We Need Murder Mysteries More Than Ever Now

Whenever I give a talk—in person in the days before the pandemic, or on videoconferencing since then—I generally deal with the murder and mayhem that permeate my books with a little self-deprecating humor. I’ll say, “Oh, I’m just trying to kill off the population of Provincetown,” or “It would all have been okay if she hadn’t been, you know, dead,” and everybody will laugh, as they do. Most of us see those deaths for what they are—literary devices. Ways to up the ante so the reader keeps on reading, caring about the characters involved, trying to figure out the puzzle.

Cozy mystery authors, on the whole, write about murder that’s very far from reality. That’s natural: we’re the second- and third-generation descendants of Dorothy L. Sayers and G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey. They taught us that murders happen in drawing-rooms, on trains, in vicarages, at tennis matches. Death is accompanied by lavish meals and solved by eccentric spinsters or dilettante lords, and the stories always seem to bring people home in time for tea.

That’s the focus of the cozy mystery: in many ways, the puzzle matters less than the people. Chesterton, one of the genre’s pioneers, was wary of popular mysteries that emphasized a crime’s mechanics, opting instead for the humanity inherent in the crime’s motives. “When I tried to imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done,” says Father Brown, “I realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental conditions. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it.”

And that’s the essence of the change that came with the advent of the cozy mystery: the amateur figures out the crime by approaching human motivation with compassion, empathy, and humility (something you’d never expect of someone like Sherlock Holmes, for example). So we focus on the people, and the crime itself, in many ways, is a rather decent foil for them: a background, a context. My protagonist Sydney Riley stumbles across murders, but solving them always help her change in some way—it helps deepen her faith, her relationships, her appreciation of her home, her performance of her job.

Of course, in real life, murder is a lot less genteel. People kill for the most mundane of reasons—because of a drug deal that went awry, because they found their spouse cheating, because they want to steal what’s in the till. As we’ve seen most recently, people also get killed in the street, with a police officer’s knee on their neck. They die in places and in ways they should never have died.

It’s never ever Professor Plum, in the library, with a candlestick.

I launched my new book—via Zoom—a week ago, just as American cities were on fire and their president was stoking the flames. And part of me wondered what I was doing. Real death felt very close; the two murders I’d invented in a story I’d made up that took place during a film festival that never happened seemed at best redundant and at worst opportunistic.

The truth is there’s a lot of fear and horror out there, out where real death lurks. Murder can happen as quickly and as suddenly and as unfairly as the deaths we read about in the news every day. So why write about imaginary murders? Why read about them?

Here’s what I think. A mystery is set on a continuum; before the story even opens, characters have already been on the journey that culminated in the dead body. We join them on the journey because through authors’ skillful writing we care about them, their eccentricities, and their dreams; we go along as the journey continues to its culmination when the murderer is revealed and justice is done.

And especially in these days, who doesn’t want to see justice done?

Studies have shown that fairy tales, even gory ones (and, honestly, which ones aren’t?), are helpful to children’s developing emotional lives: they give children a format allowing them to safely deal with their fears and traumas and be less troubled by them. And perhaps it’s fair to say murder mysteries are our fairy tales. Our world is overwhelmed by wars, violence, and myriad disasters. But murder mysteries give us reassurance by telling us stories that begin with evil events but call forth the efforts of people who rise to sometimes heroic heights to overcome that evil. We love murder mysteries because they are redemptive, they give us hope, and help us move from fear to reassurance.

And—check the news—we need them now more than ever.

This article was previously published on Jungle Red Writers