Is This Really a Game?

Mystery books sometimes feel like games. We pick them up for entertainment, a moment’s distraction. This is ludic pleasure, the pleasure of playing and being entertained.

At the same time, there’s no getting away from it. A murder mystery is about terrible things – death and suffering, bereavement, grieving, anxiety, loneliness and deep deep sorrow.

None of us – readers, writers – none of us is blind to the significance of death. No one’s pretending that death isn’t desperately sad, or that the pain of loss isn’t unthinkable, or that violence is not deplorable. 

And yet, in many books, especially those which could be classified as cosy – but even, I would argue, in many thrillers – the sadness and pain are brushed aside. The story concentrates on puzzle solving or present dangers and adventure.

Grief might be mentioned, in an interview with the bereaved. Grief might be noted, and the detective may demonstrate momentary sympathy. And at the end of a mystery, after the murderer has been identified, a detective team may be allowed a moment of reflection on the profundity of what they do. But the emphasis is on the logical business of solving a puzzle, piecing together a chain of events and identifying a murderer. This is the convention of the mystery.

But grief is surely always there. It underlies everything else. In a way, mortality, and the sadness, and the deplorableness and cruelty of murder, they are crucial to the whole business.

Is this OK, then? To tell a story of murder, but then play around with clues and puzzles, to concentrate logic or intuition and the discovery of missing facts? 

I really don’t know. I will let you decide.

It’s another question without an answer, which are sometimes the most important ones. 

*Featured image: a still from The Road to Perdition (2002) , directed by Sam Mendes, written by David Self, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner..