Mystery solved: It's a mystery

It's good timing, I guess, that I'm able to write my first real blog post about being nominated for an Edgar Award for my middle-grade novel, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman.

This is terrific news, all the more so because it was completely unlooked for. The truth is, I never thought of the book as a mystery, which seems odd in retrospect. Secret Life is about a girl named Bethesda Fielding, who is assigned by her obnoxious social studies teacher to pick a mystery and solve it. And she does pick a mystery — what's  the deal with the boring music teacher, Ida Finkleman? — and she does solve it, or she thinks she does, but the solution only leads to more trouble for Bethesda, plus a whole new mystery to solve.

So, um, yeah, it's totally a mystery story. But I guess, when I wrote it, I thought of Secret Life as being about the relationship between students and their teachers; and the relationship between kids and their friends; and the relationship between kids and rock and roll music.

What's funny is that I once taught a three-week unit to a bunch of fifth graders about mystery writing. (By the way, if you ever teach a unit to fifth graders about mystery writing, give them very specific instructions about what kinds of mysteries they're allowed to write. Otherwise you get two stories about missing unicorns, and twenty-eight extremely gruesome murders). And the whole idea of the unit was to show them that when you get right down to it, all books are mysteries. Even when there's no crime and no detective, no snooping for clues, the writer's job is to present the reader with tantalizing questions.

Will Cinderella get the prince, or won't she?

Will crazy Ahab catch his whale?

Will Huck and Jim make it to freedom?

A really good whodunit has both things going on: the reader is wondering who killed the victim or stole the jewels, but also wondering how the events of the story will shape the various characters, and how the world will have changed by the final chapter.

P.D. James, my second-favorite all-time mystery writer (my favorite is G.K. Chesterton, and his enchanting Father Brown mysteries), has a great book called Talking About Detective Fiction, where she says Jane Austen (with whom I have kind of a special relationship) was a masterful mystery writer, in her way:

In Austen's "brilliantly structured Emma," James writes, "the secret which is the mainspring of the action is the unrecognized relationships between the limited number of characters…at the end, when all becomes plain and the characters are at last united with their right partners, we wonder how we could have been so deceived."

All good books have secrets waiting to be discovered; good "mysteries" are just more explicit about it. But if the Edgar nominating committee thinks The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman is a good anything, I'm the happiest mystery writer in town.