“No good opera plot can be sensible,” admitted W. H. Auden—a man with five opera libretti to his name—“for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.” It is true that the art form demands a generous sense of the preposterous, filled as it is with dragons and walking statues and hiding from pursuit while singing fortissimo. So too, then, does any art form that seeks to replicate opera, including a genre with its own ample tolerance for preposterousness, the mystery novel.

And so, the now-forgotten diva Helen Traubel’s The Metropolitan Opera Murders (1951) begins midsong, as Elsa Vaughn—a soprano with an uncanny resemblance to Traubel herself—belts her way through act two of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Suddenly, the prompter (the staff member who, placed in sight of the singer but not the audience, mouths or murmurs the next musical phrase to keep the performers on track) expires in agony. He has been slipped some of the strychnine that flows so freely in mystery novels. Enter “a new-generation cop”—whatever that meant in 1951—called Sam Quentin. Now, Quentin and Vaughn, detective and soprano, plunge into a serviceable midcentury murder mystery, with all the trappings of the genre: the aforementioned plucky heroine, streetwise detective, and poisoning, as well as a beautiful ingenue, a stolen revolver, blackmail, family jewels, adultery, and financial speculation. There are further attempts at murder, not all of them unsuccessful.

“This is so bad that people will really believe you wrote it,” declared Traubel’s husband upon first reading The Metropolitan Opera Murders. She did not quarrel with the verdict. In her 1959 autobiography, St. Louis Woman, she cheerfully admitted, “It certainly is murder at the opera.” Making no pretensions to literary genius, Traubel was, however, a Wagnerian soprano, and therefore a self-professed “authority on the faraway and never-never, the fantastic and fabulous.” Possessed of a voice like a bolt of lightning, her stock-in-trade was magic potions, flying steeds, and transfigured swans—the role she happily gave her alter ego, Vaughn, in her beloved “bad” novel.

Traubel’s husband wasn’t alone. The critics were not especially impressed: Kirkus Reviews called the book “definitely second rate.” Nevertheless, The Metropolitan Opera Murders returned to print in 2022 as part of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, introduced, edited, and annotated by genre fiction authority Leslie S. Klinger. The series exists to revive “some of the finest American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s.” A most worthy initiative, but I am not quite sure The Metropolitan Opera Murders qualifies, because what is finest in it is not the crime writing.

What makes the novel worth reading, ultimately, is Traubel’s intimate knowledge of the strange, splendid world of a working opera house. In the fictional Vaughn rhapsodizing on the labor of learning a new role or giving advice on floating the perfect pianissimo, for example, we surely hear the experience of Helen Traubel. (To her, too, rather than the ghostwriter, we must owe the name of Vaughn’s rival, Hilda Semple—a play on Frieda Hempel, a star soprano from the very beginnings of the 20th century.) As Klinger acknowledges, The Metropolitan Opera Murders is to be read “not for its psychological depths or intricate mysteries but rather to visit a magical place backstage, in the company of an expert with a sense of humor and an unerring eye for detail.”

Still, our guide has an agenda of her own, one that adds an iconoclastic edge to what would otherwise be a backstage tour in novel form. Helen Traubel cultivated a public persona defined against the elitism of her art form, one that emphasized “her simplicity, her unconventionality, her utter lack of the professional snobbism and temperament.” She embraced television, film, and Broadway, sharing stages and screens with Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, and Jerry Lewis. The dustjacket for the first edition of The Metropolitan Opera Murders presents Traubel not as an elite metropolitan but as the operatic everywoman: “as American as blueberry pie,” a lover of baseball, cooking, shopping, and television. She was an insider, but she was always the outsider’s insider. She was our woman in the opera house.

