Pat Gaudet was born and raised in south Louisiana, and she’s worked a number of different jobs, including owning a shrimp boat. She makes her debut as a fiction writer in the Department of First Stories of our current issue, May/June 2024, with the story “The Legend of Penny and the Luck of the Draw Casino.” Her choice to write in the mystery genre comes from a long-standing love of mysteries that she tells us came partly from reading the novels of Ellery Queen. In this post she examines one source of the allure of mysteries.—Janet Hutchings

Murder mystery narratives have been with us from the time of Creation. (Even if you’re a Big Banger, stick with me here. The narrative is the point, not the theology.) Take Adam and Eve, for instance. Such a sweet couple. Not a lick of fashion sense, but hey, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? Turns out that’s not always a bad thing. Still, they were healthy, happy newlyweds. No alcohol or drug abuse problems. Totally faithful to each other. No criminal records, anger issues, or financial concerns. Just two ordinary people living their best life in Paradise (literally): no air pollution, ozone depletion, carbon footprints, nuclear waste (you get the picture), all thanks to their benevolent creator and benefactor, Yahweh. Nothing to make you think they’d ever betray Yahweh, turn on one another, or compromise their perfect existence and doom their progeny to certain death. Why would they?

And then the serpent, aka Satan, slithers on to the scene with an arsenal of lies and all hell breaks loose. Satan hates Yahweh and envies the young couple. Especially their legal right to rule Paradise. That right can never be his as long as they’re alive. So he convinces them Yahweh’s warning (that certain death will follow if they eat the fruit of a particular tree) is bogus. Just a ploy to keep them from reaching their full potential. They step out of their safe zone, eat the fruit, and death follows.

All the elements of a killer murder mystery are present in the story. We have the innocent victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. The cold-blooded murderer disguised as a mild mannered life coach who gains their trust. Then comes the con. The entrapment. The murder. And voila, Adam and Eve, first victims of the ultimate bioweapon serial killer, Satan. A psychological thriller. Real page-turner. Classic noir. Personally I find the sequel more satisfying: Yahweh’s son, J.C., uses his own blood to provide the antidote for death, brings Satan to justice, and makes sure the jerk gets to spend eternity doing hard time in a maximum security prison.

So what is it about a good mystery that gets our attention, hooks us, keeps us moving from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, clue to clue, until we reach that aha moment? Is it a complex plot? A haunting sense of place? The ability to peep like shameless voyeurs into the internal mechanisms of the mind? Is it the skill of the writer to turn a phrase? To throw out a red herring, or two, or twenty (too many for me)?

All of the above, please. But in the end, it’s the why element I’m holding out for. When the story ends, I’m never satisfied just knowing who committed the crime, or even how. I have an insatiable curiosity about human behavior. Something in me longs to understand why people do what they do. Without the why, the read is like sitting down to a big bowl of homemade chicken and sausage gumbo (side of creamy potato salad, please), only to discover the hearty chunks of spicy smoked sausage didn’t make it to the party. I hate it when that happens.

For me, the why is as much a part of a murder mystery as the who and how. It’s my need to discover the protagonist’s why that pulls me all the way into a story and compels me to stay with it to the end. It’s what challenges me to look into the depth of my soul. To re-evaluate my perception of right and wrong. Good and evil. How far would I go to right a wrong? Catch a killer? Would I be willing to bring the sympathetic criminal and the psychopathic killer to justice with the same relentless zeal?

I guess my obsession with the why began when I was first introduced to classic mysteries.

Back in the eighties, while living in England, I spent many a cold night reading about fluffy Miss Marple from St. Mary Mead who wore tweed skirts, knitted pretty pink sweaters, and ushered villains—who dared to underestimate her exceptional intelligence and observational skills—to swift justice. I was already taking such delight in immersing myself in the rural English culture, when I encountered Miss Marple on the page. Just an innocent looking old spinster, skeins of wool resting in her lap, mind working out the mystery to the click of knitting needles. But her instincts and the logic she used to figure out who done it—and most importantly, why—mesmerized me. Her superpower was her ability to connect past incidents, and the predictable pattern of people’s behavior she’d observed over the years, to solve the present crime.

Of course, Miss Marple was easily dismissed by the “real detectives” as just another old busybody (ageism, before the term was coined). Right up until her dithery, circuitous way of arriving at the truth exposed a scalpel-sharp mind, well versed in the goodness and depravity of human nature. How matter-of-factly Miss Marple laid bare the who and why of the villain as if even a child should have seen it coming. Oh how I wanted to be like her when I grew old. Knitting needles and all.  

I read Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels too. Poirot was staid, the opposite of Miss Marple. He used “the little grey cells” to get to the bottom of things. But there was something about his methodology that appealed to me too. No doubt part of the appeal was his implied backstory: a damaged, displaced person from another country coping by obsessive neatness and control of his personal environment. A man who depended on a cerebral existence to fill his waking hours. I could certainly see the why in his actions. And before everything was said and done, Poirot never failed to expose the killer’s why too. Perhaps I felt that by knowing why a person committed a crime I too could somehow see those predispositions in others. Confront evil in my own way before it was too late.   

A few years later I was back in the States, living in Florida and working at Cypress Gardens theme park (which closed down in 2009) when the resident glass blower turned me on to Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke. I’d never read anything like it. There was mystery, suspense, action, and a Cajun detective named Dave Robicheaux, another displaced person driven by a tragic past and a need to right the wrongs of this world. At first I was afraid to get too immersed in Robicheaux’s head because of his dark introspection and the struggle with alcohol addiction that plagued him.

But in the end, I couldn’t resist the deep dive because of his innate goodness, his reverence for God (despite all the blue talk), and the raw sense of justice Mr. Robicheaux wore like a mantle handed down to him by Elija himself. On top of that, there was Robicheaux’s sidekick, Clete Pursel, who’s porkpie hat and little-boy innocence captures your heart then breaks it when he goes all rogue and savagely tears into his enemies in an attempt to right a wrong, purge his own ghosts, or fulfill a perceived obligation to protect his podna, Dave.

Burke captured the sense of place and culture with undeniable accuracy—its beauty and brutality. This too became part of Robicheaux’s why. Like Miss Marple, his understanding of the people and culture he grew up with gave him an edge in uncovering the truth and bringing  justice to the privileged and marginalized alike. Burke masterfully creates Robicheaux’s world and takes the reader not just into the setting, but into the character’s mind with such eloquent prose. Is it a mystery or mainstream literary fiction? For me, it’s the perfect blend of both. After reading Black Cherry Blues, I realized you don’t have to choose between writing one genre or the other. You can write both. At the same time!

Once I abandoned the genre lines, I began to write the stories so inherent in me, with reckless abandon. And my own writing style and voice emerged stronger. Surer. I began to see why I feel compelled to write the stories that come to me in the night and will not let me go until they’re brought to life on the page. And why secrets and mystery elements must be allowed free rein if I am to tell those stories with authenticity.

Without the why, then the who, what, where, when and how are like dissonant chords begging for a resolution. You can be sure that if one of my story endings leaves the reader hanging, it won’t be the why that’s left unresolved.

So why did Adam and Eve fall for the serpent’s con? Miss Marple would probably say, “Oh my. Well . . . greed and ambition, I should think. So tempting for young people, you see. So why wouldn’t they?”