Cecily Devereux

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I think, you know, that there's a way in which there's something really satisfying to have somebody who is able to track down

someone who committed a crime and make them be responsible for it.

So, you know, not getting away with murder is kind of one of the things that's behind the way that murder mysteries work.

And when they don't do that, I mean, I would say that one of the ways that we know that or that we can really sense our own satisfaction when, you know, when we get to the end of a book and we see the murderer

identified and we know that justice is waiting for them is when the opposite happens.

So sometimes there are books that end on an ambiguous note and you don't necessarily know who's committed the crime or you can't see how that person is going to be brought to justice.

And that can be really frustrating.

I know that one of my aunts, when I had sent her a box of books one time, because we all share our mysteries in the family, she was so angry at this one book where we didn't get to know at the end who had committed the crime.

that she threw the book across the room and then, you know, basically called me and said, never ever send me a book like that again.

Just because that, you know, it's this restoration of order that we really want.

There's this chaos that ensues when a crime has been committed, when somebody has been murdered.

And all of a sudden, everything that seemed like it was going okay isn't anymore.

And until you get that whole structure back into some kind of order, you know, no one's going to be content.

And when it does come back into shape, that's what we want to see.

I think so.

You know, I mean, murder mysteries take shape as a genre, you know, at a moment that, you know, is pretty chaotic in the middle of the 19th century.

And they seem to have their moments of development as a genre changed.

when things are really difficult.

So in the, I mean, Agatha Christie, who's such a famous writer of classic murder mysteries, of whodunnits, she starts writing around the time of the First World War,