We Americans love our hot dogs. We love our apple pie. We love our baseball. And we especially love our murder mysteries.
I was thinking a bit about this cultural trait while reviewing CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Without much critical love, CSI has become perhaps the most popular show of the decade and helped turn CBS into the crime procedural network. Every week, millions of folks flick on the tube to watch Raymond Langston et al dig up dead bodies, cut ’em up, scoop out their organs and—through the miracle of modern science—catch the bad guys through the evidence found therein.
The appeal of shows like CSI, I think, isn’t the gore, but the fact that murders are solved and bad guys are caught nearly every week: There’s something deeply comforting about that—even in the midst of all the carnage we see.
I don’t regularly watch CSI. But I was a big fan of USA’s Monk when it was on the air, and I can’t get enough of those old Agatha Christie movies. I dig old Sherlock Holmes stories, and whenever I go on vacation, I almost always take a mystery to read. It’s strange, when you think about it … the classic English murder mystery, what with its cast of suspects and genteel dialogue, feels downright innocent—despite the fact there’s often a dead body lying in the conservatory or floating in the pond.
Dorothy Sayers, a smashmouth mystery writer and Christian author (she hung out with C.S. Lewis and the Inklings), grasps this fascination as well as anyone … and hints at its drawbacks in her book, Letters to a Diminished Church. She writes:
The desire of being persuaded that all human experience may be presented in terms of a problem having a predictable, final, complete, and sole possible solution accounts, to a great extent , for the late extraordinary popularity of detective fiction. … It is significant that readers should so often welcome the detective story as a way of escape from the problems of existence. It "takes their minds off their troubles." Of course it does; for it softly persuades them that love and hatred, poverty and unemployment, finance and international politics are problems capable of being dealt with and solved in the same manner as a death in the library.
We humans need answers. We long for the world to make sense, when frankly so much of it can seem, insensible. We talk a lot about how entertainment affects us, in one way or another … and there are moments I wonder whether that influence extends to how we see the template of our lives: Are the things we walk and work through experiences to be embraced, trials to endure … or maybe simply problems to be solved?
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