Writing a murder mystery afforded Helen Traubel a formidable platform for demystification, granting unoperatic readers a privileged view of the operatic world. And a mystery positively demands this kind of exposition, as the detective gathers information on the reader’s behalf. Alfred Hitchcock called exposition “a pill that has to be sugar-coated,” and so it proves for an introduction to classical music. Quentin learns what a Heldentenor is, or what performing at the Met means to an opera singer, and the reader looks over his shoulder. Meanwhile, the working life of Vaughn and her fellow singers dramatize the quotidian anxieties of a working musician, from the preperformance diet to the economics of a private concert.

There is a keen sense of opera’s fragility, of an art form only slowly recovering from the 20th century’s traumas. The first murder victim, the prompter Salz, had once been a revered opera singer, until the Nazi regime interned him in a concentration camp. “After three years there was nothing left. Salz was only a shell, his voice gone, his money gone, everything.” At the same time, Traubel seeks to rehabilitate Richard Wagner from his postwar opprobrium: “Wagner was progressive,” Vaughn tells Semple (aesthetically, undoubtedly; politically, perhaps not).

These subtle acts of instruction cohere into Traubel’s vision for opera, as she used the novel to advocate for a living art form that innovated, adapted, appealed to the general public. “Why should people pay for something they don’t understand?” The Metropolitan Opera Murders was one way of helping them to understand.

In a way, every mystery is a locked room mystery, always turning upon the politics and the codes of particular spaces.

I would like now to retract my earlier doubts, for I realize that Helen Traubel and Harold Q. Masur understood something fundamental about the genre of mystery. What The Metropolitan Opera Murders helps us to see about mystery is its hopeless entanglement with place. Call it “the scenery of the crime.”

I suppose the time-space continuum is partly to blame, because the mystery story is an exercise in reconstruction. Roger Ackroyd lies dead, a dagger in his chest. The mystery consists in working out how it got there, a constellation of circumstances enmeshed in time and space. Every crime must take place somewhere; and that place shapes how it could and how it could not have been done. An entire subgenre, the “locked room” mystery, turns upon the way space constrains the possibilities of explanation. Thus, too, the diagrams of the apartment complex or the train carriage that detectives are forever sketching out. Mystery calls for a particular kind of attention to place. The scene of the crime must be scrutinized, turning details—where the body was found, what was on the table, whether the door was locked—into clues.

In a way, every mystery is a locked room mystery, always turning upon the politics and the codes of particular spaces, of private clubs and public thoroughfares, of who can be seen where without arousing suspicion. Consider Agatha Christie’s exquisite Murder on the Orient Express (1934). A train, as Monsieur Bouc reflects to Hercule Poirot, gathers “people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days they part, they go their several ways, never perhaps to see each other again.” The mystery that Christie weaves depends utterly upon this cosmopolitan, haphazardly intimate space: transposed into a private home, or a school, or a factory, the plot would collapse.

Similarly, in The Metropolitan Opera Murders, one character surmises that the murderer must be a member of the opera company, one of whose members was murdered brutally on stage. After all, “an outsider would lack freedom of movement backstage.” Moreover, the novel takes its tone from the intimate, polyglot environs of the opera house, where dozens of languages and ambitions collide. To decipher how the scene of the crime works—what are its rules and its tics—is to get more than halfway to the solution.

Traubel was in good company in using a mystery novel to invite readers into another world. Sherlock Holmes’s befogged, imperial London. Raskolnikov’s claustrophobic Saint Petersburg. Raymond Chandler’s cruel, tawdry Los Angeles. The windswept bleakness of Nordic noir. These authors curate a particular, peculiar milieu, the mystery an excuse for them to exposit and for us to learn. It may be true, as Christie had Poirot remark, that evil is “everywhere under the sun,” but the literature of crime is the literature of particular somewheres, a genre constructed around the scene of the crime.

Escapism is a pleasingly spatial metaphor: what a cracking good mystery does is take us somewhere else. And then we return to our own place. A dear friend observed that for at least a few days after finishing John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), you walk down the street imagining you’re a spy. Your eyes seek out the ideal spot for a dead drop, or a bit of graffiti that might be tradecraft. Mystery is the art of attending to place anew, alive to its secrets and its violence.