Re-Dial M for Murder

MYSTERY, CRIME N’ Thrillers has been one of the largest-selling genres since its incep­tion in the mid-19th century in the English-speaking world and continues to be. Why? Why do we bother to read such stories?

David Baldacci says that when times are stressful and it looks like the baddies are winning out, along comes the crime novel to put the balance back in. Evil is punished, the good can sleep tight knowing all is well again. At least fictionally.

A survey published in The Guardian in 2020 revealed that people in the UK have almost doubled the amount of time they spend reading books since the lockdown began, but instead of dystopia, fiction readers are turning to the ‘comfort’ of crime and thrillers. Other surveys show that about 47 per cent of readers of this genre are over the age of 55, and a similar percentage operates for the e-book category. And women readers outnumber men for this genre, so much so, some male crime fiction authors have ad­opted female pseudonyms (Martyn Waites became Tania Carver).

What in our psyche draws us to a tale of murder, a puzzle about a whodunnit, and a burning urge to find out how they can get away with the secret papers or a jewel heist? We are drawn to such stories because each one of us knows that in a particular constellation of circumstances, but for the grace of god it could’ve been us who committed the crime.

But we are also social animals and to live in harmony, we need to abide by the laws. So, justice is very much part of the equation for readers of mystery and crime and thriller novels. WH Auden, a voracious reader of mysteries, argued that the crime fiction novel deals with offences against god and society, and the swift and final punishment of the evildoers. These books feed in readers their taste for justice and their yearning for a more stable society.

From the ancients onward, writers have explored and exploited this fascination. The Old Testament is full of bloody tales of revenge, murder and justice. The Greek playwright Sophocles in Oedipus Rex makes Oedipus hunt for the mur­derer of the previous king through a cross-examination of wit­nesses until he discovers that the culprit was himself. Though the solution is reached through magic and the supernatural, the Oedipus trilogy is a masterclass in the anguish of a man who has carried out his fate of killing his father and marrying his mother, a man confronted with the enormity of what he has done, and one who now must deal with the guilt. In the Upani­shads, the Mahabharata and in the Mauryan kingdom governed by Chanakya, espionage and crimes are committed for one’s king and land. Shakespeare explored the murderous tendencies in our psyche brilliantly in Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet.

By the mid to late 19th century, we see a growing body of work with master detectives like Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe’s C Auguste Dupin, and in France, Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq.

As a genre, though, mystery fiction came to the fore in the English-speaking world with the publication of Dickens’ protege Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The latter has all the classic trappings of a murder mystery — a locked room, red herrings, a policeman-detective, and a clever solution.

As PD James points out in Talking about Detective Fiction, “What we can expect is a central mysterious crime, usually murder; a closed circle of suspects each with motive, means and opportunity for the crime; a detective, either amateur or profes­sional who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it; and by the end of the book, a solution, which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness.” These tenets characterise the fiction published during the Golden Age (the period between the two world wars) by luminaries like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and GK Chesterton.

In the US, detective fiction took on a different form. PD James aptly pinpoints the difference as a piercing eye turned by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett toward the great social upheavals—gangsters and molls, corruption and Prohibition, boom and economic depression. Dialogue and description rather than introspective monologues are the hallmarks of the hardboiled detective. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason detective stories too belong to that category, as do authors Walter Mosley and SA Cosby today.

A puzzle is at the heart of the mystery story, a crime story and a tale of suspense. While the three overlap to a great extent, some have made a distinction between the three. In crime fiction, the focus is on the criminal who must be nabbed (Michael Connelly); in a mystery, the main question is who­dunnit (Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Andrea Camilleri, Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves); and in a thriller, it tends to be focused on how to stop a future crime (Lee Child, David Baldacci, John Grisham, Scott Turow). Ken Follett suggests that the thriller arose at the beginning of the twentieth century because the nature of war had changed with conscription; the violence and danger of war threatened all men and boys.

Today we have a vast range of sub-genres — psychological suspense (Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient), police procedurals (Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Val McDermid’s Tony Hill, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch), private eye detectives (Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins), thrillers (Lee Child) espionage (John le Carré and Mick Herron), nordic noir (Jo Nesbo) crime pulp fiction (Stephen King’s Colorado Kid), historical mystery (Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael, Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham series, Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House series), fantasy mysteries (Gigi Pandian), gothic ghost mysteries (Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Simone St James’ The Broken Girls), literary myster­ies (Kate Atkinson, John Banville), and the list goes on.

From the ancients onward, writers have explored and exploited this fascination for justice. The Oedipus trilogy is a masterclass in the anguish of a man who has carried out his fate of killing his father and marrying his mother, a man confronted with the enormity of what he has done

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But public tastes have changed since Christie’s days. Then, the puzzle-oriented public who devoured her novels were con­tent with a diabolical plot and a fiendishly clever solution and didn’t ask to be overly involved in the characters’ lives. Today’s crime fiction readers want to be in the skin of the protagonist and expect a movie-like immediacy of being sucked into the book. They demand to experience the terror, dread, guilt and anxiety almost first-hand. Hence the popularity of psychologi­cal suspense novels, first-person narratives, and the use of the present tense. Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) points out: “Men tend to be attacked by strangers, women tend to be at­tacked by people they know.” The past decade’s highly popular sub-genre of domestic noir (which might now be on the wane) interprets violence from the female perspective and gives voice to their experiences.

Readers want to experience the Norfolk marshes of Ruth Galloway in Elly Griffiths’ series, enter the blistering heat of Australia in Jane Harper’s The Dry, inhabit the bleak prison on an isolated island in Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, and attend the macabre destination wedding in Lucy Foley’s The Guest List. Psychological thrillers also combine women’s relationship troubles with the detective genre where, in Sophie Hannah’s words, the crime puzzle and love puzzle are wrapped up in the same package—is he/she the one or is she/he dangerous for us?

“I think that crime fiction represents a comforting return to the values we sometimes feel we have lost—where the forces of good win out (almost invariably) over the forces of evil,” Peter May said in a Guardian interview in May 2020. “And that is particularly relevant at a time when our world and everything familiar to us seems to have been turned upside down.”

As PD James points out, we’ve come a long way from the entrenched establishment of the Golden Age detective who upheld the rights of the aristocrats over those of the hoi polloi. If anything, present day stories upend the old structure. They tackle the social malaises of hierarchies—constructed on the basis of class, race, gender, sexual preference, caste and religion — speak up for the dispossessed and the vulnerable. Mysteries that explore different cultures, LGBTQ+ issues, and the chal­lenges posed by our access to cutting-edge technology (AI, bots, internet etc) have gained traction.

These stories appeal to our puzzle-solving psyche and provide a welcome relief from our everyday and humdrum ten­sions. If it is true, as evidence from the Golden Age era suggests, says PD James, that stories of mystery and suspense and crime flourish best in the most difficult of times—and nobody can say Covid and the global recession are not difficult—then we may see more readers flocking to this genre. In a time of fragile health and uncertain jobs, mysteries, crime fiction and thrillers provide the magic bullet, one that combines the reader’s crav­ing for escapism with a clear-eyed take on societal injustices, all somehow combining into a just resolution.

(This is the first of a fortnightly column on crime fiction)

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

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