In the Lonely Backwater
by Valerie Nieman
Regal House Publishing, $18.95 paperback, 272 pages
We employ the term “genre fiction” to denote types of specialized narratives distinctive for their usages of certain limited kinds of subject matter and storyline designs. They offer us readers a security of expectations; the stories admit of surprise; in fact, they celebrate surprises, but these are circumscribed in range. A “police procedural” mystery story will not include an episode with magic potions, a fairy tale with a wicked stepmother will not take place in a municipal landfill. Limit is one of the laws of genre.
And also one of its advantages. The writer enters a prepared ground; she does not have to explain at length the term “forensic evidence”; he does not have to describe in detail the term “femme fatale.” If the mystery story is laid out in disjoined pieces, they must at last fit with one another in a comprehensible, seemingly inevitable, design that is satisfying but not blatantly artificial, logical but not obvious, surprising but not silly.
Valerie Nieman is a strongly established and widely admired author. She has published three volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, and five previous novels. Each of her works is distinguished for clarity, forceful drama, originality, and deftness of style. Her pieces are often anthologized and she has been awarded a happy number of literary prizes.
Why, then, has she chosen to write as her new novel, In the Lonely Backwater, (Regal Publishing House, 2022) a murder mystery, one of the most generic story types? Will there be some readers who shall regard this current volume as being a less worthy effort? Can Valerie Nieman surprise us literarily while following closely the rules of the “whodunit”?
Backwater demonstrates that while following the traditional usages strictly, she can transform the genre.
The story begins with the murder of an associate of the narrator, who is a sixteen-year-old high school student named Maggie Warshauser. Maggie is from the start in a dire situation. Her mother has deserted the family and the father has fallen into an alcoholic abyss, forcing his daughter to manage the family business, a ramshackle marina in Filliyaw Creek, North Carolina. Maggies rises valiantly to the challenge while struggling at the same time with her schoolwork, the trials of adolescence, her relationships with her reckless friends, and the dark fears arising from the murder of one of them. She is aided in her troubles by a very mysterious boy named Fletcher, by the dutiful and sympathetic investigating officer, Drexel Vann, and by the example of the great botanical genius, Carl Linnaeus.
The appearance of his figure in the story is not arbitrary and certainly not capricious, though it is in one respect accidental. Maggie came across a dilapidated copy of his tour in Lapland while exploring an old church and from this volume she learned many valuable things, including especially the importance of classification and the methods of pursuing it. Linnaeus becomes her guide in her researches and in her personal life. At age sixteen she describes herself on her Facebook page: her sex, Female, her birthday, July 6, her langugages, “English, sailing,” her work, “Scientist in Training.” In a later posting she lists her work as “Voyager” and her passions as sailing and taxonomy. “My heroes are Carl von Linne (you can look it up!) and Thor Heyerdahl and Ann Bonny, ‘The Lady Pirate’” She declares that the best education is self-education, for which the first necessity is observation.
I love nature, the needless beauty of it, how the damsel flies are jeweled and skinks have neon-blue tails. And how much we’re given, nuts and berries and apples in abundance, too much there, too, I guess but sometimes the natural world can be just scary. I’ve seen the National Geographic shows, read a thousand books. Watched catfish swirling like giant globs of mucus waiting for a handout of dog food. Maggots in a carcass. Maples spewing seeds until they pile up in drifts. Spiders hatching in a seethe of tiny legs. Kudzu and mosquitoes and ticks. All of this feeding and breeding and dying and starting over again. (231)
This diary entry is a telling snapshot of her character. She is brilliant, studious, eager to learn, and determined. And very lonely. There are persons who like to boast that they are “self-made.” Maggie is mostly self-made but is not proud of it. The great detectives, from Dupin and Sherlock onwards, possess these same attributes as does Maggie, and they too are portrayed as loners, often as melancholy.
The investigating detective here, Drexel Vann, is not a melancholy loner but a practical family man. Maggie observes him as he observes her while driving his official car:
“You like to push the edge, do things that are reckless. Even dangerous. If that’s the way you assert your independence, it’s not a good one.” He rested his hands on the steering wheel and did some more of that silent waiting. I could wait right with him. It was interesting to see what was in his car, the radio and the blue light, a box of files on the floor that I had to tuck my feet around. And a picture of his kids on the dashboard, both of them wearing glasses. Genetic.
A good man, this police detective, person to whom Maggie might turn for help when in need. But she cannot, and in the reason for her careful distance from him lies the dark heart of the mystery.
From this point we can predict the tenor of most of Maggie’s behavior. She will keep the marina in working order and try to help her father find his way again; she will graduate from high school and pursue her scientific researches ever more assiduously; she will, in a long suspenseful denouement, protect herself from the inevitable physical danger and aid Drexel Vann in bringing a criminal to justice. All these things she can do because she is valiant and has studied the world about her.
But the world about her is not her complete world; the world within her, the memories and partial memories and inescapable fantasies that besiege her thoughts form a danger that her valiance can never wholly defeat. The heart of the mystery is at last her own heart. The final knowledge she must attain is self-knowledge and its dread truth may be at last undeniable and untenable. The story of In the Lonely Backwater ends in present time. Whether it concludes is a larger question.
This novel is an intricate and intriguing work of art. Its intricacies are not mere twists of plotline; they are necessary and inevitable. They define, redefine, in a serious manner the term, mystery.
