And how mysteries can be a force on breaking pre conceived ideas of people and their deeds.
Agatha Christie, Sidney Sheldon, John Le Carré, they have been taking people's minds in journeys of curiosity for decades and it always baffled me. What is it with humans and mystery?
As a teenager and young adult I didn't really pay close attention to mystery novels. My belief is that they seemed too difficult to a mind that had already too many hormones and daily drama to deal with. But as I got older and the urges subsided, I grew to enjoy them, starting off with the basic thrillers such as Silence of the Lambs and working my way up to more complex, but nonetheless exciting, stories. And the idea of a mystery novel being like a puzzle that needs solving, and the fact the author is inviting you to do it with him is what got me to love them. But after a while, just reading the same structure gets a little dull, because, if you think about, the idea behind a mystery is simple. Something usually happens, someone is missing or something disappears, the main character (or main characters) are supposed to find the perpetrator and return the missing item. Sounds simple enough. So simple, in fact, that classic mysteries became a bit dull.
Men have, in the past, been the majority of authors of mysteries. The idea of the detective that solves murders and rescues women from the hands of creepy abductors has an obvious appeal to its target audience. And some male authors with established audiences keep repeating this recipe over and over, and hey, if it ain't broken... But personally, I have seen a shift in tone of basic plot and characters of a mystery who now must be appealing to an audience who, in the past, had been overlooked, and maybe, that's why we have a surge of new true crime shows, mystery novels with brilliantly written women as main characters (thank you Gillian Flynn), and an increase of 16% in audience to mystery shows in general.
"The success Gone Girl had was not due to women's desire of revenge, but a story that exposes women's as complex characters, not just of damsels in distress."
Women are reading these stories and they want to see themselves in them, not just as victims. And not just that, according to Amanda Vicary, a crime psychology expert who conducted a study on viewers of true crime shows on streaming platforms, women are much more likely to overpower their discomfort and continue on with their watching (or reading) than men, so that is not an audience you want to subjugate in your stories. Hell, why not a woman as a perpetrator? The success Gone Girl had was not due to women's desire of revenge, but a story that exposes women's as complex characters, not just of damsels in distress.
Long Bright River is this week's book musing and a perfect example of this modern, complex story that bring women front and center as both detective and victim (because, life), and depicts women as they are: flawed, bruised and resilient human beings. This is not a typical american suburban girl missing, someone who was probably abducted against her will leading the tragedy to unfold just as loudly within the precinct in charge of finding her and the media. No. The woman missing in a story is someone who had a rough childhood and had been scared in life at an early age. She was a prostitute at the time of her disappearance and her sister seems to be the only one who believes she is gone, so obviously, she is the only one looking to find her. She is not even a detective, but a patrol officer who manages to look for her missing sister in between shifts and taking care of her son, as a single parent. No, her boss (who obviously under-appreciates her for being a woman alone) does not stop the whole department and gives her complete card-blanche to look for her sister and her abductor (sound familiar, Jo Nesbo?). The woman missing is one in thousands of prostitutes who disappear in that area of Philadelphia, the city that also plays a part in the story, and, just as it happens in reality, aside from family, no one really goes out of their way to look for them.
The brilliancy of stories like this, aside from beautifully written characters, is the intricate details that fit together in a puzzle like way. The backdrop for the disappearance, the story of the sisters, how one became a prostute and the other becomes a cop, those are all clues in helping find her, and just as interesting to read as the search for her. As I said in the beginning, great mystery novels need to fit perfectly, without stretching reality, which some authors like to do sometimes (Dan Brown, I'm looking at you). I'm not diminishing the fantastic mystery genre, but truth be told, they can be extremely exhausting. To make the last piece of the puzzle fit you must hammer the unfitting piece in, that feels like an insult to the reader's intelligence, robbing her or him the chance to figure the ending out. And still, the best mystery novels, just like Long Bright River, are the ones with spins you can't see coming. Story spins grounded in reality, that catch you by surprise? Sign me up.
And that is the cherry on top of novels like this. These endings play with our pre-conceived ideas to finish off with an amazing tone. I remember with Gone Girl, the fact she was still alive only worked because the author knew I had spent half the book certain her pathetic husband had killed her, one way or another, directly or indirectly, by negligencing their marriage or what not. Never in a million years I would had thought she had planned the whole thing, and so brilliantly as she did, which also bothered me because it hadn't crossed my mind the well brought up New Yorker had it in her. Another prejudice. And as these new versions of mystery started hitting bookshelves and I kept devouring them, my mind began to train to expect the unexpected, so much so that while watching Nicole Kidman's new show on HBO, the Undoing, I trully believed the ending would tell me she had some part in the murder of her husband's mistress. Hell, even her teenage son could have done, she actually points in all those directions throughout the episodes. And what a disappointed it was to find out that no, she was just the victim and it was the story about a white rich man being an entitled asshole all along. It felt like a waste of my brain's capacity, I won't deny it, but it serves to show how much a trained brain can start looking for clues.
What mystery books, movies and shows can do for their audience in 2021 is alter all notions of what we think we know about people, and add to our mind hard drives the actual reality of people, who are diverse and multi-faceted and smash prejudice and pre conceived notions of who is capable of atrocities when pushed enough in the wrong direction. it is a chance to see us women in positions different than the ones that men try to force on us on daily bases and an opportunity to go to sleep with a sense of justice within. Long Bright River did all those things. A must read.
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