There was a time when I was under the illusion that when I read a mystery story I stood a fair chance of figuring out "who done it" before the end of the book came about and the author would have his investigator reveal the criminal. I would studiously examine all the clues left at the scene of the murder and pay close attention to the answers supplied by witnesses and potential suspects in the hopes of being able to suss out who the killer was. While my success rate wasn't great I just put that down to my own lack of skill in that area, not any nefarious plot on the part of authors preventing me from discovering who the killer was.
However, after years of reading mystery stories by some of the most accomplished writers of the genre I've come to realize that while I may never be detective material, my inability to solve mysteries in books was completely unrelated to any failings I might have in that area. After numerous fruitless quests involving the re-reading of texts in an effort to spot any clues that I may have missed that pointed to the killer and or his/her motivation, and only rarely finding anything substantial, it became obvious that most authors had no intention of letting you figure out who the culprit was.
If that's the case, than what's the point in reading a mystery novel? While its true that with some of the older writers like Agatha Chrisitie there were occasions where it was possible for a reader to uncover the culprit, at least fifty percent of the time it was a matter of sitting back and letting ourselves be impressed by the skills of one of her favourite investigators. It wasn't just the late Dame Agatha whose works were along those lines either; how many of you can actually claim to have picked up on the clues that Sherlock Holmes utilized in unravelling the mysteries set forth by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
Is it any wonder that mystery stories were for such a long time relegated to a lower class of fiction? It wasn't until the appearance of writers like P.D.James, Jean Le Carre, and others that mystery and suspense stories began to be taken seriously. While a mystery to be solved still remained at the heart of the matter, the whole genre came in for a serious shake up as the authors began to delve deeply into the psyches of their characters and create plots that were just as interested in life as they were murder and mayhem. Reginald Hill has been one of the more prolific of the new breed of mystery story writers, but as his latest release from Random House Canada, A Cure For All Diseases, shows this hasn't affected his ability to create highly intriguing reads.
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