“I’m a man of singularly morbid curiosity.”
“Something we have in common.”

—Tom Mead in Cabaret Macabre

I tiptoe around conflict, loathe my country’s predisposition to violence, wince at the evening news. And at bedtime, to relax? I curl up with a British murder mystery or watch a Parisian homicide detective solve a murder. Always, a murder.

Killing another human being is the ultimate antisocial act, the heaviest crime, the most grievous sin. Murder yanks an individual’s goodness out of the world, cancels their future, and crushes anyone who loved or needed them. So why am I relaxing with it? That is the real mystery.

Setting out to explore, I realize halfway in that the question is inane. Why are any of us drawn to twisted or ironic amusements? And if my answer is dark, why would I want to document it?

Still, now that I am looking at my predilection straight on, it unsettles me.

1.

Remember, as a kid, circling all the objects hidden in the Seek and Find? Humans are drawn to hunt, identify, and connect missing information. See? I can rationalize my recreation. After all, that is what murder mysteries do: rationalize aberration. Not by preaching, but by dangling bits of information one at a time, inviting us to join a chase that moves as our minds do, from messy confusion and upset to order.

A good mystery surprises and teases like a courtesan. Just one more clue, we think breathlessly, and the case will be solved. The artificially induced stress, so much cozier than our own angst, will be relieved, and the rush of endorphins will leave us satisfied at last.

But why not just do crosswords? Why do I repeat, night after night, an act that ought to make me recoil? I dread that innocuous question, “What are you reading?” The titles atop my nightstand sound at once frivolous and ghoulish. And this is what I enjoy?

Elisa Gabbert sees fear as “an oddly attractive force,” and an especially modern one. She quotes No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock: “The ambiguous satisfactions of scariness have been cultivated more intensely during this [twentieth] century than ever before.” This, says Gabbert, is because we are too comfortable. We hunt at grocery stores and cross the land in air-conditioned cars, yet our bodies expect danger around every corner. “Too much safety and comfort feels wrong, so we go looking for some simulated threat.”

So every night I am feeding a stand-in for a saber-toothed tiger? Slant it another way: perhaps I am calming myself. Real death is horrific. The sight of a corpse stays in one’s bones forever. Make it a mystery, though, and intrigue pushes the horror aside. You can think about death (as we all do, every day, one way or another) without rushing to wall it off or hide it under a euphemism. For the detective, death is one more fact of life. The horror lies not in its reality but in whatever cruelty, injustice, and lawlessness ruptured the social order to cause this particular death.

During the COVID shutdown, Tana French “was popping Agatha Christies like Smarties,” and her bookseller could not keep them in stock. “We need to believe that sometimes things can fit together and make sense, even when that seems impossible,” she wrote later. But there is another kind of mystery, she added. The wild one. Questions are left unanswered, killers escape, the investigation creates more chaos rather than less. “In wild mysteries, order isn’t restored, because order isn’t the point. Truth isn’t objective and solid; it’s dark, slippery, double-edged. Good can’t be neatly separated from evil.”

These are the mysteries I read when I feel strong enough. They sneak big questions about justice, human nature, danger, and morality into the story. They ask, What are we capable of? How much of who we are is bred in the bone, and how much is circumstantial? How do we respond when life drags us into the shadowy underworld, crushes our illusions, threatens our safety, or steals our comfort?

Better to ask from the safety of the bedcovers, where a stranger’s death reminds me I am safe and lucky, and can reach across the comforter and grab my husband’s hand.

2.

T.S. Eliot’s love of detective stories maddened Edmund Wilson, a venerated literary critic whose own wife, Mary McCarthy, loved them too. Watching her swap favorites with Vladimir Nabokov, Wilson informed them that he had outgrown detective stories at age twelve. Now here was the icy formalist genius Tom Eliot, sliding an allusion to The Hound of the Baskervilles into Four Quartets. (“On the edge of a grimpen” is a wink at Grimpen Mire.)

And you, what about you? Maybe you have listened to My Favorite Murder or the first season of Serial, watched Slow Horses or Murder in the Building or Criminal Minds, or read James Lee Burke, P.D. James, Louise Penny, or Michael Connelly. Crime fiction and murder mysteries are devoured by 47 percent of us readers. They are the second best-selling genre of audiobooks, and they recently ranked second in the most profitable book titles on Amazon U.S. Add the intense popularity of true crime, and quite a lot of us are amusing ourselves with others’ deaths.

Olivia Rutigliano is an editor for LitHub and CrimeReads, and she is wicked smart, with a Ph.D. in English literature that focused on detectives of the nineteenth century. Detectives are, after all, a lot like academics: they do a close read of the materials, search for evidence, and try to draw a conclusion. But instead of hunting down dry, arcane facts, they are uncovering passion, greed, old secrets, and deep fears. Oedipus Rex is a murder mystery; so are many of Shakespeare’s plays. But Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins gave these tales their modern form.

I ask Rutigliano to whisk me through the genre’s evolution. First, though, I need her to solve a puzzle: why does Sherlock Holmes, a cranky and insufferable addict, have such sticking power, even with stuffy T.S. Eliot?

“Because Conan Doyle never much liked Holmes,” she answers instantly. Rather than bother to create a consistent personality, the author loaded his hero with nearly every trope that would follow. A cerebral armchair detective who craved physical adventure, he was flawed (opium addiction), lovelorn (Irene Adler), and lonely (today we would say socially awkward), but with a loyal sidekick (Watson), a quirky hobby (disguise), and a proficiency in whatever the plot required: anthropology, botany, forensics, chemistry….

No one will ever supplant Sherlock Holmes. But glamorous, lighthearted mysteries did nudge him aside, swinging readers through the Depression. Then people grew weary of black tie, champagne, and yappy terriers. Life was messier than that, morality and mortality more problematic. They had read Freud.

The Maltese Falcon hardened its side of the genre, streaking noir with rough heroes we worshipped as much for their vice as their virtue. But when World War II shattered nerves and shredded illusions, readers turned to the Golden Age mysteries. These tales were genteel and civilized, with tidy corpses too stylized to mourn. Often the plot unfolded within the tight confines of a country house. The murder was detected by clever, well-heeled men (or sharpish elderly ladies) who led comfortable, uncomplicated lives. The flourished reveal at the end ensured closure, order, and perfect justice.

When morality itself began to pall, rule-breaking American detectives returned, chased by their nemesis, the methodical police procedural. In the seventies, a worried nation, no longer sure it could trust established institutions, became obsessed with “serial killers,” a new term Anglicized from the German by an FBI profiler. And in the eighties, mystery writers began to grapple with social issues, connecting private aberration to systemic evil.

(Shutterstock)

3.

I have wangled an assignment to interview the celebrated Scottish crime writer Val McDermid at Bouchercon, the largest mystery and crime fiction convention in the world. We find a quiet corner of the hotel lobby, and I stumble through questions, desperate to sound smart. To my relief, a really tall, very bald guy approaches and starts to tease her. Oh my God, it’s Harlan Coben, I think. I, who never stuck up posters of rock stars or oohed over celebs, have found my people.

I will hang with these two through the awards ceremony, latching on like a geeky high schooler while they smoke and crack wise in the back of the room. But for now, I need to know about the gritty “Tartan Noir” that McDermid is credited with pioneering.

“Labels are for jam,” she retorts. “Writers like myself and Ian Rankin started writing crime fiction because it was clear that the crime novel had become the novel of social commentary. You’ve got a chance to write a big sweep of society into your book.”

She talks about class, race, and various types of power, various injustices and inequities. She seems happy to linger over the conversation, and I think I understand why. Waiting to pounce are clutches of excited fifty-plus women who look like the worst thing they ever did was scorch their husband’s eggs. Young women are said to be interested in crime because they worry about becoming its victim, but these women seem more bored than worried. Empty nested, they need people to puzzle over without being responsible for fixing them.

“Why do people read crime fiction?” I ask.

