Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories

Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories, by Keith Oatley and Jennifer Jenkins, is written as a novel, to ask: “Why do we like reading or watching stories of this kind? The book is itself a detective story moving to find an answer to this question.

Murder isn’t just about killing someone; cancer can do that. Rather, as one of the world’s best detective story writers, P.D. James, said: “it tears a jagged hole in society.” A detective works away to discover this hole and repair it, helping us all to live with each other.

Chapters in Action and Consequence are “Disorder, Clues, Plot, Character, Relationship, Context, Motive, Conviction.”

In Chapter 1, a detective tries to solve the mystery of a murder on a cruise ship in Sweden. In Chapter 2, come Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr John Watson, then in the next Chapter, Watson takes Holmes for therapy with Sigmund Freud. Later, we move via Russell Williams, a high-up pilot in charge of Canada’s largest air-base, who stole people’s knickers then raped and murdered two women. Then via Lucy Letby, a nurse who seems to have murdered infants in a hospital, we end with a story told by the first female judge at the highest criminal court, the Old Bailey, in London, England.

Although, much more modern, detective stories can be thought of as coming to stand alongside talks that one can hear in churches, synagogues, and mosques, inviting us to reflect upon differences between good and bad, and inferences we might make about people we know, as well as our selves.