By J. R. Kruze and S. H. Marpel
(Get the whole story here, why wait? https://calm.li/WalkawayBlues)
II
“Wait a minute — personal problems are mysteries?” I protested, even not taking my next bite.
“Sure. If you knew everything about a problem there isn’t any mystery to it. In fact, that is one of the key ways that geniuses of all time have solved problems — to ask questions and define everything there is about a problem. Same rough idea that the detectives in mysteries use to solve cases.” John took another small bite to highlight his point.
“You’re saying these imaginary detectives, and their contrived actions are able to solve our modern problems — if Holmes showed up today and sat on the other side of you, you could give him problems like ‘Global Warming’ and he’d sort it out for you?” I was letting my ice cream melt and saturate the last of my pie at this point.
“More or less, yes. What I’m actually saying is that if you know how a mystery is written, you’ll be able to apply that to personal problems and solve them.” John then scraped the last of his own sauce and crumbs off his plate and pushed those few drops into his mouth, smiling at the final taste.
Eying my own saturated crust, I simply started to scrape this up and finish it off before it at least got as high as room temperature.
“Would you like some coffee? I’m having one.” John asked.
I nodded in reply, too busy working to enjoy the last drips of this incredible dessert.
John rolled ahead. “Any plot has a character with a problem in a setting. In most mysteries, the crime occurs at the beginning or before the beginning of the story itself. A crime is a non-optimum solution that has been made against the published laws. A simple mystery solves the problem by finding the hidden optimal solution. Detectives have to both solve the how-dun-it of the criminal, and also determine his motivation and prevent him from repeating the crime again. That concept can be applied to almost any life situation, if not all of them.”
“Almost? Like what would be exempt?” I asked.
The coffee arrived. John put honey in his. I put imitation cream in mine, with white sugar.
John sipped slightly and let it cool a bit on the saucer. “Mostly any exception has to do with miracles, or supernatural events. Ghost stories fall into this. But there’s a modern school that solves the incomplete actions ghosts have been trying to solve that they couldn’t while alive. And that brings them closer to the Western ideal that the story has to end up with a positive outcome.”
“So other than an act of God, we’re able to solve anything?” I summarized.
“Generally, yes. Of course an impossible problem is easy to set up. But the locked room murders have long been solved in fiction and in real life.” John sipped again and smiled. “Their coffee is almost as good as their pie.”
“OK, let’s test this. My problem is that I caught the media lying to me.” I tried my own coffee and now wished I’d had real cream and honey in it instead. Maybe the next cup, if our conversation lasted that long.
“Well, that’s not too much of a problem. They’ve been lying for years. Practically, the Hearst Yellow Journalism all but created the Spanish-American War. But it never really got better after that.” John took another quick sip. “The problem is not that the corporate news media lie, it’s that we get to believing what they say is true.”
I let that sink in for a bit. “So it’s more that they have been telling me something that I really wanted to believe, in a way that I would believe it.”
“Believing makes facts, as William James more or less said. When you believe in something enough, it starts creating that reality for you. In our day and age, it’s much simpler to figure that the mob all believes one way, so it must be true in fact. But facts have an odd way of being difficult to disguise when we have more eyeballs than ever on the same set of data.” John stopped and looked at me to make sure he wasn’t getting too far ahead.
I swallowed a mouthful of my cooling coffee. “Here’s where bias comes in. You want to believe so-and-so will get elected, so you cherry pick your data and then phrase it so it has to be true.”
“Sure. I only wish more fiction writers worked for the media sometimes. Because then at least we’d get decent entertainment out of it. Most of these news stories are the worst form of mysteries. They say ‘so-and-so horrible event just happened, and here’s what we know. But then the story ends. You never get a build up or a resolution to any of these stories. Especially since the courts draw this out for years before the last appeal is ever heard. Lousy entertainment. Just one car wreck after the next. ‘Thanks for visiting our show — hope you can make it tomorrow for more of the same…’” John sighed at this and shook his head. It’s no small wonder that the news channels and programs now crow about holding the top spot, when that title only means who lost the least viewers from the month before.” He now took a decent gulp of coffee. All his talking had let it cool way down.
“I’ve felt that myself — where I get so upset after watching the news that I want to do something bad, and those studies about social media being a cause of depression. That must be related to it.” I said.
“Well, there could be a lot of additional factors in it. And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t pick out the stories you want to follow and then stick to those. People will do that anyway. The line we are going down is that knowing how good mysteries are written will let you see how to solve problems in real life. The problem we were approaching is that a person wants to believe something is true and so it becomes true for them. The actual concrete facts https://medium.com/@robertcworstell/the-case-of-the-walkaway-blues-part-1-e23018b50b45won’t necessarily support what’s being said. Like the old Polynesians said, ‘Truth is as valuable as it is workable.’ That implies you test everything for yourself.” John drained his cup and signaled the waitress for another.
While she was coming, I also swallowed my last bit. Time to test that honey he used last time.
Part 2 of 4 — The rest are coming soon… Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4
(Get the whole story here, why wait? https://calm.li/WalkawayBlues)
Find more books (clean romance, cozy mystery) by J. R. Kruze
Find more books (cozy mystery, clean romance) by S. H. Marpel
And stay tuned for Part 3…