Why Read About Murder?

My mother was a voracious mystery reader, and it is thanks to her that I “met” many of the authors who are still among my favorites: Mary Stewart, Josephine Tey, Mignon G. Eberhart, Rex Stout, Michael Innes, and many, many more. Her side of my parents’ bedroom was always heaped up with books: books sliding onto the floor, books placed in precarious and untidy piles, books tucked under tissue boxes and bedside lamps.

And a few of them, it has to be said, had some pretty lurid covers. This was the 1960s, and it was a time of realism. Women in tight sheath dresses being menaced by suit-wearing gunmen. Blood spilling out across a bright book jacket. A frightened figure running through the woods. And I can remember, too, visiting her bedroom (in her absence, of course) and being just a little distressed that she seemed to welcome so much violence into her world.

I was reminded of that recently when I was watching a TV program with a friend—one of the death-porn shows like Criminal Minds, I think—and there was a moment of particular gruesomeness. My friend turned to me and said, “Tell me again, what it is you like about this show?”

Right. There it is. Death as entertainment. On the surface of it, we mystery readers really, really like to read about death. Suspicious deaths, orchestrated deaths, clever deaths, carefully planned deaths. What is up with that?

Not to sound too trite, but I think that part of the answer at least is that murder ups the ante. Sure, there are mysteries that are about embezzlement, stolen treasures, and missing pets; but nothing holds our attention the way a murder mystery does.

Part of it, no doubt, is the escapism it offers. After all, stolen items and runaway pets are, unhappily, part of our normal lives. You read about someone embezzling retirement funds, and you start worrying about your own. You read about someone not clicking the lock so the dog got out, and you find yourself checking your own door. But the reality is that even when someone is killed and we read about it in the papers, it’s quite different from something investigated by Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. Most murders—at least the ones we know about—are shabby affairs, not particularly clever and not particularly interesting: they have more to do with drug deals, turf wars, or robberies gone bad than they do with intricate planning and hidden motives.

So to read about diabolical motives and careful plotting takes us somewhere we’re not likely to ever go in Real Life. And that’s one of the functions of fiction, isn’t it? To transport readers to a different world?

But there’s more to it than simple escapism: other popular genres, like science fiction and romance, do the same: they also offer a few hours’ respite from our daily stresses. No; I think I need to go back to my original thought, which was that murder ups the ante. It’s the one thing that we have in common, after all: the certainty of death—and our fear of it.

It’s a truism that being exposed in a benign way to something we fear allows us to vicariously experience—and deal with our terror of—things that go bump in the night. It explains the popularity of horror flicks … and it also contributes to our love of murder mysteries. They provide an intellectual exercise as well as giving us that frisson, that ability to dip our toes into the cold water and squeal and then go back to Real Life... even as we confront our fears of death actually ever happening to us.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps reading—and writing!—murder mysteries is simply a more genteel way of tapping into the apparent need for violence that humans experience: a kinder, gentler Coliseum. It’s possible, but I don’t think so; our violence comes to us wrapped in velvet shawls and locked rooms, in perfume wafting on the air and clever sarcastic protagonists outsmarting the police. We’re intellectual voyeurs rather than sadists. 

And now, as my own side of the bed has come very much to look like my mother’s, I too pick up tales of death on the high seas, death in discreet drawing-rooms, death hidden in a poison cup, and these stories lull me to sleep just as they did her.

Why read about murder? For me, it’s a legacy, and one I’m more than happy to carry on.