Thinking Inside the Box – Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy

Holly H. Hollander is the well-off teen daughter of Harry and Elaine Hollander, and lives with her parents in Barton, a pleasant little small town just outside Chicago. The Hollander family’s wealth hails from the Hollander Safe & Lock Company, a firm founded by Holly’s grandfather, and Harry spends his days managing the family business – but the majority stockholder in the company is his elder brother, Herbert, who is legally incapable of taking charge due to being a resident in a mental hospital. Holly loves her father, is curious about Herbert (who she has never met), really likes her horse Sidi, and thinks her friend Megan’s dad, Larry Lief, is kind of hot – in a teen crush sort of way, not the sort of thing she’d actually act on. That sets her apart from her Elaine, who absolutely is acting on her attraction to Larry, and the knowledge gnaws at Holly.

Everything changes one day at the annual antiques fair, where Elaine has come up with a really dynamite idea for the raffle. Trawling around the local antique shops, Elaine’s discovered a heavy locked box, fairly large, with the word “PANDORA” written across the front. The key is apparently missing, so Elaine hits on the idea of raffling off the rights to whatever is inside the box, and then having Lief pick the lock and open it up for the big reveal. Anyone who knows their classical myth knows that the opening of Pandora’s box is a recipe for trouble – and sure enough, when the box is opened there is a tremendous explosion, killing Larry and the raffle winner and injuring many, including Holly.

Soon, Holly ends up teaming up with Aladdin Blue – an enigmatic investigator who bills himself as a “criminologist” because trouble in his own past means that he’d never land a private investigator’s licence, so he has to persuade clients to hire him to “research” cases rather than investigating them. Between them, the mystery is eventually solved, leaving Holly to relate the story in her own distinctive voice. The problem is that Pandora isn’t that good of a prose stylist – but as luck would have it, after the events of the story she meets local author Gene Wolfe, who is kind enough to do a tune-up on her manuscript…

That’s the premise of Pandora By Holly Hollander – a minor Wolfe work from 1990. It’s his tersest novel since The Devil In a Forest, and like that it feels like a stab at writing for what we’d now call the Young Adult market – you’ve got a protagonist who’s of the age of the intended readership and the content is more adult in tone than material you’d write for younger ages, but the grimmer or sexier sides of the story isn’t dwelled on and the whole thing’s wrapped up and done in less than 200 pages. The plot, at least on the surface, is explained far more directly and clearly than typical for Wolfe, and is fairly conventional detective mystery material.

That said, as always with Wolfe there are nuances. Some people are inclined to second-guess the explanation of the murders we are given here (for there are multiple), and I’d be willing to go bat for one of them perhaps having a different perpetrator from the one that was outlined, but not both, and I still think the balance of the probabilities has it that the named culprit is in fact the person that did it – I’ll take issue with a particular alternative theory later on, but that’ll require spoiling the ending so I’ll finish this review first and then throw in some spoiler space before I get into that.

To my mind, the most significant lens for interpreting Pandora By Holly Hollander is not in asking whether the story misdirects us – despite his reputation Wolfe doesn’t always do that – so much as in analysing what the specific narrative gimmick is. Wolfe clearly puts a lot of importance on it; the idea that this text was written specifically by Holly is right there on the front cover and also there on the prologue. There’s plenty of stories out there which have narrators which specific voices, but generally they don’t announce it this loudly – Raymond Chandler didn’t call his first novel The Big Sleep By Philip Marlowe, and for that matter nobody calls Wolfe’s most celebrated work The Book of the New Sun By Severian.

That said, both of those examples are books for entirely mature readers, and just as we should be considering who’s narrating the book, we should consider who the book has been written for. Generally speaking, books for younger readers don’t do the unreliable narrator trick; asking readers to consider who’s telling the story, whether they might have a conscious agenda, whether some emotional factor has shaped the way the narrator’s describing something and so on is generally considered to be a bit beyond children. When we’re adults, novels do this all the time, and that leads to some shockingly bad takes from readers who think we should be accepting the narration uncritically. Giving a text a critical reading is a different thing from bluntly asking if it’s lying to you – instead it hinges on paying attention to the context of what is being said and who is saying it and taking an analytical, thoughtful approach which is conscious of what can be taken as a statement of fact (however biased) and what is outright narrator interpretation.

