[This is the second installment of Armchair Detective, a C4 column about reading mysteries. Follow it from the Columns category.]

In the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more so-called literary writers crossing over into genre fiction. Crossover has never been all that rare, but literary writers used to separate their genre work: Mike Beeman discusses Graham Greene’s “entertainments” here, and here’s a Washington Post piece about the pseudonyms that writers once used (at least partially) to write in different genres.

These days, the crossover is more condescending and less satisfying. In “mysteries” like The Missing and The Nobodies Album, authors attempt to elevate genre formulas with literary sensibilities, but they succeed only in creating hollow mishmashes, prettily written but horribly plotted.

I think I know why. …
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[This is the first installment in a new C4 column that will highlight the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month. Follow it and other columns here.]

Sea World is a weird place...

I love magazines.

I’m not talking People, Us, Maxim, or any of their like-minded counterparts who believe the American public is no longer capable of reading more than 500 characters at a time. When I talk about magazines, I mean the purveyors of substantial, long-form journalism. I mean the type of articles you find later in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. You know, the type that exposes insubordinate generals or brings humanity back to a hated woman.

To me, a magazine article is to a nonfiction book what a short story is to a novel. The best examples of both short forms are self-contained pearls, with dynamic narrative arcs and gripping stories to tell. And if the writer is great, he or she can elevate a simple subject into high literature.

I don’t know if Nico is correct about the ad he recently thumped on this site—don’t know if it is somehow a strange and desperate ploy to stay relevant in the internet age (it’s beyond a Condé thing, by the way. I’ve also seen it in ESPN and Esquire). But I do know that I want more people to read magazines. That’s the point of this little column. I want to highlight articles from the month that caught my attention. They might not all be high literature, but each will have, for some reason or another, stuck with me.

Of course, I will never profess to having read everything, so if you think there is something I left out, feel free to send it along to marcos@chamberfour.com.

And one last thing: a lot of magazines require that you have a subscription to read their articles online. I can’t fault them for protecting their market, but it does cramp my column a bit. I wouldn’t want my suggestions to make your coffee table to look like mine, So I’ll do my best to keep my suggestions to free articles.

Off we go:

Wanna feel bad about killer whales?

What if Free Willy went the killer whale version of psychotic, pulled that nosey little kid into the water, and held him there until he drowned? Next summer’s blockbuster thriller? No, that shit could have happened.

Also this article contains the best sentence of the month:

“Early in the morning, the animal-care crew would take hot-water-filled cow vaginas and masturbate the males in the back tanks,” says John Hall, a former scientist at SeaWorld. “It was pretty interesting to walk by.”

Try to get that out of your mind. …
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[This is the inaugural episode of Armchair Detective, a C4 column about reading mysteries. This time: how passion can make or break a mystery.]

Relatively late in my reading career, I came to the decision that I shouldn’t try to finish bad books, because they sour me on reading and waste my time. Mysteries are a bit different because they naturally reward a finished read, and I think there’s value (and fun to be had) in deconstructing what makes the bad ones bad. If I’m going to quit on a mystery novel, it’s probably dead middle of the road: not bad, per se, but certainly not good. Just, kinda, average.

Last week, I had to quit on not one, but two mystery novels—If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr, and The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell—both of which looked and felt much better than average. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out the problems I had with them—when I finally did, I found that it was one problem with two sides. These two novels and their complementary shortcomings illustrate a crucial, but subtle, element of good mystery narrative.

I started reading If the Dead Rise Not first, after I heard a glowing review on Fresh Air, and it sounded terrific. Dead has a great hook: it’s set in pre-WWII Nazi Germany, when Hitler’s crimes are just beginning, but there’s already no justice in Berlin for Jews. It stars Bernie Gunther, who was forced out of the police for not being a Nazi, and, though he’s been reduced to a hotel detective, he’s the only one willing to dig into the shadows.

Kerr uses oppression and injustice to light Gunther up with righteous rage, but he doesn’t give Gunther anywhere to go, and we’re left with a human flamethrower, spouting fire impotently into the air. …
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