Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

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  For my family

  O known Unknown! from whom my being sips Such darling essence…

  —JOHN KEATS, Endymion

  Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

  —SAUL BELLOW

  The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a mystery.

  —JOHN FOWLES, The Enigma

  INTRODUCTION THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERY

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  The Case of the Missing Writer

  On the night of December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie put her young daughter to bed, grabbed her fur coat and suitcase, and left the house in a gray Morris Cowley. She told the maid she was going out for a drive.

  The next morning, Agatha’s car was found near a chalk pit. It had been driven down a rutted dirt road, before careening off the track onto a grassy slope. The lights were left on; the brakes had never been applied.1 According to the New York Times, the Morris Cowley had been found with its “front wheels actually overhanging the edge. The car evidently had run away, and only a thick hedge-growth prevented it from plunging into the pit.”2

  Agatha was gone.

  At the time, she was a little-known mystery writer. That spring, she’d published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her third novel featuring the detective Hercule Poirot. The book was ingeniously constructed—the narrator turned out to be the killer—but only sold a few thousand copies.I Agatha was disappointed, as she needed money to finance her fancy lifestyle.3 (She depended on three household servants.) To add insult to economic injury, her husband, Archie Christie, had fallen in love with a younger woman. He kept asking for a divorce.

  The police initially suspected suicide. Agatha had visited her chemist a few days before; they had a morbid conversation about the best drafts for a painless death.4 Near her crashed car, the police found an open bottle of “poison lead and opium.” It seemed like a simple tragedy: a spurned wife had taken her own life.

  But if Agatha had killed herself, where was the body? The police hired divers and drained a nearby pond. They scoured the Surrey Downs with bloodhounds. After the authorities put out a call for volunteers, thousands of amateur detectives showed up to look for the missing woman. But the crowds found nothing, not even footprints. It was as if Agatha had vanished into thin air.

  The police officer in charge of the investigation, Deputy Chief Constable Kenward, began to suspect that Agatha had been murdered. Kenward was the kind of detective that Agatha Christie liked to invent in her novels—a man of deduction, he’d been awarded the King’s Police Medal for closing several difficult murder cases. Kenward had a trim mustache, a bulging belly, and a fondness for fedoras.

  When it came to Agatha’s disappearance, Kenward fixated on the fur coat she’d left behind in the back seat.5 As Kenward noted, the temperature at midnight was thirty-six degrees. A damp wind was blowing in from the northeast. Why, then, hadn’t Agatha taken her coat? Even suicidal people want to stay warm.

  Kenward was also suspicious of the crash. The car had been driven down a hill, but there were no skid marks on the dirt. Why hadn’t the driver tried to brake? The canvas roof was still attached, and the paint remained unscratched. It was as if, Kenward thought, someone had carefully driven the car to the edge of the cliff.6

  And then there was the Archie problem. Kenward knew Archie wanted a divorce. The servants said he’d had a bitter fight with Agatha the day before. When Kenward asked Archie where he’d been the night of her disappearance, he admitted that he was with his mistress at a friend’s house. Worst of all, he’d burned the letter Agatha had left for him, telling the police that it was a private matter. Kenward found the husband “vague and defensive.”7

  Yet, Archie had a solid alibi—his friend swore Archie had been with him all evening.8 (The car was in the garage, and he would have heard the dog bark.) And even if Archie had snuck out, Kenward couldn’t figure out how he’d have returned before morning. It was too long a walk and there was no sign of a second car. And why would the killer have left the poison behind?

  Days passed. A reward of £100 was posted, but that only led to errant sightings. Agatha was dressed as a man on a London bus. She was wandering around Battersea. She was on a train to Portsmouth. The more Kenward learned about the case, the more mysterious it became. Every lead was a dead end.

  As the press swarmed, Archie panicked. In an interview given to the Daily Mail, six days after Agatha went missing, he speculated that Agatha had staged her own disappearance. It was a literary exercise, not a crime. “Some time ago she told her sister, ‘I could disappear if I wished and set about it properly,’ ” he remembered.9 “They were discussing what appeared in the papers, I think. That shows that the possibility of engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work.”10

  The public didn’t buy it, but Archie was right: Agatha hadn’t been kidnapped or murdered. She had vanished herself. As the biographer Laura Thompson observes, Agatha’s disappearance was, in many respects, her finest mystery story. She had turned her own life into an irresistible whodunit, artfully placing clues that captivated the public. It was, the Times declared, “one of the most sensational disappearances that ever enlivened the columns of the English newspapers.”11

  Before she vanished, the public didn’t know who she was. They only cared because she couldn’t be found.

