I was recently asked why May is always Mystery Month in This Awful Awesome Life.
American author/poet Edgar Allan Poe had us hooked with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” (1841), and British author Wilkie Collins thrilled us with The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868).
Poe referred to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as one of his “tales of ratiocination” - problem-solving or reasoning through conscious deliberation based on rational thought, facts, or evidence. His character, C. Auguste Dupin is considered to be the first fictional detective. It is also the first “locked room mystery” in detective fiction. Dupin was not affiliated with the police force. He was a private citizen with keen powers of observation and a knack for deductive reasoning.
Before the 19th century, there weren’t many municipal police departments though the first one was created in Paris in 1667 (this may be why Poe’s character was a Frenchman). Typically, police work was performed by appointed people (constables) and volunteers. In England, the Bow Street Runners and later the Metropolitan Police Service in the London area pioneered early crime detection techniques. The first police detective unit in the United States wasn’t formed until 1846 in Boston.
C. Auguste Dupin reappeared in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” in 1842 and “The Purloined Letter,” in 1844.
Wilkie Collins’ protagonist in The Woman in White, Walter Hartright, employs many of the sleuthing techniques used by private detectives in later years. Collins studied law and was “called to the bar” in 1851. Though he never officially practiced law, Collins was able to use his knowledge of the law in many of his novels.
Collins’ novel, The Moonstone, established many of the ground rules for detective fiction. His character, Sergeant Cuff, is a renowned Scotland Yard detective, not an amateur sleuth, like his character Franklin Blake who is an early example of the “gentleman detective.” The Moonstone is considered the first police procedural even though Charles Felix used many of these techniques in his Notting Hill Mystery (1862-1863).
Since these “genre establishing” novels, the mystery/thriller genre has expanded to include crime and true crime novels. It has become the second most popular book genre on Amazon for books sales in the United States.
Why do we like mysteries?
Agatha Christie is still the best-selling thriller/mystery novelist of all time. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. Christie sold an estimated 300 million books during her lifetime. Since her death in 1976, sales of her books now total over two billion.
Two-thirds of all mystery readers are women. Thirty-two percent of all mysteries are written by female authors. Twenty-six percent of these mysteries feature a female detective.
With a strong female readership, the genre now features more female detectives. Fifty-nine percent of female mystery writers feature female detectives in their novels and eleven percent of male authors are writing books featuring female detectives.
According to Epic Reads, the three major reasons readers cite for purchasing a particular mystery are:
1. The author
2. The continuity and popularity of a book series
3. Specific characters
We like mysteries because they follow a specific formula – something/someone goes missing and/or a crime is committed. Despite the formulaic progression of a mystery, there are endless ways for authors to present their characters, add red herrings, and get creative with plots and settings. Readers are presented with suspects and a set of clues and can mentally participate in solving the mystery without risking their own safety. They get to live vicariously through the characters and the action. Readers can escape into the story and experience a feeling of satisfaction when the case is solved.
With thousands of thriller/mystery/crime novels and novelists, we will never run out of interesting stories to share.
Photo Credits:
Image of Agatha Christie: By Agatha Christie plaque -Torre Abbey.jpg: Violetrigaderivative work: F l a n k e r - Agatha Christie plaque -Torre Abbey.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4841991
Other images are in the Public Domain
Sources for this article:
https://www.epicreads.com/blog/obsessed-with-mysteries-and-thrillers/