Importance Of A Mystery

Your hands shake, your heart pounds, your mind burns with curiosity; what is it about a mystery that excites the senses of a human being? A mystery, by definition, is a novel dealing with an intriguing, puzzling crime, (Merriam-Webster, 535). But what is it about these stories that make them worth reading? No book can really call itself a mystery, unless it is realistic and creative, has a ‘good’, quality villain, and the enigma is worth solving. First, a mystery must be realistic and creative. If the mystery was not realistic, or in other words, could not be followed logically, the reader could not possibly even try to solve the quandary, and it would, therefore, lose most, if not all, of the readers’ interests. But a realistic mystery should not be so logical that it is boring; it must also be creative.

The villain, or antagonist, of a mystery must be cunning and creative. If he or she was neither cunning nor creative, the detective would easily find and catch them, making for a short, and not very interesting, story. Which brings us to our next point: the villain should be seemingly un-catchable. This makes the detective’s(s’) job more challenging and gives him a heroic persona once he finally catches the villain. Like the overall story, the villain must also be unique in some way, shape, or form. If, for example, every villain in every mystery was a woman who had killed her husband for insurance money, the reader would only want to read one mystery and be done, because they were all the same. But, if in one mystery the villain was a woman, who had killed her husband for insurance money, and in another the villain was a male serial killer, the reader would want to read both, because each one had a different villain who did what they did for different reasons and in different ways. This is why it is important to have a ‘good’, quality villain in a mystery worth