It seems to be human nature that we want things to make sense. We want things to fall into place. You can call it a sense of gestalt or a sense of closure; whatever it actually is, we seem to want the pieces of things to fit together. That may be a part of the reason that unsolved mysteries and murders capture people’s attention the way they do. Even if there’s an official explanation for something, if there are lingering questions, people want the answers. We certainly see that in real life; there are plenty of unsolved murders that have made the news. We also see that urge to tie up loose ends and get answers in crime fiction.
For example, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is faced with an interesting unsolved mystery in The Musgrave Ritual. In that story, Holmes tells Watson about a very early case – a case brought to him by a university friend Reginald Musgrave. Some odd things had been happening at the Musgrave family home of Hurlstone, and Musgrave wanted answers. His butler Brunton and one of the maids, Rachel Howells, inexplicably disappeared. Nothing in the house was missing, so theft wasn’t the reason for their leaving. The only unusual thing that had happened before the disappearance was that Musgrave had caught Brunton going through some family papers. One of those papers was part of a seemingly meaningless series of questions and answers that was part of a family ritual. There wasn’t any logical explanation for what’s happened and that’s exactly why Musgrave wanted this mystery solved. As Holmes tells Watson, once he saw the questions and answers and visited Hurlstone himself, he was able to put the pieces of this mystery together.
In Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Hercule Poirot gets involved in an interesting case of the murder of a charwoman. On the surface of it, it looks as though the case has been solved. Mrs. McGinty’s unpleasant lodger James Bentley has been arrested for, charged with and convicted of the crime. In fact, he’s due for execution. But Superintendent Spence still has some questions; he thinks Bentley may not be guilty. So he brings the case to Poirot, since he’s now assigned to another case. Certainly neither Spence nor Poirot wants an innocent man to be executed. But it’s also those lingering questions that draw Poirot’s attention. So he travels to the village of Broadhinny, where the victim lived, to find answers. In the course of his investigation, Poirot discovers that Mrs. McGinty’s murder has to do with a set of cases from long ago. In a few of those cases, there was an official explanation for what happened, but there are still some lingering questions and doubts. That thread forms an interesting sub-plot to this novel.
That need for answers and logical explanations is also part of what motivates Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant and Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse when they get into very similar situations. In Tey’s The Daughter of Time, Grant’s in hospital because of a broken leg. In Dexter’s The Wench is Dead, Morse is in hospital because of an ulcer. In each case, the inspector gets interested in an old case. For Grant, a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III of England gets him interested in the old case of the Princes in the Tower. Was the king really the horrible murderer he was made out to be? For Morse, it’s a book about the 1859 discovery of the body of Joanna Franks in one of Oxford’s canals. Two men were found guilty of Franks’ murder and duly hung, but Morse isn’t sure they were guilty. Neither detective is assigned to look for answers, but both have lingering questions and for each detective, the official explanation leaves too many unresolved “loose ends.” That’s a big part of what drives these investigations.
Lingering questions and the need to find answers are also motivators for Stephanie Anderson in Paddy Richardson’s Hunting Blind. Anderson is a fledgling psychiatrist who’s haunted by the seventeen-year-old disappearance of her little sister Gemma. Gemma Anderson vanished one day when the Anderson family was at a school picnic at a local lake. The police made a thorough investigation and everyone searched diligently, but Gemma was never found; her body wasn’t even discovered. Finally it was decided that she must have drowned in the lake. But Stephanie Anderson has never really been satisfied with that answer. When one of her patients tells an eerily similar story of a disappearance in her own family, Anderson comes to believe that the same person might have been responsible. So she takes up the case of her sister’s disappearance, despite a lot of family pressure to just let it go.
Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck is also motivated by lingering questions and doubts about a case. In Mercy (AKA The Keeper of Lost Causes), Mørck is recovering from a serious wound and he’s finding it difficult to get back to work. In fact, he’s so difficult to work with that he’s moved to a new department, Department Q, that’s assigned to investigate cases of “special interest.” At first he’s perfectly content to simply do nothing. His interest gets piqued, though, when his assistant Hafez al-Assad calls his attention to the five-year-old disappearance of up-and-coming politician Merete Lynggard. The official explanation for her disappearance is that she drowned in a terrible accident during a ferry ride. But Mørck isn’t satisfied with that explanation; it leaves too many questions unanswered. So he begins to take an interest in the case and starts talking to the people involved. In fact, you could argue that it’s in part those unanswered questions and the fact that this mystery still seems unsolved that slowly pulls Mørck back into daily life.
It’s a fascinating aspect of human nature that we want things to make sense. We want logical explanations for things, and we want answers. That desire motivates at least some of what we do in real life, and it’s a strong theme in crime fiction, too. It’s part of why sleuths investigate even when they’re not assigned to do so and have no personal reasons to ask questions. To me (so feel free to disagree if you do) it’s another example of the way crime fiction can show us what we’re like.
