Benjamin Stevenson is the author of the recent instant-classic Christie-style mystery novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone–its sequel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, is also excellent. In an interview with Lenny Picker, Stevenson says:
I started working as a stand-up comic, which I actually think gave me a lot of skills that I could then put into mystery fiction when I decided to write, because jokes are all about hiding the answers and surprising audiences. And so, I already knew how to hide a plot twist, and how to deliver suspense and surprise, because that’s how you get a laugh.
This is interesting to me because I think I’m pretty good at figuring things out and making things clear, but I’m not so good at misdirection, suspense, and surprise. For doing science, I’d argue that being bad at misdirection is kind of a good thing: like any good mathematician, I prefer the sort of brute-force approach that is directly amenable to generalization. My directness makes me a worse chess or poker player, so there are tradeoffs here.
I do think suspense and surprise are important, both in literature and in the way we learn from stories more generally. Hidden answers and surprises can come naturally, and sometimes I can tell a good story by just relating the events in the order that they came to me, for example in the 52 stories and 52 class-participation activities in our Active Statistics book. But it’s more of a challenge for me to go in and hide the clues, in the way that Agatha Christie and Benjamin Stevenson do so well.
P.S. More on suspense in this post, Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?
P.P.S. I went on youtube and watched one of Stevenson’s standup routines. It didn’t impress me much. That’s fine, I guess I’m just not part of his intended audience. His books are so clever and charming that I just assumed I’d love his spoken comedy as well, but it didn’t work that way.
I am reminded of the chapter in Tufte’s Visual Explanations entitled “Explaining Magic: Pictorial Instructions and Disinformation Design.” I particularly like the paragraph
“Finally, the techniques of conjuring are especially relevant to theories of information display. To create illusions is to engage in disinformation design, to corrupt optical information, to deceive the audience. Thus the strategies of magic suggest what not to do if our goal is truth-telling rather than illusion-making.”
I think something analogous could be said about comedy, but I can’t think of an eloquent way to say it.
I read “Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone” because of your recommendation in a post last month, Andrew, and I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks! From the novel I learned that there are places in Australia that are tall enough to have ski resorts. It occurred to me just now that this may be the only Australian novel I’ve ever read, which is a bit embarrassing. Sorry, Sheila and Bruce.
I agree that “hiding clues” isn’t a good strategy for science communication. However, having some sort of narrative-like setup of a backdrop, a threat/problem/mystery, and a heroic/clever resolution is important enough that I’d almost call it necessary. I’m always amazed at how many research talks do such a terrible job of this, tragically losing their audience. (For job talks it’s especially tragic. I should elaborate some time on the common failure modes of job talks.) A good, though over-long, book on this is “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” by Randy Olson.
About stand-up per se: the Alda Center for Communicating Science (not far from you) does workshops incorporating improv theater training for scientists. I attended one of their workshops, which was very good — more relevant to interviews and outreach than seminars, though.
I read a couple of Christie mysteries as a teenager and quickly moved on to Chandler and Macdonald. Macdonald, in particular, makes Christie look like a one trick pony who does not write very well (Macdonald had a Univ of Michigan PhD in Literature). I don’t mind that people like Christie, I find the movies based on her books quit fun.
I had never heard of Benjamin Stevenson, but I have wasted many hours with Agatha Christie. Her writings are so replete with obvious prejudice that it is, paradoxically, possible to enjoy anticipating how she quickly pigeonholes her subjects. For example, the Italian servants in the kitchen must be innocent of the poisoning because they, being Mediterranean hotheads, “prefer the knife.”
And, in case anyone who contributes to this blog has visions of writing a (commercially successful) play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mousetrap
“The Mousetrap is a murder mystery play by Agatha Christie. The play opened in London’s West End in 1952 and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the stage performances had to be temporarily discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then re-opened on 17 May 2021. The longest-running West End show, it also has by far the longest run of any play in the world, with its 29,500th performance having taken place as of February 2024.”
One of the first referee reports I received from an economics journal said “This paper reads like a mystery novel.” I don’t think it was meant in a good way…