Pandora, then, is kind of like Uncle Gene’s Introduction To Textual Analysis For Young Readers. He’s being direct with this readership up front that there’s a gimmick being worked here with the narration, because he knows that readers of the age he’s writing it for may well have not encountered an unreliable narrator before, and so it seems likely that we are meant to question Holly’s narration. However, I don’t think we are meant to be discounting the facts or theorising that the novel somehow had an outcome where the real culprit wasn’t exposed – instead, we are meant to be questioning her emotional responses to what she’s describing.

Holly, you see, comes from a fairly privileged background, and she’s at a stage of personal development where people can be very judgey or very hurtful not necessarily out of malice, but because they’ve not yet had the life experience necessary to question their prejudices (or even identify that they have them), or because they say something insensitive not out of a lack of empathy, but because their tact and empathy doesn’t quite kick in before they open their mouth. Holly can be a tad snooty here and there, occasionally describes people with an abrupt directness which makes you wince, and will go out of her way to run down characters she specifically dislikes.

I’ll get deeper into this when I discuss the ending, but this is where I think the hidden story of the book resides – not in there being an alternative, true culprit for the killings, but in Holly’s interpretation of the killer’s actions. It is of fundamental importance to remember that we are not reading a sequence of events happening as they occur in the fiction of the world – this is a retrospective document, Holly describing what has happened after everything played out, and after she knows what went down. I think Holly is quite bad – like a lot of us are bad – at setting aside how she currently feels about someone when discussing how she felt about them in the past, and that colours her descriptions of the characters.

This may also play into the occasional sense that the novel’s getting into misogynistic territory. Holly is much harsher talking about women than she is about men; in fact, the only man I can think of she’s particularly critical of is Lieutenant Sandoz, the police detective whose investigation distresses Holly when he starts to suspect her loved ones, but conversely she’ll be quite rude about how she depicts women who have been nothing but pleasant to her. Perhaps this is a conscious and deliberate attempt on Wolfe’s part to depict her as a “pick me” type, but in retrospect it’s perhaps a poor decision for a man writing in a woman’s narrative voice to work that particular angle, especially when, like Wolfe, the man in question has sometimes been a bit patchy about how he writes women.

There may well be deeper mysteries in the world of Pandora, but if that’s so then part of the reason they’re so mysterious isn’t necessarily because Holly is being purposefully evasive so much as Wolfe never got around to developing them. There’s a definite “first book in a series” feel to this – in the Wolfean sense of “series” as opposed to multi-volume novel. Wolfe defined a multi-volume novel as a sequence of several books where, just as when writing a single novel, there’s a defined end planned out and the intent is to tell a self-contained story across the series as a whole. By contrast, he defined a series as a sequence where the writer just keeps writing sequels until they or the audience or the publisher gets sick of it – and you get a lot of that sort of thing in detective fiction. In introducing Aladdin Blue as our main sleuth, establishing Holly as the assistant who ends up chronicling his work, and establishing how Aladdin lives and the society he lives in, Wolfe makes sure the novel does everything it needs to do in order to support sequels.

He never got around to a sequel, but I’d bet money he’d have been open to doing so if this was a runaway success. As it stands, it wasn’t – so he didn’t. On the whole, it’s an interesting stylistic experiment and a pleasant enough read, but it falls between two stools a little – if you take it as a Wolfean puzzlebox then, even if there are nuances I’ve missed, it’s particularly deep compared to the material I tend to go to when I get a Wolfe itch, whereas if you just take it as the straightforward detective story it presents itself as then it’s a competent but not exceptional example of the form.

Right, now to tell people why they are wrong about the solution. Spoiler space follows…

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So the particular fan theory I want to take issue with is the idea that Holly is the actual killer – a possibility she jokes about at one point, and which crops up here and there, but I am going to specifically target the version of this theory outlined by Nick Lee because he’s the one who’s actually put a fairly detailed post on the subject out there.

My big problem with this theory is that whilst I admit that it may have been feasible for Holly to set up the bomb, I don’t think she makes sense as the killer of Uncle Herbert – and once you discount her on that point, the case that she might have done the other one becomes much more tenuous. I’m basing my view on the assumption that Holly doesn’t flat-out lie to us about anything which would be trivally caught out as a lie by people investigating the case, not least because we are meant to take this text as something she wrote for publication. Putting out an account of the killing with such a blatant contradiction would be a pointless and self-destructive risk if she is the killer, for which she’d have no apparent motive.

