Why People Read Mysteries and Other Useful Stuff for Mystery Writers to Know

First, the Classic Answer. (And it's still true.)

If your aim is to write a damn good mystery, the first thing to get straight is why people read them.

The usual answer is that people read mysteries as "escape," as a form of entertainment. Reading a mystery is a good way to spend a few quiet hours away from the hubbub of real life — it's diverting. But there are a lot of things that are diverting that aren't as popular as reading mysteries. Mud wrestling, as an example.

Ed McBain (author of the 87th Precinct series) once said in an interview that we read mysteries because they "reconfirm our faith that a society of laws can work." Indeed, they do that.

It's usually assumed that most readers enjoy "solving" a mystery the way people enjoy "solving" a crossword puzzle. They say a mystery is an elaborate puzzle carefully constructed to baffle the reader, and that the writers of mysteries are playing a sort of game with their readers, hiding clues in plain sight, presenting suspects who couldn't have done the murder, but act as if they did, and so on, so the reader will go down what will very likely be the wrong path. The detective in a mystery almost always beats the reader at the game of who-done-it.

But if the love of a puzzle were the principal reason most people read mysteries, the mystery would have died out with the "locked-room" mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s, which were perfect puzzles, ingeniously devised. The murder would happen, say, in a room locked from the inside, with only a corpse inside — or some other devilishly devised perfect puzzle that at first would seem impossible to figure out. A bullet wound with no bullet. A body disappears from a rooftop. Any reader who could unravel one could be justifiably proud.

A damn good mystery is far more than a clever puzzle.

Marie Rodell, in Mystery Fiction (1943), gave the following four classic reasons that people read mysteries and the reasons haven't changed much since. People, she said, read mysteries to get:

1. The vicarious thrill of the manhunt ... carried on intellectually in the cleverness of detective and reader.

2. The satisfaction of seeing the transgressor punished.

3. A sense of identification with the people [the hero principally] and events in the story which will make the reader feel more heroic.

4. A sense of conviction about the reality of the story.

And, Ms. Rodell goes on to say, "The mystery which fails to satisfy these demands will be an unsuccessful mystery." This is just as true today as then, maybe more so: Because today's readers are more skeptical, more in tune with police procedures and forensic science, the "sense of reality" needs to be greater than in days gone by.

The Modern Mystery as Heroic Literature

Barbara Norville, in her very helpful and informative Writing the Modern Mystery (1986), claimed that the modern mystery story had its roots in the medieval morality play, but, she said, "today's literary culprit works in a framework of felonious assault against neighbor ... rather than, as in the morality play, against the sins of pride, sloth, envy, and so on."

While it is true that the two forms — the medieval morality play and the modern mystery — have elements in common, the modern mystery has its roots, I believe, in far older stories. The modern mystery is a version of the oldest story ever told: the mythic journey of the warrior hero.

When I refer to "myth" or "mythic forms" in reference to mysteries, I mean that mysteries echo mythic forms and that the mystery is a modern retelling of a very old form of literature. The hero of ancient myth slew dragons (monsters who threaten the community) and rescued damsels in distress; the contemporary mystery hero captures murderers (monsters who threaten the community) and rescues damsels in distress. Ancient heroes and modern mystery heroes share many qualities: courage, loyalty, a determination to defeat evil, the drive to sacrifice for an ideal, and so on.

Best-selling mystery writer Robert B. Parker (the Spenser series) has called the mystery novel "one of the last refuges of the hero." Fortunately, for those of us who write mysteries, it's a large refuge indeed. In the publishing world, mystery fiction attracts immense audiences, and accounts for more than a third of all fiction sold in the English-speaking world.

In The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth (2000), I showed how a modern writer can tap into the power of myth and use ancient forms and motifs that readers unconsciously respond to in a very deep and powerful way. These forms and motifs are called "functions" by mythologists, and, remarkably, the same functions are seen in every culture on earth, through every age. These functions might be characters, such as the "trickster" or the "mentor," or they might be actions, such as "the hero has a special birth" or "the hero is imprisoned." These functions are repeated over and over again, and form the patterns of myths and legends found in all cultures. As an example, some mythologists claim that there is a recognizable version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, even in places where there are no beans and no stalks.

Lord Raglan, a British mythologist, claimed in his book The Hero (1956) that the "myth of the hero king" (where the hero becomes the ruler and lawgiver, falls out of favor, and is killed) has appeared in an easily recognizable form in every culture on earth without exception.

Often, myths and legends are in the form of what mythologist Joseph Campbell called the "hero's journey," which he described in detail in his famous Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948). Christopher Vogler, in The Writer's Journey (1992) — a book aimed at screenwriters...