Two Ancient Mysteries

"The Mystery Story" or "Tale of Detection" is a somewhat modern idea, and most fans and some scholars credit Edgar Allen Poe with its genesis. But mysteries go back to -- hmm - Genesis, with a crime and missing persons case in the Garden, and a sibling murder case in Genesis chapter 4 where God interrogates the surly chief suspect who is uncooperative.

OK, that's somewhat facetious. But there are two stories of mysteries being solved by a smart investigator in the "Apocrypha," books of the Bible accepted as authoritative by some groups and not others, but still instructive. I'm talking about two brief additions to the Book of Daniel called "Susanna and the Two Elders" and "Bel and the Dragon." "Susanna" is a courtroom drama and "Bel" is a locked room mystery, each featuring the young Daniel as the solver of a puzzle. The stories date to around 150 BC.

In "Susanna," the graceful and beautiful wife of a wealthy man bathes in the family's walled outdoor garden on one hot day and sends her maidservants to fetch aromatic soaps. Once they leave, two corrupt judges (known for freeing the guilty, and who have had their lustful eye on her for a while) emerge from their voyeurs hiding spot and demand certain favors. If she refuses, they warn, they'll say they showed up in time to catch her with a young guy who got away 'and that's why you sent away the servants.' Such adulterous behavior has a death penalty. Susanna virtuously refuses and is dragged before an assembly for a trial. The elders' testimony is enough to convict her and she is led off to be executed. "Not so fast," pipes up Daniel. "I have a couple of questions for these guys." The crowd agrees, and Daniel asks them a question -- separately. "What tree was she under with the young man?" They give different answers; Susanna is exonerated and the elders are executed instead. Justice wins.

In "Bel," the Persian king asks his trusted adviser Daniel what he thinks about his god Bel and Daniel boldly says 'he's a hunk of clay that can't eat.' The king angrily disagrees, because the large food offerings put in Bel's temple disappear every night. He orders the 70 priests of Bel to prove Bel eats the nightly buffet. Sure, they reply. We'll put the usual menu out and lock the door. If the food disappears, kill Daniel for his blasphemy. If not, kill us. OK, the king says, and the priests depart, chuckling. Once they leave, Daniel says: let me leave a little offering, too -- and he scatters flour on the floor. The next day the food is gone. But the floor is covered with the footprints of the priests and their families who come each night through a secret door to consume the goodies. Enraged by being fooled, the king orders the priests executed. Truth wins. Falsehood -- ie, idolatry -- loses.

In "Susanna, there are a few things to notice. Even though the Bible says 'the testimony of two men is true,' the testimony of corrupt men isn't, and the commandment 'you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor' is upheld. Unfortunately, the witness of a woman is worthless, so it's notable that Daniel risks himself to speak up for her -- even risking being accused of being the 'young man' she was lying with in the garden. But the two unjust judges don't have an opportunity to collude on that detail. Daniel, then, becomes the independent investigator who sees something no one else does, like the 'amateur sleuth of independent means' later in the genre. Questioning people apart is often the tactic of later detectives, like Poirot in "Murder on the Orient Express." Reason wins over passion, another mystery theme. And clearly, the God of Justice and Truth is the real winner here. Fidelity is rewarded: to Susanna's husband, to God, to The Law.

This reminds me of the teachers' story of the two slackers who miss the Final Exam on purpose and ask fellow students 'what questions were on the exam?', and then ask for an immediate makeup (note: I always had an alternative exam for makeups). They claim they had a flat tire on the way to school. OK, the prof agrees, and separates them, giving each an exam with one question: which tire was flat?

As for "Bel," it's clear that this can be cited as an early locked room mystery. There is also the setting of a trap, a device used much in later detective fiction.

Both stories, like mystery stories in general, have a decidedly moral purpose: to show the triumph of good over evil, reason over chaos, and truth over deceit.

Detective Fiction: rules of the game

Before I begin posting about the history of the detective genre (not exhaustively; other websites do that), I figured it would be good to review the 'rules of the game' that have largely guided writers and readers in the field since the 1840s.

Beginning with Poe, detective fiction developed ‘rules of the game’ so that writers would ‘play fair’ with readers who wanted a shot at solving the puzzle (but still in their hearts wanted to be misled). Some of these ‘rules’ developed into fairly rigid codes for other writers to follow. Monsignor Knox of Britain had his “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” found here (among many other places online): https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction . American author S. S. Van Dine offered 20, found here (and other places, of course): https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/01/s-s-van-dines-twenty-rules-writing-detective-stories/

The British “Detective Club” had a list; even Raymond Chandler chimed in: https://www.mysterytribune.com/raymond-chandler-10-tips-writing-detective-novel/

The rules boil down to these 5:

1.       In its basic structure, the detective story must never vary from being completely logical.

2.       An unpardonable sin is the substitution of accident, chance, or coincidence for logical deduction.

3.       The story must always play fair: clues must be fairly presented; no evidence can be known to the reader which remains unknown to the detective, and vice-versa.

