“Mystery” Articles

In The New Yorker’s May 27, 2024, issue, Kathryn Schulz has a fascinating article called “Wait For It: Suspense in Literature and Life.” Her thesis is that every kind of literature—not just murder mysteries—is full of suspense. “In fact, outside of phone books and instruction manuals, it’s almost impossible to find a written work that doesn’t make use of suspense to captivate its readers.

One trigger for this particular novel was coming across the King James Bible phrase “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess 2:7-9). I found it a very intriguing phrase, one always relevant but no more so than today. (Modern translations lean toward rendering this “the spirit of lawlessness,” which certainly seems loose in the world today in many ways both overt and subtle.) What is evil? Why do we participate in it?