Murder, he read: crime, punishment & sex. (Of Several Minds).

When I was a child I had an illness that kept me out of school for a year and left me pretty much unable to do anything but stay at home and read and draw. I was seven, and my lifelong addiction to reading started with mythology and fairy tales. Pantheon had published the complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, a book I read over and over again; I loved Padraic Colum's great retellings of the Norse and Greek myths. A little later came C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and his adult science fiction and fantasy, though much of it was beyond me. I discovered the pulpier forms of science fiction when I was nine, and for the next few years that was my passion. Then, when I was a freshman in high school, I picked up a copy of Raymond Chandler's thriller, The Lady in the Lake. I was hooked on Chandler from then on.

It's not that I read nothing but thrillers and the pulps; in high school I also read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which came as a kind of saving grace: it helped me understand that real life might be found even in a middle-sized Midwestern town. I loved poetry, especially the beats, but also Whitman, Blake, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Frost. Recently, on re-reading Chandler, I wondered about the reading habits we get into. Why is it that, although I still read some of the better science fiction writers--Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin--I do so only occasionally? Mysteries have been the constant, and usually only a particular kind, the sort called "hard-boiled." (This is to set them apart from the Agatha Christie variety, the British sort that has some urbane Scotland Yard pipe smoker figure out how the man in the locked room got murdered.)

Why mysteries, and why the hard-boiled variety? At one level, the attraction is probably no more subtle or sophisticated than the reason people are drawn to erotic literature. Sex is interesting. So is violence. People slow down to look at accidents. The bad people in the novels of Dennis Lehane are really bad, and when they meet with their invariably violent comeuppance we feel an understandable, if not defensible, satisfaction. It's not so much that the good guys win as that the bad guys don't. And in some of these novels, the distinction between good and bad guys isn't all that clear. Elmore Leonard, one of the best practitioners of the craft, often writes about con-men and half-criminal sorts you wind up rooting for because they aren't as bad as the people they're up against. It helps that Leonard's style is fast-moving and does just what he wants it to do--he said once, when asked why his novels were such brisk and entertaining reads, that he leaves out the parts that readers skip. He is also often laugh-out-loud funny, and the dialogue is great.

There is another reason I keep going back to this sort of reading. The first serious classic I read in high school was Crime and Punishment. I read it not just for the murders--I wanted to know why Raskolnikov committed them. What could bring a person to this horrible act? What could make a person think that killing another person was necessary or defensible? Why are some people drawn to violence?

There was a man in my hometown, about my age, who was drawn to violence from his high school years on. His name kept cropping up in the local newspaper, when he was arrested for some act of vandalism, assault, or petty crime. He was a bully, and enjoyed tormenting people. He wound up a criminal, in and out of prison, and was suspected of having killed a few of his many enemies and burying their bodies on land he bought. I don't know if he's dead or in prison now, but once I talked with someone who considered him a friend. The friend was a weak man who enjoyed being inside the circle the bully had drawn around himself and a few other people; everyone outside was a potential victim, so if you were afraid of being his enemy you had to be his friend. There is something fascinating about both kinds of people.

The best of these books are not only diverting entertainments: they are serious explorations of human character. Graham Greene distinguished between his "entertainments" and his more serious writing; he put Brighton Rock into the entertainment category. It is more like a mystery than most of his books, and it is arguably his most profound novel. The novels of P. D. James are never simple thrillers. One of her most recent works, Death in Holy Orders, is a great exploration of malice, disappointment, and many other forms of human complication.

If, as it has been said, sex and death are the two things an adult must take seriously, it is easy to see why these books appeal. There isn't much good erotic writing (a fact underscored by the annual Bad Sex writing contest in Britain), but there is a lot of good writing in the mystery category.

We probably shouldn't expect too much of the genre, even as some of us can't get enough of it. In his introduction to The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler wrote about the people who write detective novels: "There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel." And why the rest of us keep enjoying the assaults.