“Because they want to understand what goes wrong in people’s lives,” she says, making the answer sound as obvious as rain. “There’s also an element of consolation,” she adds, “because as bad as it gets, there’s a hero who comes along and makes it better.”

Is that all I want—somebody to rescue me? I thought that was for romance novels. Walter Mosley puts the motive more palatably: “Fiction, better than reality, gives us heroes who can’t let us down, who cannot be arrested, convicted, or vilified.” Easy Rawlins is not going to abandon the case halfway through; nor will you discover that he is a child molester. He is committed to truth and justice, and you can trust him not to let you down.

Mosley also points out that in the contemporary United States, people feel extraordinarily vulnerable, distrustful, isolated, anonymous, and small. We need reassurance, forgiveness for our own secrets, and someone to blame for all that frightens us. We use crime fiction, he suggests, “to cleanse the modern world from our souls.”

4.

Inside the Mysterious Bookshop, tucked into New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, stripes of colorful book spines glow in golden light. Founded by book editor Otto Penzler in 1979, this is the oldest and largest shop of its kind in the world, its laddered shelves crammed with mystery novels that hold the zeitgeist of their era.

The manager, Ryan Lee Gilbert, is my vindication: gentle and civilized, he has been reading crime fiction and mysteries exclusively for two decades. Like me, he does not try to figure them out. “I’m not necessarily looking for answers,” he says, “but I crave seeing that somebody is figuring it out.” He pauses. “When people feel that much of the world—or their country—is out of control, a murder mystery is meant to restore order.” In this country, he adds, the craving might be even stronger, because our culture is so saturated with violence. We need good to prevail.

When I ask what the latest trends are, he says that locked-room mysteries are back (that need to solve), as are winks at Holmes or (thank you, Kenneth Branagh) Hercules Poirot. Noir is back, too—with a vengeance. Rural noir, Midwestern noir, Appalachian noir—settings that once made publishers wince.

To me, this trend feels like politicized ruins porn, turning an opioid-crazed heartland into something exotic, tragic, beautiful in its peculiar and insular way, and needing to be explained to the “coastal elites.” Nonetheless, all this flyover noir paints a truer picture, deliberately tarnishing the Golden Age’s sleek, stylized set pieces.

“I can sometimes become detached from books that are so polished,” Gilbert says, “because I don’t quite buy the stakes. In these grittier mysteries, people are afraid of something that could actually happen to themselves or someone they know.”

We are drawn to what can hurt us. Are we learning how to survive it or just succumbing to a spell? Either way, crime fiction can be cathartic, recreating the upset with a tidier, fairer ending. “I had a pretty chaotic childhood,” Gilbert confides, “so a mystery’s organization and order appeal. I like chaos to be reined in.” He grins. “I also like the emotional and mental roller coaster.”

Twists, surprises, brick walls, epiphanies—I get it. Critics call the genre formulaic, which is fair. But well-wrought crime fiction plays us brilliantly, tickling our brains and triggering sympathetic adrenaline. Its effects have been compared to those of cocaine and amphetamines. Neurologist Jaak Panksepp explains the “seeking system” with which we forage, explore, and connect, and how it rewards our brains with extra energy and a narrowed, intense, excited attention.

Bits of our psyche are always rattling around, not yet in their proper place, notes psychologist Les Lancaster. They act as “little openings to the unconscious,” the ultimate mystery. We think we are hunting for clues when in fact we are hunting for salience, glomming onto significance and meaning. Solving the puzzle, we solve our own life in the process.

5.

“At least tell me domestic noir is over,” I beg. “I am so tired of wondering if my husband is trying to kill me.”

No one can oblige. Such plots, with women being manipulated or threatened in their own homes, surge at times of national debate over women’s rights. “As soon as the misogynists reappear on the political stage,” Rutigliano remarks, “the writerly impulse is to point out that misogyny is always lying in wait, even in familiar ‘safe’ spaces, and patriarchy is never really gone.”

