On Mysteries

My favorite genre fiction is mysteries; although they are generally not considered "serious fiction," some of them are thoughtful and well written, transcending the genre, and provide great reading pleasure. I have enjoyed mysteries since I was a child, bingeing on Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys (when I ran out of Nancys), and the British Enid Blyton mysteries ("The Mystery of the Secret Room" is a typical title), as you may have seen in my childhood book list in an earlier post. As an adult, I have gone through phases of reading armloads of mysteries, then tiring of them for months or even years, but always (so far) returning to them eventually. I only like a particular type of mysteries: usually by British authors, or at least taking place in the UK, and usually by women writers. No thrillers, no hardboiled detective fiction. No cats, no cutesy writing, no chatty conversations with the reader. As I am an Anglophile -- perhaps imprinted early by being born a Canadian and raised in barely postcolonial India -- it is probably no surprise that I am drawn to mysteries by authors such as Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Elizabeth George, Charles Todd, Deborah Crombie, and Jacqueline Winspear. My most-treasured fictional detectives are either women, or British men who are clever, sensitive, and a bit melancholy; the men are "manly" but treat women as respected equals. They drive their Bentleys through the English countryside, or stride through lonely Scottish moors, thinking deeply and abstractedly. Gradually, gradually, they get closer to the truth, leading up to moments of illumination, when all is resolved, the world is made right again, and readers can close their books and go away satisfied.