I happen to attend a Presbyterian church in town, but I have it on good authority that most Baptist sermons have three points and I kind of pegged my remarks today at three different levels. Hoping that one of these levels will generate benefits in excess of the cost of your attendance. And the first level is just to explain a few things about mystery fiction against the chance that you’re not a reader of mystery novels and the second is to say a few things about the economics of writing fiction and of the costs and benefits of writing fiction. And then third, I have discovered, when I am introduced as a person who has published a novel, lots of people have a novel they want to write or they have written and want to get published. And so at a third level, I am here to encourage you because some of you will leave the Colonnade Club thinking that, “If that guy can get a novel published, I can do it too.” And I’m gonna start by explaining how my dear friend and former colleague William Breit and I made the transition from writing scholarly articles on economics to writing mystery fiction. And my sideline - and I always stress to my Chairman and my Dean that it is a sideline - in mystery writing began when I was vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands with my wife and Professor Breit, who used to teach here at UVa. Now I had taken a batch of Christian books along and Breit had taken a batch of mysteries. He was not only a fan of mysteries, but he was a student of them as well. And on this vacation, Breit explained to me that there had never been a detective hero in all of mystery fiction who had used economic analysis to solve the crime. Now that didn’t surprise me frankly, but that’s what he told me. And he told me that there had been other approaches that were used in mystery novels to figure out who done it. If you have read any Agatha Christie for example, you have probably read one of her novels with the character Hercule Poirot who uses psychology to solve the crime or Mrs. Marple who uses a kind of women’s intuition. Breit’s favorite mystery writer is Harry Kemelman who created a rabbi, Rabbi Small, who in the early parts of the book, I think Kemelman kind of ran out of ideas on this eventually, but in the early books, used logic to solve crimes. And G.K. Chesterton created a detective priest, Father Brown, whose insights from the paradoxes of Christianity he took over into solving crimes. But nobody had used economic theory and as we said on the beach and thought how sad that was, somewhat as a lark, we decided to try our hand at creating a character who would use only economic analysis to solve crimes, and finally after a lot of work, a book emerged. And at this point in time, three novels have emerged.

I am going to argue, a little bit tongue and cheek that there is a certain logic to or connection between the subject of economics and the murder mystery. There are a lot of definitions of economics, but my favorite in terms of a really short definition of economics is that it’s science of choice. It’s how consumers make choices. It’s how business firms make choices and later days, it’s how governments make choices. The mystery novel is the one type of fiction that involves a choice. The hero has to choose among alternative suspects and not only that, the reader is supposed to choose among these alternative suspects and figure out who done it. So that’s one connection between mystery writing and economics. Now here’s another one – if you write mystery fiction and your books sell, the publishers will send you money. So mystery writing can expand a person’s income and wealth. And then there’s a third, more subtle connection between economics and mystery writing. Authors, at least if you are an American author and you are law abiding, which Professor Breit and I are, have to pay income taxes on the royalties they receive from their novels. But the IRS, I learned, permits authors to deduct all their expenses in writing their novels. Now what’s the economic implication of that? Let me suggest one: an author could decide to create a mystery novel that takes place in Northern Virginia or in Indiana, you can do that. You can place it wherever you choose. Our first mystery, Murder at the Margin, takes place at a posh Caribbean resort, Caneel Bay Plantation on the Island of St. John on the U.S. Virgin Islands. This had more appeal to us than spending time in Indiana. Our second mystery, The Fatal Equilibrium, takes place largely in first class passage on the Cunard Ocean Liner of the Queen Elizabeth II. And our third, A Deadly Indifference, takes place in London and Cambridge England. Naturally, for Professor Breit and me to write these mysteries, we had to engage in extensive field research. We visited the Island of St. John’s several times. We needed three trans-Atlantic crossings before we felt confident that we could describe how the ship operated and we spent weeks in London and Cambridge.

Now let me just insert a footnote about writing mysteries. Unlike other novels - and this is more sourced by Breit who’s a student of novels much more than I am - murder mysteries are often a team effort. You may not know that from the name of the author; one of the most famous American authors of mysteries is Ellery Queen. Ellery Queen is a team two cousins, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Francis Bedding, a mystery writer that I used to read at one time was a team of two Englishmen, John Leslie Palmer and the co-author had an English name to die for - Hillary Adrian St. George Saunders was his name. Emma Lathan, another mystery writer that I like because she has kind of a business motif to her, she’s a team of two Boston women, Martha Hansard and Mary Ladsas. But the teams always use a pinname and we chose Marshall Jevens as our author’s name; that’s the sir names of two 19th century English economists familiar to my students, at least one of them, Alfred Marshall who invented elasticity and William Standley Jeeves who pioneered the use of marginal analysis.

