An Anatomy of the Mystery

TIME MAGAZINE released its list of the English language’s hundred best mystery and thriller books of all time in October 2023. Chosen by a panel of leading crime fic­tion authors: Megan Abbott, Harlan Coben, SA Cosby, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Rachel Howzell Hall, and

Sujata Massey, the list in­cludes books from as early as 1860 (Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, considered one of the first mystery novels) and as recent as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The usual suspects—Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Good-bye, Patricia Highsmith’s The Tal­ented Mr Ripley—hobnob with Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, Stephen King’s The Shining, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and some of my favourites, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders, James M Cain’s Double Indemnity, among others.

There is also a good representation of books by writers of colour and foreign writers (Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, several Japanese writers, Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, among others).

Many of these picks are debuts, that is, these are the first published novels by those authors. This is in line with a long tradition of debuts bringing fresh new perspectives to an old trope: Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was a teen­ager, and Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Many Booker Prize longlisted novels tend to be de­buts. One reason for the enduring popularity of a well-written debut is that it has an energy, a freshness, an innocence. That is certainly true of the ones in the list such as Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem, which introduces Kay Scarpetta, her forensic pathologist tracking a serial killer.

One of the pleasures of reading such lists is to discover books one has never read. For me, it was Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead, which introduces her master detective, Inspector Alleyn in a classic and enjoyable country house mur­der. In her introduction, she writes that having enjoyed the books by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, she decided to pen (well, pencil) one herself on a rainy evening in London. “I bought six exercise books, a pencil and pencil sharpener and splashed back to the flat.”

What unites all these stories is the fact that in each one, a small truth shines bright in the protagonist’s emotional jour­ney. We connect with it, having experienced it ourselves. As Michael Straczynski says in Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writ­er, the smaller the truth, the more universal it is, because we all have experience with small but potent truths; by contrast, the bigger and grander the statement, the less universally applicable they are.

Tana French, in her introduction to the list, divides myster­ies into those that are about restoring order and deal with concrete facts like whodunnit, whydunnit and the evidence (the Agatha Christies), and those she calls wild mysteries. In wild mysteries, order isn’t the point of the story. “Truth isn’t objective and solid; it’s dark, slippery, double-edged. Good can’t be neatly separated from evil.” Here, the crucial questions aren’t those of fact, but rather, about what we are capable of. Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Lehane’s Mystic River belong here.

Some on the list, though, haven’t travelled well to the present age. Margery Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley, a hotchpotch of a country house murder, a diabolical master criminal, and a hostage situation, is not a patch on her master­piece, The Tiger in the Smoke (surprising that didn’t figure in the list instead). A re-read of Sayers’ Gaudy Night (an old favourite of mine) revealed the intellectual snobbery of Harriet Vane and the other dons in the college, and it grated. But others like Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, with a simple plot, a familiar village setting, and a familiar troupe of characters, remains as fresh and startling today as it was a century ago.

Having read most of the books on the list, I thought it might be interesting to see whether we can cull the elements of a gripping and well-loved mystery. Here they are, in no particular order.

–  There are everyday sorts of detectives (Lord Peter Wimsey, Philip Marlowe, Jackson Brodie, Darko Dawson) and those who border on the superhuman (Brother William, Hercule Poirot). Even when it is someone quite zany like Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Olga Tokarczuk’s Janina, a strange recluse-caretaker who adores William Blake’s poetry, they have recognisable qualities—kindness, bravery, a thirst for justice and fair play—that we readers can connect with.

Many of the books on the best thrillers of all time list are debuts. This is in line with a long tradition of debuts bringing fresh new perspectives to an old trope

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–  Then there are the anti-heroes who tend to be men, and charming diabolical psychopaths at that (Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, Dorothy B Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, Highsmith’s Ripley). Arguably, James Bond fits into this category, except that he kills for his country.

– Despite the commandment (issued in the 1920s) that a proper murder mystery must expunge all romance, love flourishes either between the protagonists (James M Cain’s Double Indemnity, Harriet and Lord Peter in Sayers’ books) or one of the subsidiary players (for example Poirot usually uses the murder investigation to further the romance between two suspects).

– The emotional heart of the story is raw and punchy, taking us on a pacy journey into a morally ambiguous territory. For example, William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace is about an adolescent who has to come to terms with murder. They ask: would you do any differently from the murderer if you were in that situation? How far would you go for love, friendship, loyalty, and honour?

– The setting either induces a sense of the familiar (a Christie village, a city like Los Angeles in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series) or provides a vicarious experience (a country-house party, an Oxford women’s college, Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley in Rebecca, 007’s gambling in Monaco, Chandler’s high society in California) or gives us a whiff of the unfamiliar (the Japanese mysteries, Massey’s 1920s Bombay).

– The mystery itself is cleverly plotted—either a locked-room variety (howdunnit when the room is locked from inside with only the victim in the room) or a closed setting with a handful of suspects, or a retelling of a classic like Christie’s And Then There Were None in a Japa­nese island (Ayatsuji’s Decagon House Murders). The stakes are high in a gripping cat-and-mouse game between the killer and the protagonist.

– Without exception, the prose is precise. For instance, one of the best opening lines is in James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss: “When I fi­nally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

Unlike previous such lists, this one, fortu­nately, has a good sprinkling of non-Anglo- Saxon authors, and women protagonists. Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Marti MacAlister, a recently widowed Black police detective, and Barbara Neely’s spunky Black maid Blanche. These authors address gritty issues of police violence and racism (Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle series, SA Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland), and writers like Silvia Moreno- Garcia tackle colonialism through the trope of gothic horror in Mexican Gothic.

Not surprisingly, there is a divide between the issues examined by the older authors and the more recent cohort. Racism, colonialism, and the class divide don’t figure as much in the books by 20th-century white authors in this list, while they do, especially in the books by au­thors of colour. Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line focuses on a nine-year-old Delhi slum dweller investigating the disappearance of his classmate. Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay is a harrowing literary mystery that grapples with racial tensions between Black and Korean American communities in Los Angeles.

Another divide is in the portrayal of violence. The previ­ous century crime writers focus more on the psychology of murder, with very little gratuitous violence. Modern day picks like The Silence of the Lambs, The Redbreast, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo don’t hold back. We also see an overt reliance on twists in the recent domestic noir of Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty and Ruth Ware.

Lists like these are useful. They make us go back to our fa­vourites, re-read them, and find new favourites while enjoying the simple pleasure that comes from being in the psyche of a detective-protagonist solving a diabolical murder.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes