The Devil's Eye is the fourth Alex Benedict novel. The current Philcon, running this weekend, Nov 21-23, 2008, will have a panel on SF and mystery. How is the classic mystery narrative adapted into SF?
I have a passion for mysteries. Always have. I can remember listening to Jack, Doc, and Reggie in I Love a Mystery on radio in the forties when I was about seven. (It was on late and I had to tiptoe out of my bedroom and sit at the top of the stairs to hear it. Reggie, by the way, was the muscle in the goup of three private eyes. He was played by Tony Randall.) The show didn't do simple whodunits. It was more a case of Was there really a vampire in the tower? What was actually going on in Bury Your Dead, AZ?
When I discovered Sherlock Holmes, it was different. Usually a murder had been committed, and it became a matter of putting the pieces together. I enjoyed Holmes, read the entire series. But I thought Gilbert Chesteron had an even more interesting take with his Father Brown stories. How did Lord Packerton come to be lying in a small office at the top of the Kemper Building, which rose far higher thn any surrounding structure, with a window open, and an arrow through his heart? Was there really an invisible man running loose in London? Why had a general, noted for common sense and caution, in a military action forty years earlier, recklessly and pointlessly charged a fortified position and gotten most of his men killed?
These latter set-ups are much closer to I Love a Mystery and consequently, in my opinion, are far more interesting that who wanted to kill Aunt Agatha. Science fiction, happily, is a perfect fit for this type arrangement. What's running loose in the woods near Brockton, Maine? Did a time traveler really show up back when we were building pyramids and leave his mark on one of the tombs? The answer to the latter, of course, is no. The answer to the Brockton woods question is that whatever else it might be, it's not an other-worldly creature. It may appear to be one, but if it is it's standard SF, and not, in my opinion, a mystery at all.
The solution, to be satisfying, has to be one that, when readers encounter it, they will conclude that of course that's what it is, I should have seen it all along. That means when characters vanish from the deck of a luxury yacht, aliens didn't do it. And some sort of hyperbolic isn't responsible either. Rather, there's a perfectly logical explanation.
In The Devil's Eye, Alex receives a recorded call for help from Vicki Greene, a renowned writer of horror tales. "God help me, Mr. Benedict," she says, in a trembling voice, "they're all dead." Alex is on vacation. Before he can get to her, she has had a mind wipe. 'To relieve intense mental anguish,' says her doctor. She has left no explanation. But she's deposited a substantial sum in Alex's account. There's no indication that anything unusual had happened to her recently. And no one seems to be dead. She had, several weeks earlier, returned from a vacation to Salud Afar, the most distant human world, located 30,000 light-years outside the galaxy. It has a sun, of course. And a moon. And there is a handful of planets. The only other light in the sky is a distant star.
Alex and his partner, Chase Kolpath, head for that distant world. But there's no indication of unusual events there, either. At least, not at first. Vicki, while there, entertained herself by visiting various sites thought to be haunted, a ghostly aircraft at one, an undead super soldier at another, a haunted forest at a third. Eventually they begin to put things together, while also discovering that someone wants to scare them off. Or, barring that, do what's necessary to keep a horrific secret.
— Jack McDevitt
November 19, 20