Chapter 4 "Dark Thorn" - what was I doing when he died?

The great German historian in the 19th century, Druissen, believed that what has happened does not automatically become "history" unless it has some kind of connection with our "now and now" and gives rise to some kind of meaning, which is recreated by us. Memorize, ponder, organize, and seriously understand. What about a murder that had been going on for nine years?Barbara Edinger had been supposed to be one of a long line of hapless victims of an ice pick lunatic murderer, but nine years later, the killer was accidentally caught and confessed to everything except Barbara He killed.Because he was in prison at the time of the incident.In addition, Barbara's method of death is indeed slightly different from the other dead, very similar, but there are differences.

As a result, Barbara's father, who had been relieved and even stopped mourning, "created meaning" again. He wanted to find this history and asked why someone killed him. However, for the bureaucratic police, these only constitute doubts, which are not enough to give rise to the meaning of reopening the investigation with great fanfare, so the case came to our "once bitten" In the hands of Mr. Scudder, a freelance worker who will never let go of his mouth—it proves once again that the public sector can only do routine and simple work, and only the people themselves have the opportunity to complete the difficult ones.

Scudder’s warning is: You may spend money for nothing and get no results; you may find out who the murderer is, but the evidence is destroyed and the case cannot be brought to court effectively; what’s more frightening is, “You may know something Things you don't like. You say it yourself - someone killed her for a reason. You might be happier without knowing that reason." A Stab in the Dark, refers to the ice pick killer's habit of killing - piercing the victim's eyes with ice picks, because he is afraid that the last image of his killing will remain in the victim's retina, or it may be interpreted by some scientific instrument ; It also refers to Scudder's dagger piercing back into the dark time tunnel and the gloomy heart nine years ago.

"You look like you saw a ghost, no, I'm wrong, you look like you're looking for a ghost."——After nine years, Scudder returned to the apartment where Barbara was killed, Horror blurted out by the current female tenant. Of course, our murder historian, Mr. Scudder, fully understands what nine years means to an unknown murder victim. This is not geology - nine years is a meaningless short time for geology , it hardly forms any noticeable change, and afterwards it hides in the error of carbon isotope measurement, and there is no way to call it out-this is real life, basically, it accounts for eighth of our life span A ratio of one-fifth, many things can happen, and many things can be annihilated, do you want to try it now, first recall, where were you at this moment nine years ago?What to think, what to do?Try to guess again, at this moment nine years later, where might you be?Maybe think of something to do?

In fact, over the course of nine years, not only has the tangible changed, but even the memory is not necessarily trustworthy—Scudder knows this well, when he puts it, “Memory is a cooperative animal, very If you are willing to please, but the supply is not timely, you can often invent one on the spot, and then carefully fill in the blanks.” Therefore, the origin is already clear, and the whereabouts are unknown-for Scudder, there can only be "feelings" and no "clues" at the murder scene nine years ago. In my personal limited experience in reading detective novels, Scudder's way of handling cases may be the most "inefficient" of all visible detectives, famous detectives, private detectives and wonderful detectives.Scudder himself often said that he just walked around and asked as much as he could, without specific goals or reasons.He knows very well that 95% of the information and ideas he comes to see and ask are completely useless, and what you really need to solve the case is the remaining 5%. However, you have no way of knowing this 100% useful When the five percent appears, to put it bluntly, you don't even know which part of the five percent it is.

This is very similar to when we say that radioactive uranium atoms decay into lead atoms. Scientists only know that a certain proportion of uranium atoms will be converted into lead atoms within a certain period of time (such as half-life), but we can never determine in advance which one will change and which will remain the same. By chance, or commonly known as luck. However, what can we do with the 95% of the walking, questioning and feeling that are completely wasted in case handling? Thank god there's so much "waste" and as a reader I'd say these fragments of rubbish that don't directly solve the case have been a real gem of a read, the best thing to watch, they shine Scattered all around, pulling away the (slightly) narrow linear vision of traditional detective novels that only focus on crimes, allowing the world in the novel to have realistic light and shadow contrasts, and also making the original "conceptualized" novel chess pieces full of characters stood up.

Let me give you an example.In another novel of Detective Scudder, he was entrusted with finding a young girl who disappeared shortly after arriving in New York. During the search, he kept thinking, "Where can she go when she is so lonely?" ——This is what Ms. Lin Darong, who is in charge of translating this book, told me. When she translated this sentence, she experienced physical changes all over her body, and she was still deeply moved afterward. Or as in this book, Scudder also seriously suspects that the murderer is Barbara's promiscuous remarried husband, but he is not thinking of Agatha Christie style "I often wonder why everyone may kill", but rather, "Married people often murder each other, and sometimes it takes them five or ten years to do it".