It is the girl who is gone. Killed, scarred, gaslit. And why, in the spate of titles that followed Gone Girl, was she never a woman? The Girl on the Train; Girl, Forgotten; Dangerous Girls; Girl, Alone; Girl, Taken; Girl, Stolen…. “‘Woman’ reckons with a different realm of power,” Rutigliano points out. “Women have knowledge. Girls are innocent victims who have to acquire knowledge—or they will die.”

I shudder and change the subject. What do other trends reveal? Time-honored plots, like heists or horror stories, are being rewritten by writers of color in ways that raise questions of racism, inequity, hatred, and reparations. “They are modeling different ways for our culture to negotiate important questions,” Rutigliano says. Meanwhile, every other mystery seems to be about Hollywood movie- making: “The faux narrative about cancel culture suggests that #MeToo is more about getting attention and enacting petty attempts at justice. These books are not allowing that narrative. They’re refusing to let us forget the important work that #MeToo did.”

What about all those supernatural and paranormal mysteries? Again, she sees a political connection:

“For many people, Donald Trump’s meteoric rise appears almost Faustian. I think people are

turning to the supernatural because that’s what it feels like living in America today.” This is true on both sides, I realize. All of us believe ourselves confronted with dark and destructive forces we are powerless to stop.

6.

A veteran homicide detective, now a police chief and head of the major case squad, is teaching young officers how to elicit confessions “by imagining your suspect’s world. You adjust your body rhythms to his, adjust the rate and tone of your speech, even your breathing and eye blinks. You focus on his priorities.” The chief lays out the facts of an especially disturbing case, then lets his gaze sweep the room. “All you macho policemen: if you can understand why this man is sexually attracted to these babies, difficult as that is, you are going to have much more success.”

Unobtrusive in the back row, I nod. In my favorite scenes, some hypersensitive, brilliant investigator goes into a trance state, imagining themselves into the perpetrator’s reality. Empathy that dark takes courage. And I have never loved a mystery that lacked it. But I save my own empathy not for the bereaved (too sad) or the killer (too creepy) but for the victim whose life we must understand and the detective who forges ahead, heedless of danger.

That sense of sacrifice and purpose is another piece of the puzzle. In a time of disillusioned slackers and quiet quitters, I love seeing someone show up at the crime scene in black tie because they were summoned from the opera. Or interrupt their vacation or leave a family reunion or a first date. Their low-voiced urgency—body half-turned away from their companions as they promise, “I’ll be right there”—is heroic. And it makes a welcome counterpoint to consumer culture’s constant urging of “me-time.” They are doing something that matters more than pleasure.

Even if you subtract both purpose and empathy, you still have curiosity. Which might kill cats, but tends to lengthen the lives of humans. Look at the super-agers. (God, what a label—must we make everything a cartoon?) They are, without fail, engaged in the world and interested in the unknown. They refuse to withdraw into boring, shrunken private confines. Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso—all curious to the bitter end.

Curiosity anticipates a reward and is willing to earn it. In Latin, curiositas is the desire to know, but it traces to curiosus, which has connotations of careful diligence, and cura, which means care. So, a care- full search for the truth, common to most professions but, in the entertainment of murder, allowed to be idle. For the poet Philip Lawton, idle curiosity is “a physical addiction, perhaps the only harmless one. Making connections—seeing how ideas overlap, recognizing how facts touch one another, sensing, in the end, that everything is of a piece—releases serotonin, produces a chemical reward that never grows old.”

What about morbid curiosity, asks a small voice inside me. Lots of us brake to gawk at a car crash, breathlessly track along during a helicopter chase for a killer, or click on video to watch terrorists behead a journalist, I remind myself. Surely we are not prepping for our own imminent disaster. Is the schadenfreude a way to interrupt the thrum of constant uncertainty? Does a murder mystery validate our unspoken fears or sear compassion into our soul?

Morbid curiosity, researchers find, uses the same brain regions as regular curiosity but is associated with negative content. Why would anyone seek out what is dark, disturbing, dangerous, or gruesome? People with morbid curiosity throw around forensic lingo with smug glee, confronting real-life violence with the buffer of acquired expertise. Murder is sufficiently novel and complex to evoke curiosity, stir sensation, cut boredom, and offer vicarious adventure—the sort that can be had in front of a fireplace while a storm rages outside.

