I have a confession: I love mystery and crime. Fiction, I mean; all too often true crime is a squalid and brutal business.

My daughter loves true crime and is about to start her studies in criminology and psychology at Swansea University, but for me, I prefer my crime made up.

There are all sorts of crime books, and most of them feature murder. There are romantic mysteries, cosy crimes and police procedurals. There are psychological thrillers, crime stories set in the future and in the past, and those intended for a specific audience, say those of us who are of a “certain age”. There is a huge market for crime.

Crime as a genre is relatively new, less than two hundred years old. The first modern detective story is generally considered to be The Murders in the Rue Morgue, by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1841, in which the murders of two women are puzzling the police. The brilliant and eccentric detective, Monsieur C August Dupin, steps in and solves the case. The first English detective novel is Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1868, although no murder occurs in it. The first classic murder story is A Study in Scarlet (1887), in which we first meet Sherlock Homes, surely the most famous of all detectives, although Hercule Poirot must run a close second.

Crime transfers well to film and TV. Agatha Christie has perhaps the most films and TV adaptations to her credit – even when these adaptations appear to have little resemblance to the original story. I particularly hated the version of The Body in the Library where the identity of the murderer was changed. That didn’t seem to play fair for me.

Why do we love crime fiction so much?

I think it’s partly the puzzle. We enjoy spotting the murderer before the big reveal. Partly it’s the warm feeling we get when right and justice prevail, even if it’s only in fiction. Sometimes, in a series, it’s the ongoing characters. We love Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Jack Reacher and Eve Dallas. Even people who despise crime fiction have at least heard of Inspector Morse.

I think, for me, it is Right winning through and the puzzle. In real life, the murderer is usually obvious – and it’s often the wife or the husband, or a terrorist, or a failure of the mental health system that allows people known to be dangerous out on the streets, where they are a tragedy waiting to happen. We still don’t know why that young man killed three children in Stockport, but his identity was never a mystery to the police. Murderers in real life are seldom as clever as in fiction, and the reasons for the crimes are usually more sordid or make less sense than in books.

Most of all, I think books, and crime fiction in particular, take us out of the real world, with its problems and sadness and into a world where justice is always served, and a satisfying ending is guaranteed.

Mary

A Moodscope member