Were I forced to choose between fairy tales and murder mysteries, without hesitation I would choose murder mysteries. Even though in childhood few things were more captivating than stories about talking animals and royalty, and the mistakes they made, and the lessons one ought to learn from them, in adulthood fairy tales feel saccharine, too neat. Mysteries are more urgent, intriguing, dangerous. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. In the last five or so years, we’ve been living through something of a murder boom, not only with the absolutely nuclear explosion of true crime podcasts but also the tales of hardboiled crime-solvers, like the reverberant Knives Out, the series of new Agatha Christie movies, Only Murders in the Building, etc.

But in a Venn Diagram of the genres, the overlapping portion would be considerable. In her novel What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez reflects that in both fairy tales and murder mysteries, “All is simplified. Characters: types. Moral code: clear. Where guilt or innocence lie: plain. Plenty of cruelty, violence, and gore, but in the end the evil are vanquished, and even if the good don’t live happily ever after there is closure.”

“Except that fairy tales are beautiful,” objects another character. This character is dying, and against the shadow of her imminent death, she finds consolation in mythical beauty. She’s read fairy tales for hours on end, reveling in the worlds of “Gods and heroes, princes and peasants, giants and little people…and animals, animals, animals.”

Another difference, the characters agree, between murder mysteries and fairy tales is that:

unlike mysteries, fairy tales are not escapist. Even if they too simplify and conform to familiar formulas, the truths in fairy tales always run deep. That is why children love them. (Who knows better than a child what it’s like to be at the mercy of hidden and arbitrary forces, and that anything can happen, no matter how strange, either for good or for ill.) Fairy tales are real. They are more mysterious than any mystery novel. That is why, unlike mystery novels—meant to entertain, then be forgotten—fairy tales are classics. They are of the heart, not of the glands.

It seems no coincidence that the age of the murder mystery is also deeply materialistic. What seems to matter most is what can be seen, heard, touched, adjusted. The strain of our spirits—that eternal inner conflict of the heart—is not so important as the strain of one’s body.

Mysteries, even if improbable, remain firmly rooted in the possible; fairy tales relish the impossible. Animals shapeshift, witches scheme, servants become royalty due to no effort of their own, true love raises the dead to life. C. S. Lewis once observed that as we age, we tend to regain an interest in the fantastical: “Someday,” he wrote, “you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Maybe, like with the characters in Nunez’s book, I will grow less concerned with the possible, and more enraptured by the impossible, as the twilight closes in. “We who must die demand a miracle,” W. H. Auden wrote in his timely poem “For the Time Being.” For now, I live in the second-third of life, a time when death is a distant worst-case scenario, not an inevitability.

There’s something delusional — you could say, fantastical — about even that. Frankly, I am not sure I’ve ever solved a mystery, even though I always approach them with the conviction that I have what it takes to. Somehow I sooner self-identify with Poirot or Holmes (cool-minded rationalists with a strong moral sense) than Edmund Pevensie (an insecure, easily misled child), but it’s clear which I more closely resemble. If one day, as Lewis suggests, I become old enough to once again appreciate tales of talking animals and royalty and the mistakes they made on whatever quest they undertook, maybe then I will also be able to accept my role in the story. Maybe I will wonder whether, throughout my life, I fell prey to the folly those fairy tales warned against. I probably will have.

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