I have developed a theory about it and I'll let you in on that soon if not later. I just finished a detective mystery: THE FALLEN by T. Jefferson Parker (funny how many people surnamed Parker write mysteries? Robert B. Parker, for instance.). A detective who has a fairly foolproof technique to discern if people are lying solves the assassination of a cop and helps clean up San Diego's crime problem...a bit. In the process however, he's thrown from a sixth- floor window and survives, then loses his beloved wife because she's just unsatisfied and "falls out of love with him." Weird. The cop who was killed had lost his 3 year old daughter by drowning and then his wife moves away from him. And they were reuniting when he's killed. So--sadness and despair, drinking and loss of sleep and betrayal and false friendship and corruption and obsession permeate this book.
In thinking about it, I realize that characterizes the tougher kind of mysteries. There are nicer ones, of course, called "cozies" in the trade; the TV version was MURDER SHE WROTE, with "Jessica Fletcher" as played by Angela Lansbury; the murdered victims were, without exception, unlikable people and nobody really missed or mourned them. My friend Carolyn Hart can write similar stories in her Death on Demand mysteries, but she also writes tougher ones (the Henrie O mysteries). But in the really tough stories (think THE MALTESE FALCON), someone nice is murdered in an awful way and as the detective (nearly always a friend or best friend or lover) traces through the history of the mystery, he or she always uncovers more slime and awful critters who skitter away at the first touch of light. The endings are not "happy," so much as they resolve in some way the mystery and leave the living participants just a teensy bit better off than they were.
Why is this?
I think it's because these stories appeal most to the despairing and depressed, readers who feel their lives are tossed, turned, destroyed. This may not be a universal truth; I could be wrong. Let me know. If you're a happy person and yet you enjoy reading such stories I'd like to know more about you.
1 comment:
A friend wrote this: ... I was interested in the first item, on mysteries, and have read The Fallen myself, as well as other TJP books. I don't agree with your thesis -- thinking myself pretty happy and most of what I read are suspense and mystery novels -- but I did find it interesting.
I ran the idea and your blog by cozy writer Carolyn Hart. See below.
Carolyn Hart, mystery writer, wrote:
His theory is interesting but I disagree. i know many quite happy people who lap up tough books. I feel they are drawn to those books because it helps them better understand the mean street context of our lives. Moreover, they always feel enormous gratiutude that they aren't miserable like the people in the book!
At bottom of course, both for traditional mysteries (I loathe the term cozy) and crime novels, it is all about the search for justice.
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