I brave one researcher’s quiz. My overall score is 4.13, population average 3.41. It seems I am more curious than average about the paranormal and the minds of dangerous people, less curious than average about violence and bodily injury. But I am, there is no getting around it, morbidly curious.

(Shutterstock)

7.

After years of inhaling mysteries, I thought I might write one. Happy to stall, I spent weeks agonizing over names. Was my detective a Tom or a Liam or a Desloge, an old-money family name his friends would shorten to Des? What I should have been thinking about was how to create suspense—I, who insist on giving people I love their birthday present the minute I wrap it because I cannot bear to wait. Even now, there is no suspense: you already know I will not discover that I love mysteries because I am a sociopath, because a sociopath would not tackle the question.

The suspense in a murder mystery starts with someone’s burning desire to kill. Who did I (um, my villain) want to kill, and why, and how? My mind was blank. Subtler forms of vengeance appealed to me. But I could barely stand to think of yanking a fish—bloodied, wriggling, and shimmery— from the water, let alone murdering a human.

I wound up polling close friends, who alarmed me by having readymade murder scenarios, complete with modus operandi, for exes, former bosses or coworkers, cranky neighbors….

In the end, I came up with something contrived and convoluted. Then I read a stack of how-to-write-a-mystery books. All insisted that the murder had to happen fast—scene one fast, with no gentle preamble. Readers would not wait for the spilling of blood. (This did strike me as morbid. Also very American.) Better advice was to create a flawed hero and a partially redeemed or redeemable villain. “Dirty her up a bit,” a writer friend suggested when she saw that my revised detective was now (write what you know) a female journalist. “Make her divorced, maybe a little bitter.” Dragging my feet like a kid instructed to trash his ragged old teddy bear, I complied. But this loss of innocence was insufficient. Next, she had to be broken, struggling with her own life as well as the crime. My mind tossed through flaws like a bargain hunter at a rummage-sale, but all had been worn thin: alcoholic, addict, bipolar, autistic, incapable of relationships, having trouble with a wayward child, broke, rebellious, grieving, talking to a ghost, suffering chronic pain, deaf, scarred by rape or abuse, using a wheelchair, fighting her own criminal proclivities….

Once I flawed her and broke her, I was to make her miserable, then ratchet up the misery. Here are notes I saved:

Put pressure on hero by taking away something she needs. Heightened impact if this causes her to be injured Danger isn’t only physical—losing family friends love mind even soul!

Insert a ticking clock—solve fast or something terrible will happen. Make the conflict as deep and bad as it can possibly be.

Success must be nearly impossible, and the pressure enormous. The protagonist should be almost at the breaking point by the time the final confrontation with the antagonist occurs.

Let the reader know what hero fears most. Make sure that in final confrontation she has to face that fear and overcome it.

Kill someone close to her, so the reader realizes that no one is invulnerable.

Hell, why not just kill her? I recoiled from these instructions and the world view they implied. Why was it not enough to like a character and watch them try to solve a mystery? I understand the need for sympathy and suspense, and it is lovely to see an honest jumble of diverse characters and to be reminded that heroism coexists with struggle and disability. But just how high can we ratchet?

On CrimeReads.com, a “fast-paced and gripping thriller” filled with “choking smoke” is described as “a perfect beach read.” Choke on smoke while turquoise waves lap your toes. Other books in the same list are praised as “trenchant, terrifying fun” or “viscerally and metaphysically repulsive.” Stats on the uptick in thrillers (especially psychological thrillers, ascendant since the nineties) make me wonder what we are all doing to ourselves. Are these books and shows like video games, dulling our moral sensibility and making us indifferent to death? Nah. I slide past the gore and skim the chapters inside the criminal’s mind, preferring to analyze its workings from the detective’s distance.

Thrillers activate fear, which happens to be the dominant emotion of our current sociopolitical landscape. Keep on at this rate, and we will burn up our psyches.