*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from the Moody Blues’ Question.
I agree that we do like things to make sense, and one reason I like crime fiction is that it does tend to end up with more of an explanation than “mainstream, literary” fiction these days, which seems to very commonly go for non-explanations or vaguenesses. I don’t like things to be too neat, but I do like to know the point of what was going on, and if things aren’t explained, to know that there is a way they could be explained that does not involve the supernatural or other unlikely factors.
Maxine – You make such an interesting distinction here between crime fiction and “literary” fiction. Well-written crime fiction tends to offer an explanation for what happens in the story or at least a solid way to understand it. In fact, you’ve pointed out one of my pet peeves in poorly-written crime fiction. I’m not keen on novels where the only explanation for killings is psychopathology, or the only explanation for the sleuth catching the killer is coincidence. That annoys me. Like you, I don’t like things to be perfectly neat; they aren’t in real life. But I’ve never been fond of stories where there’s no point to what the characters say and do.
Margot: In real life crime stories there is often an ambiguous ending because of our legal system’s requirement that guilt be proven beyond reasonable doubt. People may be found not guilty where there is significant evidence of guilt but not to that standard. America’s most recent highly public example was the Casey Anthony case. In crime fiction, unless you are reading the novels of Scott Turow involving Rusty Sabich, mysteries proceed to definite results. Readers get the satisfaction of a clear solution.
Bill – You’re quite right about the “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” requirement. There are so many mentions of that point too. In more than one case I can think of, the police are quite sure of the person who committed a crime, but there’s not enough evidence. Or someone’s been acquitted of a crime because the prosecution couldn’t meet that standard. That issue does indeed lead to ambiguous endings to real-life cases. It happens in crime fiction, too, of course, but I think you have a point that readers prefer a clear solution to a case. Interesting point.
Good points, in a book I;ve recently finished, the prosecution case was thrown out of court because the defence lawyer pointed out that the police had given the accused the English wording of the caution (Miranda to you guys!) whereas the trial was in Scotland. Had a ring of truth about it!
Maxine – Oh, that’s interesting! Both linguistically and legally, it’s definitely got a ring of authenticity that a case wouldn’t go through because of the way the caution was given. I’ll be interested to read your review….
I thought you were going to list the stories that didn’t have a proper ending but this is better. I don’t like mysteries that don’t give the solution to the mystery. Well, not properly anyone.
Cold cases work for me. Like Martin Edwards cold case mysteries.
Clarissa – Thanks; I’m glad you liked the approach this post took. And I agree that mysteries that tell one what really happened are more satisfying (at least for me). Thanks for mentioning Martin Edwards’ novels, too; he does handle the “cold case” element really effectively I think.
I think we read crime fiction because we want a beginning, middle and conclusion of a plot. We want answers. I agree about not accepting supernatural reasons or answers, nor coincidence. Not me either.
In real life the opposite things happen as to the point here. Often innocent people are railroaded to jail because someone is indicted who’s convenient, who’s easy to arrest, try and convict. And jail. Or there are real miscarriages of justice in trials, like when the prosecution doesn’t turn over key evidence to the defense or leaves it locked in a cabinet somewhere and never presents it — as it doesn’t prove their case. Or attorneys are limited in how much investigating they can do for their clients, if they’re public defenders. Much of this has come to light recently with DNA evidence and the Innocent Project. There are frequent revelations of railroaded suspects, even when they’re on death row.
John Grisham has dealt with these issues often. So have other writers of legal mysteries.
Finding out what really happened is a good motivation for an investigation, the best. Mercy sure shows that. A friend who just finished that book said she was up all night with nightmares from reading Mercy, but asked me at the same time, “When is Adler-Olsen’s next book coming out here”?
Kathy – You’re quite right that in real life, plenty of innocent people have been convicted for a lot of reasons. And good legal thrillers address issues such as “railroading” suspects because the suspect’s a convenient scapegoat, or for another reason. That premise can be effective because it’s a logical motivator for the sleuth to have questions about the case. And those kinds of lingering questions can raise the reader’s interest because as you say, we want answers. We want to know “what really happened.”
And in real life, supernatural explanations just don’t work for cases, and neither do too many coincidences. And like you I’m not much for either of those as an explanation in crime fiction, either.
Nor do the “evil” twins who appear mid-book work for me either. Nor do accidents or natural disasters — tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Logic, science, i.e., explanations that make sense with motives, using the tools of intelligence and deductive reasoning helps a lot.
Kathy – Oh, absolutely! Those transparent contrivances really bother me. I’m not saying things like disasters can’t happen; they do. But anything that smacks too much of convenience and not enough of solid detective work makes me wary…