Having recently watched the Murder, She Wrote episode Deadpan with my oldest son, the superficially far-fetched motive for murder became a subject of conversation. I pointed out how it amounted to  the motive being narcissistic injury and the murderer was portrayed as a raging narcissist so it did have psychological truth to it. The issue, I suspect, is that the murder was complex and clever and it doesn’t feel true to life that someone who could plan in this careful and patient way could take this kind of insult so seriously that he would change the course of his life over it and then eventually murder the person who insulted him so many years later.

But then it occurred to me, this may be a bias that in real life we’re only familiar with the motives of murderers who are caught. There are unsolved murders. For all we know, people do carry twenty year long grudges and eventually kill people because of them in carefully planned ways but they plan the murders well enough that they never get caught, so we never find out why they did it. (This may be especially true of poisons which mimic death by natural causes; absent a brilliant detective to bring the poisoning to light, these deaths would never even be known as murders.)

I’m not saying that it does happen frequently; it would be absurd to argue from a lack of evidence that they happen at all to the conclusion that they happen frequently. That said, it is not much better an argument that the lack of evidence means that they never happen. I get why it’s easy to make that latter argument, though. The death of people who are not old and sick is rare, so murder must be rare, and it is not easy to believe that rare things are real. Further, most obvious murders take place in cities and seem to be intertwined with criminal gangs or with semi-professional thieves, so a murder like one sees in this episode of Murder, She Wrote must be extremely rare, since it was an obvious murder. (This, incidentally, is probably why so many clever murderers try to pass off their murders as having been committed by thieves as adjuncts to the theft.) But this is a mere prejudice; it is the mistake of going from statistical certainty to real certainty. It is like going from the fact that for any given man it is vanishingly unlikely that he will ever be president of the United States to concluding that there are no presidents of the United States.

Of course, it doesn’t actually matter if the thing is realistic; being realistic is not the point of murder mysteries. What matters in murder mysteries is being logically consistent. Murder mysteries must have no plot holes (I mean, as an ideal). Murder Mysteries do not need to be historical documentaries with the names changed. Indeed, the latter would largely defeat the purpose of fiction.

Modern fiction has, for the last several centuries, adopted the art of using fake details to lend an air of reality to stories. This is fun, but it can be misleading. The reason why we read stories is because they condense the events they describe into intelligible patterns, so that we can learn to recognize these patterns in real life where the far greater level of detail makes it harder to see the patterns in real life for what they are.

In real life, people do carry grudges which harm relationships for decades. It’s more often against family members than against newspaper critics, but that doesn’t matter to the symbolism. Indeed, making it less familiar can make it easier to see since it gets past the defenses people have erected to fool themselves into believing that they are not behaving as badly as they are. For the more common case of people reminding themselves of these truths lest the fall into them, a less common presentation can help to make the pain feel unreal while the intellectual lesson is not diminished.

That said, you never do know. It is always possible that murder mysteries are more realistic than we give them credit for because we don’t have the brilliant detectives, in real life, to bring these crimes to light.