We knew from the get go that we wanted an economist to be our hero, our central figure and we decided to make him a professor. And we did that in part because what little we knew about writing fiction people who wrote fiction always said, “Write about things you know.” And being a professor of economics is what we knew best. And our central character is a professor of economics modeled after a real world professor of economics, Milton Freedman. Milton Freedom, who is now at Stanford, was at the time, and was for many years, an economist at the University of Chicago. He was a Noble Prize Winner. He was at one time a Newsweek columnist. He’s one of the titans in my discipline. And we think we captured Freedman in our character Henry Spearman. Captured him, but not his wife. Milton Freedman’s wife whose name is Rose is also an economist and we needed a fictional wife, we named her Pidge, to whom the economics could be explained. And you have to understand something here, Sherlock Holmes, for example, couldn’t exist as a fictional character without Watson. Holmes has to have someone to explain his reasoning to. So that we the reader can know why "it’s elementary, my dear Watson". And so Mrs. Spearman simply could not be as bright, at least in economics, as Milton Freedman’s real life wife Rose. Poets are often asked to read their work and I am going to take the liberty of reading a portion of A Deadly Indifference that won’t give anything away, but it’ll give you some idea of what it’s like to view the world like our hero Henry Spearman. And this is a scene early in the book in England when Henry and Pidge Spearman are taking a train to Cambridge, England where Henry will be a visiting professor for while.

'Watching her read as the train rolled on, he thought about how lucky he was to be married to her. She appeared to him almost the same as she had fifteen years ago when they were married. The same chestnut hair. The same light complexion. And the soft brown eyes that attracted him to her so many years ago; they attracted him still. Only the fine lines at the corner of her eyes and the set of her firm chin indicated her maturity. She was taller than he, 9and just as an aside, if you’ve ever seen Milton Freedman, he’s a very, very short man). Something her father never failed to point out when they were dating, but if it mattered to her, she never revealed it. Their dating pattern had been unusual. Pidge always wondered if others who dated people trained in economics encountered the same situations. The peculiarity involved the social tradition of the male paying for the date and the economic theory of gifts and transfer payments. Henry Spearman knew from economic analysis that if a person were offered one hundred dollars in cash or as an alternative, an assortment of goods worth one hundred dollars selected randomly or chosen by someone else, the recipient generally would be better off taking the cash and spending it on the goods and services the recipient selects.

Another party rarely would have the knowledge to select the bundle of goods worth one hundred dollars that would maximize the individual’s economic satisfaction or what Spearman called utility. The economic theory of the consumer restsoan the individual maximizing his or her utility by purchasing more of this and less of that. The same principle could apply to a gift or payment from the government. Only the recipient had the knowledge and the incentives to spend the money to generate the most satisfaction. For that person, gifts in kind were inefficient. This is why many economists support direct cash grants to the poor rather than have government relief agencies offer non-cash material assistance.

Henry Spearman had applied this economic principle to courting Pidge. He would invite Pidge out, say to a movie and dessert afterwards, and in the same conversation, Spearman would offer Pidge the alternative of taking the cash equivalent of what he would have spent on her. He was quite transparent in offering Pidge the cash alternative. His reasoning had two elements. First, Spearman recognized all to well that Pidge was free to take the money and run. By choosing a different set of goods and services than the date with Henry, Pidge might be able to get a greater amount of satisfaction. Second, Henry Spearman knew that if he really loved Pidge, he would want her to be as happy as possible even if that meant not having her company. He maintained that by putting their welfare first, offering someone the cash equivalent of a date, was a sure sign of genuine love for the other person. Henry had told Pidge more than one before they were married that love to an economist was a matter of interdependent utility functions. Interdependent utility functions were the very essence of love; one receives pleasure giving the other person pleasure. With all that is written about love, Spearman did not know of a songwriter who had ever picked up on this theme, but he thought this probably was because of the difficulty of getting lyrics to rhyme with interdependent utility function and not with the subtly of the concept. And I am about to end, I am going to read one more paragraph. Only once did Pidge accept the cash equivalent. On that occasion, it was more out of curiosity to see if her boyfriend’s economic logic would be backed up by action. It was. Henry Spearman gave her twelve dollars – his estimate of the cost of a dinner and a theatrical production at Columbia. All the other times, Pidge accepted Henry’s invitation and declined the cash. Henry never considered Pidge’s turning down the cash to be irrational on her part. To him it was a sign of Pidge’s utility function being intertwined with his. They were, one might say, falling in love."

