Anyone up for horseshoes and hand grenades?

 When something is called a simple truth, it isn’t always a contradiction in terms.  Some truths are simple.  If you jump from the top of a mature oak tree without a means for arresting the fall, you will hit the ground.  Irrefutable.  However, the underlying mechanism involved in this event is gravity, and there is nothing simple about a fundamental force of nature.  Ask any physicist.

I’ll go out on a limb of that oak tree and propose there is no truth that is simple, for the simple reason that a truth itself is nearly impossible to establish absolutely in all its particulars for every observer assembled for the task.

I’ll creep further out on the limb, testing its tethering to the trunk, and propose that mystery stories, in all their dazzling variety and genre distorting forms, are all essentially about people seeking the truth, in competition with other people and circumstances aligned in opposition.

Truth has always been under threat, yet today is a time of particular advantage for the powers of concealment and obfuscation.  There is a cultural trend of people “speaking their truth.”  This is a triumph of solipsism, since it affords deference to the notion that everyone’s version of reality is equally valid.  It’s also in direct contravention of Daniel Patrick Monihan’s maxim that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”  If one abandons Moynihan’s proscription, then there’s really no point in trying to understand anything.  In such a world, we would have no use for people like Sam Spade or V.I. Warshawski. 

I spent many years in close enough proximity to the media, often thoroughly involved in the matter being reported upon.  In all these cases, I never observed the story to be 100% accurate.  And none of these slight variations (some not so slight) would I attribute to malicious intent.  The principal culprit was time.  It just wasn’t possible for any reporter, editor or factchecker to pin down every nuance and particular with total precision in the time required to get the story written/published/distributed.   The majority of these imperfections were incidental, though not all.  Journalism has its share of sloppy performers, but by and large, they strive for an accurate and dispassionate recording.

Still, biases have a way of creeping in.  This is always true for everybody.  They’re often manifest in how information is interpreted.  One of the wonders of language, and the cognitive process overall, is the bounty of ways one can express any given thought or observation.  Within these multitudes, there’s little chance that something can be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

What can be agreed upon is that everyone try to get close.  For this endeavor to work, we rely heavily on cynics, skeptics and imperturbable analytics.  Their counterparties are those committed to deceit, duplicity and guile, people actively striving to obscure the truth.  These folks are the bread and butter of the genre we celebrate, and thus indispensable.  What’s more interesting to me, however, are those who have decided the truth is their truth, a conclusion arrived at usually through a tortured, circuitous psychological voyage. 

They don’t have to be patently delusional.  There are plenty of historical heroes who simply understood something the rest of humanity considered absurd.  Though sometimes they are, they just don’t know it.  When this condition inhabits a brilliant or powerful mind, or a collective of capable people, things get really interesting. 

The action and adventure in the mystery genre are fun, though the appeal wanes over time.  What endures for me is the effort involved in uncovering the truth, however approximate it might be.  This dynamic achieves its fullest expression with the unreliable narrator, though any narrator’s reliability is also suspect for the reasons outlined above.  My favorite books are those that relish ambiguity and uncertainty while still managing to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. 

We know that massive social and political movements can be premised on monstruous untruths.  It’s unsettling to contemplate.  At least we have mysteries and their adjacent narratives, where in one messy entanglement someone was able to get close to something resembling a true thing.