When mystery fans start swapping the names of favorite books and authors, they often sound as though they are speaking of several conflicting genres. Devotees of locked-room puzzle stories may disdain the hard-boiled private-eye saga. The tea-sipping pleasures of naughtiness in a village can seem overrefined in comparison with the beer, blood and brawling in big-city police procedurals. Like the roving players in Hamlet, the authors of mystery fiction are prepared to entertain in veins lyrical, tragical, comical and historical and in moods from the slyly literary to the sociologically earnest.
Even the nomenclature is open to debate. Some "mysteries" contain no puzzle or enigma. In many modern "detective" stories there is no true detective. What the French call a roman policier may not actually include the police. The British surmount the problem by calling the genre crime fiction. Perhaps the crime story is like pornography in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's oft-cited formulation: impossible to define but unmistakable in its effects.
Among those most devoted to stretching the mystery are its two best writers, Britons Peter Dickinson and Ruth Rendell. Each of Dickinson's 16 mysteries has something unique and haunting at its heart, from Sleep and His Brother, set at a clinic for children doomed to compulsive somnolence and early death, to The Poison Oracle, centering on linguistic research among apes at a desert sultanate's laboratory. Perfect Gallows (Pantheon; 234 pages; $16.95) traces the psychic development of a world-class actor who through much of the narrative has barely set foot on a stage, yet feels absolutely certain of his craft and ultimate triumph.
The story bristles with shrewd ideas on topics as varied as how Shakespeare's The Tempest ought to be played (an amateur production is the fulcrum of the plot) to the role of egalitarian wartime food rationing in dismantling the old British class structure. The budding artist coolly looks on everything -- from his mother's death during World War II bombing to his own accidental hastening of an aged relative's demise -- as mere material. His outlook could be that of a genius or a schizophrenic or a psychopath. The confluence among those personalities is precisely Dickinson's point and confers most of the book's considerable suspense. Comparisons to Dostoyevsky are not out of order.
Rendell's most recent work, Talking to Strange Men (Pantheon; 280 pages; $16.95), eerily recalls Lord of the Flies. Her schoolboys and -girls are not washed up on some island but housed in upper-middle-class comfort. Yet mentally they inhabit an unseen world where they play an elaborate game of spy and counterspy, conducted with high solemnity and utter ruthlessness. This emotional tinderbox is ignited when the espionage is discovered by an unstable outsider who believes he has found evidence of treason. Rendell's trademark is to invert the classic adventure story: rather than transmute ordinary men into heroes, exceptional events crush them into madness.