By Tess Little.
This is an extract from Writing the Murder (Dead Ink Books, 2024) edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst:
IT BLEEDS
You are invited to open a door. Behind this door, you are told, you will find a room, and within this room you will find a question. Everything you need to answer this question sits within this room.
You push open the door. Behind it lies the room you wanted to find. The library nook of a gentleman’s study, with a crackling fire and leather Chesterfield and the sweet scent of wood-shelved volumes. Or, no: a metal table and chair, white walls with a mirror, several feet wide, affixed at exactly eye level. Or, no: the rush and jolt of a train passing fields at dusk – warm in the carriage but cold from the window, no other passengers in sight.
Whatever room it is you desire, whatever room you find yourself in, you will find within it three things:
A folded square of paper;
A cardboard box, just big enough to fit an orange;
On the floor, blood, dark and terrible.
You tear your eyes from this puddle, pull yourself back to the task. You are here to find, and to answer, a question.
The paper seems the natural place to begin. Something solid, there. Gingerly avoiding the blood, you approach the arm of the leather sofa, the plain metal chair, or the train table upon which the note sits. You unfold it. Scratched in ink/scrawled in biro/hammered by a typewriter, it reads: What is mystery?
***
You lower yourself to the Chesterfield/metal chair/train seat and ponder this question. What is mystery?
You start with the words on the paper. That last word: mystery. The defining characteristic of any mystery novel or short story – or film, for that matter – must be the presence of a mystery. And what is a mystery? The answer might lie in the note, too: the punctuation. A mystery is a question. Something unexplained – for the writer to know and the reader to discover.
This fosters a certain feeling, which gnaws beneath your ribcage now. An unsettling, because you don’t yet know where this is going, but excitement, too. You’ve nursed such a feeling before – when reading about a missing person in the news, when studying museum artefacts from the distant past, when looking at a shelf of dusty tomes, an unnaturally placed mirror, or passing unfamiliar landscape at night.
A question draws attention to the unknown, creates suspense, provokes curiosity. This is the nature of mystery.
Yet that can’t be all there is to the genre, because every story contains mystery of some form. In a romance, the question is: will they, won’t they? Reading horror, we wonder: who, or what, is creaking the floorboards? Sci-fi and fantasy often give rise to a whole cascade of mysteries: how does this technology work, how does this magic manifest, who will wield it, to what ends?
The unexplained sparks stories of all genres – when a stranger knocks on the door, say, or a peculiar object appears. The more you consider mystery, the more expansive it seems.
***
Perhaps mystery novels centre on questions of a more specific nature. Your eyes dart to the blood. Finally you acknowledge the dread in your stomach – the suspicion that something horrific has happened here. But what? A murder? An attack? Upon whom? By whom? And where is the body?
Whatever the answer, clearly a crime has occurred. Crimes make perfect mysteries, you think. The perpetrator, in concealing their identity, provides a neat question. Take Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: who killed the American businessman found stabbed in his train compartment, snow-stranded in Eastern Croatia?
And a compelling question, too. Not only because of the high stakes involved – justice, ensuring the culprit won’t strike again – but also the sordid nature. When the fundamental rules of society are contravened – thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal – curiosity prickles. That enduring mystery: what would drive one man to end another?
You are still staring at the blood on the floor. Is it growing? No, a trick of the light.
You tilt your head this way and that, trying to discern how the body would have lain, picturing the weapon, but the shape is indistinct. The blood has pooled and puddled over time, seeping into the Persian rug/the concrete floor/the plain patterned carpet of the carriage.
You realise crimes make compelling questions not because they must be answered, with everything at stake, but also because they can be answered – because, like riddles, they have solutions. The snowdrift outside Christie’s Orient Express is pristine, so the killer must have been another passenger. The criminal is there, to be rooted out. The answer is waiting to be found.
And while the culprit may have tried to conceal the evidence, something will always remain. Crimes alter the fabric of the world: one less person walking, talking, breathing; an object missing, or discovered somewhere it shouldn’t be; the room, rearranged; a guilty conscience. Threads to follow. One question will lead to another, one small mystery to the next: if Christie tells us that a handkerchief embroidered with the letter ‘H’ is found in her American businessman’s train compartment, might that have belonged to the killer? Who, on the Orient Express, has a name beginning with that letter?
