Show Me The Fun
Ron Benrey is a prolific writer who has coauthored nine romantic suspense novels with his wife Janet: The Pippa Hunnechurch Mysteries, The Royal Tunbridge Wells Mysteries, and the Glory, North Carolina, Mysteries. All three series are available as Kindle, Nook, and Apple Books. Ron has also written ten non-fiction books. His most recent, published this past January, is Know Your Rights, a Survival Guide for Non Lawyers (for Sterling).
Ron “wrote his way” through engineering school as a freelance magazine writer. After graduating, he became Electronics Editor at Popular Science Magazine. He went on to become a speechwriter for several of America’s largest companies.
Ron holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a juris doctor from the Duquesne University School of Law.
Ron and Janet live in North Carolina. Contact Ron at ron@benrey.com.
Experienced novelist Ron Benrey, co-author of Dead as a Scone
(A Royal Tunbridge Wells Mystery)
muses about why reading mystery novels can be so much fun.
It’s been said many times that while many novelists write to tell readers something — by creating content variously designed to inform, enlighten, illuminate, educate, enrage, challenge, proselytize, encourage, and possibly call to action — the authors of mysteries have a less lofty goal. We hope readers will have fun when they read our novels.
To paraphrase the online dictionary I use, one of the definitions of fun is “… behavior or an activity that is intended purely for enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure and should not be interpreted as having serious purposes.” Therein lies the reason why so many people read mystery novels, even though it might seem weird (depraved?) to get lighthearted pleasure contemplating something as grisly as murder.
Why should this be so? Fun may be the author’s intention, but why does the reader cooperate? Given the popularity of mystery novels, they obviously do find mysteries enjoyable. What is it about a mystery novel that delivers fun?
For starters, while most mysteries are fun… few novels are actually funny (far fewer than all that try to be). No, the fun in a good mystery typically is found elsewhere. It begins when interesting people are put into difficult circumstances — and we get to watch them react.
The essence of most mystery plots is quite simple: The protagonist’s world goes out of kilter and s/he spends the rest of the story restoring the order of his/her world.
Given the tumult and uncertainty of our real lives, it’s satisfying (fun!) to see good triumph over evil… harmony replace chaos… traditional values replace anarchy.. calm replace fear.
A good mystery aids and abets this major source of enjoyment with clever dialog, interesting settings, exotic locales, eccentric characters, and often painless opportunities to learn interesting things — about topics ranging from food, to bell ringing, from sailing to monasteries, from golf tees to high tea.
If these details are presented well, the reader vicariously enjoys a ride on the Orient Express… lunch in a Greek taverna … family members far worse than our own… opportunities to work in unusual occupations… chances to have Walter Mitty moments with unusual crafts… the list goes on and on.
The engine that powers all of this — the force that compels the characters and the readers to slog on — is (to use the Brit cliché) murder most foul. It’s possible to write a mystery without a murder — Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers is the probably the best-known example — but there seems something hollow about a corpse-less mystery.
Golden-age mystery writers dealt with the it’s-too-bad-people-have-to-die problem by creating initial victims who absolutely, positively deserved to die. The cliché second victim was often presented as a blackmailer who foolishly tried to make a few bob off the crime he or she had witnessed. These arrangements eliminated “innocent victims” (translation: victims a reader would identify with.)
Today, all of this seems less important  Still, mystery writers kill off innocent pets at their peril.
Interestingly, even a “dull” mystery can be the source of fun. It was Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe, who famously wrote, “The English may not always be the best [mystery] writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” Chandler — along with many critics before and after him — was surprised at the popularity of dull mystery novels.
I’m not. Dullness —actually, quiet meandering around interesting locale, lack of frenetic pacing, enough time to meet fascinating characters, and slow pacing that avoids slam-bang action — is an important part of the fun for many of us. We (and me) read mysteries to relax — to escape a busy world — not to partake of the stuff of so-called thrillers:
- Gruesome murders
- High body counts.
- Lovingly written details about horrific tortures.
- Fast-paced action that moves from one corner of the world to another
- A barrage of foul language
- Shades of gray morality where the hero has to do wrong to achieve right
Stories that feature these things are not our cup of tea. And speaking of tea… when we began to develop The Royal Tunbridge Wells Mysteries, we focused on the fun aspects right from the get-go. Specifically, the fun we had writing the books. IMO, mysteries are more fun to write than any other genre, which helps to explain the profusion of mystery novelists.
Consider The Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum as an example. The museum is the foundation of Dead as a Scone and The Final Crumpet — the primary locale and the “MacGuffin” of every story.  (The MacGuffin, a term invented by Alfred Hitchcock, is the thing the characters care about. Think of those improbable “letters of transit” in “Casablanca.”)
In real life, chances are slight that someone would establish a combination art and natural history museum dedicated to the art, geography, botany, and manufacturing related to Britain’s tea trade and its love affair with tea — then house the institution in an impressive, four-story Georgian-style building that has five major galleries, tea blending and tasting rooms, meeting facilities, a tearoom/restaurant; and a tea garden heated by subterranean steam pipes.
We took delight in picking the museum’s location. As it happens, Janet grew up in Tunbridge Wells. We placed the building on the same plot of land where Janet lived when she was a teenager. Her family house had been replaced with a petrol station; we “demolished” the petrol station in favor of a significantly more interesting edifice. And then we enjoyed drawing up plans for the museum (you’ll find them in the front of Dead as a Scone.
We’re no longer surprised when a reader writes to us and says, “I’m traveling to England next summer. How do I get to the tea museum”?
That’s another thing about mystery novels. Their “realness” is part of the fun.
September 9, 2011
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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2 Responses
So many interesting and true comments in this essay/blog!
First, I’ll agree that I enjoy reading mystery fiction that is not too gruesome or gory. In fact, if it starts with a horrific crime that screams sick serial killer, I won’t go any further. I want to relax, smile a bit, figure out a puzzle. As a writer, as you say, I want to create order.
I also want to mention that I love your titles.
Jacqueline Seewald
THE TRUTH SLEUTH
In the introduction to The Horizon, Helen MacInnes recounted soldiers “wry amusement” about their futile search for a town from Assignment in Brittany, during a lull in battle after the Normandy landing. The underground sentiment was real, but, for reasons of security, the location was totally fictional.
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