As the days get darker and autumn blossoms, book recommendations with a morbid core have become the center of conversation and posts alike–murder mysteries. To many, from content creators to the avid readers, murder mystery novels have become an ironic comfort, something synonymous with the coziness of fall.
Thousands of written murder tragedies have become extremely popular. Crime novels make up over a quarter–26%–of books that are translated. Detective stories (the genre that murder mysteries are most frequently found within) are published at the rate of about four novels a week, on average. Each group of 2,000 fiction novels written within the United States contains nearly 200 detective stories. There is no pleasantness to a topic as terrifying and real as murder, so how did such a category become a pleasure read for so many Americans?
The answer may lie within the category’s exploration of the unanswerable. Untied ends of murder novels leave the reader to grapple with their own desire for justice and their personal views of good and evil. The intensity of an unsolved or unclear murder mystery allows for the line of morality to remain undefined, creating a fascinatingly unique opportunity for internal discussion of human nature and mankind’s capability.
Murder mystery novels take real issues and contain them as something more easily comprehensible, a pocket-sized insight into a world too emotionally overwhelming to work through. Questions raised by murder mysteries on how to cope with imperceivable tragedy or how to survive devastation without closure can be safely worked through behind the veil of fiction before a reader may have to confront an inescapable reality in their own lives. Accepting unknowns may be far less intimidating to learn in a world of fiction for many.
For others, comfort may be found in the closure that fully solved murder mystery novels present.
As one Time article put it, “We need to believe that sometimes things can fit together and make sense, even when that seems impossible; that someday our crisis will end and we’ll be able to leave it behind.”
Murder mysteries can create a safe space to grapple with the insolvable, but sometimes a solution is all that a reader needs. Great satisfaction can be found in the relief that follows the solving of a murder mystery, even a fictional one. Clear resolutions to complex fictional tragedies can help restore a belief in ultimate justice and personal closure, even if it may seem impossible in the life of a recently devastated reader.
Just as these novels create a digestible view of what cannot be solved, it can make solutions to any issue–not necessarily just a tragedy as deeply scarring as a murder–seem within reach and worth pursuit, whether that means the active search for a solution or the resolution to attempt healing.
The often formulaic format of thousands of different modern detective stories becomes cozy in its repetition, pushing the comforting promise of a resolution over the grisly, gory details of murders that were originally associated with the genre. Plots seem simple when all is revealed in the end (and the reader can count on a final reveal) and a sense of dire anxiety is never drawn out longer than the blissful joy of the answer’s pieces snapping together.
The morbidness of mortality has been transformed into a safe place of pages and ink to explore innermost reflections and find peace without answers through the complexities of modern murder mystery novels.
