Review by Mack Hassler
“…to tell the whole thing, going back to that first grisly night….back even further,
in fact, to our days with Professor James at Harvard. Yes, to dredge it all up….”
Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994), p. 5
Tichelaar has produced a comprehensive book loaded with scholarship on a particular genre of novel, with thoughtful self-examination on a vast amount of previous work he has done, with cool characters, a sinister plot, and his fierce desire to build a literature on trusted models from the past, and mainly a love of storytelling. It is not a book for timid readers. I will go out on a limb to suggest that Tichelaar may be the undiscovered Melville of UP literature. This is a whale of a book, self-published, just waiting I think to be picked up and glossed by a major publisher. The main topics are mystery writing and storytelling itself. The epigraph that comes to my mind above is from the start of a book that might have been titled The Mysteries of New York that I worked on and enjoyed years ago when I was still, in my mind, a New Yorker.
The secret for Tichelaar is not only his love of mystery writing but also his commitment to his hometown of Marquette Carr’s Alienist is a fascinating spin-off story associated with the Beats of Columbia University. Carr’s father made the news and was notorious, in fact, for the alleged murder of a gay Beat who had molested him. Carr grew up to become a skilled military historian as well as author of The Alienist, an award-winner, and a sequel, about the early history of psychoanalysis, actually the early stories of New York crime in the time when Teddy Roosevelt was beginning his career in politics as crime commissioner. So Carr tells good stories and does good non-fiction reporting on good real-life crime detection and psychoanalysis. Tichelaar’s moves begin with literary history and later gets into stories about real-life Marquette history and actual historical characters of the time. He also refers for the enlightenment of his reader to earlier work of his own on Marquette history and crime in Marquette. The only deep stuff missing, as far as I can tell, are the Oedipal resonances in all the Tichelaar material.
Some of the time a good writer does feel Oedipal tension, however, as he or she writes and broods over his or her literary ancestors. In that sense, all that follows here is “Oedipal” but in place of the psycho-analytic theory, we find general ideas about literary history. Tichelaar as he looks back over his many Upper Michigan books beginning with The Marquette Trilogy and including When Teddy Came to Town, a volume that Carr would have liked since they both have been fascinated with TR, decides to use the very popular work of the French writer Eugène Sue, who started serial publications in journals (Dickens did the same thing with his Pickwick Papers) in June 1842. Sue’s innovation caught on immediately, and even became a genre of the novel with many writers imitating, the most recent and far from the Paris of Sue is by Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988). Tichelaar follows the tradition with this book, and in the book he describes what he is doing and produces scholarly descriptions of the many books of his under the imprint of “Marquette Fiction” that came before his discovery of Sue. One of the volumes he describes is even a time travel book, or science fiction novel, titled Odin’s Eye (done recently, 2023). Early in that book, he introduces a character who is a fictional namesake with a Dutch particle much like his own family in old Marquette, “Neil lVandelaare, who has completely lost his memory at the beginning of the novel…the year is 1900.” This is clearly getting ready in Tichelaar’s mind for doing his own “city mysteries” book in the tradition of Eugene Sue. The memory loss that gets restored with the use of science fictional devices seems to me a medical event worse even than death since scriptural links across the Old Testament to the preaching of Jesus and his own High Priesthood give us clear hope for a story from creation onward that is friendly to life. Rather it is the loss of memory—memory that allows us to read and to trace what we read–that is worse.
So this book has the framework not only for a raft of storytelling but also for good philosophic speculation. Still it is a mystery. Tichelaar at the very back of the book provides a study guide to help his reader navigate the many misdemeanors and infidelities of his characters as well as to the big crime associated with the fictional Marquis, who is actually a fake nobleman whose real name is Edmund O’Brien. Tichelaar had done his doctoral research on Medieval literature and King Arthur, but he is, also, a great reader of 19th-c French Fiction, where he had seen his overall model in the City Mysteries of Eugene Sue, and of Victorian fiction leading up to the modern detective novel. Eager to show off his knowledge and his borrowings from all that reading he includes an “Author’s Note” in the substantial backmatter here just prior to his Discussion Guide for the Reader. All this material makes this a wonderful read for those of us interested in the development of our literature Gothic novels came before Sue and the notion of adding a city in the title probably derived from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
The practice of faking a nobleman was probably part of the mix from the very popular The Count of Monte Cristo as well as from Paul Feval’s The Mysteries of London (both books 1844 and both big sellers). In Ferval we find a fake Portuguese Marquis showing up. In any case, the Marquis of Marguette is a commoner named Edmund O’Brien. He is driven by very bad motives and ends up by murdering his father. He also has a great lust for an object called the Perrot Monstrance, now located in a museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Tichelaar reports in this detailed and short Author’s Note that this Monstrance (an expensive and decorated container for the Roman Catholic “host”) was buried and rediscovered in Gothic haunts and towers and tombs a la the modern thrillers of Dan Brown. Tichelaar cannot resist telling the reader that his own ancestor Nicholas Perrot (1643-1717) was involved in the recovery of this object. Then later his ancestor is prominent in Marquette history. Later after all this fascinating history of the genre of literature he is presenting in the book along with Marquette history, his Reader’s Guide asks the reader to think about his or her feelings about the murder of his commoner father by the fake Nobleman Edmund.
So The Mysteries of Marquette is not just a well-told and vital mystery asking for moral response from the reader but also it is a complex slice of literary history dedicated to the major part of the author’s other work and to an interesting facet of his hometown. I am very impressed and a bit in awe of what Tichelaar accomplishes in just a few over 800 pages. I think the project needs to be more widely known.
The Mysteries of Marquette, by Tyler R. Tichelaar (Marquette Fiction, Marquette MI 49855, 2025) 814 pages, pbk, $29.95.