So that’s a little bit about our character. Now here’s something you might not know about mystery fiction, this form of novel was invented by a UVa student. Note I didn’t say UVa graduate, but he certainly was the most famous student to attend Mr. Jefferson’s University and not take a degree. And that student of course is Edgar Allan Poe, he is generally credited with inventing the mystery novel. If you were to attend or watch the event in which the movie industry gives out the awards, you know the award is called an Oscar. When the mystery writers of America give out their awards, it’s called the Edgar and it is a bust of Mr. Poe.

Now let me tell you one area where mystery fiction differs from a novel and that is mystery fiction has rules. And here the basic rules of what’s called a British traditional mystery at least. First of all, all necessary clues must be in the book. You can mix them up, but they must be in the book. Can be red hearings and false leads, but all the clues have to be there. Second rule is the author can’t introduce the murderer at the very end of the book. If you know mystery fiction at all, especially if you know Agatha Christie, you’ll know that she has one novel called The Murder of Rodger Ackroyd and mystery scholars still debate whether she played fair in that particular book. Third rule is that everything that’s a fact has to be a fact. So if we describe the first class reading room on the QEII, in the fatal equilibrium, it’s to be done accurately. And many mystery readers watch carefully to see if the author got the facts right. And finally, in a mystery, everything has got to be possible. It may not be plausible, but it must be possible and that is what distinguishes a mystery from say, science fiction or ghost stories. And you should read any mystery novel with those rules in mind and if you read a mystery novel by Marshal Jevens, you should check to see if Professor Breit and I played by the rules.

Now we had a further constraint upon us than these rules and that is we had to use economic theory to solve the crime. And that proved very difficult at times. Mind-numbing and headache-generating at times. Now let me shift gears just a bit and tell you in case you don’t know that mystery rule writing also has rules for the reader. The novel has a set of rules that most novels wouldn’t have. And number one is you’re not to go and peek at the end of the book to see who done it. That violates the rule. The second rule is that you are not allowed to guess. A lot of people have told me, “I figured out who did it”, and I asked why and it just turns out that it was just a guess. And that violates the rules. You are to reason out from the text who did it before the solution is revealed to you and I think that’s one of the reasons Americans love mysteries and buy them every year by the hundreds of thousands of copies. Americans like games and they like challenges. Now anybody who has taken a class from me knows that I consider writing to be a very important skill. And I want to tell you something that I learned about mystery writing compared with the normal type of writing I do for scholarly journals. It is much harder to write fiction than it is to write for scholarly journals. It is much harder intellectually, physically, emotionally and I’ll give you an example from my own experience. The year is 1890 and the Sherman Act is passed. I have devoted literally thousands of hours of my life trying to understand the economics of that famous anti-trust law, but when I write an article in the area of anti-trust economics and it involves research on the Sherman Act, to cite the article, I just put down the Sherman Act. Everybody knows what I mean. I don’t have to know what Senator Sherman had for breakfast the morning the act was passed. I don’t have to know whether he was nervous the day that the vote was going to be taken. I don’t need to know whether he had a dog or not or what he wore. I didn’t even know how tall he is; all these things are just very efficient in scholarly writing that you can just say the Sherman Act and all you readers can just click onto exactly what you’re talking about. And that’s not the case with fiction of course, you have to describe people and that was all new to me.

Now let me shift gears just a little bit more here, I want to talk just a little but about the trials and tribulations of getting fiction published against the chance some of you are interested in writing a novel someday. And here I am not just going to refer to murder mysteries, but fiction generally. There is an almost intractable chicken and egg problem. I say almost intractable because clearly it’s not intractable literally or we would never see novels published for the first time by a new author. But publishers are very risk-aversed for the most part and they only want to publish a book by somebody who already has a track record; that they’ve published a book and there are people out there who like that style, or that author, or that character. And so when you go to approach a publisher with a new book they want to have some evidence that it will sell. And of course if it is a new book by definition, it has never sold before and it can be extremely frustrating and virtually every author, from kind of pedestrian mystery writers like Breit and myself to titans like John Grisham, have a story of how incredibly difficult it was to get their first novel published and how when, you listen to the story, you think it’s amazing that it ever was published. This an aside.

