An interesting push to the mystery envelope

Roughly half the members of my library mystery book club hated The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentile. The others either liked it a lot or they thought it is an interesting exercise. I didn't care for the mystery, which I thought was absurd, but thought the book’s structure was imaginative.

The book starts with a letter to "Hannah Tigone," a mystery writer, from "Leo," a fan of Hannah's and another writer who offers to be a sounding board "if you require one" as Hannah drafts her new novel. It's not clear that they have ever met, but he know her work and has corresponded with her in the past.  

The next chapter, told in the first person, takes place in the reading room of the Boston Public Library where the narrator, Winifred (Freddie), another writer, is at a table with three young people (under 30): Cain, Whit, and Marigold. There is a scream and ultimately someone finds the body of a young woman in a nearby room. 

In subsequent chapters we learn about Freddie, Cain, Whit, and Marigold, their relationships and connections to one another and to others in the story and something about the dead girl. Every chapter os followed by Leo's comment on and critique of the developing story. In other words, The Woman in the Library operates and two levels simultaneously: the creation of a mystery story and commentary on the story and the characters in it. Adding to the complexity, Gentile names another character, an acquaintance of Freddie's, "Leo." This Leo is not the Leo writing letters to "Hannah," about her new mystery in which the character Freddie is narrating the story. All clear?

Gentile is an Australian writer who had published ten mysteries featuring an artist and gentleman of leisure and set in 1930s Australia. She says that in thanks to her American readers for their support she wanted to set a book in the States but had a problem. She hadn't been to America in years and never been to Boston. However, she had a friend in Boston and he was writing his own novel. She wrote him to ask, "Can I pick your brain while you're there so that I can get the elements of place right for this novel?" Important because as she says, "crime fiction traditionally has a very strong sense of place."

The friend sent her maps, menus, photographs, weather reports, and when there was a a murder two blocks from where he was living, he sent her detailed information about the crime with pictures of the scene.

It was not a giant leap therefore to start the book with the (fictional) author’s friend sending her a letter offering to help her with the new mystery she plans to write. Gentill says, “I love traditional mystery. I love the conversations I can have about politics, and race, and prejudice within the framework of a traditional murder mystery. Part of that is because people know what to expect with the way the plot goes. You can actually load them up with other themes and other ideas, because it doesn't take a lot of effort to follow the plot.

“But after several years of writing in that genre, I feel the need to push the envelope and to write something that's truly novel. I suppose that's where . . .  The Woman in the Library came from. It's my need to actually do something in a way that nobody else has done before. Now, you can't be sure that that is that nobody else has ever written a book like this before, but I haven't read them. 

“I did want to actually twist not just the plot, but the structure of the novel itself. I also quite love removing that fourth wall and talking directly to the reader. So what metafiction is is the ability to say to the reader, ‘Let's talk about the fact that this is a story.’” Let's.