Since this month’s theme is mysteries, I thought I should write about why it’s my favorite genre. But when I came to write this post, I quickly got stumped. I’ve been in love with mysteries for so long that I find it hard to step back and explain why. But after some serious, deep thinking — I’ll take an aspirin later — I’ve discovered four reasons.
The Puzzle
I love puzzles that challenge my intellect. The mystery starts with something that is wrong in the lives of the characters. A series of robberies have occurred, and the police must stop them. The obnoxious newcomer to town gets killed. A high school senior receives threatening texts from an anonymous source. The puzzle must be solved in order to put life right again.
Sometimes, I just like a puzzle, like the stories by Agatha Christie. But if the puzzle can have some kind of emotional stake tied to it, that’s even better. The detective faces dire consequences if he doesn’t solve it. If the detective is in a series, it may stretch believability to the breaking point if ever mystery is high stakes for him. But it can be high stakes for some character the detective it trying to help.
The Investigation
How the detective solves the puzzle determines how much readers will enjoy it. Agatha Christie is still the gold standard for whodunits because the process for uncovering clues and drawing conclusions made sense in most of her stories.
I’ve read mysteries that were entertaining but the detective’s explanation of how she pierced together clues to reach her solution didn’t make sense to me. So while it was a good story, it wasn’t a good mystery.
In the novella Kill Now—Pay Later by Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe accepts as a client the daughter of the man who shined his shoes for three years. A man at the business where the daughter worked as a secretary was murdered. The police think her father did it because the man seduced the daughter. When the father is found dead, the police believe it was suicide. Case closed.
The daughter tells Wolfe that she was not seduced, and her father would never have believed that about her. She offers Wolfe all the tips her father collected from Wolfe over the three years. Her father wanted to save the money for something special.
Wolfe later tells the police he believed the daughter’s story because if the story of the seduction was true, she had no reason to make up her tale and offer what was for her an exorbitant amount of money. Therefore he knew both deaths were murders.
It’s those kind of deductions, ones that ring true to life, that I love to come across in a mystery.
It must be the librarian in me, but I also love when the detective has to conduct serious research into a mystery, especially a cold case. In the 1973 TV movie, The Night Strangler, reporter Carl Kolchak is investigating the strangulation murders of several women. He visits the newspaper’s librarian, or what used to be called the “morgue attendant”. The librarian remembers a similar set of strangulation murders from some time in the 1950’s. They haul out the huge books that have the old editions for the paper pasted in them. The librarian was right. A set of strangulations murders occurred in 1952, all women.
The librarian and Kolchak dig more and discover that six women have been strangled every twenty-one years from 1889 to 1973. The scenes for these discoveries is the dark basement of the newspaper building. Eerie musical cues screech each time Kolchak opens up an old book to discover yet another newspaper article on the murders.
Unexpected discoveries that a detective unearths during his investigation thrill me as a reader, or viewer, and makes mysteries so intriguing.
I’ll have the other two reason I love mysteries in my next post.
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