Historians love to tout an association with detectives and mysteries. From the television shows History Detectives and History’s Greatest Mysteries to the podcast Mystery History, characterizing historians as detectives has held such strong appeal that popular history textbooks and classes use the association as a selling point. My own department offers a series of courses under the umbrella heading The Art of Historical Detection. Nor is the association between historian and detective a recent phenomenon. When the historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood published The Idea of History in 1946, he told readers that “the hero of a detective novel is thinking exactly like an historian when, from indications of the most varied kinds, he constructs an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed, and by whom.”
If there’s a bit of appropriated glamour in the comparison—making our research seem more exciting than it often is—the association is nevertheless well earned. Like detectives, historians need to ask good questions, seek help from experts in a wide range of fields, solve problems creatively, and search out unexpected resources. We wrestle with difficult and slippery characters from the past who left us documents that offer only varnished, contingent views. We learn to read all our original sources with a grain of salt, and develop innovative ways of analyzing and contextualizing them. We question earlier interpretations, wondering whether a previous scholar jumped too quickly to make assumptions. Educators suggest that urging students to see themselves as historical detectives leads them to understand history better and become more critical thinkers.
But if it’s aspirational to think of ourselves as detectives, historians also have something to gain from that genre. “All historians read mysteries,” the renowned historian Mary Beth Norton told me matter-of-factly. I think I know why: Historians—like detectives—spend a lot of their time floundering as they try to understand the past.
Reading about detectives who flounder can be cathartic. Years ago I discovered Henning Mankell’s novels, especially those featuring the dour detective Kurt Wallander. To a degree I find unmatched in other mysteries (and uncaptured in the TV adaptations of the books), Mankell portrayed Wallander as utterly baffled by the crime for drawn-out portions of each book, clueless as to a perpetrator or a motive. During these periods, Wallander frets that the seemingly nonsensical brutality of the crime is indicative of larger, existential concerns—signs that his country had become unrecognizable to him.
Historians are familiar with this kind of chaos and confusion—and the work it takes, day after day, to make sense of our research. As a friend used to say, with mock precision: When writing anything, historians spend the first 65 percent of their time struggling to figure out what the evidence means, and how to analyze and contextualize it. (Then there’s the self-doubt as you wonder why you aren’t doing something meaningful, like seeking a cure for cancer.)
Wallander’s process of dealing with the mess of a case is an object lesson. Wallander moves slowly and blindly through the first 65 percent of each investigation, and Mankell underlines the tiny, mundane steps he takes along the way. I dare you to find another author who showcases such seemingly pointless busywork. “He picked up the phone and dialed Martinsson’s number. No answer. He tried again, still no answer,” a passage might read (that one’s from The Man Who Smiled, published in 1994). At another point, Wallander might simply sit at his desk and rearrange his pencils. Nevertheless, he painstakingly pieces together the answers to the mystery. As I read these books before falling asleep after long days of struggling with my manuscript, I found Wallander’s pencil-rearranging eminently recognizable.
Other writers’ detectives offer different processes for figuring out their cases—from Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, who spends most of her time racing around Chicagoland and yelling at people (also cathartic!), to Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole, whose job as a police detective is killing him, even as he continues to muscle his way through the sadism and violence of his Oslo environs. Whether we actually identify with these characters and their methods is beside the point. The point is that each illustrates how one might face the chaos, the unknown, and how to start moving toward making sense of it.
Perhaps some historians appreciate the ties between history and literary thrillers because they would seem to cast us in the heroic roles of a Nancy Drew or even an Indiana Jones, but it’s become increasingly unpopular for novelists to portray their detectives as admirable figures. They’re far more likely to be troubled, self-destructive, and morally ambivalent; sometimes they’re hiding damning secrets themselves. We see a lot more of the bristly, cheesesteak-eating Mare of Easttown than Maisie Dobbs, the annoyingly beautiful, brilliant, universally admired, and self-possessed heroine created by Jacqueline Winspear. I don’t know about you, but I find it reassuring to follow protagonists who have even more personal failings than I do.
But if all of these ties between history and mystery help to explain the popularity of the association between them, they do not ultimately explain my attraction to this genre, particularly when I’m deep into writing a book. In the past, I read procedurals because they focused on process. Thus, no one could have been more surprised than I was when I was writing my most recent book and realized that I had uncovered a mystery of my own.
Mysteries don’t focus solely on a crime and its solution. They immerse you in worlds of meaning. Detectives have to parse the inner logics of strange subcultures of people and places, and their authors take you along for the ride, offering rich descriptions of sights, sounds, and tastes to place you there. Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti never failed to appreciate in detail the delicious Venetian meals he tucked into three times per day; Joe Ide’s IQ described a gritty East Long Beach and its people in a way worthy of LA noir.