Or the clues might lie in suspects’ backgrounds. Often the true mystery is the question of the characters’ relationships. Find out who Christie’s passengers are, work out who the businessman was to them, and you’ll know why he met his death on that snow-stalled train.
***
For these reasons, you decide upon detective fiction as your clearest example of mystery: a story not only sparked by, but continually propelled by, questions. But as you test your hypothesis, you grow less confident that the presence of a crime is the defining characteristic of the genre at large.
Golden Age author Josephine Tey is widely considered one of the greatest mystery writers, yet her novel The Franchise Affair follows attempts to prove no crime happened at all – that Marion Sharpe and her mother were falsely accused of kidnapping, imprisoning and abusing local schoolgirl Betty Kane. (The mystery here becomes: if the Sharpes have never laid eyes on Kane, as they claim, then how does Kane remember the interior of their house in detail? Why would she frame two women she’d never met?)
In Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, another master, the initial mystery comes in the form of a vicious note – unpleasant, but not quite criminal. Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette follows a fifteen-year-old’s attempts to track down her missing mother – a disappearance precipitated not by murder or theft, but neighbourly disputes, and no less intriguing for this. Considering examples such as these, you eliminate the possibility that mystery is a subgenre of crime.
Nor is the inverse true – there are countless crime novels which don’t centre on the investigation of a crime in its aftermath, but instead describe its unfolding. A Helping Hand by Celia Dale, for example, opens as former nurse Maisie Evans and her husband holiday in Italy following the death of their elderly lodger, Aunt Flo. While abroad, they meet widow Cynthia Fingal and her niece Lena, who resents the burden of caring for her aunt. The Evans couple offers to take in Mrs Fingal, care for her as they did for Flo. But the reader already suspects, and soon learns, that ulterior motives lie beneath this offer: the care will take a sinister turn. The suspense Dale weaves, then, is not mystery’s intrigue. Rather, a creeping unease, as the reader awaits the inevitable.
Then there are those novels exploring underworlds – stories that, even where they contain mysteries here and there, are primarily fuelled by attempts to best rivals and law enforcement. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and J.J. Connolly’s Layer Cake, the veil is not lifted inch by inch, but thrown off from the very first page. Gangs! Mobs! Murder! Torture! Guns! Knives! Drugs! Money! Sex! Betrayal! Good versus Evil! And danger, everywhere.
***
The blood is still soaking into the floor, and you still have your question. What is mystery? Not the investigation of a crime, necessarily, but the investigation of a question—
Wait, yes, perhaps that’s it. Mystery centres not on the unknown but its gradual elimination: deducing, deciphering, detection. This would explain why certain crime novels take the form of mysteries while others do not.
Your thoughts return to that clear example of mystery: detective fiction. Perhaps there’s something, here, of the wider genre’s essence – a subgenre which distils, even codifies, certain conventions of the genre at large.
Author Ronald Knox explored these conventions in his introduction to The Best English Detective Stories of 1928. His definition of detective fiction is straightforward:
A detective story must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.
This was followed by a Decalogue in which Knox (also, notably, a Catholic priest) set down the subgenre’s Ten Commandments. No supernatural explanations were permitted, nor unannounced identical twins, no culpable detectives – and certainly no deus ex machina events. If the author contravened these rules, they weren’t giving the reader a fair chance to deduce the mystery for themselves.
Of course not, you think. It would spoil the game, cheating the reader. Because a detective novel is a game, or more specifically, a kind of puzzle.
You are irritated with yourself for not considering this sooner – you’re certain you’ve heard it said before.
But now this realisation (or recollection) sets your thoughts skittering on. A puzzle is a game, and what do games do? They create closed arenas, limiting actions with rules and objectives, asking players to devote themselves to particular tasks. If detective novels are puzzles, then their closed arenas are the confines of story.
