It is an inalienable convention of fiction that a mystery entails a solution. Imagine a whodunnit in which the murderer is never revealed! Readers would howl in frustration.
It would be wrong to suggest that Scottish writer Martin MacInnes cheats the reader of the satisfactions of solution. He is not a frustrating or peekaboo author: quite the reverse. And yet, though his novels tell stories that hang on mysteries, his distinctiveness as a writer does not depend on plot reveals. In his first novel, 2016’s Infinite Ground, a middle-aged man disappears during a family meal, and an eminent detective is brought in to investigate. But as the investigation proceeds, throwing up other mysteries as it goes, the understanding grows in the reader that something more than a missing persons narrative is under way. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’d say the real mystery of Infinite Ground is our very existence, and its relationship with the world into which we are born.
