The Mystery Engine

This week, I've been reading my first Agatha Christie novel: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I've read a few mystery novels before, and I've never really liked them. I either guess the murderer way too early, which leaves me bored and impatient, or I'm completely lost and confused and I just want the author to tell me who did it already.

But Christie is different. Despite the shortness of her novels, her characters are astonishingly complex and surprising and funny, and she colors them richly with just a few deft strokes of very British humor. She also doesn't write straight up "whodunnits," as far as I can tell. What propels the reader through the book isn't solving the mystery, it's figuring out what each character is hiding--it's discovering what each person wants, who each person really is, and what he or she believes that they must hide from the world. It makes for fascinating reading.

I suspect that writers of bad mystery novels tend to think the wrong way about the mystery genre: people don't really care about crime or culpability. Instead, I think that we all care unfailingly about people, the complexities of the human mind and human motivations. As in all literature, people and their personalities, our neighbors and their passions and secrets, are the engines of mystery novels, not the mystery itself.