“If I have any work to do,” WH Auden wrote in his 1948 Harper’ s essay The Guilty Vicarage, his exposition on the genre, “I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it.” Ever since Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe started publishing detective stories in the mid-19th century, we’ve been hooked. But it’s a comfort we have sought for ages, across ages, and perhaps more now than ever before. The bad guys always get caught, the good guys always triumph, the loot is always returned to its rightful owner.
Like any escape into fiction, it is a childish comfort, willfully ignoring the nuances and messiness of the world. I’ve found myself looking forward to our nightly escapades with Blyton’s five, not just because of the nostalgia that’s part and parcel of remembering how voraciously I devoured the series myself, years ago, but also because of something much deeper: in a day-to-day in which so many things, trite and not, remain a mystery to me – from where the socks go, to how to achieve the proper work-life balance, to if my grandchildren’s planet will more closely resemble Tatooine than Earth – it’s comforting to immerse myself in a world in which problems have solutions. In them, three siblings, their cousin and a trusty dog, largely free of adult supervision, wander around on vacation catching criminals in between teatimes. Her bedside table is piled high with kid detective books: Nate the Great and Cam Jansen for when she’s reading to herself, and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, which we’re making through together. She carries a notepad around wherever we go, jotting down times and notes and possible clues, drawing elaborate maps, squinting her eyes and looking off into the distance as she tries to connect the dots to figure out where the missing piece of chalk went (her one-year-old brother ate it) or why she keeps waking up so early (a mystery I’d pay someone gobs of money to solve). Her commitment to her future calling is total. Becoming a detective is one of the least likely lines of eventual employment for my six-year-old, second only to “trampoliner” (runner-up most desirable profession) and yet much of her free time this summer has been spent immersed in mystery literature and mystery pretend.
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