S02E01: Choosing all the figs.

Mystery writers seem to have a knack for living life as a series of tiny experiments.

What is your purpose in life?

As a millennial going through a midlife crisis that has lasted a decade, I ask myself this question every other week. Why am I here? What do I want to do with my one wild and precious life? My quest for answers has taken me down fascinating rabbit warrens—the writings of

Oliver Burkeman

and

Paul Millerd

, interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita, Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis… Right now, I am reading Tiny Experiments by

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

.

In chapter 2, the author talks about escaping the tyranny of purpose. Purpose, she argues, could be a scam. Even when we try to follow our passion and do what we love, we could be falling into another trap, influenced by the epic stories of those who “broke free” or “followed their heart”.

When we focus on our ultimate purpose, we train our eyes on a distant target, a magical destination far away from where we are. We assume that following our passion will lead to success—or, at the very least, bring us happiness. So when we face the inevitable challenges on this path, we are dismayed. We feel let down by life itself.

Forget purpose, the author says, taking the example of Ron Finley, a successful fashion designer from LA whose efforts to grow tomatoes in the space between the front of his house and the sidewalk turned into a “guerilla gardening” movement against a broken food system that inspired thousands of people and got the City of LA to change its law about urban farming permits.

“I didn’t go from fashion to gardening to being a humanitarian,” he says. “As a gardener, I was already a humanitarian. When I’m designing, I’m still a gardener. I’m still creative. And I’m still a father… For me, this is about freedom. It’s already within me.”

And that, Anne-Laure¹ says, is a more beautiful way to live. She writes:

We each have within us, unlimited possibilities; purpose is therefore never a singular discovery. Life is a continuous opportunity.

At this point, it struck me that in my previous episode, I had written something very similar about Dame Ngaio Marsh. Ngaio was a prolific and acclaimed writer of murder mysteries—but she was also an artist, a travel correspondent, the co-owner of an interior decoration shop, and a theatre producer and director. In fact, her Damehood was awarded for a lifetime’s contribution to the arts, not for writing alone.

What about other mystery writers? I wondered. Did they have other passions that became more than just passing hobbies? Did they explore other career paths? In this debut episode of Season 2² of About Murder, She Wrote., I want to share what I’ve discovered.

Revisiting the Fig Tree

One of the most famous (and heartbreaking) passages from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is her metaphor of the fig tree.

When we have a world of possibilities open to us, many of us freeze where we stand. We are unable to choose any path because the allure of the others is too much. We are terrified that by choosing one, we close our lives off to all the others (classic FOMO). So we wait, endlessly, to discover our ultimate purpose, our true path—and die, perhaps not having lived at all.

These anguished themes come up repeatedly in the works of many writers—Franz Kafka, John Keats, Fernando Pessoa, and Virginia Woolf come to mind. But a surprising number of mystery writers seem to have lived differently. They’ve shaken the fig tree of life in a way that Anne-Laure might delightedly approve of.

In Tiny Experiments, she suggests that we treat life as if it were a playground. That instead of focusing on a linear path to a goal, we follow our curiosities to wherever they take us. We treat each interest as an experiment and explore it, irrespective of the final outcome. This way, choosing one fig need not mean losing all the rest. We simply bite into one fig at a time, giving ourselves the permission to drop one and choose another if it isn’t sweet enough.

Image courtesy: Dall-E and me, sitting under a fig tree..

Agatha’s Experiments

Agatha Christie was a lifelong experimenter. In her autobiography, she writes that she showed an early talent for singing and playing the piano, and had trained for years in both. She “cherished a secret dream” of becoming an operatic singer but was eventually told that her voice was not strong enough. Her desire to be a professional pianist also ended because she was painfully shy and did not have the temperament to play in public. Her response was characteristically cheerful:

“I was miserable about it for a while, but I tried hard not to dwell on it more than I could help. (…) I put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in going on studying singing. I had never really believed that my dream could come true–but it is a good thing to have had a dream and to have enjoyed it, so long as you do not clutch too hard.” Source

While she let go of music as a singular passion, she did not cut herself off from it. She continued to sing/play, composed a waltz, wrote and set Harlequin-themed poems to music, and used music as a backdrop in her works, particularly in Giant’s Bread and Swan Song.

