When the Beginning isn’t the Beginning
A lot of mystery readers will tell you they don’t care about history.
For them, reading is all about experiencing a fast-paced modern thriller, a whodunit, a crime drama. Figuring out where the red herrings have been scattered, trying to beat the protagonist to the solution.
But what I’d like to suggest is that nearly all mysteries really are, at their core, all about the past.
When you open a mystery, you’re not coming in at the first act. You’re seeing the result of something that happened before you picked up the book—the beginning of a mystery story always deals with the end of something else. In murder mysteries, that tends to be a human life. The reader and the protagonist arrive on the scene several acts in: whatever untenable situation led to the killer seeing no way out other than murder happened some time ago. It could be in the recent past, leaving the pain still shimmering in the air when the protagonist arrives; or perhaps the motive is old and decayed and was years in the making. But either way, it didn’t just land at our feet fully formed. There’s a dark history there that needs to be unraveled if the mystery is to be solved.
So mystery readers and mystery writers are all—in a sense—historians, delving back into the past to see what possibly insignificant detail drove the victim along a certain path to meet their death, what terrible situation the panicked killer sought to remedy through violence.
And maybe that’s important. Maybe we always need to find the path coming from the past in order to get to the future. Maybe history isn’t all that uninteresting.
image: Getty Images in collaboration with Unsplash
I’ve been exploring the past in one way or another for most of my life. When my friends in primary school wanted to be astronauts or rock stars or fashion designers when they grew up, I wanted to be an archaeologist. When around age ten I started writing fiction, I began with a novel set in the middle ages. And I think that a lot of what I write now—present-day mysteries with causation rooted in the past—is a natural development for someone who believes the past never really goes away.
For the past several years I’ve been traveling around libraries, book clubs, schools, and other organizations, presenting an interactive event I call Candlestick in the Library. In just under an hour and a half, it shows people how a mystery is conceived and written. Together we assemble characters, motives, weapons, and places, and then we knit them all together into a semi-coherent (and often hilarious) story. And of course most people want to start with the protagonist, and are a little bemused when I point out that the killer and the victim take precedence in the order of things. Without them, the protagonist has nothing to investigate!
We all have skeletons in our closets, whether the “we” refers to us as individuals, as communities, as families, or as countries. There are things we’ve all done we’d prefer stayed buried, things we only remember late in the night with shame or embarrassment. So even as we tend to identify with the detective in a mystery, there’s also a part of each of us that also understands the fear or need that drove the killer to act, to protect themselves in the only way they saw possible.
That empathy is an important component to mysteries. Early detective novels—featuring Sherlock Holmes, for example—focused on weaponry, timetables, access; people and their motives were scarcely mentioned. But G.K. Chesterton with his Father Brown mysteries ushered in an age of understanding others, focusing on motives and individuals, and it’s thanks to him that we now love to read about the characters in mystery as much as we enjoy the plot. People are complicated, their backstories are complicated, and we honor that when we take the time to understand what past events led to current choices and decisions.
image: Sander Sammy for Unsplash
It's not a bad way to look not just at history but at life, too: with an empathy that understands that everyone’s life and circumstances are as important to them as our own are to us.
And of course our own backstories fascinate us—there’s a reason why genealogy is so popular. You get to see whose lives led up to yours, what adventures they may have had, how they came to do what they did. Uncle Ernie may have had crooked teeth and Grandma could have been something of a drinker—but they’re part of your past, part of your family, part of who you are.
Part of your history. Every story has a beginning, whether it’s the story of your life or the story in a mystery novel, and that beginning can have its roots well in the past. And as a culture, as readers, as writers, we’re imperfect at understanding why we do what we do. We can’t set up experiments to see how situations will turn out, so looking at the past has to be our most vital evidence as we try and figure out why our complex species does what it does.
Like murder.
image: Getty Images for Unsplash