I usually start at the beginning, to get a sense of what I’m dealing with. So when Sara Gran and I meet to discuss her story collection, Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight, published by the author’s independent Dreamland Books, I ask about the name of the press.
“I have this theory of narrative that works by dream logic,” Gran explains. “And I think maybe the biggest example of that is David Lynch, you know? Things do make sense, but they don’t make sense in a linear way.”
It’s a sunny morning in Los Angeles, just a few days after the new year. We sip from steaming lattes to the sound of ocean waves. Neither of us has any idea that, in a few days, more than 40,000 acres of our city will burn, or that, within the next week, David Lynch will die.
Mysteries always invoke that fine line between before and after: before a crime is committed and after it is solved. In retrospect, the clues are so obvious, but while you’re reading, there’s nothing but the friction of the narrative. This is why I find such stories so comforting: tension, then release. Mysteries also reward obsession, looking at the same spot on the wall again and again until suddenly it takes the shape of an answer.
Gran and I talk about obsession. “With my weird Christmas obsession,” she says, “I got into these Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies. Everyone thinks they’re misogynist, but they’re not, in my opinion. It’s the same in some romance novels; the men exist to support the women or to fulfill a sexual fantasy. It’s really the only form of narrative where a woman’s aims and goals come first.”
From obsession, we move on to anxiety and fear, and the fine line that separates them: “There’s a lot of overlap,” she says, “and people use the words interchangeably.… Maybe fear is for things it’s appropriate to be scared of, and anxiety is for things that aren’t, necessarily. Not in a judgmental way, but just like, nothing’s really going to happen.”
Our conversation mimics the stories in Little Mysteries: philosophical, blunt, sardonic, feminist. Many who know Gran’s work came to it in one of two ways: via her 2003 novel Come Closer or her detective Claire DeWitt.
Gran has a devoted following, and yet her success hasn’t been defined by blockbusters, cross-country tours, or six-figure deals. Rather, it’s the fact that her career has provided a life most writers could only dream about. Her work is respected, she calls the shots at her own press, and she’s been able to publish without limiting herself just to one genre. She’s been a bookseller and a book collector. She’s written for print and for television shows, eventually finding enough stability to launch Dreamland Books.
Now she and Dreamland are releasing her first story collection into the wild.
Fans of Claire DeWitt will be happy to see her in some of the new stories. Other characters from the DeWitt universe also get their due, including her assistant, Claude, and her doctor-friend, Nick. These shorter forays allow us to be with DeWitt in the exact moment she decides to intervene in certain situations, certain lives. I tell Gran that these stories feel more optimistic; in the novels, DeWitt’s journeys were more inward-looking. Here, however, she moves beyond herself.
“I put it a little bit differently,” Gran suggests. “It was about this dilemma between reaching out versus staying alone. When do you reach out—whether to help someone or to help yourself—and when do you stay alone?”
Throughout the collection, Gran gives us the opportunity to make these decisions for ourselves. One story is a Choose Your Own Adventure, where each chapter’s choices force us to decide between isolation or connection. Not only that, but the book opens with a delightful surprise for my fellow millennials: a cootie catcher titled “Make Your Own Tool of Psychospiritual Divination.”
You don’t have to tell me twice.
One of the DeWitt stories is among my favorites in the collection: “The Good Smell of New York City/The Ocean-Salted Air.” It’s actually a pair of narratives unfolding side by side in double columns on the page. The first recalls DeWitt in New York in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The second follows her to Los Angeles in 2020, the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The form here adds immediately to the tension. Do you read the entire left column first, then go back and read the right, or do you try to read them side by side, switching back and forth every few sentences?
You don’t have to have read the DeWitt novels to appreciate the stories in Little Mysteries. Gran meant them to be standalones. “Weirdly enough,” she confesses, “I wrote a lot of them as Christmas stories. I did this thing for four or five years in a row where I sent out a short story every Christmas to a small email list.”
I love this detail because it makes me think of each story in Little Mysteries as a puzzle piece or clue that Gran was sending out, and now the resolution, or completed puzzle, is the finished book. It’s another testament to the fact that you don’t need a splashy publishing deal to get your work out. You can literally just send it to people.
The other highlight of the collection is “The Mystery at Killington Manor, or The Feeling of Seeing Clear Blue Sky After Being Lost in the Woods.” It’s the longest story here, and has nothing to do with DeWitt. Instead, a gardening-fixated teenager in a big house suddenly finds herself at the center of a mystery involving the unexpected death—and possible murder—of her favorite relative. It reads like a more gothic, hipper Downton Abbey, with rich people behaving badly and an old lady detective I kept picturing as the late Maggie Smith.
“I have always wanted to do an old lady detective,” Gran admits, “like a Miss Marple, a Jessica Fletcher. It’s funny because there’s been such a mystery revival, but that character has not come back in any way. That’s interesting for a bunch of sociological reasons, but it is also just creatively compelling to me, especially because I am becoming an old lady rapidly.”
Many of us feel like we’ve rapidly become old ladies over the past month. Maybe even the past decade. As I write this, staring at the belongings I am still too terrified to unpack lest I need to evacuate again, I think of the last story in Gran’s collection: “Ten-Second Mystery: How You Never Seem to Get Exactly What You Want, but Somehow Time Moves Monstrously Forward Anyway.” It’s one of the shortest pieces in the book, aimed directly at the reader. I don’t want to ruin it, so I will only say that the reader asks one simple, loaded question: “I hate it here. Why did it have to be this way?” Then Gran’s narrator offers an answer that, if not a solution, offers comfort in the meantime. Before, after. Question, answer. Tension, release.
This is the allure of mystery stories: Although they deal with situations many of us may never experience, they also allow us to entertain, as Gran says, “the idea that our questions have answers, when in reality our questions don’t have answers. We don’t know why we live, we don’t know why we die, we don’t know why people we love die, we don’t know why horrible things happen.”
All we can do is look for the moments when we have to decide whether to reach out or stay alone. Trust the dream logic. Things might eventually make sense, just not in a linear way.•
LITTLE MYSTERIES: NINE MINIATURE PUZZLES TO CONFUSE, ENTHRALL, AND DELIGHT, BY SARA GRAN
Jackie DesForges is a writer and artist in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Off Assignment, the Coachella Review, Air/Light, and more.