Agatha specialised in going off the script all through her life. Working as a nurse and dispenser during WWI, she wrote a detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, just because she thought she could. A few years later, she chose to go on a year-long tour around the world as part of a British Empire mission, leaving her toddler in the care of her sister. The trip would eat up all their savings and her husband would have to look for a new job when he returned. In her autobiography, she writes about why she took the chance.

“I longed to see the world, and it seemed to me highly probable that I never should. We were now committed to the business life, and a business man, as far as I could see, never got more than a fortnight’s holiday a year. A fortnight would not take you far. I longed to see China and Japan and India and Hawaii, and a great many other places (…) ‘I think you’re right,’ I said [to Archie Christie]. ‘It’s our chance. If we don’t do it we shall always be mad with ourselves…if you can’t take the risk of doing something you want, when the chance comes, life isn’t worth living.’ We had never been people who played safe. We had persisted in marrying against all opposition, and now we were determined to see the world and risk what would happen on our return.”

During this trip, she tried her hand at surfing and became quite the expert; today, she is believed to be one of the first women in the world to try stand-up surfing. Swimming in the sea, bathing, and surfing remained lifelong loves for her.

In the 1940s, she began accompanying her husband Max Mallowan on his archaeological digs in the Middle East. She was no tourist though—in the mornings, she wrote her novels. In the afternoons, she painstakingly cleaned and catalogued the dig’s finds. Later, she attended photography classes and became the official photographer of excavated items.

At the peak of her popularity as the world’s most renowned mystery writer, she decided to experiment again and write a set of novels about human relationships under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. And a few years later, just for the heck of it, she started writing plays.

“…writing plays seemed to me entrancing, simply because it wasn’t my job, because I hadn’t got the feeling that I had to think of a play (…) I should always write my one book a year–I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure–that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have play after play a success, and then, for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. Yes, play-writing was not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.” Source

Christie’s attitude to life reflects the spirit of Anne-Laure’s book—treating life with openness and curiosity, and trying your hand at a series of purposeful experiments that feel exciting and offer meaning during the process, irrespective of their eventual outcomes.

Dorothy’s “energy of a well-stocked mind”

Dorothy L. Sayers, perhaps the second most well-known Queen of Crime, was described—quite aptly—like this by a fellow writer:

“I have never known anyone so brimful of the energy of a well-stocked mind: even at 24, when I knew her first, she knew an enormous amount about all sorts of subjects unconnected with Old French literature, which was her alleged special…” Source

While still at Oxford's Somerville College—one of the first institutions to grant degrees to women—Dorothy co-founded the Mutual Admiration Society, a group of intellectual women who supported each other's creative and scholarly pursuits all their lives. This was the first of many collaborative creative projects she’d go on to spearhead.

Though she nurtured serious literary ambitions, she needed a job to pay her bills. She tried teaching after graduation but quickly discovered it wasn't for her. She abandoned it without regret—a good example of treating life as an experiment rather than forcing oneself to persist with something that didn't feel right.

Her next experiment was as an ad copywriter at S.H.Benson’s, a leading advertising firm. Instead of seeing commercial writing as a compromise, she embraced the experiment and became quite good at her job. One of her most successful efforts was the introduction of the Guinness toucan and the accompanying verse. Later, she would draw on this experience for her Peter Wimsey novel Murder Must Advertise.

Like Agatha Christie and surfing, Dorothy was a motorcycling enthusiast and is known to have ridden around on a Ner-a-Car in the 1920s, “sitting bolt upright as if driving a chariot”.³

Woman (not D.L.S.) riding a Ner-a-Car Source: The Vintagent

As a mystery novelist, she co-founded the Detection Club, bringing theatrical flair to the club’s proceedings by creating elaborate initiation rituals involving candles, cloaks and swearing oaths upon Eric The Skull. To raise funds for the club, she led experimental collaborative novels where each chapter was written by a different member of the Detection Club.

At the height of her success as a mystery writer, Dorothy established herself as a serious literary critic, writing incisive analyses of detective fiction and other genres with scholarly rigour. By 1937, she stopped writing mystery novels, feeling that she had done what she wanted to do—which was to lift the “low-brow” perception of detective fiction and prove that this genre could be literally and intellectually rich.

In her later years, she focused on writing religious works and children’s writings, as well as mystery and religious plays. Her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy became acclaimed for its readability and poetic sensibility, and brought a complex medieval work to modern readers.