4.       All action must proceed from the central theme of the crime and the pursuit of the criminal.

5.       No human frailties, like stupidity or a poor memory, can change or prolong the plot in any way.

There are some secondary rules:

1.       The crime must be murder (robberies, heists, cons and such are ‘capers’, not detective stories)

2.       The killer’s motive must be strong enough to induce even an amateur to commit murder

3.       All suspects must be real suspects, the killer must be one of the suspects (ie, don’t bring in a new character at the end)

4.       The killer should be an intelligent, competent amateur, the crime elegantly planned which, except for the brilliant detective, would go unsolved

5.        The murder must be premeditated, or if it is a crime of passion, or unintended, it must be ingeniously covered up

6.       The detective is not superhuman but uses reasoning to fit the clues together

These are not rules, but nice to have:

1.       The detective is fun if unusual, fallible, and has personal problems (Monk, anyone?)

2.       Lead characters should grow and change (some never change and readers don't want them to change: Holmes, for example, whose last story is in 1926, refuses to acknowledge radio, planes, automobiles, fingerprinting and WWI and remains his eccentric, gaslighted, Hansom Cab driven self).

3.       The detective should have a profession that allows him or her to spend time, money, and energy on the crime (homicide cops, obviously, are paid to do this and have cases routinely come their way; retirees take it on as a hobby of sort, like Hercule Poirot; Brother Cadfael is a non-cloistered monk; Jessica Fletcher writes mysteries for a living).

4.        Don’t treat police as idiots (like Dupin and Holmes do; by the 1940s/50s, with advances in lab forensics, this disdain became an anachronism)

5.       Don’t make the victim an angel or the killer thoroughly evil (even Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the James Bond master villain, loves his cat)

6.       The killer must be an amateur who hasn’t killed before and does not plan to kill again (well: this was a guideline in the genteel Golden Age but the genre more recently has had its fill of serial killers, gangsters and psychos).

7.       The story moral must be BAD is punished, GOOD rewarded, and the universe is restored to balance (well: ‘Law and Order’ made us all comfortable with ambiguity).

8.       In the classic whodunnit, the killer must be near the victim and use an ordinary means

9.       It is desired for the murder to happen early in the story so that the puzzle is ‘whodunnit’ and not ‘when will the writer get down to business’

      It helps if there’s a ticking clock, a deadline to beat, although this is a hallmark of the 'thriller,' mystery's cousin.

OK, so these ‘rules’ are bent all the time and some of them famously (as Agatha Christie did) but they remind us that readers/fans have certain expectations and writers ought to deliver – or surprise delightfully.

The reader only has 2 rules:

1.       Don’t read the end

2.       Don’t tell anyone whodunnit

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Fiction: an incarnational art

In her non-fiction collection of essays and talks about the nature of fiction, Flannery O’Connor – a firm Catholic – observed that fiction is ‘an incarnational art’. It’s less about explaining and pointing things out (as Fielding and the Victorians did) and also less about describing emotions or ideas and more about experiencing people vicariously in unfolding time. There’s some telling and explaining – even O’Connor can’t help herself at the end of some stories – but the world of matter – uh – matters.

This is most important for anyone who is a ‘spiritual’ writer of any sort, because the abstract is meaningless unless it is made concrete. We agree with Aristotle that one can say a person is just but it means little until we see the person acting justly. It doesn’t help to say ‘Uncle Jim was mean’ but we must show Jim kicking the dog that brought him his slippers. Why say “Nancy was happy’ when we can show her skipping through puddles and saying hello to everyone on the sidewalk? Yes, this is the ol’ ‘show, don’t tell’ dictum, but consider how more difficult it is to ‘show’ redemption, depravity, healing, forgiveness, reprobation, reconciliation, enlightenment? The ‘word’ must ‘become flesh’ as we present people doing stuff in the flesh by words.

Making the abstract come to life is what we do in fiction; we make the unseen seen, and point to universals with particulars. It’s what Jesus did in his stories. Heavens, it was Who Jesus was:  The Word made flesh. It’s a ‘sacramental’ way of seeing, something Catholics and Anglicans are especially comfortable with. Bread, wine, water, oil, incense, bells, statuary, architecture, stained glass, icons, song and Scripture-read-aloud engage all the senses and enlarge the imagination at the same time. They are real things that point to things more Real than themselves. It's what quality fiction ought to do: The unseen becomes seen.

