Odd title, I know. But here's a possibly counter-intuitive proposition: At their core (and at their best) mystery novels invite us to hope.

Stay with me here...

There are a number of ways to write mystery/thriller novels. I don't write traditional cozy mysteries. I don't have a lot of interest in exploring why someone put poison on Miss Titcomb's knitting needles, and I couldn't build a sufficiently engaging story around it. That doesn't mean cozies are any less important than any other genre, just that they're a lot harder to write than some of the others.

I recently read a novel that centered around espionage, and knowing that genre's parameters, I should have been forewarned that Things Would Not End Well. They didn't. The book concluded with great emptiness and sadness and impossible loss, feelings that stayed with me for days afterward. That sadness was less about the lives of the characters and more about how an organization (such as the CIA or MI6) can become a machine in which those characters' lives are of no importance.

I can't write those, either.

A point I make in my most recent novel is this: mysteries involve personal motives, personal solutions—however ill-advised—to personal problems. As such, we can identify with the characters, sometimes the victim, sometimes the criminal, but always someone. And it's that sense of understanding motives and fears, betrayals and jealousies, all the small human emotions that make up our days, that allow for empathy to enter the chat.

And anytime that happens, it makes us more human.

Of course, stories don’t need to involve death in order to help us find empathy; but there is something about death, and especially deliberately inflicted death, that ups the ante for both the writer and the reader. The decision to take someone else’s life, the events that have led one to conclude that the only way out of their situation is to kill somebody, all of that provides a sort of sharp clarity about what matters … and what doesn’t.

The thing is, real life doesn't often offer that level of clarity. For most of us, a lot of what we think and experience happens, as C.S. Lewis so rightly observed, when we are busy doing other things. We rarely have—or take—the time to examine our motivations and reactions and purposes, much less those of others; why complicate things more than they already are?

But mysteries cut through the wooliness of our understanding and the demands of the present and invite us to take a step back and think about all those things, precisely because the stakes are so high. They force us to consider both sides: life and death, darkness and light. "The first and fundamental principle," writes G.K. Chesterton, "is that the aim of a mystery story, as of every other story and every other mystery, is not darkness but light. Any form of art, however trivial, refers back to some serious truths (...) the darkness is only valuable in making vivid a great light in the mind."

I don't want to fall back on the trope by which many mystery writers explain the attraction of their stories: that in an unfair world, mysteries offer fairness. At the end of the novel, justice is done. The bad people get punished, the good people find closure. Life as we know it can begin flowing again; we breathe a sigh of relief, we relax, the world has righted itself. That trope isn't incorrect, and I've written and spoken about it frequently.

But it's also an oversimplification of the process involved in mysteries, which is, at least partly, the discovery of self. As Chesterton's innocuous-seeming little priest Father Brown so wisely points out, we all have it in us to do both brilliantly wonderful and brilliantly dark things. We're all of us capable of wild acts, grim moods, and puzzling irrationalities.

I do rather harp on poor Father Brown, but there's a reason for that: he's the epitome, for me, of why we read these stories. Sherlock Holmes gives us intricate puzzles, but the more radical Father Brown shifts our sense of mystery somewhere else. A crime is solved, yes; but the solution comes in such a way as to unsettle our sense of what we know (or even of what we think we know). That unsettling points to something larger: the world is weirder than we previously believed, but also much better, richer, and stranger.

Brown's vocation as a priest brings enigmas into the stories that a detective might not be expected to solve: we're not just solving a whodunit, we're considering the ultimate mystery of life and death. It’s not his ability to figure out a crime that makes Father Brown great, but rather his willingness to see within it a human being with a soul. We are invited not just to look at others, but also to examine ourselves—and our fallibility informs us about the fallibility in others.

Which brings me back to the issue of hope. Mysteries are aptly named: there's the mystery of the crime itself, but also the mystery of our participation in it. Every character in these stories counts: the perpetrator, with their desperation to somehow put things right in some dark way; the protagonist, with their need to figure out why it happened; and every other character who contributes to our understanding of the complicated thoughts and motives that, when the novelist knows what they're doing, weave their way—in manners simple and complex—through the story.

Fictional death does a lot of things for the reader. At a very basic level, it helps us rehearse the future experience of our own losses and eventual deaths—that's the reason fairytales work. At a deeper level, it enables us to contemplate from the safety of our own status as reader the biggest questions: what is the meaning of loss and death, how do we memorialize our dead, how do we want to be remembered. And if the novelist really knows what they're doing, we can also, with Father Brown, empathize with even the darkest of decisions.

It's a lot to pack into a mystery novel. But it does give us hope: one day, we may be able to see ourselves as part of a wider community that includes saints and sinners, the lost and the betrayed and, occasionally, the very very good.

That's worth a read any day, isn't it?

Finding Hope in Fictional Death

A Useless Heroine