In particular, I think if Holly says that the police determined something, or that something was stated in court, we should take it as fact – the police know what they did or didn’t do or find out, and the court proceedings would likewise be a matter of public record, so exposing an inconsistency there would be trivially easy. Therefore, we can be very confident that the police did find that Harry’s gun was used to shoot Herbert, that a nurse at the hospital was able to give convincing testimony that she’d seen Herbert and Elaine together at the hospital, and that Elaine was put on trial and convicted for Herbert’s murder, which means that that and other evidence was convincing enough that the best defence attorney she could find wasn’t able to unpick the prosecution case.

For similar reasons, I don’t like Lee’s assertion that we only have Holly’s word on how injured she was and what mobility problems she had in the immediate wake of the bombing – and his theory absolutely depends on her being a bit more mobile and finding it a touch easier to get around than she lets on. Again, she’d been treated in hospital in the wake of a high-profile crime and was interviewed by the police whilst she was in hospital. Both the police record and the hospital’s own documentation would give a fair idea of just how bad her condition was.

This being the case, Lee’s theory for how Holly pulled off Herbert’s murder seems bizarre. The idea was that she took Harry’s gun from his desk, kept it on her, followed Herbert out of the hospital after he snuck in to visit her, and then confronted him in the parking lot and shot him, either because she was terrified of him because he was an escaped mental patient who was confined in the first place because he’d killed his wife or because she wanted to implicate Elaine in Herbert’s killing because she’d failed to get Elaine with the bomb. When she shoots him, she is standing upright and steady on her feet, because we’re told that the shooting didn’t happen at an angle – despite having been blown up earlier and having significant mobility problems as a result of the explosion, to the point of needing crutches to get around. She then keeps the gun on her person until the end of the hospital trip, gets home, and returns it to her father’s desk before he gets back from New York, where he’s been away on a business trip.

This is a theory which has a ton of problems – not least being that Elaine also visits Holly in the hospital, and if Holly was out to get Elaine that badly, and if Holly was ruthless enough to take the risk of shooting someone in a well-lit parking lot (even though it was late at night, the odds of being spotted seem high enough to make the whole thing risky), why wouldn’t she use the same plan to simply shoot Elaine? But you don’t have to get psychological to point out problems with the theory – logistically, practically, it just doesn’t make sense.

Consider: Holly didn’t get a chance to go back home between the explosion at the fair and the slaying of Herbert, so she’d have had to have her father’s gun on her at the antiques fair, kept hold of it when the explosion happens and she’s struck by shattered glass, had it on her when she rode the ambulance to the hospital, and had it available for her to use whilst she was in her hospital room, even after she’d been divested of her usual clothes and given hospital clothes (after the bombing a paramedic cuts her trousers off her to get to and treat the cut).

Are we being asked to believe that in all this process, nobody at the hospital found the gun? Surely not. Are we also being asked to believe a hospital in the Chicago area would take in an injured teen, find a gun on her person, and just sort of leave the gun in unsecured in her hospital room? I feel like that’s the sort of thing they’d either put in some sort of secure locker or hand over to the police, especially if said teen with a gun was coming to the hospital direct from the scene of a major crime. In addition to all that, we’re being asked to believe that they did all that, but also that they didn’t Lieutenant Sandoz about the gun – and you’d think that if they had he’d make a priority of asking Holly why she was packing heat at the antique fair of all places in his interview with her at the hospital.

No, there’s profound logistical problems with Holly shooting Herbert, whereas there simply isn’t with Elaine, who had ample opportunity to go fetch Harry’s gun (perhaps after speaking to him and discovering that he wasn’t going to cut his business trip short to come home, and therefore wouldn’t miss it) and then head to the hospital to keep an eye out for Herbert, who at this point in the story has been trying to get in touch with Holly and is known to be doing so by at least one other individual. On top of that, you have that eyewitness testimony that puts Elaine on the scene in Herbert’s company, which seems to clinch it.

Lee doesn’t seem to address that point especially closely, but he does suggest when discussing the bombing that Aladdin Blue may have been bluffing about having a tape of the antique dealer that sold Elaine the box stating that he’d sold the key with it, so her “lost key” story was a crock of shit, or that if the tape was real that Blue had somehow pressured or bribed the dealer into stating that. But for Lee’s theory to hold with both murders, we’re now dealing with multiple witnesses perjuring themselves. At that point we’re starting to get to Mafia-like levels of malfeasance, and even Blue used the $5000 retainer he got from Harry to bribe people, bribed people have an annoying habit of asking for more bribes – it seems like a bad plan all round.

Moreover, the more people we have to assume are lying to perpetrate the conspiracy, the more implausible the whole thing starts to feel, and at one point in the book Blue specifically warns against entertaining the sort of theory which feels more like a heavy-handed twist from a cheesy detective story than stuff people do in real life, and “they leaned on all of the prosecution witnesses” is just going a tad too far.

Similarly, Lee’s theory to work out we would need to believe that the hospital staff were simultaneously attentive enough to spot Elaine and Herbert, inattentive enough not to notice Holly creeping out to meet Herbert (how is she meant to have known he’d be so conveniently nearby?), and then either sufficiently inattentive to utterly fail to notice the gun or attentive but negligent enough not to make sure the gun was good and secured. In other words, they’d need to be bad at their job in all the ways which made it possible for Holly to do the murder, but good at their job in all the ways necessary to put Elaine in the frame, and that feels more like a gimmick in a book than real life in turn.

On top of all that, of all the theories you could come up with about a crime story narrated in the first person “the narrator actually did the murder” is 100% the sort of thing which feels more like a fictional conceit than something that happens in real life. If you murdered someone, got away with it clean as a whistle, and weren’t subject to any sort of OJ Simpson-scale media shitshow ensuring that people constantly associate you with the event, the absolute last thing you’re going to do is to try and bring more attention to the situaiton by publishing a book about it. You’d just shut the fuck up and let the whole thing die down.

No – the only two people I think are plausible fits for killing Herbert are Elaine and maybe Uncle Dee, who knows that Herbert is out and about and looking for Holly, and Elaine has motivation where Dee simply didn’t. (Eliminating Herbert ensures that the Hollander Safe & Lock Company ownership falls to Harry and substantially boosts Harry’s personal wealth, which Elaine may be intending to rinse him for through a divorce settlement or some similar chicanery to get free of him, using the bombing to suggest that he’d tried to kill her in order to overcome any arguments from his side on grounds of infidelity or similar.) But either way, it’s daft to put Holly in the frame for it – it just doesn’t hold water.

And once you take Holly out of that equation, it’s vastly more difficult to put her in the frame for the bombing, unless you want to believe that Aladdin Blue and possibly others conspire to pin the bombing on Elaine as well as Uncle Herbert’s murder for the sake of getting Holly or someone else off the hook. Perhaps the best reason to suspect Elaine of the bombing is that of all the people involved in staging the raffle, she was the one who had the critical combination of having control over the flow of proceedings and freedom to move.

Whoever planned the bombing must have either directly intended for Larry to die or simply regarded him as collateral damage to get to whoever they wanted – but Elaine could, and in fact did, move off the stage whilst Larry was opening the box, whereas Larry could hardly be anywhere else when the box was opened except right next to it, so if the bombing was any form of targeted murder rather than a random act of terrorism (a possibility which is raised but just doesn’t seem all that plausible), then it makes far more sense as a plan to target Larry than a plan which was targeting someone else and treated Larry as a means to an end, simply because if you are hatching a scheme like this you want to make sure the one person who is definitely taking the full force of the blast whatever happens is also the person who is your primary target.

Where I think Wolfe is being evasive, and where a deeper story might be being told, is not in terms of who planted the bomb – but the motivations for doing so. If Elaine did the bombing, then she definitely wanted to see Larry dead – why? The theory outlined in the book that she wanted to seriously implicate Harry so he’d go to jail or potentially even the electric chair, freeing her from a marriage she despised, is actually a pretty good one – but what Holly doesn’t explore, and what I think we should be asking more questions about, is why that should be the case. Holly writes it off as just being about money and greed, and thinks that Elaine sleeping with Larry is just her being nasty, but I am not so sure.

Harry refusing to cut off his business trip to head home when Holly is injured seems shockingly cold, and certainly doesn’t seem like the decision you make if you’re part of a loving family who can count on each other in moments of crisis. It only makes sense to me if you had a situation where, even though Holly was hurt, Harry absolutely, positively, did not want to be present – and the only reason I can think of why that would be would be if things had got so bad between him and Elaine that he couldn’t bear to be in her presence.

