‘The Big Slump’ - hits and errors in baseball mystery fiction

 Bill Knight column for 10-14, 15 or 16, 2021

 

Major League Baseball’s postseason is underway toward a possible deciding game of the World Series on NOVEMBER 3 (!), after which I’ll start my winter routine of reading murder mysteries.

But the National Pastime probably won’t figure in most of them.

Many past mystery writers using baseball as a key part of their fiction grounded into routine outs, popped up, choked. With apologies to Raymond Chandler, these authors “slumped the Big Slump.”

However, such failures probably were less a result of their reliance on a handful of predictable conventions than simply a lack of attempts for them to build on.

Previous disappointments in baseball mystery fiction had little literary foundations. Aside from the obscure 1934 movie whodunit “Death on The Diamond” and a handful of juvenile books and short stories, the phenomenon is generally about 50 years old. Since, I’ve read dozens of baseball mystery novels, most from the 1980s and ’90s. Two of the best are recent, written by old friend Dennis Hetzel, who penned 2014’s “Killing the Curse” (loosely about the Cubs, politics, a sports-talk host, a crazed fan) and 2017’s “Season of Lies” (with some of those characters, plus an approaching comet, religious zealots and terrorism threats).

For some authors, it may have seemed that linking baseball and crime was “The Natural.” The sport has a calming familiarity, reaching deeply into the American psyche, as author Kevin Kerrane writes: “After Vietnam, beyond football, in spite of Astroturf and designated hitters and megabucks, we keep finding the game again every time we lose it – rediscovering it not only in major-league parks, but in every corner of the country, on innumerable streets.”

Indeed, baseball can inhabit the “mean streets” of modern, hard-boiled detective novels, as developed by Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him.

But it’s not easy, so using baseball as a device for detective fiction has been difficult.

 “None are very good,” comments Paul Adomites, editor of “The SABR Review of Books,” published by the Society for American Baseball Research. “They have to fit the formula for the genre, but they have to get the baseball right, too.”

A successful baseball mystery author agrees – with reservations.

 “There’s no doubt that baseball offers us that great tradition of memory and love, of imagined youth and boyhood stories,” says William Brashler, co-author of the Duffy House series of baseball murder mysteries. “Baseball is a nostalgic game filled with mythic heroes.

“As far as baseball mysteries, there haven’t been many practitioners,” he adds. “It’s changed dramatically.

“Most mystery readers – most readers – are women,” Brashler continues. “Some women follow sports, and some are baseball fans, but not most. So writers using baseball can get anxious that the vast majority of readers out there prefer the parlor room to the locker room, the scent of arsenic to the odor of liniment, and so on. [But] you’ve got to satisfy baseball fans, who know the genuine article.”

Baseball mysteries must be convincing in atmosphere and detail, unlike other genres, Adomites says.

 “Everyone in American society knows something about baseball – even if they hate the game,” he says. “Too many authors do their ‘research’ in an afternoon, but writing about baseball isn’t like fantasy. Stephen King can create a creature out of whole cloth, but with baseball, you have to know your stuff.”

The “sub-genre” has common elements.

Ballplayers are murdered in “Gamemaker,” “Dead Pull Hitter,” “Squeezeplay,” “Murder in Wrigley Field,” “The Screwball King Murder,” “Strike Three, You’re Dead,” and “The Devil to Play.” Owners are targets for killers in “Murderers’ Row” and “Beanball.” Players are blackmailed in “The 7th Game,” “Mortal Stakes,” “Dead in Center Field” and “Seven Games in October.”

Pitched baseballs kill people in “Beanball” and “Strike Zone.” Bats are the weapons of choice in “Three Strikes and You’re Out” and “Dead in Center Field.” In addition to inimitable weapons, baseball mysteries offer captivating personalities.

 “Baseball lends itself to character. Every team has colorful characters that we turn into composites. There’s an unlimited well of characters for us,” says Brashler, whose non-mystery baseball titles include character-driven works such as a Josh Gibson biography and the novel “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings.”

Ultimately, Brashler says, “Baseball is a game. It doesn’t count to read too much into it. In baseball mystery fiction, the reader gets a crackling good read with a little baseball thrown in – and there’s a dead body.”