Not all mystery novels are puzzles – they needn’t necessarily adhere to Knox’s rules. But it still holds that they have as their main interest ‘the unravelling of a mystery’, and that this mystery arises from, and is contained by, story. In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Umberto Eco (a writer of mystery himself, of course, as well as philosopher and critic) describes fictional worlds as ‘small worlds’. By bracketing the human experience, he says, novels enclose the reader in a ‘finite’ world, thus leading them ‘to explore it in depth’, and, ‘one way or another, to take it seriously’.
Here is the question, says the mystery author. Here are the characters, their setting, the clues they leave behind – and the answer to the question, the gratification of your curiosity, lies somewhere in this small world.
No deus ex machina, indeed. Each detective novel its own locked room.
***
You glance at the door through which you entered this library/interrogation room/train carriage – wonder, briefly, whether it locked behind you.
Over the years you’ve read various locked-room mysteries: stories where a crime occurs in a space near-hermetically sealed, door locked from the inside only, and yet the perpetrator is nowhere to be found. A puzzle within the puzzle: not who committed the crime, but how?
The ‘impossible murder’ is, the unnamed narrator of Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders states, ‘a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point’. They add, ‘Constructing a solution is an appealing challenge to the author’ – as though the ultimate riddle is not for the reader (in solving any locked-room novel’s particular crime), but the author (in solving the archetypal problem in their own ingenuous way, mathematicians devising new proofs).
Yokomizo’s offering centres on a newlywed couple found ‘slashed and soaked in blood’ on their wedding night. The groom is the eldest son of the Ichiyanagi family, who have ‘distinguished ancestry’; his bride, the daughter of a lowly tenant farmer. The couple have retired to an annexe on the Ichiyanagi estate when the guests in the main house hear bloodcurdling cries and the twangs of the koto, a string instrument, ‘being plucked with wild abandon’. By the time they make it to the annexe, the killer is nowhere to be found. All the rain shutters are locked, there are no openings large enough to climb in or out, no footsteps in the surrounding snow – only a katana ‘stuck blade-first’ about six feet away.
The Honjin Murders makes abundantly clear that this is a puzzle. At one point, a diagram of the annexe is provided, annotated with numbers that correspond to evidence found through the novel, right down to ‘pile of fallen leaves’. The characters themselves even refer to the scene as ‘the puzzle of this murder’ and a ‘locked room mystery’.
They would know: private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, drafted in to help police, passes idle moments reading mystery novels, and one of the suspects, the youngest Ichiyanagi son, is an ‘avid’ reader too. Kosuke almost falls over with amazement when he happens upon a bookcase crammed with ‘every book of mystery or detective fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign’ – Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Japanese writers all the way from Ruiko Kuriowa to Mushitaro Oguri – and ‘the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc.’ Did the killer learn from these masters?
***
Like other twentieth-century Japanese murder mysteries, The Honjin Murders explicitly grapples with the conventions of the subgenre. Another such novel, The Decagon House Murders, by Yukito Ayatsuji, begins with the characters discussing the trope of the ‘chalet in a snowstorm’ (used by mystery authors to create ‘a sealed environment’) just as they are heading straight for one themselves.
They’re students, members of their university’s mystery club, each nicknamed for a mystery author: Poe, Agatha, Carr, Orczy, Leroux, Ellery. A fisherman is ferrying them to an uninhabited island – the site of a fire, only six months before, which burned down a mansion. Four bodies were found in the wreckage. Keen to investigate, the students set up camp in the only building on the island still standing: the Decagon House. Until, that is, an unknown killer picks them off, one by one.
This comes as no surprise to the reader, who has, even before the first death, encountered multiple references to Christie’s And Then There Were None – the template for any tale in which a murder occurs in an isolated location, and then another murder, and another, with the frantic tension mounting as everyone tries to find the killer before they become the next victim.
Christie’s novel is one of the bestselling books of all time – the plot has inspired so many screen and page reworkings, it virtually forms its own trope. The same could be said of two other Christie novels, whose titles are now shorthand for certain mystery solutions: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express. Detective fiction is a genre rich in tropes and self-reference. Just as chess players deploy openings and variations devised by the players before them, so are there established ways to play the game of writing mystery.