Why Do We Love Mysteries?

During this pandemic, with the news dominated by a daily death toll that is grim and horrid, I'm wondering why I even bother to write mysteries. Death is not entertaining. 

Even so, in previous times of national trauma, the public was drawn to stories of crime and detection. And in our current time of quarantine and isolation, many are cozying up to -- well, cozies, and other kinds of mystery fiction. Such works consistently dominate the bestseller lists in both the US and Britain. What draws us to these tales of mayhem, in times of peace or peril? Why do we stay up late at night reading about violence and vengeance?

There may be a few reasons. The first is that they are distracting fun. Mysteries are the guilty pleasure of the intellectual. They are puzzles of logic. When Sherlock Holmes cries out, ‘the game is afoot,’ he almost means it literally. For if the classic mystery – the traditional mystery – is a contest between the intelligent sleuth and the clever villain, it is also a duel between the skillful writer and the astute reader, who delights in trying to solve the puzzle along with – and possibly before – the detective. The paradox is that if the reader does, indeed, discover ‘whodunnit’ early on, the game is spoiled. The alert reader far more wishes to be surprised and fooled at the end, and yet find delight in seeing how the outcome was inevitable. This is only possible if the writer has ‘played fair’ with the ‘rules of the game,’ in which the reader can detect along with the detective – and still be assured that the detective will be more clever than the reader.

In Britain, Monsignor Ronald Knox had set out in 1928 the "10 Commandments of Detection," contending, for example,  that the criminal must be mentioned early on, the supernatural must be ruled out, the detective himself must not commit the crime, and "no accident must ever help the detective, not must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right." American SS Van Dine offered 20 rules that same year, insisting, for example, that the reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery with all clues plainly described. “There simply must be a corpse and the deader the better”, and “there must be no love interest”. Dorothy Sayers believed the same thing but fell in love with Lord Peter Whimsey and married him by proxy via Harriet Vane. The Detection Club, which formed shortly afterwards in 1930, asked members (such as Sayers) to swear an oath on Eric the Skull (all in good fun): "Do you swear solemnly never to conceal a clue from the reader?" Members also promised to honor the King's English, use legitimate detection methods in stories, and refrain from stealing other writers' plots, although collaboration was encouraged. Two of the greatest collaborators in the genre – Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay, the cousins who comprised “Ellery Queen,” regularly issued ‘A Challenge to the Reader” near the end of Queen novels, saying that the reader now had all the clues necessary for solving the puzzle. Queen began his – I mean their – writing career by entering one of the many detective fiction contests of the period, and always saw the detective story as a contest between the writer and the reader.

Some of this rule-making - and breaking - became quite complex. Christie, especially, played with the "rules" as a way to outsmart readers. It was a matter of "you think that I think that you think I think this, so I won't - or will - in order to outwit you." She did things like exonerate a suspect in a trial only to prove he was guilty all along, employed double disguises, broke the convention of "the least likely suspect" in Murder on the Orient Express, and committed the unforgivable sin in The Murder of Roger Akroyd. I should probably not say here what she did with those two books. It would spoil the fun.

Books of this period sometimes looked like games: they included lists of characters, maps of houses, gardens and room layouts, all part of the game. Some included physical clues – matchsticks, coins or facsimiles of letters. One of my favorites is the "sealed mystery" - the last chapter was sealed with an onionskin wrapper. If you returned the book with the wrapper uncut (because you figured out the mystery or gave up trying), you'd get a refund. Small wonder that Parker Brothers launched the board game “Clue” at about this time. The newspapers were full of crossword puzzles and other word games. Edgar Allan Poe, who practically invented the detective story, also produced scores of crossword puzzles, secret codes and other games of logic. One might argue that his first detective story is a kind of game; He begins it with a long essay on ‘ratiocination,’ the art of logic and deduction, and the story is, in some ways, an illustration of his argument in the form of a locked-room puzzle.

But mysteries aren’t only about the puzzles, they are about the people who solve them. Mysteries allow readers to spend time in the detective’s gumshoes for a while.  Along with our favorite sleuth, we get to outwit the killer with our friend within a few hours of reading. From the security of our armchair, bed or tub, we get to be brave and clever for a while. And if it is a character in a series, then we welcome them as friends into our lives a few times and get to know them better than our own families.

