THE FATAL ART OF ENTERTAINMENT

Plotting the contemporary mystery is a tough discipline—a discipline most authors of mainstream fiction would rather spare themselves—to judge from the few consensual opinions expressed in the 13 long interviews that Herbert (editor-in-chief of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing) conducts with writers from P.D. James to Tony Hillerman. The group agrees on little else: Jonathan Gash describes his work as ``self-delighting,'' and Jane Langton and John Mortimer revel in their status as entertainers, but Julian Symons repeats his frequent assertion that mystery fiction is necessarily second-rate, and Patricia Cornwell bristles at being labeled a ``mystery writer'': ``I entertain by not entertaining!'' Herbert's leading questions—about the authors' backgrounds and writing habits; about the importance of place and the sense of mortality; about whether mystery fiction can attain the status of literature—though not especially penetrating (something you'd never know from her typically wide-eyed reaction to James: ``What a profound statement!''), can pay off in unexpected ways, as when Sue Grafton's description of her work habits opens up the general question of the mystery's focus, or when Robert Barnard blithely deflects one Big Question after Another. Most of the other subjects—Reginald Hill, Jeremiah Healy, Catherine Aird, and Barbara Neely—hit Herbert's softballs over the fence too. (Foreword by Antonia Fraser)