Come to the Dark Side: Why We Love Mysteries

By Michelle Barker

When it comes to readers’ preferences of genre, mystery consistently lands at or near the top of the list. The only books more popular than Agatha Christie’s novels are the works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

So what is it about the genre that keeps us coming back for more?

Our fascination with darkness

As someone who writes about Nazis, I know a little about this fascination. My preoccupation with Nazi Germany is partly an attempt to understand how it happened, not just historically but on the level of human nature. How did educated people who came from a rich cultural background devolve to such an unimaginable level of darkness?

On some level, this is the question mystery readers ask too. What would push a person to such an extent that they decide to commit a serious crime—usually murder? What does it take to make someone do something terrible? And since we read to make sense not only of the world but also of ourselves, I think on a subconscious level we’re asking: am I capable of such a thing? What would it take to push me over the edge?

All right, maybe you’re not asking that question, but I’m always wondering about the criminal’s motivation. I think we turn to mystery at least partly to learn something about who we are as human beings: our shortcomings, our baser inclinations, what happens when we get a little too angry or are wronged, or have come on hard times and are desperate.

But it’s a contained darkness

Mysteries deal with difficult emotions: violence, fear, betrayal. But they do it in a contained structure. This allows readers to engage with dark material without being overwhelmed by it. We get to encounter someone who can lie so convincingly that we’ll miss it but won’t be hurt by it. We get to watch the carefully constructed plan, the meticulous alibi, the smooth-talking criminal, come unraveled.

Often the mystery world is quite different from our usual nine-to-five what’s-for-dinner existence, so we get to live in this exciting and exotic setting vicariously, trying to solve the crime but still putting on our slippers and feeding the cat.

If Lisa Cron is correct and we come to story to learn things that will help us survive, then mystery offers some important survival lessons in a difficult world. The genre creates a safe boundary around darkness.

Puzzles are fun

A mystery novel usually involves solving a puzzle: whodunnit, whydunnit, or a combination of both. Readers are looking for a crime that doesn’t have an easy solution and a detective or amateur sleuth who’s up to the challenge. What’s fun about this is that the reader is implicated in the process. We’re working alongside the detective to gather clues, look for patterns, and come up with a solution. We’re watching everyone, suspecting everyone, looking behind the respectable facades to see who drinks in secret or is having an affair or lied about where they were last Friday.

People are always hiding something in a mystery novel. They have debts and hold grudges and lead secret lives. We get to be the fly on the wall. We can judge them, suspect them, empathize with them—whatever our approach, the bottom line is that sooner or later they will be held accountable.

We strive to solve the puzzle before the detective does, but the wonderful paradox in mysteries is that we also hope we’re wrong. We want to be given a fair chance to solve the puzzle but we’re most delighted when we fall for the sleight of hand. In fact, if we do figure out whodunnit before the detective does, we’re likely to be disappointed.

That said, we don’t want to feel cheated. If the author has held back crucial information that the reader couldn’t possibly know, we will feel that the game was unfairly rigged. Ideally, we should be able to go back and piece together the clues we missed. In other words, it should be a fair fight that we’re certain to lose.

What do we want? Justice!

In the real world, justice is not always served. Good people are hurt; the criminal gets away with it or gets off on a technicality and is free to do it again. It’s infuriating. We want to see justice done; we want things to work out in a way that feels fair. If we can’t get this in real life, at least we can look for it in a mystery novel and have our need for justice satisfied. It’s a pretty seductive system; it gives us a world that (eventually) behaves better than the one we live in.

And besides justice, control

Life is chaotic at the best of times. We like to believe we have control when in fact there are very few things in our world that we have any control over. Not so in the world of fiction, and especially in a mystery novel where the detective eventually succeeds in imposing order on chaos. Nothing is random. Everything fits. The loose ends get tied up. We start with a problem, but we know we will end with a solution.

If only life were that simple.

In Conclusion

Mystery novels are about figuring out who committed the crime, but they do more than that. They explore what humans are capable of and give us something that the real world often denies: justice.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. She is the co-author of two craft books: Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.