordinary people would have.

Such ordinaryness makes him seem strange in the world of reasoning, where the detectives who cross the river appear in turn on the runway to win the show, but seem strange, like an office worker in normal clothes who is suddenly thrown into a masquerade ball and is out of place.However, if we enlarge the category of novels to general novels (that is, so-called "orthodox" novels), then Grant's appearance immediately becomes familiar and recognizable. Such characters are not only common, but also usually serve as The character of the narrator of the novel (sometimes the first person of "I", sometimes the third person of "he", and sometimes a named character in the omniscient point of view, which is okay), like Tolstoy, for example Pierre in Green, or Brown in Green's "The Comedian", the story is seen, participated in, and brought to us through their inner refraction.

Borrowing the famous novelist Luo Yijun's half-joking way of referring to such characters in the novels of his colleague Zhu Tianxin, they are called "sensational soil-type characters". When I was younger, I wrote the short story "Birth of the Twelve Constellations", which miraculously combined the ancient star charts in the sky, the irreversible but seemingly inescapable life encounters and fates, and the may-ant-like emotions in the East District of modern Taipei City. Luo Yijun, the "earth-type character" he said is obviously borrowed from the mysterious term of astrology-many people are familiar with this. The people of the Wind Clan are impulsive and passionate like a prairie fire, and they are involved in everything. The people of the Wind Clan are floating and gliding like the wind from the sky, and they have far-reaching but naive eccentric obsessions or ideals. As for the people of the Water, they are drifting like water. In the abundant river of emotion, and when the rainy season of life comes, it overflows without resistance.

The image of the soil type character is the solid earth formed by layers of inconspicuous soil. Basically, the earth is heavy, stubborn, silent, and trusts in the long-term power of dripping water and rocks. Therefore, his reaction and change are always slow to almost impossible Perceived, or bordering on impatient. When will earth-type characters let us see emotions?Maybe even let Luo Yijun boldly label it with the word "sensational"?Most, I guess, on days of intense turmoil when the wind and rain are blowing.At the special moment when everything seems to be in distress and is no longer reliable, the fire of enthusiasm has been burned out or extinguished, the erratic wind is more likely to go far away and can no longer be seen, and the water tribe hides in its own carapace and weeps sadly, On a sunny day, the land that is almost invisible, or at least makes people feel boring, shows a moving and firm force-this is a kind of warmth from the wind and rain, so sensational that it will make people's eyes blink immediately hot.

Novels are basically not stories about sunny days. As Hegel said, there is nothing to write about the history of good times. The world is peaceful and everyone lives and works in peace. This can be turned over in a few hundred years.Fiction always asks for trouble and finds itself in the vortex of change, contradiction, and conflict, whether its specific visible form is war, revolution, or just emotion, or even crime and murder. In the midst of the constant blowing and tugging of this violent storm, at this time, whether as a storyteller or as a reader, you will need and long for a sober fixed point that does not dance with the wind, a place that can mark the position of everything in motion. Calm coordinates—a earth-type person who is as solid as the earth.

Solid, becomes sensational in the wind and rain. We use Pierre as an example. It is about a great war that makes people feel at a loss. An old society and an old empire that has been sleeping for a long time and even creaking and decaying are violently pulled into it. The blue-white-red-red flag flies the subversive ideological fury of the French Revolution.Readers of novels are easily attracted at first by Prince Andrei, who is thin and handsome, in a bright military uniform, and whose heart is also radiant with pure gold.Andre is upright, smart and brave. Relatively speaking, Pierre, who is fat, slow, and just kind and good-tempered (Tolstoy even gave Pierre a physical image of earth) is extremely different. Eye-catching, even like a clown.

Not only was Pierre unable to make a quick decision about his generous participation in the war, but he was always hesitant about how to view the war psychologically and his relative position to the war, which was almost impatient, but But we can't help but be led by him to go up to the poor and down to the underworld, looking for some kind of vague but vague answer to a vaguely shapeless vast question.We followed him through the banquets of the upper-class nobles who were still speaking French, eating Black Sea caviar, dancing and singing, and we were also led by him into the vast old Russian rural land that was about to be swept by the war and mountain rain.We meet princes and ladies, Westernized liberal decadent intellectuals, old-fashioned aristocrats and newly rich merchants, Great Slavic populists, Cosmopolitan Freemasons, soldiers of all ages, priests, shopkeepers, ordinary civilians and serfs, etc. ——The fat and soft Pierre is like a big sponge, or directly like the earth. He absorbs almost everything, but often does not make immediate reactions and choices, good and evil, high and low, beliefs Doubtful, filthy and clean, progressive and traditional, they form a long way of viewing and thinking, instead of just seeing and thinking of a tangible war.

In the history of novels, Maugham and many other people solemnly praise it as the greatest novel in the human world. This is actually thanks to Pierre, thanks to his slowness and thoughtfulness, thanks to his patience and patience. Tolerance, this Franco-Russian war that did exist in history, but is undoubtedly only one of the thousands of cruel human killings, mainly through the refraction of Pierre's eyes and heart, it slowly blooms like a flower More generally, with unprecedented abundance of life, it is not just a blood-boiling holy war book about the heroic resistance of the Russians to Napoleon's invasion, written by the Russians.

