As I slowly pick my way through the entire Midsomer Murders on Netflix, my love for mysteries is enjoying a resurgence. Or more like a rediscovery. Back in its heyday, which is the 1990s, A&E offered a fantastic collection of literary adaptations, which included mysteries. Their focus was heavily on British programming where those were concerned, and I didn’t care one bit. It was great watching Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, John Thaw as Inspector Morse, etc.

Once the classic literary adaptations stopped coming in, it was mostly British mysteries that filled their program schedule, and I ate everything up. Twenty years – give or take a few years – later, I’m depending on Netflix for my non-TV fix; I no longer watch TV, so whatever interests me via streaming is what my primary viewing pleasure is all about.

I’m seriously loving these mysteries. I used to watch them purely for entertainment value, and while I still do, now it’s like I keep half of my attention to “logistics” for lack of a better term. I love puzzles, firstly, and it’s always a treat following clues here and there and coming up with my own theories as to whodunnit and then comparing my conclusions to what’s slowly revealed.

But lately I’ve been experiencing what I call “genre envy”. Now I watch these shows as a writer, observing the way the plot unfolds and what clues and red herrings are all laid out throughout the episode as well as the events leading up to the resolution.

Midsomer Murders, for instance, is really crafty in the way each episode flows and yet there’s always that breadcrumb that you need to latch on to that’ll play a part in the mystery’s solution. Those breadcrumbs, though, are always so trivial and inconsequential – at least in the way they’re initially treated. Once the mystery’s solved, Barnaby picks those breadcrumbs out of the muddle of information he has and shows us how each turns out to be an important part of the overall puzzle.

I’ve never written a mystery before, and while I’d love to try my hand at it, it’s a genre that requires a special kind of skill – multi-tasking, pretty much – in which the writer has to have several important things happening simultaneously that are both significant and yet not. It’s like having strands of important details woven into the rest of the trivial stuff, and they’re so cleverly hidden that the audience wouldn’t know how it all worked till someone points it out in the end.

I seriously wish I could do that. It’s like a chess game that the author has to plan out in advance, sweat blood over the details, and make sure to weave all those things together seamlessly. Unfortunately it’s a skill that I don’t have, but I appreciate it in others, and I’m constantly in awe of writers who can pull off a great mystery.

And as a final sparkly-eyed word on writing mysteries, I thought I’d share a gratuitously fangirly image of Sean Pertwee as Hugh Beringar, who gave Cadfael a certain kind of Medieval hottitude. Rawr.