While crime fiction remains a firm favourite genre throughout the year, autumn and winter is when I find myself reaching for these reads the most.

There is something about reading a thriller while tucked under a blanket, as you watch the rain bead down the window …but why?

Arguably, there is nothing comforting in reading about these depraved criminals, but there somehow is, so what is it? 

Let’s start with the classic whodunnit, with the likes of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club.

The puzzles these books pose are fascinating and invite us to test our intelligence.

How could this Locked Room Murder Mystery have possibly happened, and why do we have so much fun trying to figure it out?

If you’ve ever found yourself solving the mystery before the detective, well who could blame you for being a little smug?

These tend to lie in the aptly named category of ‘cosies,’ which provide this sense of mystery without the gore to accompany it.

The murder is lightly touched upon, a tool for the story and not subject to grotesque analysis.  

However, these novels also provided a very different kind of comfort for their contemporaries.

Authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Sherlock Holmes novels, were essential at making new forms of law enforcement, that took place due to industrialisation, more palatable.

One should be okay with increased surveillance if it stops crimes. There is reassurance in the sense of containing the criminal.

If crimes can be logically solved and the criminal justly punished, it makes us feel safe and reassured in our law enforcement.

Agatha Christie was also central in reassuring readers of what it meant to be British, setting her novels in the idyllic countryside, which had traditional societal roles, in the wake of uncertainty after the world wars.

It points to the whodunnit providing more than the challenge of a puzzle, but an assurance of identity.  

But I think there is something to be said about morbid curiosity’s role in crime fictions’ popularity.

There is something that draws us to these horrible stories, the very same thing that has people looking at a car crash or crime scene, despite knowing the horror it will reveal.

Crime fiction plays on this very curiosity and uses it to its advantage – by keeping us unable to look away, we keep reading.

Sometimes this goes too far, playing out our voyeuristic tendencies to the grotesque, with criminals becoming sensationalised.

Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, although a historical novel, explores the impact of sensationalising criminals, asking questions about why we do this and what impact it has.  

Playing on this idea of curiosity, there is also a sense of a desire to understand.

People read crime to try and rationalise why someone would commit such crimes.

The logic given is often comforting for readers, as they are able to finally understand the incomprehensible.

This isn’t always the case, especially if you find yourself reading a particularly inconclusive novel.

The frustration, as well as despair, that prevails is noticeable… 

Of course, all readers are different and will find themselves picking up these novels for different reasons, and it’s entirely possible that people find themselves moving to and from these different rationales.

Our environment, perhaps, has a bigger role than I’ve given it credit. If the world is facing a turbulent, violent reality, do we really want to read about one too?

Regardless of why we read crime fiction, it is safe to say that its popularity prevails, finding itself consistently in people’s poolside reads and in wrapping under the Christmas tree.