Two nights ago, my girlfriend and I finished the above puzzle. It was a tough nut to crack in places - especially the near-solid patches of blue sky, grey asphalt or green shrubbery. We pushed through, though - spending hours on end listening to music and going piece by piece to try and complete the picture.
Growing up, puzzles were my jam. My eyes would light up if I walked into a classroom and saw a shelf with puzzles. I quickly graduated from the big block puzzles most children start off with and went from 100-piece puzzles to 1000-piece puzzles like the addict I was. I would even check puzzles out from the library - a dangerous endeavor if there ever was one. There was nobody at the library counting pieces to ensure puzzles were turned back in complete. You might spend days working on a puzzle only to find your labor would remain uncompleted due to pieces long gone missing.
I don’t know when I stopped working on puzzles regularly. I think it might have been in high school. I was given a puzzle as a gift - the image was a hedge maze. The gimmick, though, was the fact that the image on the puzzle box was not the same as the final completed puzzle. Constructing the puzzle was the real maze and you would have to work blindly to piece together the final picture. I never finished this puzzle and it might have well broken me.
Coincidently, this week I also finished watching POKER FACE, the new murder mystery show from KNIVES OUT creator Rian Johnson. The show streams on Peacock and stars Natasha Lyonne as Charlie, a woman who has a preternatural ability to tell whenever anybody is lying. When she is framed for a murder, Charlie goes on the run - traveling across the United States and solving murders with her abilities. It’s basically COLUMBO meets THE FUGITIVE. The comparison to COLUMBO comes from the fact that POKER FACE is not a whodunit. At the start of every episode, audiences are shown the murder Charlie will have to solve. The drama of the show is not the audience trying to guess who the killer is, it’s watching how Charlie proves the killer did it. In a lot of ways, the show is kind of also like LAW & ORDER, I guess.
POKER FACE is really good. Natasha Lyonne is an absolute joy to watch at all times and the show builds an incredible cast of guest stars around her - including Adrien Brody, Ron Perlman, Hong Chau, Chloë Sevigny, Tim Blake Nelson and Nick Nolte (just to name a few). The writing is sharp, the directing on point and it’s always a pleasure to watch any mystery where murder is built around a DVD copy of Bong Joon-ho’s OKJA.
Between solving my first puzzle in over twenty years and watching ten episodes of one of the best crime dramas I’ve seen in a while, I was a little introspective this week about my own relationship with mysteries. In short, I am frequently puzzled by them.
Narratively, writing a mystery is hard as shit. At least, writing a good one is. There’s a mystery at the center of WHERE WOLF and trying to fit in enough red herrings, false leads and clues into the book was tricky. I still regret the fact that the mystery wasn’t as developed as it could have been. I like mysteries where the audience pieces together the clues at the same pace as the protagonist. Too often, though, a mystery is solved between the panels - with literary or film sleuths coming to their conclusions thanks to wild leaps of logic or fortune. It certainly happens in WHERE WOLF but at least I’m in good company. POKER FACE - despite being a very entertaining show - has a giant crutch built into the show with Charlie’s ability to immediately tell when somebody’s lying.
So what if I didn’t trick readers with the reveal in WHERE WOLF. Mysteries don’t have to be about tricking the audience. Leave it to the true masters of the genre, like my beloved Gregory MacDonald, to spin those yarns. Because I rarely come across a true mystery, I have grown to enjoy mysteries for the same reason I enjoy puzzles - a sense of completeness.
In life, we never get the final punctuation mark on most things. Plot threads are left dangling, mysteries unsolved. You see or experience things that confuse or intrigue but you never, ever find out the full story. A good mystery, though, fills in every gap. The characters are all drawn into the parlor room and our detective goes one by one and explains everybody’s inner motivations and secret desires. Life is given an X-Ray. Mysteries in literature, film and television give us what life can’t provide - a sense of closure.
With a good mystery, the last piece of the puzzle is always found and put in its place. And that’s more than I can say about a puzzle checked out of a library.