Order From Chaos: MM version

A guest post from an avid reader of murder-mystery books. My companion “Order from chaos” on the origin-of-life will be coming up next.

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Order from chaos: The appeal of the murder mystery

Why murder? From the Golden Age mysteries of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey, to the ubiquitous police procedurals on TV today, what is the fascination with homicide investigations? Public libraries today have whole sections just for “Mystery” (most of which are murders). Isn’t the name of the sub-genre of “cozy mysteries” (most of which are murders) an oxymoron?

One possible answer is that murder comes with an air of finality, a kind of certainty in an uncertain world. A tragedy has occurred; a person’s life has been ended. And yet, in the investigation, life goes on. Not for the victim, maybe, but for those around them. There is life after death. The detective and his team encounter a mass of relevant and irrelevant information. They tease out the complex web of relationships. Slowly, they sift through the debris of life and personalities, and zero in on facts. They bring these facts in line and use them to establish means, motive and opportunity. The murder investigation makes meaning out of the chaos of life and death—it is an oasis of order in a disorderly world.

That is why it is strangely comforting to observe the tidy trail of interviews of Hercule Poirot, to follow the measured progress of Inspector Parker or Alleyn or Grant or Lewis, to bask in the California sunshine with the team from The Mentalist. All detectives, like Poirot, rely on the “little grey cells”. But whether it is Father Brown, who emphasizes the psychology of the individual, or Chief Inspector Gamache of Quebec, who believes in the emotions, or Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, who dismiss motive and insist on means—“when you know how, you know who” (see “Busman’s Honeymoon”), both the homicide detective and the private agent of inquiry go about their work with reason, method, and deliberation. They ask questions, and they reflect. They (or their underlings) follow leads, take notes, write summaries. They review the evidence. All persons are categorized, all events gathered into a timeline. Everyone is accounted for, everything has its proper place.

The thing that cannot be accounted for, the one who does not fit—that is the clue that breaks the case open. Inconsistency is what the bloodhounds are looking for. That is why the police collect (and try to break) alibis. That is how Father Brown cuts through conundrums. A murder investigation is eminently rational, even if the crime itself is not. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Holmes tells Watson.   

In the murder mystery, all murders are solved, even if not all killers are brought to justice. Donna Leon’s Brunetti often finds that although he may have found the proximate cause—the identity of the killer or the truth behind the murder, the moving force or unseen hand remains elusive, unpunished. The problem of evil and corruption is too pervasive. Still, by the end of the investigation, all motives and movements, jumbled truths, half-truths, and lies, have been sorted out. People’s lives have been put under a microscope, turned inside out—there is no privacy in a murder investigation, says P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh—and made sense of.  

By the end, we know who is guilty and who is innocent (and of what); why he said this or she said that; how someone panicked, who covered for whom, which parts were totally irrelevant. Out of the messiness of daily life, all the comings and goings have been filed, sorted, discarded—everyone’s character has been revealed, the victim has been brought back to life and laid to rest; everything now makes sense. We have lived, for awhile, in an orderly world. We have looked at the consequences of violent death (cf. newer series like Broadchurch and The Killing) and survived. Life is a puzzle, but we have the means to solve it. That is the power of the murder mystery—all wrapped up in a neat package, ready to be examined at your leisure. A way to spend some time in a world that, for once, makes sense.