In the opening of The Decagon House Murders, student Ellery asserts that, in his opinion:
mystery fiction is, at its core, a kind of intellectual puzzle. An exciting game of reasoning in the form of a novel. A game between the reader and the great detective, or the reader and the author. Nothing more or less than that.
Then, in a diatribe against ‘gritty social realism’, he lists everything he looks for in such fiction:
What mystery novels need are – some might call me old-fashioned – a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer.
Your definition of mystery is more expansive than this hard-line detective fan’s, but you admit that when you first unfolded your note, this was the kind of mystery that leapt to mind. Those building blocks: a mysterious setting; a closed circle; a sinister act; a shrewd detective.
***
Maybe this is what mystery is – or any genre, for that matter: a collection of tropes. A body of ideas which the writer can draw upon for inspiration. And as the tradition takes shape, so too does it shape the reader, their expectations. A reader will expect to encounter different settings, characters, maybe even different registers of language or plot points depending on whether they have lifted off the shelves a courtroom thriller, a police procedural, hardboiled, noir, or true crime.
More broadly, any novel centring on a mystery will come with expectations too. That feeling of curiosity, intrigue, suspense you identified earlier – this is key, and mystery tropes foster and prolong this feeling. The foreshadowing, the clues, the red herrings, the twists.
Do tropes define genre, or does genre engender tropes? The answer could be either, or both at once. Either way, you know tropes aren’t prescriptive: mystery writers will take some, leave others, and all manner of writers can draw upon the mystery tradition – adopting its page-turning, rug-pulling techniques without plunging in headfirst.
Any story can take the form of an investigation, with the discovery of clues, the testing of hypotheses (see A.S. Byatt, Possession). Any story can feature misinterpretations that mislead both protagonist and reader (as in Ian McEwan’s Atonement). Novels structured around a character slowly revealing their past, bringing the reader to the present day, introduce natural mystery (Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist), as do certain characters, certain settings. Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac takes place in the titular hotel, out of season, introducing the protagonist, Edith, to a cast of idiosyncratic characters who would fit right into a Christie. The mystery, here, is Edith herself, nursing a wound that is hinted to the reader from the opening pages. Secrets are always mysterious.
When you first entered this library/interrogation room/carriage, you decided that stories of all genres centred on mysteries of one kind or another. Now you see that the mystery novel’s form – its conceits, devices, tropes – has its own wide reach as well. Mystery is a genre which bleeds into the rest.
Yes – your gaze returns to the bloodstain – it bleeds.
***
You feel more hopeless than ever now: if mystery isn’t distinct, how can you answer your question?
Yet a detective can still deduce something about a missing corpse from the traces it left behind. If mystery is a body of ideas, bleeding out, that seeping is evidence too.
You crouch on the rug/concrete/carpet. At the very edges of the stain, the crimson has thinned, blending with the ornate swirls of the rug/colouring the grey/tingeing the carpet pattern. Perhaps boundary cases can help you in your task: what is it that blends and bleeds?
When you think of mystery beyond crime, the first works that come to mind are those of Daphne du Maurier. Gothic mysteries: novels set in dark, isolated reaches (a romantic country estate, a gloomy coaching inn) where some secret festers in the shadows. Du Maurier stories are often propelled by the protagonist’s attempts to uncover such secrets: did cousin Rachel poison Ambrose Ashley? Why is Maxim so haunted by his dead wife, Rebecca? How does the Jamaica Inn survive with no guests? Beyond du Maurier there are more examples, yet. In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the Blackwood family’s tragedy is revealed little by little. Mystery and the gothic are ideal bedfellows. What hides in the shadows, indeed.
Then there are fantasy-mysteries, in which worldbuilding either gives rise to mystery or constitutes the mystery itself. As in, for example, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which casts both the titular protagonist and the reader adrift in the mystical, cryptic ‘House’: a world of great halls and vestibules, ‘hundreds upon hundreds’ of marble statutes, and crashing tides of seawater which rush up the stone staircases ‘making all the Statues tremble’.
The same is true of sci-fi-mystery. Take China Miéville’s The City and the City, in which there is both a traditional mystery driving protagonist Inspector Tyador Borlú (who killed the unnamed young woman and dumped her body between a ‘derelict tower’ and a skatepark?) and also a fundamental mystery for the reader: how can two cities separated by an insurmountable border exist in the exact same location? As the novel unfolds, so the two questions entangle. Science fiction, fantasy and horror provide fertile ground for mystery, and vice versa: each genre draws upon its own tradition of the unknown.
Comparing these works to detective fiction, you find they are less formulaic, yes, perhaps not puzzles, but they still follow Knox’s opening maxim: they have as their ‘main interest the unravelling of a mystery’. Crucially, ‘unravelling’ is as central as the mystery itself. A mystery novel, or a hybrid mystery, is not simply sparked by a question – the characters, the story are propelled by its unravelling too.
***
Your knees are aching; they crack as you stand. Of course, what many hybrid cases lack is the presence of a detective. This doesn’t trouble you – you’ve never felt detectives were a defining feature of mystery so much as detective fiction – but you wonder: what role do such characters play in the unravelling?
Within the story, they lead the investigation, finding clues, forming theories, making the fateful accusation. For the reader they are something more. Not an avatar, not quite a rival, nor a colleague, a guide, but some mixture of all these elements. A go-between, almost, bridging author (with their omniscient grasp of the mystery’s solution) and reader (with all their initial ignorance). The detective will feed the reader facts, observations, hypotheses, but a good detective will hypothesise one step behind, giving the reader a chance to work it out for themselves.
You’ve heard it said that detective fiction is unique in its ability to draw in the reader, how it embroils them in joining the dots. But this doesn’t feel quite right. All works of literature ask the reader to interpret. A sentence as a string of clues: put the words together, the author says, and you tell me what I mean. It isn’t simply that – as you mused when you first entered this room – the author has all the knowledge and the reader all the ignorance, it’s that the reader is asked to understand the author’s intentions. ‘To read a book well,’ Virginia Woolf once argued, ‘one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal.’
Mystery brings this relationship to the fore. Nothing exemplifies this better than a successful twist, which emerges from the author’s knowledge, the reader’s attempts to work out what the author knows, and then the author’s subversion of those attempts.
Every mystery should include at least one twist, you decide. A readily guessable mystery is no mystery at all. Twists are fundamental to the atmosphere, with the reader’s delight lying as much in anticipation of trickery as in the trick itself. Like a child winding a jack-in-the-box, ready to spring at any moment.
***
You’ve been haunted by such a feeling since you first entered this room. You glance at the corners, as though someone might be hiding there. In doing so, your vision skirts the cardboard box. How could you have forgotten the box?
You sit at the walnut/metal/train table, take the box into your hands. It’s no jack-in-the-box, but you hear a rattle – there’s something inside. Perhaps this object is meant to exemplify the point you were considering: the author’s knowledge, their ability to wrong-foot the reader. If so, you’ll give it a shot – you’ll play the guessing game.
You shake the box again, feel the shifting weight. Only slightly, though – it’s something small. And useful, you hope. Like a pencil – you could stand to make some notes.
Or maybe it’s another clue. Galvanised by this hope, you hurry to open the box.
There is nothing inside. What made the noise? You shake the box again, hoping something might fall out, and as you do, you find the cardboard itself is weighty – the inner flap of the lid was simply knocking against the inside.
Ah, you think. But this is what a twist should be: constructed from the thing itself. Infuriating, inescapable. You had no firm beliefs about what the box would contain beyond the belief that it contained something. You should have known, therefore, it would contain nothing at all. You laugh at yourself.
Didn’t this guessing game show something of your own expectations? Your hopes for a clue? This is what a twist does, revealing not only the truth of the mystery: it reveals the reader to themselves.
***
It’s an oft-repeated maxim (sometimes attributed to Aristotle, sometimes to Flannery O’Connor) that the ending of a story should be ‘surprising yet inevitable’. This matters more, you think, for mysteries than any other genre.
But how difficult the challenge of truly surprising readers who expect – no, demand – to be surprised.
Knox ended his Decalogue with a lamentation:
Nobody can have failed to notice that while the public demand for mystery stories remains unshaken, the faculty for writing a good mystery story is rare, and the means of writing one with any symptom of originality about it becomes rarer with each succeeding year. The game is getting played out; before long, it is to be feared, all the possible combinations will have been used up.
Writers have continued to produce mysteries both original and brilliant in the century since Knox wrote those words – but perhaps he was correct as far as conventional detective fiction goes. True experimentation is more readily found in those areas where the genre has bled and blurred.
Or, indeed, where authors have subverted expectations altogether, in mysteries metafictional, postmodern, experimental – you still remember the jolt you felt seven pages into Paul Auster’s City of Glass, when the protagonist, Quinn, answers a ringing phone and the voice asks to speak to ‘Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency’. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you,’ Quinn replies. ‘There is no Paul Auster here.’
As much as you loved them, as much as detective fiction is ripe for metafiction, those postmodern mysteries still irritate. You still remember that impulse which seized you with the last sentence: to reach through the pages and shake the author and ask what the hell they thought they were doing. What is it that unnerved? The frustration of your conviction that a mystery novel will, should, must feed an answer. The Magus by John Fowles, Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh – these are novels which upend convention, leaving the reader with the unease mystery fosters, expanding beyond the confines of their covers, because no solution is provided. Life, after all, is a mystery with no clear answer.
The note, with its question, is in your pocket. You fiddle with the paper, flick it with your thumb.
Postmodern and/or experimental mysteries are, then, exceptions that prove the rule: a mystery novel cannot simply present a reader with a question, does not simply revolve around attempts to find an answer; there must always be an answer too. If, as Knox wrote, the nature of detective fiction was both ‘to arouse curiosity’ and to gratify that curiosity ‘at the end’, the same holds for mystery at large.
This is, you feel, the final piece of your puzzle. Mystery, as a genre, is defined by three things. First, the question. Then, the act of deduction. And last, an answer. And all within the confines of the novel’s ‘small world’, which is to say: character, place, and plot.
This definition encapsulates your paradigmatic example of detective fiction, but also gothic mysteries, sci-fi mysteries, fantasy mysteries, espionage mysteries – any story in which both protagonist and reader are driven to reveal the truth, uncover the hidden. And as the protagonist arrives at an answer, so too does the reader – if they haven’t worked it out already, that is – bringing the story to its close.
***
You wander to the blazing fire/your own reflection/the misting window. Your hypothesis feels right, but you can’t quite tell how it relates to this room. As though the true puzzle was not your question but the strange situation – the invitation, the door; the note, blood, box.
Those objects still unsettle you. All three sent your thoughts in the right direction but you have no clearer notion of their origins. Where did the blood come from? Who left this box? Where’s the author of the note?
Rest assured, these are not real mysteries. You know the culprit. It was me, the author of this essay (didn’t Woolf tell you writers are criminal?). I conjured these fictional props, this little mystery, from the words on these pages. It was a ploy, yes, but that’s not to say the props had no purpose at all. My point was not to provide you with clues revealing specific facts, but to, quite simply, provide you with clues.
You strike your hand against the table. Of course! The answer was there all along. Not in the particular clues but in the fact of their presence. Their presence in this fictional room. The true puzzle, you see, was the situation, and the situation was the mystery – the closed world you entered when you pushed open the door, when you read the first lines of this essay:
You are invited to open a book. Within its pages, you are told, you will find a story and within this story you will find a question. Everything you need to answer this question sits within this story.
This is the nature of mystery, as a genre – what it promises the reader, what it invites them to do. The task was always the answer.
The fire pops/the fluorescent light bulb flickers/the train horn blares, as though in confirmation. Now the question has been answered, you may leave. And perhaps the leather Chesterfield/the bare walls/the view from the train window, entice you to linger a while longer – if only to delay your return to reality. Then again, there are other doors, other books to open. Other rooms, other worlds, other questions to answer. Other stories to read and to write.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tess Little is a writer, historian, and Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. Her essays and criticism have appeared in various places including The Paris Review Daily, The White Review, and Literary Review. She is currently working on her second novel, Girls! Girls! Girls!
