Mysteries don’t focus solely on a crime and its solution. They immerse you in worlds of meaning. Detectives have to parse the inner logics of strange subcultures of people and places, and their authors take you along for the ride, offering rich descriptions of sights, sounds, and tastes to place you there. Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti never failed to appreciate in detail the delicious Venetian meals he tucked into three times per day; Joe Ide’s IQ described a gritty East Long Beach and its people in a way worthy of LA noir.
Historians don’t set out to solve mysteries. But we nevertheless find wonderfully weird and surprising things along the way.
I thought a lot about those lessons as I developed my most recent book, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. When I discovered that James Ogilvie, the “strange genius” and celebrity orator at the heart of my book, wore a toga during his eloquent performances, I dedicated an entire chapter to unpacking what those togas looked like in the early 19th century and what they meant to American audiences. Likewise, the fact that he struggled throughout his life with an opium habit allowed me to discuss the surprising fact that virtually all early Americans simply didn’t see opium as habit-forming; they celebrated it as a wonder drug in a world otherwise lacking in painkillers. If mystery writers need to evoke all the nubbly uniqueness of a particular city or landscape or character, historians need to underline the myriad and memorable ways that the past is a foreign country. Consider the ways that Tana French immerses you in the very particular world of a working-class Irish family, with such distinctive dialogue and bristling, passive-aggressive familial relations, and you’ll know what I mean.
As much as I utilized insights of rich description and social subcultures drawn from great fiction, it never occurred to me that I might have a historical mystery on my hands. I thought I knew the story I was writing. But at the very end I stumbled upon a stupendously important letter, and I realized that my story had to change.
James Ogilvie had a long, successful teaching career in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, but abandoned that job in 1808 in favor of jumping on his horse and traveling from town to town giving public talks. His friends thought that decision was preposterous. He later confessed that he saw “in their faces a suspicion, that his mind was deranged.” But I knew that plenty of early Americans made odd and sometimes regrettable decisions, and considering that he struck gold as a traveling performer, it didn’t occur to me to question why he’d turned away from guaranteed paychecks.