As a woman of faith, one of the aspects of the mystery genre that has always appealed to me is the search for truth. Something is unknown, and finding this knowledge is essential to solving a murder, recovering a stolen item, or rescuing a kidnapped person. The truth is typically difficult to discover, but in the mystery genre the truth is findable. While justice may be postponed, ultimately it will be served.
There are exceptions of course, mystery novels that mirror real life circumstances in which a crime is never solved or the murderer goes free (and thrillers sometimes have very unsettling outcomes), but by and large the mystery genre presents a world which can be understood, though typically not all at once. Knowledge is gained piece by piece, line upon line, precept upon precept (though in this case, precepts would be more aptly defined as legal warrants authorizing the gathering of information).
My debut novel, The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet, features the character of Mary Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After the death of her father, she joins distant relatives at Castle Durrington, which is located in a small community next the English Channel, just a few miles from Napoleon Bonaparte and his forces as they subjugate the continent. Mary discovers a dead body on the beach, and suddenly, she does not know who to trust, she does not know what to believe.
While Mary begins a quest to find the murderer, she is also on a quest to figure out herself. Her future is unclear, both full of possibilities and limited by so many outside factors. She must figure out who she is: What is her identity? Who does she want to become?
If I were to apply scriptural imagery, I would say that Mary Bennet feels like a “wanderer in a strange land.” It is always a bit unsettling, a bit precarious, to come to know oneself. And murder itself is also strange, always an unknown territory, no matter how many mysteries one encounters. The taking of someone’s life is no small matter. Inherently, mystery novels have high stakes: as one searches for the truth, one’s own self is often at risk.
The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet fits in a subgenre of mystery novels which feature amateur sleuths. She is without training to solve a murder, without experience, and this probably should not be her murder to solve. Yet she seeks for the truth all the same.
One of the principles of the amateur sleuth subgenre is that anyone is capable of finding the truth. As readers, we too are on a quest for truth as we discover the story, page by page. Like the amateur sleuth, we need to individually experience this process of truth finding. Knowing the truth—flipping ahead to the last page and reading the murderer’s name—is not what is satisfying. What satisfies us, what fills us, what brings us joy, is experiencing the process of truth discovery.
In life, we are all amateurs, not experts. We are all on a truth-finding journey. And we can’t just be handed the truth by someone else. We must discover and experience it on our own.
Katherine Cowley read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when she was ten years old, which started a lifelong obsession with Jane Austen. She loves history, chocolate, traveling, and playing the piano, and she teaches writing classes at Western Michigan University. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband and three daughters. She is on the Board of Directors for the Mormon Lit Lab. The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet is her debut novel.