I once heard John Grisham tell the story of getting his first novel published. It makes no sense to me as an economist. He would send the manuscript off and send the manuscript off and he always got rejection letters. And the manuscript consisted of, I think it was five chapters. It wasn’t the whole book, but it was enough to get you an idea of what this book was about and how he wrote. And his wife said, “You are sending chapters in sequence. Instead of sending chapters one, two, and three, send chapter one three and five.” It wasn’t those exact numbers, but send some chapters out of sequence. Now I thought about that several times, and I cannot make any sense of that. Why that would make sense, why that would be a plausible or a desirable strategy, but it worked. That novel was sent off in that form and a publisher bid on it and the rest is history. Everybody has their story. We have ours. There’s an expression in fiction writing of sending a novel and it arrives over the transum; that is it as though it just drops in unannounced on an editor. And I have now learned because I have been around the loop a few times on this, that publishing houses get hundreds and hundreds of unsolicited books all the time that come in “over the transum” and some young maybe English major who has graduated from UVa is given the job of looking at these manuscripts and getting just enough out of the manuscript to you can write a letter saying, “Thank you very much, but it doesn’t quite fit our lists, but by the way, we like the way you handled the food scene in Chapter Three.” And that’s just kind of a courtesy; that we like the way you did this…Well Breit and I would get these rejection letters, but they would always encourage us because we would get together and say well Harper and Roe turned us down, but they liked the way we did this. So we would think oh well that’s great; we just need to find somebody who likes the whole book. Later on we learned this was really dumb on our part; that this was a routine way of rejecting book manuscripts and it was done by the hundreds. And don’t be deluded into thinking that gee, we almost bid on this cause we liked so much the way you did the food scene. We heard that over and over again about the food scene because Breit really knows food and he can really write just brilliantly about food, we just couldn’t get him to write the whole book brilliantly.

Our good fortune was a small publishing house picked up the piece because the house had a connection with Paul Samuelson. And Milton Freedman and Paul Samuelson were the two wunderkinds in economics at the time and in some sense they were rivals but everybody acknowledged them as two great titans. And the publishers said if Paul Samuelson likes this book, we’ll publish it. We thought well, how that would work out in terms of the chemistry in that? Well he liked the book and it was published and it was our good fortune to have it reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. And I didn’t know at the time, but the Wall Street Journal reviews just really sell books. It’s a huge circulation and it’s a high propensity of book buyers along the Wall Street Journal readership and that got us underway and the book just took off. And once we had our first book published, the chicken and egg problem was solved and it is not that difficult to get the subsequent ones published.

Now I want to wrap up by making one other type of comment. Economists always get a bad wrap because people think all we are interested in is money and financial returns and so on. And I want to tell you how greatful I am for the none pecuniary benefits of mystery writing. I always cash the royalty checks, don’t get me wrong, but I have gotten much more of a kick, or technically speaking, more utals from my fiction writing than my regular scholarly writing. I’ll take time to tell you one story that meant a lot to me. Mystery readers are a funny group of people. They think you have made a mistake or an error in logic, they will write you a letter and tell you about it. If they really like a book, some will write you a letter. They do not write you or me at my University of Virginia address, they write the publisher and it gets sent onto you. The most wonderful letter that Marshall Jevens received came from a professor of economics in Pennsylvania and she described that her husband who was not an economist found it very difficult to communicate with her and was very baffled by the way she thought, the way she looked at the world, the way she processed information. She thought like an economist in other words and he clearly didn’t. And she admitted in the letter to us that their marriage was on the rocks. And she happened to give her husband a copy of Murder at the Margin, our first novel. And he read the book. And through reading Murder at the Margin, so she reported to us, and getting through Henry Spearman’s head, and as you’ve seen just from what I’ve read here, Spearman looks at everything through the lens of economics, this man came to understand his wife so much better that as she told us in the letter, their marriage was saved. And this was a letter of gratitude. And then what I really appreciate as an economist was that she said, “Your book is so much cheaper than marriage counseling as well”. Now a lot of my students ask me whether my murder mysteries make good Christmas presents and birthday presents for parents, and friends, and colleagues, and family members, and that’s always a tough one for me because I indicated in my reading, economists generally tend to think that cash gifts are the most efficient way so I am always torn when somebody says, “Do you think that somebody would like a copy of your book as a Christmas present or a birthday present?” So not withstanding being torn, I am going to deviate from my general rigid appearance of economic principle and say, “Yeah, I think Murder at the Margin, The Fatal Equilibrium, A Deadly Indifference, they make terrific presents and if you care enough to give the very best, you should give a hardback and not a paperback.”