When we read a mystery we try to discern the essential truth of the mysterious situation from a smattering of details. We begin tentatively, with a hypothesis or set of hypotheses which orders our understanding and, more subtly, through the uncanny influence of relevance, our perceptions. Some details are regarded as significant, others as trivial, and some fail to register at all until much later.

As the mystery develops, anomalies accumulate; things stop adding up; we suspect that our failure to make sense of things might have less to do with absence of clues, than it does with misreading the significance of existing clues. The investigation becomes reinvestigation. We try on different interpretive schema, look at the picture from different angles, ask ourselves what understanding develops if some innocent-seeming character is hiding something, or if some suspicious character is actually benign or benevolent. We find our allegiances shifting, and with it the balance of relative certainties.

Eventually, an epiphany occurs. Often it comes in the form of a crystalizing paradox which changes everything at once, as a whole and in every detail.

We can also experience this same strange phenomenon — the hermeneutic shift — reading mystery novels, though the effect is mostly confined to the experience of the book itself. In reading real-life mysteries, the world itself is transfigured, ourselves with it.