The Bookshelf: Vive la Différence! Vive le Mystère! 

One of the most amusing recent episodes in Very Online Discourse was the miniature Krakatoa that erupted over journalist Helen Andrews’s Compact essay “The Great Feminization,” which was itself an almost perfect exercise in extending a No True Scotsman fallacy for more than 3,000 words. (All men and women who do not conform to Andrews’s thesis about the sexes were declared ipso facto not really masculine or feminine on her terms.) According to Andrews, Western societies are in deep trouble precisely to the extent that important institutions—universities, businesses, the legal profession—come to be preponderantly manned (oops!) by women.  

While this thesis was celebrated by many Very Online men on the right—at least by those who can’t get a date or hate their girlbosses—there was also plenty of pushback by conservative women who have no interest in flacking for androgyny or radical feminism, and who faulted Andrews for exaggeration and oversimplification. That there are differences between men and women—not just physically but in general patterns of character, behavior, inclination and so on—is something no reasonable man or woman can deny. That the rising clout of women is (in Andrews’s words) a “threat to civilization”? Much more questionable. 

Here at Public Discourse, our writers frequently discuss the very real differences between men and women, boys and girls. Just in the last month we’ve seen Matthew X. Wilson write about how to reach disaffected young men on the right; Beatrice Scudeler dig into what’s behind the recent trend of young women’s fascination with a highly sexualized new “Romantasy” genre in fiction; and Elizabeth Grace Matthew discuss the distinctive kinds of literature that can be positively formative in the education of boys. And I’ve been thinking for a while now about the subject to which I devote the rest of this column: Why do women read—and in many cases write—so darn many mystery stories? 

The birth of the modern detective story is conventionally dated to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduced the amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, whose remarkable power of induction upon observing a crime scene is a harbinger of the similar mental acuity displayed by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. By the early twentieth century the genre was so well established that the Catholic priest, Bible translator, theologian, and sometime mystery writer Ronald Knox offered what he himself called a “Decalogue” of “main rules” for the writing of mystery stories—e.g., No. VIII, “The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.” (Knox, by the way, elaborated these rules in the introduction to an anthology that reprinted the first appearance of another Christie detective, Miss Jane Marple.) 

I have read some of the writings of all the mystery authors I’ve named so far—all of Doyle’s Holmes stories, in fact—but I have never had a sustained enthusiasm for the mystery genre the way, for instance, I had a mania for classic science fiction in my twenties, or a recurring interest in historical fiction. In fact, I have never known a man or boy who had a steady appetite for reading mysteries. Yet it seems that at least half the women I’ve known read them constantly, some preferring the mystery to all other forms of fiction as a proportion of their reading diet. My late wife went through them—in print, in e-books, in audiobooks—at the rate of dozens every year. My mother, whose tastes ranged widely across literature and history, devoured mysteries in great quantities as well.  

And aside from the various forms of romance, no genre of fiction has such a high proportion of notable women authors as does the mystery. I can think of exactly one woman who belongs in the pantheon of science fiction authors: Ursula K. Le Guin. (If others have emerged in the last few decades, I beg to be excused as not having kept up.) But in addition to Agatha Christie there were, even in her own heyday, three other “Queens of Crime” in British fiction with their own recurring detective heroes: Margery Allingham with her Albert Campion, Dorothy L. Sayers with Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ngaio Marsh with Roderick Alleyn (Marsh’s Alleyn was a London police detective, but she herself was a lifelong New Zealander). Hewing just to notable British women who wrote mysteries, one notices later writers such as P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Ellis Peters (a pen name of Edith Pargeter), Ann Cleeves, and Susanna Gregory. And among more recent Americans, best-selling mystery authors include Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Kathy Reichs, Janet Evanovich, Faye Kellerman, Linda Fairstein, J. D. Robb (a pen name of Nora Roberts), and Tess Gerritsen—and some of these women’s work has succeeded in film and television adaptations as well. 