8.

At last, my chance: a real-life murder mystery a block from home, waiting to be reported. I settle onto a bench and open my notebook. The prosecutor wheels a white, two-story structure that looks like a giant dollhouse into the courtroom. It would be such fun for a kid to play with—if two sweet- faced little boys had not been strangled, by their father, in the house it represents. A queasy heat suffuses me, then a chill and leaves me clammy and faint. While I am reminding myself to take deep breaths, the notebook slides off my lap.

Real life is nothing like a plot puzzle. I barely make it through the week-long trial and all the attendant interviews. Yet I make no change in my leisure habits, and I continue to react to news of some grisly murder with practiced interest rather than horror. I know what questions to wonder about, what forensics might reveal. Fiction has made me less shockable.

“I think we’ve all got murder in us,” McDermid remarked during our interview, her Scottish burr making the “murrrder” even more ominous. No doubt this is true, and admitting it feels brave. But if you are (relatively) sane, you need an awfully good reason. Greed strikes me as too banal, profit too flat and stale a motive. And jealousy? Just leave the asshole. Most motives leave me cold, even though I relax by conjuring them in others.

Rutigliano is bemused by her grandmother, who cannot sleep unless she watches Dateline. I think I understand. Murder is entirely absorbing. The suspense pulls and holds your attention, and the rest of the world drops away. All the day’s fussy little worries vanish, because death is inherently, primally compelling. Not because you, too, want to kill, but because you want the killer caught. The death of a stranger becomes a receptacle for private, unacknowledged angst.

Also, a reminder of our vulnerability. Which probably does explain the explosion of interest in true crime, which is mainly created and consumed by women. Sally Cline, author of After Agatha: Women Write Crime, notes the paradox: women “who spend much of their real lives being terrorized by and afraid of male violence are nevertheless drawn to stories that luridly and frighteningly bring those fears to life.”

Maybe we are, the stock explanation, learning to protect ourselves. But maybe, too, we are angry. These crimes will no longer be ignored. We want our constant need for vigilance explained and removed. Get the bastards. Let us breathe easy, for the first time in history, and move freely through the world.

9.

 I can see myself now: the little old lady in sponge curlers who was watching from her window all evening on the night in question. I will serve scones to the homicide detective and peck at him with questions and theories…. Oh, God. How do I head this off? Some real-life violence would kill the fascination, but the price is too high. Should I give up murder mysteries instead? I experiment, hoping to transfer the pleasure to something that does not involve an autopsy. A clever art heist will do, I find, or a medical or literary mystery, as long as the research is juicy with human character.

Scams and cons are exploding in popularity (see: Ripley) because we are painfully aware of the fakery now possible. Yet they fail to interest me. Nor do I want to hang out with thugs: crude violence is boring. I like my murders complex and the motives flowing from relationships, not drug cartels or real estate shenanigans. Only then do distractions fall away. Murder shivers your bones, lights up your spine. All that primal adrenaline leftover from the sabre-toothed tigers and now spiking in traffic jams and work meetings? It can channel into this instead.

Somehow I have circled back to arguing for murder mysteries, when the point was to wean myself from them. Sighing, I try cozies and wind up slinging decorative pastel paperbacks across the bedroom. I try the women’s fiction slated for book clubs and want to shake the characters by the shoulders. I try Important nonfiction and fall asleep because there is no story, no clues for the imagination, nothing propelling me toward a climax. Gilbert is right: I need higher stakes.

Espionage, maybe, though I grow unbearably nervous when someone is undercover. Murder just seems to work, a fact I still find disconcerting.

“Don’t you ever worry about why we like this stuff?” I ask Gilbert.

He takes a minute to answer. “This might be a little doe-eyed or naïve,” he says slowly, “but I think people are better-hearted than they give themselves credit for. I think people are good at recognizing evil and can be more courageous than they give themselves credit for. And maybe if they read as many mysteries as I do, they might recognize that in themselves and speak up.”

Practice in compassion, and a rehearsal of courage? Much nicer than feeling like a ghoul.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.