The more I read about Dorothy’s life, the more I realise that she saw each creative pursuit as an experiment to be explored fully and, when the time was right, to be set aside for new curiosities. She never limited herself to a single identity as a mystery writer or literary critic or playwright—and how much richer her life was for it!

From Conan Doyle to Contemporary Authors

Though he created the most famous detective in literary history, Arthur Conan Doyle considered his Sherlock Holmes stories a distraction from his “serious” work and even attempted to kill off his character to pursue other interests. Here are his many tiny experiments in his own words.

Source: Memories and Adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle

Erle Stanley Gardner is best known for his Perry Mason novels—but he was also a practising lawyer, the founder of Court of Last Resort for people unfairly incarcerated, a boxer and a travel writer.

G. K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown, was also an illustrator, essayist, literary critic, humorist, debater, theologian, and philosopher, who created his own political philosophy called Distributism.

P. D. James worked as a hospital administrator and a civil servant for many years and sat in the UK’s House of Lords while also writing 20+ detective novels.

There are many contemporary examples too. Richard Osman, whose Thursday Murder Club novels have arguably renewed worldwide interest in detective fiction, had a successful career as a TV producer, presenter, and comedian before writing these novels. This interview of his is a good watch; he talks about doing the things you love and how he has never “reinvented” himself.

Tana French was a professional stage actress and voiceover artist before she started writing crime novels; Abir Mukherji worked as an accountant for twenty years before turning to mystery writing. I could go on and on, but you get the drift.

A Chicken or Egg Problem

Why have mystery writers been particularly enthusiastic about exploring other passions in life and not restricted themselves to one identity? Or is it that creative and experimental individuals from different walks of life eventually turn their hand to writing mystery novels? I think it is the latter.

Mystery writing requires a curious mind that constantly asks “What if?” and explores possibilities from multiple angles. Perhaps the same intellectual traits that make someone excel at constructing mysteries—attention to detail, connecting seemingly unrelated elements, an aptitude for puzzle solving, and thinking beyond conventional patterns—naturally extend to how they approach life. Perhaps these writers are predisposed to see multiple paths where others see only one.

Writing detective fiction also demands certain skills—a keen interest in/observation of human behaviour, awareness of social contexts, and sometimes, specialised knowledge. For example, Agatha’s training as a pharmacist’s dispenser led to the particularly accurate poison plots. Doyle’s medical training influenced Holmes’ deductive methods; Chesterton’s interest in theology led him to create a priest-detective. In a previous episode, I’ve written about how Dorothy Simpson used her experiences as a guidance counsellor to create her Inspector Thanet series.

People with varied life experiences and knowledge are drawn to mystery writing because it allows them to incorporate their diverse backgrounds in playful ways. And in that sense, the mystery genre itself might represent a unique solution to Sylvia Plath's fig tree dilemma.

Unlike other literary forms, detective fiction is remarkably elastic—elements of history, science, medicine, art, travel, theology, and countless other disciplines can all find expression here within a single narrative framework. Which means these authors aren’t exceptional for refusing to be defined by a single passion—they may have simply found the literary form that best accommodates their naturally experimental approach to life.

So, if you find yourself curious about many different things and go through life drifting and dipping into each of these, perhaps you might one day turn your hand to writing a mystery novel. I know I certainly will. :)

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Recommendation of the Week

Talented but disgraced former-PI Todd is hired by his highly ethical, stiff-upper-lip-wielding attorney mom Margaret Wright to be her firm’s in-house investigator. Every short episode has a standalone case (or two), a small but pleasant dose of family drama, and light humour. Sadly, the show was discontinued after two seasons but it’s a good accompaniment for TV dinners. Watch on Amazon Prime in India.

Rating: 🩸🩸🩸🩸💧

1. I was born and raised in Kerala, where surnames are often our fathers’ or mothers’ first names and sometimes, simply their initials. When I quote women, I often wonder if I should use their first name instead of a familial surname. I myself prefer to be quoted by my full name OR my first name. In this case, I choose to go with the author’s first name as it belongs, wholly, to her.

2. I like the idea of naming my newsletters the way TV shows are named—with series and episode numbers. This is Season 2 because I expect to experiment with a different set of themes and formats going forward. Read Season 1 here.

3. The Remarkable Dorothy L. Sayers | C. S. Lewis Institute