The Son of the Earth stayed behind for time, giving him the necessary space to turn around. Of course, Pierre's big climax scene is the scene where he decides to go against everyone fleeing the war and innocently tries to assassinate Napoleon alone.I guess, Luo Yijun, who is familiar with the study of constellations, may say that this is just a funny convex hammer performance of a typical earthen figure, and it is an inevitable periodic brutal reaction of their long-term hysteresis and suppression; or, Luo Yijun may also assert based on this, Pierre must have been disturbed by some kind of rising sign, or some reckless Aries or playful Sagittarius characters were hidden in the beginning, but suddenly broke out at a certain gap in his life. In the novel, the beautiful Natasha, who loves to dance and fall in love, should be a woman of the water type. Like us, she only thought Pierre was a good-tempered and ridiculous person at first. However, after the long wait and sorrow of the war Among them, every time she turns her head, she always finds Pierre's increasingly broad, more specific and reliable warmth, just like the solid comfort of stepping on the ground with bare feet.The role of Natasha is very interesting. She seems to be slowly overlapping with us readers of the novel, standing aside like us. While Pierre gradually understands the chaotic nature of war, she also gradually understands and really touches The touching nature of Pierre - the slight difference is that we start to like Pierre and she chooses to marry him without doing anything. As for my personal favourite, the man in Green’s “The Comedian” whose father is unknown, went to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, to receive a hotel left to him by his dissolute mother, and was still busy with the German ambassador’s wife at the time of a left-wing revolution and bloody suppression by those in power. Brown, the earthy guy who had an affair, but eventually got involved involuntarily, and went to exile in the Dominican Republic to become a funny mortician who collects corpses, I leave it to you to read-but remember to read it, but the original Times Company has published it Broken version, you may have to spend a little time looking for it. Here we go back to Inspector Grant. We often say that Tie Yi, who writes reasoning crimes, is far more interested in the design and clever disclosure of "murder/case solving", but in the same way, any reasoning novelist who is smart enough to pretend to be shocking can do so himself Yangyang declared, just like the old cross talk: "Anyway, you don't need to put stamps on bragging."——No, of course, this is not just a matter of saying, but it has to be seen in the specific presentation of the novel. Everyone knows that crime and murder are not two groups of things with the same scope at both ends of the equal sign. In fact, in the reality of life, the ultimate means of killing is only a small part of crime (in recent years, the proportion in Taiwan has been quite large. The degree has increased), especially if we expand the crime to the level of human "maliciousness" that does not need to be practiced, as psychologists care about and compassionate religious wise men exhort, then the occurrence of murder is even more like a drop in the bucket.Such a distinction is common sense, and all the mystery writers who are troubled by the exhaustion of murder books also know that there is this large uncultivated virgin land there, but the trouble is that it is not easy to write, it is not strong enough, dramatic enough, like Land that is too barren generally does not meet the "input / output" reasonable return on investment, a practical problem. Here, let's empirically see what good things Teyi has done. Among the seven Teyi novels we have seen, two of them have no murder at all, accounting for two-sevenths; "Any malicious" death; one of them did have the idea of ​​killing, but the hands and feet were not vague murderous intentions that had to kill people; another one said that no one was murdered in the current real world, but there was an innocent A hospital patient who can do it accidentally remembered that a cold-blooded murder case hundreds of years ago may not be what the official history says—here we assume that someone has not read all of Tie Yi's novels, so it is very professional to not reveal the book. name. In other words, in principle, there are only two Tie Yi novels that conform to the format of "murder/solve crimes" - the proportion is so low that it is inclined to the truth of life. It does not directly narrow the broad and ubiquitous crime into a single form of murder, nor does it just transfer the statement of a psychologist and translate it in the language of the novel, which is equivalent to a description of criminal psychology. The writing of novels like Tei is comparable to imagination. It is much more difficult in the novel, because it is tantamount to giving up the convenient and easy-to-use framework of mystery novels, including the followable plot trend mode and the easy-to-apply character model. You need a patient newcomer to look at crime afresh through his patient eyes, and that man is Inspector Grant. Grant is set to be Scotland Yard's detective, but we see that when crime comes to him, whether it's in the form of a specific case or just a veiled flavor, his interest isn't exactly a cop-like duty In body, or hound-like conditioning, a large part of Grant's bright eyes was simply the joy of discovery.The practice of discovery is not to act vigorously to handle cases, but to search calmly and patiently; it is not to interlock rigorous logical reasoning or even to find evidence with legal effect, but to contain feelings, understanding and sympathy; in the end, when the truth Uncovering smoothly is not a kind of triumphant triumph of self-importance, but a sense of exhaustion and satisfaction after wading through a long road-my favorite ending of Teyi is the ending of one of the two non-existent death novels In the description, Grant quietly found the female "murderer" who wanted revenge but did not kill, confirmed his conjecture, comforted the suspect who did not commit a serious crime, and then left with a sincere greeting and salute. Very gentleman, very So warm and understanding, very Grant. Grant, however, is not a cold-hearted man, nor is he a solipsist with personal questions and no sense of justice in the public sphere.No, it wouldn't, and in that case, this man wouldn't be plowing into an unrelated murder 400 years ago (and he's not a historian to profit from it) just because he doesn't believe and doesn't. May the dead king be wronged to bear the eternal cold-blooded name—Grant is also a typical earth system in this respect, cold on the outside and hot on the inside, just like the earth, with hot lava flowing under the condensed and hard crust. Readers are not satisfied with the sword, and "Singing Sand" will be Grant's last case. Grant always lingers - who is he?Why did he come here?Why did he die?