A Literary Warrior Considers Mysteries

& This is Leads to, God Help Us, a Panel Discussion

Some ideas arrive like little cracks of thunder with lightning illuminating a strangely familiar landscape. Others may be akin to forty days of constant snow, heaping against walls and drifting around fences, covering up the ugliness of a town’s uncaring attitudes. Out of sight, out of mind. Until the chinook winds arrive and melt the snow, changing the world from -30 C to +10 C overnight. Then the faded heap of clothing covering bones in the back lane are revealed…and off to the races we go, pursuing the plot, fleshing out the living characters (and those bones), creating a story we hope readers will enjoy as much as we did in that first thrill of knowing we are on to something. Something with a hook, a motive to unravel and people to bring to life.

Why do we crave narratives, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end? I am reminded of a seminar at the Bouchercon, a big annual international convention of mystery writers in Seattle back in 1995. Why, we were asked by the moderator, did we think readers, which of course included us writers, love books called thrillers, suspense novels, cozies, crime noir, spy novels, police procedurals, all the sub-genres of mysteries? Why did women and men read them voraciously, getting hooked on series? Why were mysteries, like science fiction, and other literary genres, called ‘brain candy?’

Some self-promoting windbags writers answered the first question by stating how many readers told them they just loved their lead detectives, those lovable deadly rascals, and how true to life were their descriptions of the mean streets of Boston/New York/Miami.

At another solo presentation, mercifully not a panel, and remember this was 1995, some fans belatedly discovered Easy Rawlins, a private detective who was a man of colour. This never failed to surprise the guest of honour, a man of colour, the author Walter Mosely, who has a wonderfully droll sense of humour. He created unforgettable characters in his 1930’s L.A. mysteries and like other great writers in the mystery genre, John Le Carre and Donna Leon come immediately to mind, his elegant writing is never formulaic or clichéd, or littered with violent blood baths en route to the finish line.

I observed the really great writers at this particular conference, Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, and Walter Mosely among them, were unfailingly humble and good-natured when dealing with organizers, other writers and fans. Fans can be a little overwhelmed in the presence of their favourite writer and can get a bit pushy and/or gushy but the real pros like the afore-mentioned trio handled it all with what I call ‘professional and personal grace’. Listen and learn, grasshopper. It’s the insecure writers, especially the defensive and socially oblivious ones who lunge for the limelight, behave like demanding divas, and annoy the crap out of everyone else in the vicinity.

When I was finally asked to comment on the panel I was on, I forgot about having a recent book to promote. I responded as a reader and as a woman reader in particular. I reframed the question. ‘Why do women read gritty suspense novels about fleeing abusive relationships or tyrannical regimes or creepy work situations where criminal stuff is happening and everyone is supposed to turn a blind eye? Well, I read books like this to find out how to get away,’ I said. ‘To survive.’

Photo from a detail of Mexican sculptor Sergio Bustamente’s monumental bronze ‘In Search of Reason’ on Puerto Vallarta’s malecon. Photo by Caroline Woodward.

All the plausible reasons for reading their own mystery novels had been expounded upon at length by the other writers. Thinking about it again thirty years later, I’d say we readers have a longing for justice in an unjust world, even 2-D justice meted out by dogged detectives who always catch their perps. Perps never prosper like they seem to do in real life.

What do we hear on the playground? “That’s not fair!” “Those aren’t the rules!” “You cheated!” Tell that to the disgusting men who are making a mockery of democracy and decency, cutting medical care to millions of poor people, cutting taxes to thousands of obscenely rich people and dropping bombs on children and families living in tents in the desert.

It almost goes without saying I was the lone Canadian at the end of the panel row. Two of the five writers had totally dominated the discussion, butting in when others spoke and blathering on and on. I cannot remember a single original thing they came out with. The moderator had been utterly ineffectual at disrupting this dynamic. I also did not, as one author did, hold my book up in front of me like she did the entire time she spoke, her book cover akin to a miniature billboard. I think it may have been Margaret Atwood who said something apt like ‘Hell is another panel discussion.’

You could have heard a pin drop. The moderator looked embarrassed for me, or maybe I was projecting this reaction. Perhaps she actually thought I regarded all books as DIY instruction manuals. One older man in the audience looked at me and nodded slowly, unsmiling, sombre. He got it. He probably had daughters and loved them and his wife very much. I nodded back and shrugged. I’d spoken my plain truth then and I’d answer that question in much the same way now.

Many of us read mysteries to escape worldly woes, literally and figuratively. We even identify with lead characters and long for more of them, hence the popularity of series and the use, trivialized and defanged of pain and misery, of ‘addiction’ for that longing. That sugar rush of adrenaline via the printed page. Guilty as charged! More James Lee Burke, more Iona Whishaw, more Donna Leon, more Ian Rankin! More Icelanders, Swedes, Indian, Sicilian and Mexican mystery writers! Make that good writers, period. Who can forget either the book or the film of Irish-Canadian Emma O’Donoghue’s Room? Or Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins in the filmed version of Walter Mosely’s Devil in a Blue Dress? How does the corruption within one disturbed mind, or a family walking on eggshells, a close-knit community hiding a terrible secret, a large organization, ditto, an entire country built on bloodshed and land theft and legalized corporate bribery become fodder for a detective’s observant mind, woven into everything they write? How do their characters survive, make it out of the locked car trunk, escape entrapment by a sinister, smothering spouse, or not?

In fact, I read Anna Karenina the same way. She was certainly trapped. Ditto The Handmaid’s Tale and thousands of other books. Every gripping novel with a discernable plot and narrative momentum and characters we actually care about and root for has a mystery embedded, a convoluted human problem to be solved by the final page, we hope and we expect.

My late friend, the Doukhobor writer Vi Plotnikoff, author of Head Cook at Weddings & Funerals, answered the same question, Why do you read? when I asked it of her.

“To find out… how… other people… live,” was Vi’s carefully measured reply. The perfect plainsong response, containing multitudes of possibility.