"The Funny Face Murders" (1975/1980)
- Jon Nelson
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Advanced Lafferty.
“The Funny Face Murders” is an important Lafferty story because of its commitment and compression. You can learn a lot about Lafferty from it, and for that reason, I think it is a great story. It is definitely not great for people who want to stay far from Challenger Deep. Just one person’s opinion, but it is his hardest short story. It had to be, because it tries to cancel every ontological part of the mystery short story, and it succeeds. I have a personal theory about FFF that may not convince many readers, but I encourage anyone who takes the story seriously to think about what or who he is. Lafferty puts the challenge directly to the reader so one ought to try to meet it. What I want to do in this post is to find a way into the story. The starting point has two parts: Roy and Austro. They are the only solid things here. We know them. We ought to hold onto them for dear life. If you are reading “The Funny Face Murders” for the first time or returning to it, I hope some of what I say here will be useful.
How to approach this story has been on my mind for a while. This is the best I can offer. The Funny Face (non)murders cannot be solved by conventional logic because justice requires subjects and objects. The story takes place in what I would call the Broken Bench Zone of Hybridity. You could imagine color-coding the story’s sentences and scenes across its spectrum of being. I think the result would be clear. This is not a “whodunit,” but a “what-even-was-it?” The crime comes out of an escalating series of hybrid states, and it will not make much sense unless you follow those transformations. That is why it matters when Judy feels unmoored after her troubles are taken away. I think Lafferty is saying something like this: if you have no troubles, you have no self. It’s about suffering, about carrying the cross, about the idea that whoever wants to save his life will lose it. I cannot imagine that Lafferty did not think of 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he wrote this story.
Because the story is so complex, I will handle it out of order and apply the min-max principle: minimize explanation and maximize insight. This means setting aside all the fun Shakespeare stuff in it. The mystery begins before the crime. Three husbands have “transitioned” from everyday life into a new kind of being through a Force of Corporate Creation. Somehow, this allows them to “slip out of their skin and bones” and move their identities into the “Corporate Composite Being” called False Face Flaherty, who also serves as their hiding place. The husbands do not die. They become the unseen minds living inside FFF. The “skin-and-bone boxes” they leave behind are their old, individual selves.
The big murder moment occurs in a confused set of stabbings. The stabbings, though, are an act of ontological paradox in that they exist simultaneously on different planes of reality. On one hand, it is the physical destruction of an artificial entity that serves as a proxy for a discarded human identity, committed with a weapon that transforms from a toy into a lethal object. The whole thing slides across the Zone of Hybridity and the story's Reality Spectrum. We are in the world of Whitehead's actual occasions, where things are drops of experience.
The victim’s identity is a chain of hybrid substitution. The abstract target is the conceptual identity of a husband, but the physical host is an engineered life-form like a Basic Ape. This host becomes a "Living Wax Figure," on which a Funny Face pill applies the likeness of the discarded identity. This means that what is stabbed is a "Proxy Husk." It is an engineered life-form, disguised as an inanimate object, wearing a proxy face, and containing the "Hybrid Substance," shuttling of rubber and real blood stuff.
So what about the weapon transformation business? Not a random anomaly but a systemic feature of Broken Bench Lane's inventive chaos. A Dirky Dave Rubber Dagger starts as soft inanimate matter, but the Transformative Force of the Lane's science alters its properties. Austro’s Dirky Dave Roulette game genre-style ratiocination shows this to be an institutionalized form of hybridity, a commercial system designed to produce ontologically unstable objects.
The crime scene, Madame Gussaud's Wax Museum, is not neutral. As part of Broken Bench Lane, it is partly responsible for creating the mystery. It manifests as the Zone of Hybridity, a particularly effective sub-environment designed to dissolve certainty. How? By making the real indistinguishable from the artificial. That is a waxwork face. No, it is a human face. No, it is both, but it is neither; it is a funny face. With funny faces constantly popping out on figures that may or may not be alive, the museum is an Ambiguity Theater. You need something like this for a hybrid crime to occur without leaving a coherent trail of evidence.
The confessions are, of course, necessarily unreliable. The suspects are not tethered down. The "fooling-around syndrome" is thus a Hybrid Motive, while the "compulsion to confess without a feeling of guilt" is a Hybrid Emotional state that burlesques moral action and the sacrament of reconciliation. Hybrid Agency is confirmed when Judy complains of her voice being hijacked. Personal will has become hybrid on the Broken Bench Lane, with beings acting as vessels for a collective, chaotic impulse that makes specific culpability impossible to assign. In Arrive at Easterwine we learn that people are inside out. This is the Ultima Thule of that condition.
One does not solve this mystery by finding a clear answer, but by taking apart the hybrids involved. Roy and Austro break down False Face Flaherty and mentally unravel the chain of substitutions that led to the victimization. In the end, we get a Mexican Standoff because the investigation has worked. All the people involved are incomplete, hybrid boxes. Justice depends on identity conditions, again, because it needs clear subjects and objects, and those no longer obtain on Broken Bench Lane after FFF appears. That makes the Funny Face crime a perfect, and perfectly unsolvable, result of its own Broken Bench Lane Logic. As Austro asks, is there crime in criminality?