The feeling may well have been mutual, and may have motivated her affair- or, based on hints Larry drops early on, affairs. Larry’s conversations with Holly early in the book are troubling; you get the sense that something is on his mind, something which Holly herself perhaps didn’t entirely catch above and beyond the hints that Larry is getting to know real well and his direct expressions of grief and remorse about some of the stuff he did in Vietnam back in his army days. Some of his statements could be read two ways; when he admits in the burger parlour that he and Elaine have been having an affair, the stuff he says about her is particularly intense, talking aboiut how he’s an empty house and Elaine is someone who came to live in there at last, or how it felt like he was the only sane person in the world until he met Elaine. It’s possible that Elaine was trying to break it off with Larry, only for Larry to get weird and scary about it, prompting Elaine to try and kill two birds with one stone.

Or, possibly, Elaine didn’t do the bombing. (She’s not convicted of it, after all – despite apparently having an antiques dealer willing to say he sold Elaine the key as well as the box, the police like their chances on pinning Uncle Bert’s murder on her better and the jury finds it convincing.) Characters seem quick to discount the possibilty that Larry was suicidal… but why? It’s very obvious from his burger joint conversation with Holly that he’s in a bad way psychologically, dwelling on things and disclosing stuff to Holly in a weird and borderline inappropriate way and scaring her. And in her earlier conversation he talks about how not everyone gets what’s coming to them in this life. On top of that, the obscure truth of the Pandora box which makes the whole plan viable turns out to be jotted down in one of the histories of safe-making tucked away in Harry’s library, and we know that Harry and Larry talked shop extensively – they had a friendship based firmly on having that interest in question. Even if Larry didn’t know as much about the history of his profession as Harry did, he had ample opportunity to take a peak in Harry’s books and uncover the secret.

Moreover, I am 99% certain Holly tells us when the bomb got rigged in the box without realising it. When she gets back home from visiting Herbert in the hospital, the house seems deserted – she goes into her father’s study and the box is there, and she mentions that something else seemed to be missing but she couldn’t put her finger on what. (It later turns out to be a crucial component of the trap.) At the time she arrives, Larry’s van is parked out front, and she hears a door slam, suggesting that Larry left in the van at around that time.

Her assumption is that Elaine and Larry were fucking in the basement, where Harry has his locksmithing workshop he uses to keep his technical skills up to speed (despite long since having been promoted out of that tier of the business), and then snuck out and drove off in Larry’s van – but what if Larry had come by with a borrowed key to collect the box, took the opportunity then to take it down to the basement and use the workshop there to set up the bomb in the box, then drove off with it? Unless we want to believe that Holly is lying to us wholesale to the point where we can’t trust anything she says in the text – at which point we end up with no text at all – this seems remarkably likely.

Or what if both Larry and Elaine perpetrated the bombing, in cahoots? If Larry was in a psychologically vulnerable state and guilt-ridden about what he did in Vietnam, and Elaine wanted to get away from Harry bad enough, then it’s wholly possible she manipulated him into being her accomplice, disguising a suicide as a murder. (If there was in fact a hidden abusive side to Harry and Elaine’s relationship which Holly doesn’t clock to, Larry might even believe he’s making sure people get what they deserve – Elaine gets to be free, Harry goes down for what Larry perceives as his mistreatment of Elaine.) Perhaps she even convinced him it would be some grand Romeo & Juliet-esque gesture, only to double-cross him at the last moment; Larry might not even have realised that Elaine was no longer on the stage – after all, to open the box he’d have needed to get right up close to it, crouch down, and concentrate on what he was doing, and she might have moved off the stage without him noticing.

When you consider how plausible the alternatives are and how much you have to invent or add to the book to make Holly the bomber (and how Holly shooting Herbert the way it went down seems outright logistically implausible), all you have left to support the idea of Holly and others fitting up Elaine for the crime for something she did is the fact that Holly doesn’t like Elaine all that much. But that in itself is also further evidence that the Hollander family dynamic is much sadder and grimmer than Holly has made it out to be – a factor which puts others in the frame too. Surely it’s just as plausible that the animosity that Holly feels towards Elaine in her narration consists of the ordinary teenage resentment people that age sometimes feel towards their parents mashed up with her feelings about the affair with Lief (and Lee’s theory that Holly has a crush on Lief has some legitimacy), and then heightened tenfold in the recollection by what Holly knows what happened? If someone betrays you or someone you love very, very badly, it’s extremely difficult to be generous in your recollections.

No, I’m sorry, I just don’t like Holly as a culprit for either murder – and I don’t think it’s necessarily especially meaningful or profitable to try and imagine alternative solutions to the mystery which have less textual support than the actual resolution given in the book.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and Holly H. Hollander truly is a master player of the game.