The Case of the Imaginary Detective is not really a mystery.  Well, no more a mystery than any other work of fiction that deals with the secrets at the heart of a family.  There is a central question, a heroine looking for clues, and, in the distant past, a murder, but the story itself shunts these standard elements to the side.  In fact, the lack of sharp focus on a central crime allows other mysteries to pop up and proliferate, a garden of questions and puzzles for the heroine to wander in. The setting, Santa Cruz, California, and the characters all conspire to create a novel that dissolves when stared at too hard, that requires its readers to wade through the same mist of grief that envelops its heroine. It is a quiet novel, with a deft touch at both the comedy that finds its way into, and the tragedy that punctuates, everyone’s lives.

It begins with an orphan, Rima Lanisell, arriving at the Santa Cruz seaside mansion of her godmother, famous mystery novelist A.E. Early. This mansion, with the fantastic name of “Wit’s End”, houses her godmother, two dachshunds, a live-in assistant, and a collection of doll houses that illustrate in minute and perfect detail the murders that made A.E. Early and her creation, Maxwell Lane, famous.

Rima has never met her godmother. She knows little of her beyond her first name, Addison, and that there is a mystery to be found involving her and Rima’s father, Bim. Rima is familiar with authors, though.  Her father wrote a weekly column where he spun the stories mined from his children’s lives into homilies meant to inspire others, but which left little room for the real lives that his children were leading. He was also a character in one of Addison’s most famous novels, Ice City, lending his name and his personality to a man responsible for murder. This question of character and characters, of story and fiction, resonate through Rima’s life and the book itself.

Rima has only just lost her father to cancer, after losing her brother to a car accident and her mother to a sudden aneurysm.  She is uncertain and vague, and Fowler’s light touch highlights Rima’s inability to focus and emphasizes just how shaky a narrator a grieving, imaginative, and curious young woman makes. Rima cannot even tell her own stories accurately. She tells her godmother’s dog-walker, Scorch, that she lost her brother in a crash with a drunk driver:

Scorch leaned closer into the mirror, turning her head from side to side to see the braids she’d made out of soap and hair. “Wasn’t the drunk driver Oliver?” she asked.

Rima felt as if, out of the blue, she’d been punched in the gut. This was not the way she liked to tell the story.

Rima, in her search for the true story of her father and Addison’s falling out, discovers that Addison’s Ice City may contain more truth than even the author realizes.  Weaving a narrative out of blog posts, Wikipedia articles, and letters found in the attic, Rima strives to piece together the real events behind Ice City and discovers a history her father never shared with her.

Fowler’s deft writing and embrace of the uncertain narration provided by Rima serve the book well.  Without ever stating it directly, she allows us to feel Rima’s grief through her actions: her constant naps, her emphasis on her habit of losing things, her need to discover more stories about her father. Although the chapters from Ice City, and the fantastic intrusion of Maxwell Lane himself, do occasionally slow the narrative down, it is the  inside-out journey of Rima’s gradual respite from her grief that is the novel’s true mystery.  How does one recover from abandonment and loneliness? Who gets to write the stories of others’ lives? How much control does anyone have over their own story?

Although Rima does, eventually, solve the case, the particulars are almost incidental.  The real story here is of her survival and her grief, neither of which can be resolved by a correct arrangement of clues. The Case of the Imaginary Detective may feel quaint and charming, but its great strengths, like Rima’s, are hidden, and the issues it tackles are as dark as any murder mystery and as puzzling as life itself.

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