Historians don’t set out to solve mysteries. But we nevertheless find wonderfully weird and surprising things along the way.
I thought a lot about those lessons as I developed my most recent book, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. When I discovered that James Ogilvie, the “strange genius” and celebrity orator at the heart of my book, wore a toga during his eloquent performances, I dedicated an entire chapter to unpacking what those togas looked like in the early 19th century and what they meant to American audiences. Likewise, the fact that he struggled throughout his life with an opium habit allowed me to discuss the surprising fact that virtually all early Americans simply didn’t see opium as habit-forming; they celebrated it as a wonder drug in a world otherwise lacking in painkillers. If mystery writers need to evoke all the nubbly uniqueness of a particular city or landscape or character, historians need to underline the myriad and memorable ways that the past is a foreign country. Consider the ways that Tana French immerses you in the very particular world of a working-class Irish family, with such distinctive dialogue and bristling, passive-aggressive familial relations, and you’ll know what I mean.
As much as I utilized insights of rich description and social subcultures drawn from great fiction, it never occurred to me that I might have a historical mystery on my hands. I thought I knew the story I was writing. But at the very end I stumbled upon a stupendously important letter, and I realized that my story had to change.
James Ogilvie had a long, successful teaching career in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, but abandoned that job in 1808 in favor of jumping on his horse and traveling from town to town giving public talks. His friends thought that decision was preposterous. He later confessed that he saw “in their faces a suspicion, that his mind was deranged.” But I knew that plenty of early Americans made odd and sometimes regrettable decisions, and considering that he struck gold as a traveling performer, it didn’t occur to me to question why he’d turned away from guaranteed paychecks.
But at the very end of my research, I found a letter that made me realize I should have asked more questions. Sitting in the hushed, high-ceilinged reading room of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I read a missive in which Ogilvie begged a doctor to help him with his melancholy.
The fact that he battled melancholy was no surprise to me: He had often described his bouts with it to his correspondents, and it became so well known that newspaper reviewers sometimes made note of it in their columns, explaining that he was clearly struggling or had recently recovered. What I hadn’t realized was the extremity of his condition. Indeed, one of his friends confessed that “When he told me that he was subject to low spirits, I naturally concluded that he merely complained of an evil to which most men are more or less exposed.” Finding this letter revealed to me that if he were alive today, he likely would have been diagnosed as bipolar or manic depressive—diagnoses that would not appear until more than 130 years after his death. In his letter, he described cycling through emotional highs that exhilarated him, making him feel brilliant and exceptionally eloquent, but they were followed by depressive lows so crippling that they made him contemplate suicide. That’s the trouble with the word melancholy: It doesn’t capture the many different degrees of depression. If Ogilvie had lived in the 21st century, he likely never would have publicized his struggles so openly due to the stigma experienced by many people on the bipolar spectrum. In the early 19th century, long before psychiatrists characterized manic depression as a “disorder,” people like Ogilvie felt free to bemoan their troubles openly without fear of being thought of as “disordered” or “mentally ill,” as he likely would have been in the 20th and even 21st centuries.
Finding this letter sent me down the research rabbit hole. How did 19th-century medical experts wrangle with the different degrees of melancholy? How did they treat it? And that’s where I found something important. Over and over, doctors advised patients suffering from melancholy that two solutions to their troubles were to travel and to engage in public speaking. Traveling and public speaking, so the rationale went, encouraged people to remain active and engaged with others, such that they might avoid or resolve dark periods of melancholy. Doctors believed these activities allowed sufferers to feel that they could take charge of their own health, granting them a sense of self-control rather than despair. My jaw dropped as I realized that Ogilvie’s glittering, controversial career, which took him to virtually every corner of the new United States, had originated from his need to resolve his melancholy: He abandoned teaching in favor of an itinerant career as a public speaker at least in part as a survival strategy. I had uncovered the answer to a mystery that I hadn’t recognized existed, and was left feeling a bit like the Gene Hackman private detective character at the end of the movie The Conversation, cognizant of my own mistaken assumptions.
Mysteries showcase people trying to work through problems, and their various processes for making sense of the chaos. Along the way, however slowly and methodically, their protagonists need to come to grips with a diverse array of unreliable sources, questionable tips, and red herrings. Given those elements, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we find so many close associations made between history and mystery. The best mysteries are never just about catching a murderer or solving a case, just as the best histories ultimately reveal much more than the dynamics of the subject at hand. Both forms of writing reveal entire cultures of people and politics and actions and words that force us to expand our views of the world and think outside of ourselves.
I’m in the midst of a new project now—my favorite part of the process—and I see that Cheryl A. Head has a new book out, and RV Raman seems to be channeling Agatha Christie with a new series. I want to see what else this genre has to teach me—not just about surviving the research and writing, but about developing narratives that might even end, occasionally, with a finish that makes you say “Wow!”
