Quick question: why do we read mysteries? What is it about identifying the secret perpetrator of a singular crime that rocks our socks, so to speak?
Well, lots of reasons; but chiefly, I think, it’s because we all want justice. This is, after all, a genre whose essential core is the correction of a past injustice — not because the injustice is necessarily a threat to anyone’s life going forward, but because past sins demand penance. I mean, sure: maybe it’s clear that the murder is a one-off and no one else is going to get it in the neck; and maybe there aren’t any innocent suspects erroneously charged with the crime. Maybe nothing will change if it’s swept under the rug. But that’s never good enough for us, now, is it? It isn’t fair that one man should have his life unexpectedly cut short, and it isn’t fair that the one who did the cutting should escape without consequence. We care about fairness so much that we’ve tried on at least two separate occasions — Ronald Knox’s decalogue and S. S. Van Dine’s twenty rules — to lay down the law on what was or was not “fair” in the telling of our stories.
This desire for justice isn’t new. While Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely regarded as the first modern detective story, tales of crime and comeuppance go back much further. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” dealt with the titular prince trying to prove that his uncle Claudius, now the king of Denmark, did indeed murder his father. The ancient Greeks had “Oedipus Rex”, with Oedipus, king of Thebes, trying to discover the murderer of his predecessor. Both dealt with crime and its consequences, but what distinguishes “Rue Morgue” from them is the mystery: no one sits through either “Hamlet” or “Oedipus Rex” thinking, “Well? What’s the answer? Whodunnit?”
Neither Shakespeare nor Sophocles intended their respective audiences to wonder at the solutions to their riddles. Still, regardless of format, they’re playing to humanity’s need to see justice done. If you pick up a Bible, you might notice that the book of Judges precedes the coronation of the first king of Israel — meaning that long before this society developed the need for a centralized government, it saw the need for individuals appointed to keep the scales of justice balanced over the land. And if you look back to the golden age of detective fiction, you will find a shell-shocked population looking to literature for the justice they were unable to find for the tragedy of the First World War — a riddle without a solution.
Justice matters, even if it is only by proxy.
But remember that one of the traditions set by “Rue Morgue” was that of the earnest but ineffectual police force — the amateur sleuth, by virtue of a superior intellect, runs circles around them. This attitude is repeated in Sherlock Holmes’s scorn for Scotland Yard, and to a similar degree in Hercule Poirot’s contempt for all the running around that official police work entails. I’ve always thought that this was a matter of empowerment, this idea that private individuals might have the power to solve their own problems, just as readers are invited to solve the mystery presented to them on the page. And what this empowerment requires is for you to understand that the police are fallible. Raymond Chandler and others of his tradition often had policemen act as antagonists and obstructions in their stories. Even when our detective heroes are themselves members of the police, their heroism comes with a deeper characterization of the police as human beings, full of their own fears, flaws, and follies — fallible, because where would be the fun otherwise?
An extensive exposure to imagined criminal scenarios teaches us sooner or later that justice is complicated. Fiction makes crime intimate in a way that mere courtroom trials cannot. We understand the thought processes and the motives, and gain sympathy for the characters — perhaps even the killer. What if the murderer is justified in this one specific case, or what if they’ve already paid their dues? What if the murderer, in fact, deserves a medal? Has justice already been served?
Before we all jump onto the bandwagon for private vigilante justice, however, let us remember that due process exists for a reason. We know through the pages of a book that our detectives are honest and earnest in their quest for justice, but real life isn’t narrated. We can’t look into the head of the random civilian who steps up declaring that the murderer was definitely the colonel in the closet with the candlestick. Who gave this dude the authority? How can we know, without the omniscience of a reader following his story, whether he’s Jack Reacher or Jack the Ripper? Failing the ability to read someone’s thoughts as we do on the page, we must depend on the arguments of lawyers; and what is a jury but a democracy of representatives for us, the community? It is an unfortunate truth that while fiction shows us how complicated a labyrinth the quest for justice can be, real life expects us to navigate that same labyrinth blindfolded. Perhaps that is why we prefer fiction for our fix of fair play and consequence.
At the end of the day, we all want justice. That’s how this conversation started, and that’s how it’ll end. Even when it eludes the laws we create to define it, and even when we disagree on the finer points, we all recognise the general shape of justice, and we all appreciate its universality. Just as the book of Judges precedes the books of Kings I and II, humanity demands justice first, for everyone from the kings of Denmark and Thebes down to lowly sailors smuggling orangutans into nineteenth century Paris. If this weren’t so — if we didn’t long for a world where justice is as certain as death and taxes, or care about its nuances — we wouldn’t embrace a genre that examines it, celebrates it, and ultimately revolves so tightly around it.
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