Obviously, this has nothing to do with efficiency. If it depends on efficiency, then we'd better go back to the world of classical reasoning, and go back to those detectives who are different from normal people—even Sherlock Holmes, whose efficiency is so high that he can tell that he is a sailor at a glance Or accountants, have you ever been to China, or were once rich and now in poverty.Scudder has no such skills, he is just an ordinary person walking slowly in Greater New York City. "These martyrs have a strange fascination for me. They can find such a variety of ways to die." This is Scudder's impression of lying on his hotel bed and reading the book "Biography of Saints".

EM Foster said: "Man's life begins with an experience he has forgotten, and ends with an experience he must participate in but cannot understand." Therefore, we can only walk between these two darkness, And the two things that help us unravel the mystery of life and death—babies and corpses—can tell us nothing, because the organs through which they convey experience do not match our receptors. Yet novels that touch on death are ubiquitous, Foster thinks, perhaps chiefly because death can end a novel neatly and neatly. If Forster's statement is to be believed, these writers who have been writing detective novels for 150 years are obviously a group of retrograde people. Their novels basically start from death, and their income and fame all die. start.

How to start?I have personally argued in a short essay on Raymond Chandler's novels that classical reasoning can be described as a kind of "deathology" concerned with information directly revealed by death (such as wounds, fingerprints, time and place of death, etc.) ), death gives us hints, gives us clues, and death is a puzzle; crime novels after the "American Revolution" may be called "death ecology", which turns to concern about death and various hidden or obvious aspects of the real society. Through the planning, execution, occurrence and pursuit of death, we have the opportunity to probe into the darkness of society and investigate the subtleties of people's hearts. Here, death is close to a symptom, or even a symptom.

Scudder is closer to the latter, but slightly different. I think his real concern is probably death itself. Confucius said, life is too late to understand, how can we have the energy to care about death.Death conveys a message that we cannot decipher, Foster said.These are the words of wise men who are wise, open-minded and insightful, and you should listen to them; however, death is still death, and it is still hanging over everyone's heads. when you are hungry, or when you turn on the newspaper and TV and see death coming through the door).In short, since we live with death so day-to-day, in the long life, you will have to take care of it sooner or later, or how much. Therefore, I personally think that the appearance of death in all kinds of novels (not only reasoning) may not be because of Forster's half-joking so-called technical functional significance of ending novels, but because novels (and even all literary creations) can be regarded as a way to deal with death. A useful form.Of course, using religion is more convenient than anything else, and it is a once-and-for-all "closed-door" solution to death, but for many people, it is too simple to be "real", which inevitably makes people unwilling or uneasy.However, through science you have to prove, through philosophy you also have to explain the logic and deduction process to some extent, which will encounter the eternal trouble of "difficulty in receiving" as Forster said; novels have always had the privilege of not having to find evidence, Instead of relying on syllogisms, you can directly "touch" death through the construction of situations, the soaring of imagination and the feeling of sympathy. Generally speaking, what a detective should touch is the deaths that are directly related to his handling of the case, at most to be indirectly related. However, Scudder can't help but touch the deaths that don't belong to him and have nothing to do with him. Read Anyone who has ever lived has fully seen this. He always murmurs about the woman whose head was blown off while drying clothes on the balcony, or the TV set that was picked up at the garbage dump and repaired when she was bombed, killing one and injuring the other. The pair of old men and old ladies, for example, a pair of old neighbors who shoot arrows because a dog peed on other people’s lawn, for example, they went to the street basketball court to fight bullfights because someone dropped a pistol from his pocket and went off. And the unlucky ghost who died inexplicably... There are eight million people in New York, eight million stories, and eight million ways to die. There is no money to be paid for caring about these deaths, but Scudder did not change his mind. Among the domestic novel writers, Zhu Tianxin is most likely to be the most diligent about death. For Matthew Scudder (or Lawrence Bullock, who created him), Zhu Tianxin said that she One of the deepest impressions is that when Scudder heard about the murder, his first reaction was often, "What was I doing when he died?" Zhu Tianxin especially emphasized that, in fact, very few people are like this.I think I can probably understand what this means. In Zhu Tianxin's works, there is such a group of people scattered all over the place. They feel death from time to time. They can't help remembering and prying and thinking about death. They can't forget their love for death. She calls it "old soul"——in "The Chronicle of Predicting Death" ", she said, "The same city, in the eyes of old souls, often presents a completely different image." "I don't know why in today's regular, planned and rigorous modern urban life, Gives old souls a sense of being in the wilderness." Scudder (or Brock, who wrote him) is probably really an old soul. Indeed, Scudder's novel world fulfills such a "prophecy" of Zhu Tianxin.Think about it, such a person who is sensitive to death, was thrown into a dead city like New York, and had to support himself by chasing death, and occasionally sent money to his divorced wife and son who lived away. The image is indeed extremely wild as walking in the wilderness, and he can stare at every vicious and broken death almost disgustingly, but he can look at death so strangely and tenderly. There is no limit to life and no limit to death, let us end the conversation with an old soul joke from Scudder-this is his reflection on the streets of New York in this book, and it is indeed profound and bleak: "Excuse me sir, can you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building?" "Fuck you, you freak." This is the etiquette of the modern city.