  On December 14, eleven days after Agatha Christie was first reported missing, a banjo player at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate noticed that a woman on the dance floor closely resembled the missing writer. The musician told the police, who passed on the tip to Archie.

  When Archie arrived at the Swan, he was told by the police to wait in the lobby. The hotel manager said that Agatha would soon descend for dinner; she’d already made a reservation. After a few minutes, Archie spotted her on the staircase, dressed for another night of dancing in a pink georgette evening dress. Agatha calmly returned his gaze, then took a seat by the fireplace in the lounge. After a few minutes of awkward silence, the couple headed into the hotel restaurant for dinner.12

  Although Archie wished to remain silent, the hordes of reporters demanded answers. Agatha’s disappearance remained front-page news. To appease the papers, Archie gave a statement to the Yorkshire Post: “There is no question about her identity. She is my wife. She is suffering from complete loss of memory and identity. She does not know who she is. She does not know me.… I hope that rest and quiet will put her right.”

  Archie assumed his explanation would end the spectacle, that he could soon return to his golf game and mistress. However, as Laura Thompson notes, this only proves that “Archie did not have a clue about what he was doing, what he had become mixed up in.”13 Perhaps if he’d read Agatha’s fiction, he would have appreciated the appeal of a good detective story.

  Agatha, of course, knew exactly what she was doing. As a crime writer, Agatha understood the allure of the unknown: the best stories give us tantalizing clues but withhold the answer for as long as possible. “The det
ective story was the story of the chase,” Agatha would later declare.14 Not the catch. The chase. And she had just engineered the perfect chase.II

  Although Archie blamed amnesia for her disappearance, Agatha was writing again within days. Before she crashed the car, she’d been struggling to finish her next detective novel. There were days she didn’t think she’d ever figure it out. (Her mother-in-law told the Daily Mail that Agatha walked around the house muttering, “These rotten plots! Oh! These rotten plots.”)16 It was so hard making the details line up, telling the story without giving away the surprise.

  But something shifted after her return from Harrogate. “That was the moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional,” Agatha wrote in her memoir.17 She was now committed to her craft, determined to apply the lessons of her disappearance to her fiction. There was a strange power in the mystery story: we were hooked by those tales we couldn’t solve, drawn to those crimes and plots that kept us guessing.

  But the mystery story did not always exist.

  It had to be invented.

  The Rue Morgue

  In the spring of 1841, at the age of thirty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided to write a new kind of short story. At the time, Poe was best known for a magazine column on cryptography in which he dared readers to send him a code he couldn’t crack. He received nearly a hundred secret messages from all over the country. Poe solved them all, except for one. And that coded message he proved to be “an imposition,” a jumble of “random characters having no meaning whatever.”18

  Unfortunately for Poe, his column only paid a few dollars a page. As his editor observed, “The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand.” Poe’s desperate need for money led him to try writing fiction, as he searched for a tale that could pay his rent and bar tab. He gave his first story a salacious title—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—and an intriguing protagonist, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, a young bachelor living in Paris who is also able to crack the most inscrutable codes.

  The story takes places during a recent summer, when the evening papers arrive with news of an extraordinary double murder. The mother’s body was found in the garden, “her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off and rolled to some distance.” The daughter, meanwhile, had been rammed up the chimney, killed by brute force. While the police initially assumed the motive to be theft, no valuables were missing. After a lengthy and fruitless investigation, the police concluded that “a murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all its particulars, was never before committed in Paris.”

  Dupin is drawn to the mystery. He tells the narrator that they should visit the crime scene for themselves; perhaps they will stumble upon an overlooked clue. If nothing else, Dupin says, “an inquiry will afford us amusement.”

  After a lengthy examination of the bloodied apartment, and interviews with the neighbors, the narrator is more confused than ever. He concludes the murders are “insoluble.” Dupin lets out an exasperated sigh, then systematically lays out his solution to the unusual case.

  Dupin begins by summarizing the most perplexing facts of the crime: the needless decapitation, the girl stuffed up the fireplace, the absence of apparent motive. While the cops are searching for a madman, Dupin concludes that the murderer isn’t a man at all—he’s an orangutan. Furthermore, Dupin has already placed an advertisement in the newspaper for an escaped primate. A few pages later, a sailor shows up, looking for his guilty pet.

  Poe’s story was an instant success. The ghastly crime and brilliant detective mesmerized readers. Poe even got paid: the owner of the magazine gave him $56 for the tale. But Poe shrugged off the achievement, writing to a friend that “people think them [his detective stories] more ingenious than they are… In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself… have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?”19 If Poe was proud of these popular tales, he wrote, it was because he had finally come up with “something in a new key.”20

  What Poe had come up with was the detective story.III His formula went this way: First, there is the impossible crime, followed by the baffled cops. The case appears to be hopeless. But then our brilliant detective appears. He ponders some neglected clues, connects the far-fetched dots, and comes up with an inspired solution. Moral order is restored in the last act, when the guilty soul is found and punished.

