Readers love mysteries and writers who satisfy that desire can achieve recognition, praise and even, very occasionally, financial success.
But is it possible for writers to write mysteries that have real characters? By this I mean real characters who happen to be truth seekers, victims, policemen, detectives, suspects, criminals and love interests-not cardboard characters who are entirely defined by their role in the mystery? And a similar question for mainstream or literary writers would be: is it possible to give their novels the tension and narrative drive of mysteries, without sacrificing literary quality and depth?
The best writers of mysteries have solved this problem in two ways. First, by grounding their stories in settings that are overpoweringly real-a gritty city neighborhood, a rural community, a hospital, a foreign country. And second, by getting deeply into the heads of their main characters, whether these are detectives or ordinary citizens or people who perpetuate monstrous crimes. I think of classic authors like Simenon or Ross Macdonald, and contemporary authors like P.D. James or Martin Cruz Smith as examples of writers of mysteries who transcend their genre through the alchemy of setting and character.
For me all writing starts with place, story and protagonist, and that holds true whether the novel is deemed a mystery or literary fiction. And the most believable protagonists are those who are incomplete because they need to find the truth, either about themselves or those around them, or those who preceded them.
This quest must be apparent early in the book, and its resolution must come late in the book. Why? Because a good novel draws readers into the story, creates a world unto itself, peoples it with characters who are struggling, and maintains and heightens the tension of the unanswered question. If the quest, the struggle, ends too soon, the reader loses interest, no matter how brilliant the write paper for me.
The disappearance of a child, the theft of the diamonds, the identity of the unknown corpse, the murder of a seemingly innocent victim, the reason a father killed himself, are fertile ground for mysteries. But so are they fertile ground for literary fiction that involves a protagonist and a quest. The tension of the story derives from the quest for the answer, and the deeply felt need of the seeker of that answer. And this is true whether the seeker is the chief of detectives or the parent wrestling with the disappearance of a child.
Of course not all great literary fiction has an overt mystery at its core--but for sure it has an unanswered question and a character tearing himself or herself up to find the answer. Take such diverse writers as Trollope, Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Foer. Whether the book is Can You Forgive Her (Trollope), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Power and the Glory (Greene), Middlesex (Eugenides) or Everything is Illuminated (Foer), at the core is a quest--a mystery, if you will--and a character seeking to complete himself or herself by solving that mystery.
For me, then, to be a writer of mysteries is to be an observer of life, someone who portrays, in depth, real human beings struggling with all the unknowns that prevent them from achieving fulfillment or peace. The true writer of mysteries helps us understand the human condition-and tells a whale of a story in the process.
