LUCY BURDETTE: If you stop and think about it, writing crime fiction might seem a little weird. Who wants to spend their days writing about murder? And then who wants to read this stuff? Our guest today believes we need murder mysteries more than ever...
JEANNETTE DE BEAUVOIR: Whenever I give a talk—in person in the days before the pandemic, or on videoconferencing since then—I generally deal with the murder and mayhem that permeate my books with a little self-deprecating humor. I’ll say, “Oh, I’m just trying to kill off the population of Provincetown,” or “It would all have been okay if she hadn’t been, you know, dead,” and everybody will laugh, as they do. Most of us see those deaths for what they are—literary devices. Ways to up the ante so the reader keeps on reading, caring about the characters involved, trying to figure out the puzzle.
Cozy mystery authors, on the whole, write about murder that’s very far from reality. That’s natural: we’re the second- and third-generation descendants of Dorothy L. Sayers and G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey. They taught us that murders happen in drawing-rooms, on trains, in vicarages, at tennis matches. Death is accompanied by lavish meals and solved by eccentric spinsters or dilettante lords, and the stories always seem to bring people home in time for tea.
That’s the focus of the cozy mystery: in many ways, the puzzle matters less than the people. Chesterton, one of the genre’s pioneers, was wary of popular mysteries that emphasized a crime’s mechanics, opting instead for the humanity inherent in the crime’s motives. “When I tried to imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done,” says Father Brown, “I realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental conditions. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it.”
And that’s the essence of the change that came with the advent of the cozy mystery: the amateur figures out the crime by approaching human motivation with compassion, empathy, and humility (something you’d never expect of someone like Sherlock Holmes). So we focus on the people, and the crime itself, in many ways, is a rather decent foil for them: a background, a context. My protagonist Sydney Riley stumbles across murders, but solving them always help her change in some way—it helps deepen her faith, her relationships, her appreciation of her home, her performance of her job.
Of course, in real life, murder is a lot less genteel. People kill for the most mundane of reasons—because of a drug deal that went awry, because they found their spouse cheating, because they want to steal what’s in the till. As we’ve seen most recently, people also get killed in the street, with a police officer’s knee on their neck. They die in places and in ways they should never have died.
It’s never ever Professor Plum, in the library, with a candlestick.
I launched my new book—via Zoom—a week ago, just as American cities were on fire and their president was stoking the flames. And part of me wondered what I was doing. Real death felt very close; the two murders I’d invented in a story I’d made up that took place during a film festival that never happened seemed at best redundant and at worst opportunistic.
The truth is there’s a lot of fear and horror out there, out where real death lurks. Murder can happen as quickly and as suddenly and as unfairly as the deaths we read about in the news every day. So why write about imaginary murders? Why read about them?
Here’s what I think. A mystery is set on a continuum; before the story even opens, characters have already been on the journey that culminated in the dead body. We join them on the journey because through skillful writing we care about them, their eccentricities, and their dreams; we go along as the journey continues to its culmination when the murderer is revealed and justice is done.
And especially in these days, who doesn’t want to see justice done?
Studies have shown that fairy tales, even gory ones (and, honestly, which ones aren’t?), are helpful to children’s developing emotional lives: they give children a format allowing them to safely deal with their fears and traumas and be less troubled by them. And perhaps it’s fair to say murder mysteries are our fairy tales. Our world is overwhelmed by wars, violence, and myriad disasters. But murder mysteries give us reassurance by telling us stories that begin with evil events but call forth the efforts of people who rise to sometimes heroic heights to overcome that evil. We love murder mysteries because they are redemptive, they give us hope, and help us move from fear to reassurance.
And—check the news—we need them now more than ever.
How do you feel about reading murder mysteries during these hard times?
Jeannette de Beauvoir didn’t set out to murder anyone—some things are just meant to be! Her mother introduced her to the Golden Age of mystery fiction when she was far too young to be reading it, and she’s kept reading those authors and many like them ever since.
She wrote historical and literary fiction and poetry for years before someone asked her what she read—and she realized mystery was where her heart was. Now working on the Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series, she bumps off a resident or visitor to her hometown on a regular basis.
Jeannette is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the Author’s Guild, and the National Writers Union. Find out more (and read her blog or sign up for her newsletter) at her website. You can also find her on Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, and Goodreads.
The Matinée Murders: It’s time for the Provincetown International Film Festival, and wedding planner Sydney Riley has scored: her inn is to host the wedding of the year. Movie star Brett Falcone is marrying screenwriter Justin Braden, and even Sydney’s over-critical mother is excited about the event. The town is filled with filmmakers, film reviewers, film buffs, and it’s all the inn can do to keep up with the exciting flow of people and events.
And then Sydney opens a forbidden door in the mysterious Whaler’s Wharf, and finds the body of a producer—and a lot more questions than she has answers for. Who strangled the innocuous Caroline Cooper? What dark force followed Brett and Justin from LA? Why is her boss Mike looking behind doors at the inn? And is Mirela really leaving P’town forever? Sydney and her boyfriend Ali need to find the answers fast before Whaler’s Wharf claims another victim.
