booktastic

I noticed, when I was a teenager and worked for the public library, that all the middle-aged ladies who worked for the library were big mystery readers. I always thought mysteries were boring and couldn’t get up the gumption to read them.

… Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of mystery novels. I don’t quite know what’s going on here - maybe now that I’m nearing middle age myself (well, perhaps not quite, but close) my brain has changed. I just read “A” is for Alibi and am now reading Christmas Cookie Murder , and have One for the Money lined up after that.

(Yes, I know Christmas Cookie Murder isn’t seasonal right now. But by the time Christmas rolls around I won’t be able to find a copy of it… I ran into this last year at Christmas. I wanted to read Christmas mysteries and couldn’t find them at the library or the bookstore… I had to read the fusty old remainder books from the college bookstore.)

As I said - I don’t quite know what the connection is between reaching middle age and suddenly wanting to read mystery novels.  In Way to Happiness, Bishop Fulton Sheen claimed that it was because people didn’t have mystery in their lives. Well, there are plenty of mysteries in my life right now (like how I’m going to pay the rent next month) - so, with respects to the Bishop, I’m not sure it’s that.

I’d almost say that it’s escapism - but it seems odd to say that you want to escape into a world where someone you know has just been murdered. There is an element of that, of course: the women in these mysteries always have great jobs with lots of flexibility that allow them to go around solving mysteries. I especially enjoyed the Mary Higgins Clark novel The Christmas Thief for that reason: it was all about this couple that had won a huge lottery and went around solving crimes in their free time.

But perhaps it’s the fact that there’s always an element of control in these novels. After all, the person who committed the muder is always caught, found out or apprehended in some way (or else it wouldn’t be a mystery novel - it would be freakin’ literary fiction). It’s the same reason I watch Cops, I suppose: it’s enjoyable to feel that there’s some control in the world and that bad guys get their comeuppance.

As a side note, I’d like to comment on a theme I’ve scene in modern mystery novels. Reading Agatha Christie recently, it was very much what I think of as a mystery novel - the mystery is the star, the characters (although interesting and integral) are secondary. In other words, the emotional climax is the solution of the mystery. In modern mystery novels, I’ve seen quite a different trend: for instance, in “A” is for Alibi, the mystery is solved a good way before the book ends and the emotional climax of the book is well afterward (so really, the characters were much more important than the mystery). I have to question - is this simply because mystery novels have changed stylistically, or because people aren’t clever enough to write good complex mysteries anymore? (I’d like to note: I’m not insulting the author of “A” is for Alibi - her novel worked. But I’ve read other ones, similar in style, that didn’t.)

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