What’s going on here? Why is there such an appetite for reading—and evidently, for writing—mysteries among women? I decided to ask several women I know, all of them wives and mothers whose husbands do not share this enthusiasm. Their answers were interesting. 

Each one of my friends said something similar about women’s interest in solving puzzles. Do women work on daily newspaper puzzles—crosswords, sudoku, Wordle—more than men do? Do women more than men enjoy putting together jigsaw puzzles? My unscientific impression is that they do. Puzzles require concentrated focus, keen observation, patient attention to details, and imaginative consideration of probabilities. Jigsaws, crosswords, and murder mysteries are each the sort of thing that calls for such qualities of mind and spirit. (I’m pretty certain that men are more oblivious to the details of their own surroundings, at least if I am typical. Once years ago my wife, exasperated with my inattention to our household, asked me what color were the curtains in our spare bedroom. My reply: “We have curtains in the spare bedroom?”) 

As with a finished puzzle, too, a solved mystery is a closed book, a task tidily completed—as one of my friends put it, a conundrum unraveled. With a sigh of satisfaction one shuts the book and moves on to the next one. My friends told me in various ways that a good mystery got them emotionally involved with the characters and the case, appealing to their empathy and their natural social interest in other people’s tales and travails. Of course, it is not just mysteries that can do this—as one of my friends noted, women simply read more fiction than men, period. Good fiction of any kind is at once an escape from our own lives and a mirror held at a peripheral angle in which we can see a bit of ourselves. Mystery novels—typically entailing a murder—compel the reader, as one of my informants said, to “reckon with the light and the darkness inside all of us.” And if the characters are well drawn, we must reckon with a good deal of moral ambiguity. (Rare, in fact, is the diabolical genius of pure evil such as Professor Moriarty.) 

A recurring detective character—successful mysteries almost always spawn a series—can be a compelling companion for many volumes. And series fiction is comfort food, as I’ve written before. Men like such comforts as well—more men than women will plow through all twenty volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series. Interestingly, though, one of my correspondents cited the routines of many women’s domestic lives as a reason to turn to mystery fiction: “women like to be surprised and delighted,” she said. If a detective series can consistently provide such experiences, women will be loyal to an author as long as their reading pays off. 

I began to see another angle from a remark made by another of my friends. A mystery, she said, “satisfies a desire for order” but without the “emotional sacrifice” that must be made to satisfy that same desire in one’s family, school, church, or workplace. While the heroes of detective fiction will sometimes cut corners on the letter of the law—either bending toward mercy or contrarily toward ruthlessness, according to their own lights—the obvious thematic spine of the mystery is the quest for law and order. The point of the mystery is justice: for victims, for their families, for criminals themselves, for society at large. 

Are women more keenly interested in justice than men are? I think so. Physically and socially, women are the more vulnerable sex. They bear children, and care for a disproportionate amount of their upbringing. As contemporary villains from Hamas to Jeffrey Epstein painfully remind us, the agents of violence and chaos are frequently men who prey on women and girls, physically and emotionally. Fear of a (potential or actual) villain’s strength and malevolence is, alas, a more common experience for women than for men. 

And in the family, Mom is the implacable foe of chaos, the bringer and keeper of order in the household. Dad may be the executioner of justice, but as often as not this is at the behest of his wife, the supreme judge of orderly family relations. How often do we hear from our fathers, “Don’t disappoint your mother”? Quite contrary to the view taken by Helen Andrews, I think the regularity and strictness of justice—not the fickle impulses of spite or revenge on one hand and emotional softness on the other—strongly mark the characters of women generally. It may even be that forgiveness is more difficult for women, not because they are hardhearted but because they are hardheaded, demanding more than men do that forgiveness be earned. When was the last time you heard a woman described as “easygoing” in her relations with others, the sort of person who expects little of her friends and family?   

In that column on series fiction I linked above, I said four years ago that it was “a puzzle to me why mysteries are so much a feminine enthusiasm.” Maybe I have solved my own puzzle, with a little help from my friends. The taste for mysteries has more than one cause, but a keenness to see justice done, and the balance of the world set right, takes pride of place.

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