The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell

Sarah Caudwell wrote four mystery novels before she died, and everyone who has read them wishes she had lived to write more. Her formal, almost Dickensian style is full of humor and wit. If you can get through the first ten pages, you will enjoy the rest of the book. Consider her prologue, after her narrator insists that the story contained herein is a true one:

Some of my readers, perhaps many, having expected to find in these pages diversion rather than instruction, will now hasten back to their booksellers to demand indignantly, it may be with threats of legal action, reimbursement of the sum so ill-advisedly expended. So be it: such readers will give me credit, I hope, for having enabled them by my prompt confession to return the volume unread and in almost pristine condition; and I for my part (for publisher and bookseller I cannot speak) would rather forgo the modest sum which would accrue to me from the sale - very modest, meager would be a better word, one might even say paltry - would infinitely rather forgo that sum than think it obtained by deception.”

If that intrigued you, you will enjoy The Shortest Way to Hades. If you skipped down after the first fifteen words, then this book is not for you. It just goes on like that.

Caudwell’s detective is Hilary Tamar, a professor of law at Oxford who frequently haunts the offices of a group of friends who practice law. Here I will avoid certain terms, because I know so little about the British legal system, and cannot tell the difference between a lawyer and a barrister and a solicitor and so on. Tamar is a busybody whose nosiness is alternately tolerated and enlisted by the friends, who sometimes stumble upon crimes in need of solution.

The first time I read Sarah Caudwell’s novels, I completely missed one of the ongoing gimmicks of her books. In the U.S., Hilary is almost exclusively a female name, so I naturally pictured the protagonist as a woman. But Caudwell deliberately left the sex of her detective ambiguous. The name is androgynous, and the story is told in first person narrative. No one - author or character - ever says in the four novels whether Hilary Tamar is a man or a woman.

This approach is carried out in the relationships her characters carry on. Sexual interest is frequently described, without apparent restrictions of gender, and there seems a general promiscous bonhommie throughout Caudwell’s books. Combined with her refusal to assign a sex to her main character, this works to erode any traditional understanding of sexuality and gender. I suspect Caudwell tried to destroy any perception that sees the world through binary thinking, not only that of male and female, but perhaps even right and wrong . It is all quite deliberate, and sometimes leaves me with the sensation, after I have laid down the book for a half hour or so, that I have forgotten to wipe the slime from my hands.

I enjoy Caudwell’s books in part because I think she failed in her purpose. The mystery genre still maintains too much commitment to a truth/lie dichotomy to completely demolish morality. Tamar’s mocking of a friend’s quotations of Thomas Moore remain unconvincing when Tamar still doggedly pursues the truth of the crime.

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