Any reader of mystery fiction recognizes that there’s one basic difference between the lives of people in mystery novels and the rest of us. In books,  murders with unknown perpetrators happen all the time.  It makes some sort of sense that a homicide detective has a lot of unsolved murders in his life. It’s his (or her) job.  But when writers or school teachers or NASCAR drivers start having unsolved murders pop up, it seems a little unnatural.  Which is why most of us in the real world can expect to go through life without any murder mysteries to solve. They just don’t happen that often to regular folk. (And if they do,  maybe you should visit the police and explain things to them,  if they aren’t visiting you already.)

Mysteries without the  word “murder” coming before them happen around us all the time, mostly trivial, easily ignored, or both. If the car ahead of you at a traffic light turns right, it’s a mystery to you just why he turned right and where he’s going.  You don’t really feel the need to gather clues and solve that mystery.  You don’t really have a reason to.

Being a Sherlockian,  one often becomes fascinated with the mysteries within the Holmes mysteries, and we wind up investigating them just for fun (for a good example, take a look at Stanley Hopkins’s column this week).  The great thing about Sherlock Holmes is that we can often dig into history to find answers.  And if you dig into history enough for Holmes, eventually you may find yourself digging into the past about somebody else.

This summer, I’ve swapped out Sherlock Holmes for Jacob Vollmar.  Sherlock Holmes went into practice in the 1880s. Jacob Vollmar  immigrated from Germany to America in the 1880s. Sherlock Holmes had Dr. Watson. Jacob Vollmar had his brother Augustus.  Sherlock Holmes has a great-grandson that writes movie reviews for this website.  And Jacob Vollmar has a great-grandson that writes a column for this website, too.

Trying to go deep into the details of someone who  died seventy-five years ago is a lot like investigating a murder mystery.  You know what happened, like a false start in Nebraska, followed by a move to Illinois, but you don’t know the motives or the means. Working out the answers to such “cold case” puzzles is as challenging as anything Sherlock Holmes ever faced, which is probably why he did a little historical research of his own.

And the best thing about looking into the mysteries of history is that the local police aren’t going to get ticked off that you’re infringing on their turf.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver