Why We Love Mysteries by Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Nancy Lynn Jarvis has been a Santa Cruz, California, Realtor® for more than twenty years. She owns a real estate company with her husband, Craig.

After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News.  A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager of Shakespeare/Santa Cruz.

Nancy’s work history reflects her philosophy: people should try something radically different every few years. Writing is her newest adventure.  She invites you to take a peek into the real estate world through the stories that form the backdrop of her Regan McHenry mysteries. Details and ideas come from Nancy’s own experiences. 

Readers can read first chapters of books at Nancy's website  go to facebook and look at Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries

Why We Love Mysteries

by Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Romance may currently top the list as the best selling genre for fiction and books with vampires are all the rage, but it’s easy to understand why mysteries are timeless mainstays in the world of fiction. Deep down, we are all amateur sleuths.

I’m not saying we spend our days with a magnifying glass in hand looking for clues a la Sherlock Holmes, but we do solve little mysteries regularly and it’s satisfying when we do.

Recently my mom began acting confused and complained she couldn’t sleep. I could have chalked her problems up to her age, but the innate mystery solver in me decided to do a little investigating. It turns out she changed insurance companies at the start of the year. Further sleuthing led to the discovery that her new provider sent her medicine before her old prescription ended. Her new pills treated the same condition and were the same dosage as her previous medicine, but they looked different and had a different name. Without realizing it, she began taking twice her prescribed dose of hypo-thyroid medication. The result was a 93 year old on speed.

When I figured out what was happening and spoke to her physician about it, she congratulated me for having solved a mystery. “Hey, I don’t write mystery novels for nothing,” I laughed, but what I did could have been done by any of us.

We’re all mysteries solvers in our day-to-day lives. Reading mysteries just raises our ordinary experiences to a higher level and lets us have fun seeing if we can solve the mystery before the protagonist does. Often we can, and don’t we feel clever when we do?

Solving a mystery is like solving a logic puzzle—Sudoku on steroids— and if that isn’t fun enough, mysteries can give a reader — or me as a writer — an excuse to delve into a world of fascinating but unsettling things like decomposition, accidental mummification, and how ligature strangulation and death by hypothermia work. When we look at clues and read details about murder, we get to be like a four-year-old playing with rubber dinosaurs: the game is especially enjoyable because we control what might otherwise give us nightmares.  

Mysteries let us share the sleuth’s shoes for a time. From the safety of our favorite reading spot, we get to be daring, crafty, and quick. We get to outwit the murderer within three-hundred pages.

Mysteries offer readers another perk. Not many of the problems we encounter in today’s complex world are easily and cleanly resolved. Mysteries, however, at least the kind I like and write, end with the bad guy getting caught and with justice being served. There’s not much in life that’s more satisfying than that.

Fala, our cat, in her usual summer outpost. This is where she goes when she isn't helping me write and explains why we can't have water in out courtyard fountain