Made-Up Answers for Real Mysteries: A Reading List

When I was around 10 years old, my dad walked in on me praying. I was raised Catholic so this wasn’t necessarily a weird thing. He seemed to find it sweet, even. Except it was the middle of the day when he found me kneeling before the crucifix that hung on my parents’ bedroom wall with my little hands folded in supplication, and I’d been watching Unsolved Mysteries in the living room just minutes before. What spiritual crisis had brought on the urgency of this prayer? I wanted Jesus to please promise to someday tell me what happened to Amelia Earhart, why that man shot JFK, and what happens in the Bermuda triangle, among other things. My poor dad tried so hard not to laugh.

From the time I’d learned to read, I’d been a mystery lover, but the mysteries I was reading back then tended to have tidy resolutions. The idea that cases in real life go unsolved, or solved but not satisfactorily, was breaking my 10-year-old brain. It breaks my almost 40-year-old brain a bit, too. You might not think that I’d then gravitate as much as I do to books that center these kinds of stories, but I do. I’m still hoping the knowledge I prayed for makes its way to me someday, but in the meantime, I enjoy spending time with stories that posit answers to unanswered questions. Here are five mysteries from as far back as Elizabethan England to the 1990s with book pairings for each.