Why Do We Love Murder Mysteries?

(Up beat music) - [Anthony Horowitz] Why has detective fiction remained so popular for so long?

I can't think of any genre in which the main character, and the reader or the viewer are more closely connected.

The detective and the viewer stand shoulder to shoulder.

They make exactly the same journey towards the same goal.

They both want to find out the truth and we discover the truth more or less.

At the same time - You wish to know who killed Sir Magnus Pye?

- The resolution of a detective story is absolute truth and that is something that I think we need in a world in which truth has become something of a scarce commodity.

We have 24 hour news, we have fake news, we have social media in which everybody in the world, it seems, has their own version of the truth, until you no longer know what the actual truth is.

But in a detective story, every I is dotted, every T is crossed.

You know exactly where you are at the end.

- Why does life have to be so bloody difficult?

You know, that's why I like books so much, in books the characters do it all for you and it all manages to work itself out in the right way.

- [Anthony Horowitz] There is a sort of a warmth about detective fiction, a sort of a comfort.

Why are so many detective stories set in the golden age?

You know, like in villages like Saxby on Avon.

The answer to that is, is they remind us of a different world of, of a pace of life that is slower of a sort of a relationship between people that is more open and giving.

Somehow I think the sun is always shining in a murder mystery story.

And at the end of the day, the whole journey from the murder, to the investigation, to the final solution is a journey towards comfort.

- Cake?

- [Anthony Horowitz] Detective fiction also panders to, I think, a a not entirely attractive side of the human psyche, which is this, that we are fascinated in other people.

We want to know people's secrets.

Everybody we meet is hiding something.

And I think there is a real desire on our part to get behind the facade, to get to know the worst about them, to know everything that they're trying to hide.

And again, that's something that a detective story does by its very nature.

- Never underestimate the stupidity of criminals.

I've devoted a whole chapter to it in my book.

- Criminal Stupidity.

- Exactly.

- [Anthony Horowitz] At the end of the day, Magpie Murders is a puzzle.

Every single clue has got to be up there on the screen.

You should be able to guess the solution by sort of episode three or four.

You should have really a good idea if you are as smart as Atticus Pund or for that matter, Susan Ryeland, - I'm gonna work out who killed him.

- [Narrator] For me, the joy of reading Agatha Christie has always been at the end of the book.

I normally don't guess the ending, but I'm always aware that I should have and could have.

That she hadn't hidden anything from me.

And in everything I write in this genre I try to do the same.

- It's not strange how evil can find its roots so easily in an English village.

- [Anthony Horowitz] It's funny, isn't it how the murder mystery is something that the British seem to do so well.

We are a very small country.

We are also a very rural country, you know and villages like Saxby on Avon or St Mary Mead, whatever it may be, are everywhere scattered around the country.

Little tiny pockets where everybody knows everybody.

And where the outside world, the modern world is almost distant or non existent.

- It's very personal Mr Punt, - Nothing is more personal than murder Miss Sanderton.

- [Anthony Horowitz] Certainly the the British are quite straight laced.

We hide our emotions.

Unlike the Americans who are much more effusive with their emotions.

I think we tend to keep everything internalized.

Famously our houses have net curtains you cannot see through.

And I think with the detective story which rips down the net curtains and takes away people's inhibitions and, and goes to the core of who and what they are and what they're trying to hide, is something that we just relish because it is so against our nature to give this little stuff away.

- Why does anyone kill anyone?

I can think of four reasons.

Fear, envy, anger, and desire.

- There must be others.

- No, From my experience, the extremes of human behavior they always come down to those four things.

- [Anthony Horowitz] One of the problems for a writer like me is that there are actually very few motives to murder somebody.

And you've got to remember, that if you are setting this in the 1950s, where you'll be hanged if you are discovered, the motives have to be very serious indeed.

Fear is that you know something about me, you've discovered a secret of mine.

I've done something that I don't want anybody else to know, and the only way to protect myself is to silence you.

Envy and desire.

That's simply what you have something that I want.

It could be your husband or your wife.

Your money, your house your, your your pressure stamp collection.

It could be anything.

I want it.

The only way to get it is to kill you.

And the fourth and the final motive, and the reason that I might kill you is revenge, anger.

There's something you did in the past.

Somehow you hurt me, you did something to somebody I knew or loved.

There was an accident, perhaps that's why so many murder mysteries have a story buried in the past.

It is revenge.

(mysterious music)