  This formula has since led to one of the most successful genres of modern culture. From Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly to Law & Order, these narratives still obey the tropes and traditions invented by the young Edgar Allan Poe. As Arthur Conan Doyle would later admit, Monsieur Dupin was the first Sherlock. Poe deserved credit for “the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime.”

  In 1948, nearly a century after Poe’s untimely death, the poet W. H. Auden wrote an essay in Harper’s that tried to explain the enduring popularity of the detective story.22 For Auden, the subject had personal stakes: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: Firstly, the intensity of the craving—if I have any work to do, 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.” And while Auden dismissed most of these crime novels as pulpy fictions, he also believed that a close study of the detective story might “throw light… on the function of art.”

  Auden’s argument began with a short history of tragedy: “In Greek tragedy, the audience knows the truth.” The plot is spoiled at the start. Oedipus Rex, for instance, is the story of a man searching for the murderer of the king. It’s framed as a cryptic crime story, but everyone already knows how the story ends: Oedipus is the killer he’s trying to find.

  The genius of Poe was inverting this ancient formula, creating a tale designed to keep the reader in the dark. (The root of mystery is the ancient Greek muo, which means “to shut the eyes,” or “to hide.”) While fiction had traditionally relied on predictable beats, Poe’s stories were built around the element of surprise. He took the delightful search for clues that had defined narratives since Oedipus but added in an unpredictable ending. (As Auden noted, the entire point of the detective story was that “the audience does not know the truth at all.”) And so the reader becomes another sleuth, searching for clues just like the characters on the page.

  Poe’s insight was that the audience didn’t care about the murder. That was just the setup, the inciting incident. What they really cared about was the mystery.

  The Hook

  When Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, he discovered a new way to hook the human mind. The enduring appeal of Poe’s formula raises a larger question: Why is it so compelling? Why do we get obsessed with missing writers and impossible crimes? Why does mystery create a mental itch that must be scratched?

  The explanation begins with a strange feature of the dopamine system, an ancient part of the animal brain. While dopamine is often associated with hedonism—it’s supposed to be the chemical of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—one of the most important functions of dopamine is the way it controls our attention. In essence, dopamine acts as a neural currency, allowing us to appraise the world and locate the most interesting parts. The feeling of delight is just the brain’s way of telling itself to look over there, notice this, focus on that.

  So what triggers the biggest spikes in dopamine? It’s not predictable pleasures. Rather, it’s pleasures that arrive with a sense of mystery, or what neuroscientists refer to as “prediction errors.”23 In the lab, scientists trigger these prediction errors by establishing a rewarding pattern—hit a lever, get some sugar—and then introducing a surprise, such as a sweet treat that arrives without warning. (You can also elicit a large dopamine spike with less pleasing shocks, such as loud sounds and flashing lights.) These brain cells are sensitive to surprises because it’s an in
credibly efficient way to learn, which is why the same quirk of programming exists in fruit flies, mice, and primates.24

  This mental software has been around for millions and millions of years. The human brain, however, found a way to put this old code to new use. The crucial turn is the ability to find pleasure not just in calories and sex but in ideas and narratives. It doesn’t matter if it’s a newspaper story about an inexplicable disappearance or an Edgar Allan Poe whodunit: these works still excite the dopaminergic system, which is why we pay attention even when they contain no primal rewards.IV As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously observed, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”25

  But remember, this dopamine system comes with a peculiar feature. Although the human brain is a pattern-making machine, always attempting to solve for x and predict what’s next, it’s not the accurate predictions that grab our attention—it’s those prediction errors, the rewards and revelations we can’t anticipate. Good art turns this impulse into engagement, establishing a premise and then subtly violating our expectations, postponing the answer for as long as possible. Because it’s the questions that keep us interested. Not the expected turn, but the twist we never saw coming. As Stephen Sondheim observed, in a summary of his aesthetic approach, “Art needs surprise, otherwise it doesn’t hold an audience’s attention.”26

  Prediction errors are just the start of this neural process. If the tale is well told, that initial surprise gives way to a feeling entirely unique to human beings. We stop trying to solve the problem and start surfing the mystery instead, immersing ourselves in what we’ll never understand. This feeling goes by many names—wonder, awe, astonishment—but it is rooted in the pleasure of the mysterious. Most animals fear the dark. We find our greatest meaning in it.