Political Mysteries

What do love, greed, and envy have in common? They’re all great motives for murder. Check out any good mystery and chances are high that one or more of those qualities are behind the evil deed.

But lurking beneath those three motives is often something else—the lust for power, either power over an individual or a group. And it’s that lust for power that defines a political mystery. Politics, after all, is the art of getting someone to do what you want them to do—sometimes for noble causes and sometimes for selfish reasons, sometimes through persuasion or incentives, sometimes through blackmail or violence. And when neither reason nor threats work on those blocking your path, well, you just may have to get rid of them. And that’s the makings of a good political mystery.

Political power is hardly a new source of suspense and drama. The thirst for control goes back to the beginning of time, and we find it in literature as early as ancient Greece and through the Middle Ages. Shakespeare made a living off of it. Think of Julius Caesar or Macbeth. These were not political mysteries in the true sense because we knew from the start who was guilty, but no one did a better job than the bard when it came to examining the underlying hunger for power. Traitors like those who did in Caesar populate political thrillers to this day, and many authors are still trying to replicate the evil in Lady Macbeth, though no one has done it as well as Shakespeare.

Trying to date the modern political mystery is a fool’s errand, but I’ll give it a try by pointing to Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, which was published in 1931. That was a time when political power was local, and muscle was the only kind of lobbying in vogue for the ward bosses who held it. Hammett’s violent scenes seem mild compared to today’s, but he knew when and how to use them to keep a plot moving.

Hammett’s real strength, though, was in dialogue and character development. He is able to paint a picture with just a sentence or two, and every page is a textbook for writers who want to learn how to show and not tell. Here’s one example: “The smile that had nothing to do with pleasure was lifting the ends of Ned Beaumont’s lips again and his eyes glittered through cigar smoke. He shook his head slowly and spoke slowly in an unpleasantly sweet tone.”  Think of all that conveys about the mood and atmosphere in the room and how it sets the scene for what’s to come.

The cozy version of the political mystery became popular later in the 1900s when two writers with famous names took advantage of their front row seats to the presidency. Elliott Roosevelt, son of FDR, and Margaret Truman, daughter of Harry, each helped author two dozen mysteries with such unimaginative titles as Murder in the Oval Office, Murder in the Rose Garden, Murder at the FBI, Murder on Capitol Hill, Murder on… (well, you get the idea).

Unfortunately, the books were only a little more imaginative than the titles.

Roosevelt used his mother, Eleanor, as his lead detective, a role that allowed her to employ the full powers of the presidency as she gave orders to everyone from the Secret Service to the D.C. police. His novels borrow heavily from history–Murder in the Lincoln Room, for example, takes place during the 1943 Trident Conference when Churchill secretly visited the White House to discuss the timing of the D-Day invasion.

The Roosevelt novels are often compared to those of Agatha Christie, but the similarity is mostly in mood and format, including the gathering of all the suspects at the end, though Roosevelt  usually puts them in the Cabinet room rather than the parlor. But Christie was more original, and she had a much greater flair for character development.

Truman adopted a similar format, and like Roosevelt, made ample use of her inside knowledge. Indeed, the biggest draw of the novels is the descriptions of life in the inner sanctums, and of course both authors had impeccable credentials for that. (I use the word ‘authors’ advisedly as both Roosevelt and Truman relied on ghost writers. Many of Roosevelt’s books weren’t even published until after his death.)