From Crime Reads:
Yet the detective story has kept its hold; had even, in the two decades between the great wars, become more popular than ever before; and there is, I believe, a deep reason for this. The world during those years was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to avert…
—Edmund Wilson, New Yorker, October 14th 1944
You’re going through a divorce. Your loved one is ill. Your house suffered flood damage. Your dog ate your dress loafer. You are upset, overwhelmed, possibly even in the depths of despair. And what do you do to make yourself feel better?
You pick up a crime novel.
Why? an acquaintance with different tastes might wonder. You might even ask yourself the same question. Why if I’m suffering would I want to read about more suffering? Why if I’m anxious would I read something tense? And if I’m frightened, why would I delve into the minds of terrified people for comfort? Is it insane of me to pick up a crime novel right now?
I’ll answer the last question first: of course you’re picking up a crime novel right now.
In 2017, Nielsen Bookscan reported that crime fiction was for the first time outselling general-literary fiction. As in, simply put…fiction fiction. A single genre had surpassed its entire parent category in dividends. Beemgee estimates that in the western world, 25%-40% of all book sales land in the crime basket depending on region. In 2015, according to Statista, nearly half (47%) of readers copped to having picked up a crime novel in the past year. Not only are you not alone, you’re a member of a vast community composed of every gender, color, and creed, gobbling up nefarious goings-on as if they’re part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast. The motives for this are powerful and based in multiple human urges, none of which need be shameful or even mystifying.
The most self-evident is as follows: it’s comforting to fall into someone else’s story when trapped inside your own. If the wheel of your brain is still spinning, but the hamster has passed out cold and can’t get off because his leg is stuck in the spokes, it’s natural to seek escape from a lousy narrative. And crime fiction is singularly able to hold our attention. High quality mysteries don’t merely guarantee a plot that clickety-clacks right along rather than a navel-gazing arc in which a tubercular bank clerk spends 400 pages debating whether to marry for love or money and then dies before popping the question. Sure, plot is a given, but we’re given so much more. Often, the setting lives and breathes. The dialogue crackles. The characters are vivid. Not only are they vivid, they’re at a crossroads, they’re fighting for something, and nothing draws us in like mingled passion and plot. Some folks might find it soothing to read laundry detergent ingredients, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’d rather go back to Louis Bayard’s first novel Mr. Timothy and read about how Timothy Cratchitt of A Christmas Carol scratched and clawed and succeeded.
Directly connected and equally self-evident: when at our most vulnerable, isn’t it marvelous to know that others have bled and survived, even if they’re imaginary? Alma Rosales, the brawling, cross-dressing, pansexual Pinkerton heroine of Katrina Carrasco’s The Best Bad Things gets the living daylights beat out of her often enough to suggest she likes it (she likes it at least a wee bit). But she thrives nevertheless, and we get to thrive with her as we navigate her pages. One of the wisest things ever said to me was that if there is such a thing as vicarious suffering—and there absolutely is, for everyone except your friendly neighborhood sociopath—then vicarious resilience exists too. Vicarious resilience is a grand and a glorious thing; for the price of a hardcover, e-book, used paperback, audiobook, whatever your fancy, you can follow the career of a detective or police officer or lawyer or grandmotherly cottage dweller as they follow scarlet skeins to inevitable conclusions.
Link to the rest at Crime Reads
PG will note that Mrs. PG’s latest murder mysteries are selling quite well.
I have a different take, PG. I think it’s because the problems in books can be solved (more or less). They are problems ultimately under control (e.g., mystery solved).
Unlike our real world problems in times of stress. It’s like playing games instead of doing work — taking care of little problems you can fix instead of big ones you can’t (or can only with difficulty), to get some sort of jolt of effectiveness.
Good points, Karen.
The classic murder mystery includes a substantial disruption of the characters’ world – the murder.
Then, by various means, the sleuth pieces together bits of evidence and identifies the criminal near the end of the book. Mistakes, back-tracking, wrong conclusions may be included during the investigation, but the reader feels emotional satisfaction knowing that justice will prevail in the end.