A peculiar thing about the genre is that, while usually driven by a crime to be solved – a puzzle – and therefore plot-oriented, it’s the people we remember more than the plots: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Inspector Maigret, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade,  Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter, Steve Carella, Dave Robichaux, VI Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, Miss Marple, - well, the list is long. For each sub-genre – the cozy, the amateur sleuth, the police prodedural, the Private Eye, the historical, among others – there is a kind of character that affords a particular insight or comfort for readers.

For example, readers of the ‘cozy,’ where the violence is offstage and the sleuth often quirky or an outright amateur, the battle of wits with the villain is won by a person much like the reader. There is the subtle reassurance of St Paul’s dictum in I Corinthians 1 that ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things that are mighty.”

In the police procedural, readers meet the hardworking middle-class and working class joes who do their job under stress. The police novel is, some say, the literature of the proletariat, celebrating duty in one’s work. Readers find special delight in the rumpled rain-coated Columbo asking just one more question of the elitist, wealthy killer who truly believes he’s gotten away with murder.

One more example: in the PI or hard-boiled story, as in ‘The Maltese Falcon”, readers encounter another kind of  working-class hero who must work for a living and take lousy, dangerous jobs to make ends meet. He is, in the words of the character Race Williams, "a middleman, just a halfway house between the cops and the crooks." Because of this, the hero is often isolated, lonely, and cynical. He is idealistic and a bit sentimental, a tough guy with a noble heart. He’s an urban counterpart of the lone cowboy in The Western who is good with a gun and, like a mounted knight, upholds a code of justice and chivalry. As Raymond Chandler put it famously in his essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He must be…a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.’

The ‘noir’ story may be a game like other detective stories, but it is a rough game.

If even the serious crime novel is a form of game, there’s another reason we play it. One writer put it this way: ‘When we look at clues and details about murder, we get to be a four-year-old playing with rubber dinosaurs: the game is enjoyable because we control what might otherwise give us nightmares.”

It is small wonder that the detective novel emerged in the Victorian Age when the murder rate was twice what it is now .  People wanted some assurance that the police could do their job and keep respectable citizens safe. The books did that. They still do.

Murder mysteries are the modern form of the medieval morality play, where the sleuth is Everyman who works against time, big money, a determined antagonist, daunting odds and his own flaws to expose evil, stop the bad guy and restore the balance of justice. At the end, readers who identify with the successful hero or heroine feel a little better about the world and about themselves. A critic might say that mystery novels are escapist, since they offer a fantasy world in which justice prevails, right always wins over wrong, and love finds a way. But what's wrong with that? That's healing. The odd thing is that we can escape reality and face it at the same time.

That’s because, with mysteries so close to the barest human desires and fears, they have a built-in opportunity to explore life's higher mysteries: love and power, guilt and innocence, good and evil, the mystery of undeserved suffering.  

All literature tries to make meaning out of the frightfully short dash between our birthdate and departure date on our tombstones. Mysteries, dealing so openly with the reality of death, do this well.

It was Aristotle who defined what good literature ought to do, and as it turns out, mysteries do it best.

The best stories, Aristotle said, advance through a series of discoveries – recognitions and subsequent reversals – and this is what occurs in a mystery whenever the detective discovers a clue, a new suspect, an alibi that checks out or doesn’t, or another body – usually the lead suspect. This results in a reversal – a change in direction, a setback, a gap between expectations and results, a new plan of action. The reversals and the setbacks raise the stakes, the danger, and make the protagonist suffer. So our detective endures criticism, failure, false leads, isolation, and the threat of being killed by the desperate villain who cannot bear to be exposed.  The ending must be inevitable, but it cannot be predictable, Aristotle says – it must be a surprise. And this is exactly what happens in a mystery where the puzzle pieces fall into place perfectly at the end, and the reader is delightfully fooled.

That’s why we love a mystery.

Why Jesus Told Stories

One of the first things to notice about the Bible (besides the fact that it is not a single book but a library of books) is that most of it is in the form of poetry or story.

Why is this?

We get a clue in the teaching of Jesus. Early in the narrative that Mark writes, Jesus explains to The Twelve and other close associates why He uses 'parables' to teach. 'Parables,' you may recall, are short stories, sometimes riddle-like, usually with homespun characters and situations, which seem to have a primary point (rather than a loaded this-means-that symbolism). You know many of them: The Prodigal Son, The Good Shepherd, The Sower and the 4 Soils, and so on.

With 'The Sower' story in Mark chapter 4, we get 2 explanations: why Jesus tells stories in the first place, and what the point of the Sower story is.

First, Jesus' explanation to his inner circle for using stories is cryptic: 'To you has been given the secret (or, in some translations, 'the mystery') of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables, in order that 'they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen but not understand, so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.' (Mark 4:10-12).

