This week EQMM’s July/August 2023 issue went on sale. In it you’ll find “Death in the New Age,” a new story by Mehnaz Sahibzada. The author  is a 2022 Jack Hazard Fellow in fiction writing. Since debuting in our Department of First Stories in 2010 under the name Mehnaz Turner, she’s had stories in Jaggery, Strange Horizons, Mystery Magazine, and other publications. Mehnaz is also a poet; her poetry collection My Gothic Romance came out in 2019. It’s the connection between poetry and mystery that she discusses in this post.—Janet Hutchings

I read my first mystery novel when I was eleven years old and on a train cutting through the Swiss Alps. The book in my hand was Agatha Christie’s, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, a handsome navy hardback with the paper jacket removed. I loved the causal flourish of diving into Marple’s St. Mary Mead as the train snaked its way through tunnels and across bridges that broke into an expanse of deciduous trees. I had lugged the novel from California to Saudi Arabia, where me and my Lahore-born parents, as well as my younger sister, would reside for three years during the 1980s before returning to the U.S.

Now on a family trip to Europe, I was finally reading the book.

My father, a physician, worked at Al-Hada Hospital in Taif. My mother, a stay-at-home wife during this era, busied herself with trips to the souk where she sought out spices for the curries and cakes she placed before us on the long dining table inside our desert abode. On weekends we’d visit the Kaba in Mecca or picnic by the Red Sea with a tin of kababs. And somewhere amid living in Pakistan, America, and Saudi Arabia, as well as my family’s travel excursions through Europe & Asia—I fell in love with the mystery genre. I couldn’t understand why every text in a bookstore wasn’t a mystery, nor why every person I encountered wasn’t a diehard fan. My proud young mind pitied the human who found little interest in the whodunit. How dull their reading lives must be, I reckoned. It wasn’t just amateur detectives, like Jane Marple, who appealed to me, but also the aesthetics I associated with the cozier moods of the genre: mahogany dressers, magnifying glasses, lush countryside, and cups of peppermint tea. I devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden stories; watched Murder She Wrote, Scooby-Doo, and Colombo to the detriment of completing my homework and spent more time than I care to admit trying to perfect my pronunciation of Poirot (a feat I’ve yet to master). My favorite board game, predictably, was Clue, and I could amuse myself at any dull gathering my parents dragged us to by imagining the cohort of guests as a sea of suspects. I wondered about the inner lives each body guarded—who might be guilty of something yet to be discovered? 

This habit of reframing reality so it was refracted through the lens of a mystery has accompanied me into adulthood and my present life. I have relied on it through college courses, faculty meetings, weddings, and plane flights—reading the room with as much curiosity and anticipation as I would a good detective novel. Yet while the reading of mysteries was my first love, as a writer I gravitated toward poetry, which I began writing with a preternatural ferocity around the same age as I discovered detective stories.  At school teachers passed out the odd printed copy of a poem for us to squint over in class, but at home, I wasn’t drawn to reading poetry even if my notebooks teetered with the earnest rhymes I’d penned myself.

As I came of age, this identity of being a poet became part of my social image—but my alter ego, I noticed over time, had the silhouette of a detective. The classic detective as a loner, stoic, and observer—having an unsentimental yet probing nature—has always been a draw for me. As a Pakistani-American introvert, born in one country and raised in another, with a childhood marked by international travels and experiences, I could relate to the sense of alienation romanticized in the aloof figure of the sleuth.  At the same time, writing poetry gave me a space to piece together the clues and red herrings my shifting realities presented.  I explored spiritual questions like, is there really a God?  And practical ones like, why don’t most American women veil?

All through high school, college, and beyond, I kept my nose in mysteries, finding joy in the fresh scent of a book and a cup of hot chocolate. In graduate school, pursuing an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies (1999), I read thrillers while working on my thesis—where I researched Islamic Numerology and attempted to solve the puzzle of why certain numbers (like three, seven, and forty) have become familiar patterns in literature and religious rituals.  It wasn’t until later, when I became a high school English teacher and began teaching mysteries, that I seriously entertained the possibility of occasionally writing them as well, and came to understand mystery stories as the suspenseful sibling of poetry, the genre I wrote in most frequently over the course of my life, and as I grew older, appreciated more and more, as a reader. 

I consciously began to grasp how the practice of engaging with mysteries for the poet might represent some understandable pattern when I read W. H. Auden’s 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” in which he explores both the allure and archetypal elements of traditional mysteries. In the essay, Auden comments on the psychological appeal of the genre and how it provides readers with a sense of order in a chaotic and uncertain world. The detective, as an emblem of the pursuit of justice, is usually the figure to help restore it. As a mystery-loving poet, I found solace in Auden’s essay.  And in researching his career in poetry, I stumbled upon his poem “Detective Story,” which I have returned to again and again when searching for poetic responses to the mystery genre.  Poetry and mystery writing, while distinct forms with conventions all their own, have much in common:  they can present a riddle for the reader to solve and rely on atmosphere to immerse them in a game of appearance versus reality, often maintaining a degree of emotional restraint. The detective, as archetypal lone wolf, works to uncover the truth; yet the poet is often a keen observer of reality, piecing together clues to uncover deeper meanings. While the poet explores the mystery of being through fragments, the detective parses together fragments to solve crimes. Poetry has a long history as a vehicle for social justice while mysteries can explore the brutal consequences of murder, greed, and social inequities. 

These connections did not occur to me all at once: they unfurled over time, making my relationship with both genres simultaneously more intimate and more strange.  Not only could my reality be reframed when observed through poetry or mystery goggles, but viewing the mystery genre through the lens of poetry and vice versa deepened my appreciation of both these forms while complicating their aesthetics.  There seemed to be something synchronistic about the meeting of these genres in my mind: both shared the obsessive philosophical quest to discover the truth. I understood that in surveying reality we are always operating through a particular lens or set of lenses: mine also hinged on the meeting point of poetry and mystery writing.

The summer after I turned twenty I wasn’t yet ready to piece together the clues of my own life to understand how my passion for poetry and mystery would later intersect.  But in June of 1994, I walked into the Tate Gallery in London, the first stop on my backpacking trip with a college friend; in the gallery I wandered aimlessly alone, gazing fleetingly at the art on the walls, until I stumbled upon James Waterhouse’s 1888 painting of “The Lady of Shalott,” inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same title.  I stood so transfixed by the painting, I couldn’t move for several minutes. Something in the Lady’s expression seemed to capture yearning in a way I had never before surmised.  Later that morning, in the museum store, I purchased a poster of the painting and a stack of postcards of it as well.  The latter would become bookmarks for the many mystery novels I was to consume in the years that followed.  But it would take me another decade or so to make a connection that surprised me:  I entered my classroom one morning to teach and closely analyze, for the first time, Tennyson’s 1832 poem entitled, “The Lady of Shalott,” with a group of high-school seniors. It was a piece I vaguely knew. My heart skipped a beat when we encountered the lines, “The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried The Lady of Shalott.”

With a shudder, I realized that the title of the first mystery I ever read on that train ride through the Alps came from a line of poetry. 

I thought again of the Waterhouse painting that had arrested my attention at the Tate Gallery: it wasn’t just the Lady’s mysterious yearning that had struck me that day in the museum, but also this glimpse into my own reserved nature spontaneously overflowing into lyric.