Uh -- what?

At first glance, it seems there are those who are 'inside', a spiritually privileged few who get the full teaching, and those in the 'out crowd,' who do not belong to the elect and rightly so. The goods are deliberately kept from them.

That's the surface reading. But I wonder, instead, if the parables are a gentle invitation for those on the 'outside' who are already inclined to not see or listen, who are predisposed to resist, who have already decided to put up their defenses and crossed their arms and huffed, 'just try to teach me.' Believe me, I met many such people in my years of teaching.

So Jesus is beckoning to them with a folksy, often funny story, and inviting them to 'Listen!' (Mark 4:3). 'Pay attention to what you hear' (Mark 4:24). 'Let anyone with ears to hear, listen! (Mark 4:9). Can you hear it? He's almost begging people to lean forward and engage. Why? 'Because the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For those who have, more will be given. From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.' (Mark 4:24-25).

Wait: is that fair?

Absolutely. No one is forced to listen and grasp what has been said. If you engage and give it some thought and act on what you hear, you get more. If you guffaw and turn away (perhaps having been entertained), you get nothing else and it's your fault. No one is compelled to believe. All are invited. The story reveals something for one who is open minded and ready, and kindly conceals from those who are not.

What follows in Mark chapters 5 and 6 are examples of both these kinds of people. Some hear, engage, take another step. Some turn away and miss the opportunity.

So the parables -- and the story of Mark itself -- is an invitation to think and to grasp the truth of the story. By extension, the whole Bible is.

Then, secondly, Jesus offers a play-by-play of the Sower story. It describes 4 kinds of listeners. The first three receive the truth but have trouble grasping it and holding on. The 4th gets it and grows. The sower keeps sowing wildly anyway, even with a 75% fail rate. The original listeners probably laughed out loud at his stupidity and wanton flinging of seed -- and of stories.

God loves stories

There's a Yiddish proverb that says, "God made people because He loves stories." And, as we should know, everyone has a story. Everyone IS a story. We don't just tell and hear stories, we ARE the stories we tell. Our view of the world and of ourselves and how things work and why things are, all of it, is shaped by the frame through which we perceive the world, and stories provide that frame. Not that truth is entirely subjective -- there is Truth outside of ourselves, Protagorus -- but our understanding of it (and our misunderstanding of it) is.

To illustrate, let me tell you a story. In the year 612 BC or so, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon conquered the tiny state of Judah and deported all the good-looking, smart princes of the Hebrews to Babylon. But they were not maimed and enslaved; no, they were given free scholarships, room and board at the University of Babylon (you can read about it in Daniel chapter one). Why was Nebuchadnezzar so generous? Well, he wasn't. The 'catch' was that the young men could choose only one major: Babylonian Language and Literature. He knew that people's identity and perceptions are shaped by stories and songs and language itself, and so the plan was to turn these young leaders into loyal Babylonians. They would cease to be Hebrew, because they would no longer remember their Story.

This is why we have Genesis chapter 1. An unknown priestly writer in Babylonian exile knew the Hebrew Story needed to be preserved and taught. So he composed this wonderful liturgical poem (yes, it's basically a song) to counter the culture's story of how Marduk defeated the competing gods and goddesses in battle, cut a major female deity in pieces to make the world and formed the first humans from the losers' blood drops to be his slaves. In a striking contrast, we have this beautiful poem arranged in typical Hebrew parallelisms (a pattern of repetition and balance) to describe a single, sovereign and all-good Creator who calmly spoke the worlds into being, making three habitats, then three categories of occupants for those habitats, with humans as noble vice-regents, and finally resting on a '7th day' to indicate completion, peace and wholeness. The Universe is personal, purposeful ,balanced, and beautiful, and humans are God's creative co-partners in it. How's that for a contrast?

(Yes, there's a second creation tale that follows it, very folksy, but that's another -- ahem -- story).

I suppose the basic point here is this:  When God wanted to reveal something about Himself, we got stories, songs and poems. Most of the Bible as we have it is in the form of story, one way or another. And the human writers, diverse and distributed over centuries, were not interested primarily in 'history' as we understand it, but in HiStory (I mean, "High Story"), storytelling with a higher purpose. And what we have is high art, as well. There are fewer stories in world literature better told for character and suspense than Joseph in Genesis or Saul and David in First Samuel, for example, or The Gospel according to Mark which is full of rhetorical skill. And let us not forget that when Jesus taught in the Gospels, He employed folksy, funny and insightful short stories that we call The Parables.

So maybe this is why we are compelled to tell stories. They give us meaning. And God loves them.